Austen had a puzzle-solving mind, concerned with construction and timetables and detail. R. W. Chapman and later editors have demonstrated how carefully she used calendars of specific years against which to plot her fictions, and what importance she gave to matters of fact (as shown by her enquiry ‘whether Northamptonshire is a Country of Hedgerows’ when writing Mansfield Park47). She homed in on factual inconsistencies in her niece’s draft novel; they clearly annoyed her (‘Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards 40 miles from Dawlish and would not be talked of there. I have put Starcross instead’48). The apple blossom in June in Emma is an uncharacteristic slip of this kind in one of her own books (pointed out to her, too late, by her brother Edward), as is Pug’s apparent sex-change halfway through Mansfield Park. Perhaps she missed these errors in the proofs because they were ‘continuity’ mistakes, the result of having revised her drafts so often that she couldn’t keep in mind exactly what was and wasn’t in the final one.
Austen’s long-held control over her texts is one of the things that generates the unusual feeling of life going on in them, and which has helped make them so vivid and believable to generations of readers. That sense of Austen being for us and for our time is one of her most appealing attributes. Bloggers are wont to exclaim on the exact similarity between a situation in one of the novels and one in their own life and the degree to which they can ‘relate’ to them. ‘She’s almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she’s so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature,’ Laurie Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, has said. Addressing the Jane Austen Society in 1963, Elizabeth Jenkins spoke for many when she said that the value of great artists (among whom she definitely placed Austen) ‘is that they inhabit the sphere outside time’.49
One of the reasons that Austen is, without doubt, a ‘timeless classic’ is that in her case the phrase is true in a literal sense as well as metaphorically. ‘Timelessness’, so intimately connected to the processes of composition and revision which I described in Chapters 1 and 2, is imprinted in the texts. Austen, the constant rewriter, keeping her juvenilia and old manuscripts to hand, going back over them and adding topical touches in the hope of making them come up to the present day, was obviously exercised by the problem of making her oeuvre look consistent. When she was correcting proof sheets of the first eight chapters of Sense and Sensibility, Jane wrote to her sister, in her characteristic shorthand style, ‘The Incomes remain as they were, but I will get them altered if I can.’50 The reference is to the discussions early in the novel between John and Fanny Dashwood about how much they are prepared to give widowed Mrs Dashwood and her daughters from his father’s estate. In the published version of this painfully believable scene, Fanny Dashwood reasons her husband down from his initial resolve to give the women three thousand pounds apiece, to a vague intention of handing them the odd fifty pounds every now and then. As the gradations involved are pivotal to the meaning of the scene, and three thousand pounds would have been a generous sum in 1811, it’s extremely likely that Austen did subsequently update this figure on the proofs. But more importantly, she knew the sums were out of date and needed attention.
The fact is, the whole of Sense and Sensibility was out of date. The topic of ‘sensibility’ itself was old news by 1811–12, a preoccupation of the previous decade (which was, of course, when the book had been conceived and most of it written). Austen’s very first reviewer, in the Critical Review of February 1812, remarked on this exact ‘want of newness’ in Sense and Sensibility. Later readers have the luxury of being able to read the book on its merits, and judge it high accordingly, but to its contemporary audience Sense and Sensibility might have failed to impress in ways we cannot reconstruct.
I suspect that Austen took the remark in the Critical Review very much to heart. The problem was that all the material she was using, in her first years of publication, was old material. Anyone who has attempted to keep an unpublished novel of contemporary life current will know the surprising difficulties involved. I tried in 2006 to revise a novel written in 1996 and found it virtually impossible, not because of any desired changes to the plot or characterisation, but because of small things, like the glaring obsolescence of the technology. Telephones seemed to be everywhere in the story, ringing quaintly for their absent owners; messages were written on notepaper, mail posted in boxes, and the flashier characters had use of a fax. Doling out cell phones and e-mail addresses did not, however, do the trick of modernising the story sufficiently. Instead, it did a sort of violence to the flow of the book, from which the text couldn’t recover.
I believe that Austen’s familiarity with the hazards of updating made her study to avoid period-specific detail in new work when old and new began to appear side by side between 1811 and 1816. People often comment on the non-specific nature of Austen’s descriptions of persons, places and things, the recourse to ‘regular features’ or ‘fine eyes’ as the indicators of beauty, the rooms and furniture which, like those at Pemberley, are merely ‘suitable to the fortune of their proprietor’. More critically, she is held to be immune to, or ignorant of, signs of the times. Richard Simpson, writing about the Memoir in 1870,51 began this persistent nagging about Austen’s lack of topicality: ‘She was not wholly uninterested in politics … but she lived and wrote through the period of the French Revolution and the European war without referring to them once, except as making the fortunes of some of her naval characters.’ She seemed detached from literary trends, too, unlike Cassandra Cooke, whose Battleridge: An Historical Tale anticipates Scott, or James Stanier Clarke, whose suggestions may have been ill-conceived but, as Richard Cronin has pointed out, at least indicated ‘a man with up-to-date literary tastes’.52
But Austen’s novels, written and published during years of war, revolution and massive social upheaval, deal quietly with their ‘3 or 4 families in a Country Village’ as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. Granted, Mansfield Park and Persuasion contain references to naval engagements and manoeuvres, Northanger Abbey slips in a mention of Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel Belinda and there are those carefully inserted late references to Walter Scott and the new postage rates in Sense and Sensibility, but these are gestures – sometimes rather desperate-seeming – towards contemporaneity, which if anything highlight how unfixed in time the novels are.
The ‘time’ problem also arose in the characterisation of the heroines, who range in age from seventeen to twenty-seven and were created at very different times in the author’s life. Emma, for example, is a distinctly non-young woman. She’s meant to be about twenty years old, but is as fogeyish over rectitude (towards Mrs Elton, for example) as someone of the next generation might be expected to be. This is what makes the match between her and Mr Knightley credible: they do seem to be of an age, despite the author’s information to the contrary. The book had a contemporary setting, and there was hardly any lapse of time between the writing and the publication of it, but Austen was not really able to invent a young heroine of 1815: Emma was a throwback, or rather, Emma was her own age in 1815, that is, approaching forty.
The result is that although Austen’s novels were composed between 1792 and 1817, all six seem to take place in an imaginary 1801 or 2, regardless of internal evidence to the contrary. The exception is ‘Sanditon’, which is very much of 1817, but ‘Sanditon’ is only a fragment, and who knows how much of its contemporary feel might have been ironed out by the author had she lived to finish it. It gives her oeuvre a remarkable coherence and consistency and has been a major factor in Austen’s longevity, and in her appeal to generations disconnected from her own. The silver-fork novelists were quickly forgotten, not just because they were quite bad, but because they tended to be very topical, dealing with issues of the day such as Catholic emancipation and reform. Austen understood this; she knew that paring down detail would give her narratives more imaginative flexibility (she once warned her niece Anna against descriptions that are �
�more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand & Left’53). She also knew that pinning her works to a particular time would date them; she had to ‘unpin’ them, so she could use her disregarded early masterpieces.
The irony is that she has come to represent her period. ‘Jane Austen’s Regency World’ could as well have an equals sign instead of an apostrophe. She stopped the clock and now IS her time.
* * *
Just as Jane Austen feels closer to our own time the further she recedes from it, so the sense of a personal connection being possible with the author has increased with the exponential growth of her fanbase. Katherine Mansfield, clearly speaking personally, had remarked wryly in 1924 that ‘the true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has become the secret friend of their author’,54 but she was by no means the first to write about the friendship, even love, that many readers felt in their private communion with Jane Austen. Harriet Martineau, writing in her diary in 1837, identified a feeling which now pervades thousands of Austen blogs on the Internet, that Austen’s characters are ‘the unrivalled intimate friends of the whole public’.55 Constance Hill experienced similar feelings as a form of possession while writing her 1902 biography of Austen, an ‘intangible something’ which had ‘exercised a sway of ever-increasing power over the writer and illustrator of these pages’,56 while Anne Thackeray simply lost her heart; ‘as we turn from the story of Jane Austen’s life to her books again,’ she wrote, reviewing the Memoir of Jane Austen, ‘we feel more than ever that she, too, was one of those true friends who belong to us inalienably – simple, wise, contented, living in others, one of those whom we seem to have a right to love.’57
The Internet has made mass intimacy with Jane Austen available at the click of a mouse. Individual bloggers can see the whole of life through their reading and appropriation of the books; ‘AustenProse: a daily celebration of the brilliance of Jane Austen’s writing’ is particularly prolific and engaged: ‘My personal Austen tends toward appreciating her clever irony and wit; because I dearly love to laugh at life in defense of the serious reality. However, there will be some who disagree with me entirely and think that I have missed Austen’s point. That’s ok. There is room for many opinions, and like Jane Bennet, I will try to find the good in all of them!’58 ‘Following Austen’, and the ‘blook’ it relates to, A Walk with Jane Austen, both stem from the author Lori Smith’s search ‘for a connection with the writer whose books (and the movies based on them) had become like literary comfort food for me’. Other blogs, clearly run by extremely public-spirited individuals, seek to provide something like a service through their personal enthusiasm: ‘Jane Austen Quote of the Day’, ‘Austentatious’, ‘AustenBlog’, with its teacup logo, ‘one lump of snark or two?’ and the larger sites, ‘Jane Austen’s World’ (which takes a wholly materialist view of ‘food, dress, social customs and other nineteenth-century historical details’ connected with Austen) and ‘Jane Austen Today’, which contains long posts about recent media events and running features such as the online polls of ‘Worst Father’ and ‘Longest-Suffering Heroine’ in the novels.
One of many breakaway fan-clubs (begun and almost entirely run on the Internet) is the archly self-mocking ‘Republic of Pemberley’, whose members (‘Pemberleans’ rather than ‘Janeites’ or ‘Austenians’) divide literature into two categories: Jane Austen books and non-Jane Austen books. Their online Shoppe sells Jane totes, T-shirts and stamps (‘I * Mr Darcy’) that parade a self-conscious irony, and on its home page, the Republic claims to be ‘Your haven in a world programmed to misunderstand obsession with things Austen’, an interesting recasting of the Cheney test of 100 years earlier, that it was a mark of ability ‘whether people could or could not appreciate Miss Austen’s merits’. Pemberlean irony has a nervous quality to it, as if it feels the chill breath of D. W. Harding at its back and worries, as Harding never did himself, about being taken for the wrong kind of admirer, the kind who doesn’t appreciate that the author might be mocking him.
Other fans are much less self-conscious, and not afraid to be seen wallowing. Jane Austen’s Regency World is a magazine unashamedly devoted to the material construction of ‘all things Austen’. It is produced in association with the Jane Austen Centre in Bath – not a study hub, as the name (and the example of the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford) might suggest, but a cheerfully populist exhibition of costumes, prints, period furniture and enlarged stills from recent films. In their shop you can buy books, embroidery sets, pencils, an oil-painted image of Colin Firth as Darcy, printed on canvas, for £60, and also reproduction pelisses, spencers, muslin dresses and bonnets for those who like to look authentic at conventions. There is also a selection of gentlemen’s cravats, and a popular nightshirt range. No Darcy pillowcases yet, but that would be a logical extension of the franchise. The lady at the cash desk seemed very sympathetic to her customers’ needs and as I paid for a Darcy key-fob said, ‘You’ll be wanting to put your keys right on there.’
What would Austen have made of all this? An impossible question, of course, but simply framing it hints at the enormity of our cumulative presumption, the vast distance our admiration has opened up between its object and the ways in which she is celebrated and consumed. Famous names ‘allow us to identify what’s present with what’s past’, according to Leo Braudy; they are ‘vehicles of cultural memory and cohesion’,59 but only vehicles, a method of transport, a means to an end. As it grows, a legend has to smooth itself out and disguise the diffuse and contradictory material from which it was formed, and if it is as well-travelled as Jane Austen’s legend, it becomes very smooth indeed. There is no doubt that the historical Jane Austen would not recognise herself in any of it, even its grains of truth.
And what would she have thought of our interpretation of her work? This gave D. W. Harding the shudders, for he saw the risk of becoming (or being) one of the very ‘people whom she disliked’, one of those benighted misreaders who fall headlong into the trap of the books and think them merely light, bright and sparkling. According to Harding, this effect was ‘exactly as she meant [it] to be’; he credits Austen with a somewhat sinister, at best playfully malicious, disposition towards her audiences, contemporary and future, a view he would have found echoed in James Austen’s unpublished poem about Jane’s relish for people’s foibles, ‘for ever on the watch/Some traits of ridicule to catch’.
Lionel Trilling, in his essay ‘Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen’, was easier on all of us when he suggested that the powerful personal emotions generated around this author, and indulged grossly in Austenolatry, may not be entirely the fault of people’s lack of taste and ‘impulse to self-flattery’, but perhaps triggered by the work itself, ‘in some unusual promise that it seems to make, in some hope that it holds out’.60 In other words, Trilling felt that Austen to some extent brought misreading, or overindulgent, personalised reading, on herself. If Trilling was right, perhaps the bumper stickers are right, too, and we should all ‘Blame Jane’. Perhaps she simply succeeded too well at charming us: she knew what she liked in a novel, she laboured to make her own novels as attractive as possible and – it worked. Better than anyone could have imagined possible, or desirable.
Henry James came near to saying the same as Trilling in 1914 when he wrote of the mass popularity of Austen as a form of presumption, but one that has been licensed from the inside: ‘Why shouldn’t it be argued against her that where her testimony complacently ends the pressure of appetite within us presumes exactly to begin?’ he asked. And, one could add, is illimitable. In the year that she died, Henry Austen claimed that his sister would always be unknown to the public: ‘No accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen. In the bosom of her own family she talked of them freely, thankful for praise, open to remark, and submissive to criticism. But in public she turned away from any allusion to the character of a
n authoress.’61 This is clearly, forgivably, untrue. Austen was as motivated and ambitious as all possessors of great gifts are. When she joked with her sister in 1796, ‘I write only for Fame, and without any view to pecuniary Emolument,’ she was doing what she always did, making light of the things she felt most strongly about.62 Aged twenty, utterly unknown and unpublished and chary of making a fool of herself, Jane Austen still had every reason to feel secure at heart in her own talent and its eventual success. And though she had to wait another fifteen years till the publication of her first book, 1796 was the year when she wrote ‘First Impressions’.
Austen is unlikely to have ever wanted a cap on her potential success, though, of course, she could never have imagined the farthest reaches of it. She was sufficiently philosophical (and cynical) to watch the early stages of its progress in her lifetime with unblinking interest at how little control remains to an author once a book is public property. Her recording of the ‘Opinions’ of her friends and family shows these temperamental traits perfectly; she may have scorned the advice of James Stanier Clarke on how to improve her stories and inspired terror in Miss Mitford’s friend with her satirical silences, but ultimately Jane Austen cared less about being misread than about not being read widely enough.
E. M. Forster recognised the truly transgressive aspects of the process when he remarked of Austen’s Letters63 in 1932 that ‘they have reappeared exactly as she wrote them, but in a setting which makes them look strange to her, and we are part of the setting’. It is not always a benign symbiosis, and certainly not controllable by any of the custodians of culture, but as Thomas Kebbel remarked in 1885, ‘while English society remains what it still is, with so much to remind us what it once was, and while the manners of one generation melt so imperceptibly into those of another that the continuity hardly seems broken, so long will the interest in Jane Austen continue to strengthen and expand’.64 The significance of Jane Austen is so personal and so universal, so intimately connected with our sense of ourselves and of our whole society, that it is impossible to imagine a time when she or her works could have delighted us long enough.
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