The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  1826—Sir Walter Scott eleven years later, after Austen’s death, his enthusiasm having grown6

  Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!

  1826—Chief Justice John Marshall, letter to Joseph Story7

  I was a little mortified to find you had not admitted the name of Miss Austen into your list of favorites. . . . Her flights are not lofty, she does not soar on an eagle’s wings, but she is pleasing, interesting, equable, yet amusing. I count on your making some apology for this omission.

  1830—Thomas Henry Lister8

  Miss Austen has never been so popular as she deserved to be. Intent on fidelity of delineation, and averse to the commonplace tricks of her art, she has not, in this age of literary quackery, received her reward. Ordinary readers have been apt to judge of her as Partridge, in Fielding’s novel, judged of Garrick’s acting. He could not see the merit of a man who merely behaved on the stage as any body might be expected to behave under similar circumstances in real life. He infinitely preferred the “robustious periwig-pated fellow,” who flourished his arms like a wind-mill, and ranted with the voice of three. It was even so with many of the readers of Miss Austen. She was too natural for them.

  1848—Charlotte Brontë, letter to G. H. Lewes9

  What a strange lecture comes next in your letter! You say I must familiarise my mind with the fact that “Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment’ ” (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), “no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry”; and then you add, I must “learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, one of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.”

  The last point only will I ever acknowledge.

  Can there be a great artist without poetry?

  1870—Unsigned review of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen10

  Miss Austen has always been par excellence the favourite author of literary men. The peculiar merits of her style are recognised by all, but, with the general mass of readers, they have never secured what can fairly be called popularity. . . . It has always been known that Miss Austen’s private life was unruffled by any of the incidents or passions which favour trade of the biographer. . . . It fits in with our idea of the authoress, to find that she was a proficient in the microscopic needlework of sixty years since, that she was never in love, that she “took to the garb of middle age earlier than her years or her looks required.” . . .

  The critics of the day were . . . in the dark. . . . She was not conscious herself of founding a new school of fiction, which would inspire new canons of criticism.

  1870—Margaret Oliphant11

  Miss Austen’s books did not secure her any sudden fame. They stole into notice so gradually and slowly, that even at her death they had not reached any great height of success. . . . We are told that at her death all they had produced of money was but seven hundred pounds, and but a moderate modicum of praise. We cannot say we are in the least surprised by this fact; it is, we think, much more surprising that they should at length have climbed into the high place they now hold. To the general public, which loves to sympathise with the people it meets in fiction, to cry with them, and rejoice with them, and take a real interest in all their concerns, it is scarcely to be expected that books so calm and cold and keen, and making so little claim upon their sympathy, would ever be popular. . . . They are rather of the class which attracts the connoisseur, which charms the critical and literary mind.

  1870—Anthony Trollope12

  Emma, the heroine, is treated almost mercilessly. In every passage of the book she is in fault for some folly, some vanity, some ignorance,—or indeed for some meanness. . . . Nowadays we dare not make our heroines so little.

  1894—Alice Meynell13

  She is a mistress of derision rather than of wit or humour. . . . Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter. . . . The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest in Miss Austen’s indifference to children. They hardly appear in her stories except to illustrate the folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as children; they are her subjects as spoilt children, and as children through whom a mother may receive flattery from her designing acquaintance, and may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. . . . In this coldness or dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Brontë.

  1895—Willa Cather14

  I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that. They are so few, the ones who really did anything worth while; there were the great Georges, George Eliot and George Sand, and they were anything but women, and there was Miss Brontë who kept her sentimentality under control and there was Jane Austen who certainly had more common sense than any of them and was in some respects the greatest of them all. . . . When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.

  1898—Unsigned article in The Academy15

  It is sometimes my fortune at a week-end to . . . have discovered a cosy old inn on the Norfolk coast where there are no golf-links, some flight shooting, an abundance of rabbits to pop at, a plain, good dinner to be had, and a comfortable oak room in which to spend the evening. For the sake of convenience I will call my friends . . . Brown and Robinson. . . .

  Brown is a flourishing journalist, and therefore, entirely destitute alike of definite opinion and principle. . . . It is his business to keep a finger on the public pulse and allot space accordingly.

  Robinson is an ardent young student, busily employed in devouring literature wholesale. . . . It was he that started the talk about Jane Austen. . . .

  “I like Di [Vernon],” said the student, “but [Sir Walter] Scott did not take her through her paces as well as Lizzie [Elizabeth Bennet] is taken. She is not shown in as many different moods and tempers. She is too perfect. It was the way of Scott. All his heroines . . . are spotless. Elizabeth has a thousand faults . . . is often blind, pert, audacious, imprudent; and yet how splendidly she comes out of it all! Alive to the very tips of her fingers . . .”

  “It does my heart good to see that youth is still capable of enthusiasm,” said the journalist, “but my dear chap, after another twenty years, when I hope to see you a portly husband and father who has ceased to think much of heroines either in fact or fiction, your ideals will be completely changed. You will like much better to read about Mrs. Norris saving three-quarters of a yard of baize out of the stage-curtain, and Fanny Price will be more interesting to you than Elizabeth.”

  “Not a bit of it,” stoutly rejoined the student. “Mrs. Norris is quite interesting to me now. . . .”

  1898—Mark Twain16

  Every time I read “Pride and Prejudice” I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

  1901—Joseph Conrad to H. G. Wells17

  What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?

  1905—Henry James18

  Practically overlooked for thirty or forty years after her death, she perhaps really stands there for us as the prettiest possible example of that rectification of estimate, brought about by some slow clearance of stupidity. . . . This tide has risen high on the opposite shore—risen rather higher, I think, than . . . her intrinsic merit and interest. . . . Responsible . . . is the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the
pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their “dear,” our dear, everybody’s dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose. . . .

  The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her unconsciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes over her work basket . . . fell . . . into woolgathering, and her dropped stitches . . . were afterwards picked up as . . . little master-strokes of imagination.

  1905—Unsigned review of Jane Austen and Her Times, by G. E. Mitton19

  Miss Mitton . . . reveals many virtues which we salute. She is a lover of books. She is hard-working. . . . Her expressions of opinion are naive and abundant and likely to give much pleasure to those who contradict her: for example, in her mention of “Sense and Sensibility,” she says very little and that of a disparaging kind about Mrs. Jennings; we, on the other hand, bow down to Mrs. Jennings as one of the few persons in fiction whom it is equally delightful to have met on paper and not to have met in the flesh.

  1908—Unsigned review in The Academy20

  Northanger Abbey is not the best example of Jane Austen’s work, but the fact that the scene is mostly laid in Bath, one of the few towns in England which retain their proper character, makes it particularly attractive to foreigners. It has also a stronger romantic element than is usual with Jane Austen, which adds interest for young people.

  1913—Virginia Woolf 21

  Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought . . . and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

  1913—G. K. Chesterton22

  Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.

  1917—Frederic Harrison, letter to Thomas Hardy23

  [Austen was] a rather heartless little cynic . . . penning satires about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves. . . . Not a breath from the whirlwind around her ever touched her Chippendale chiffonier or escritoire.

  1924—Rudyard Kipling, epigraph to “The Janeites”24

  Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!

  Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!

  And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,

  Glory, love, and honor unto England’s Jane.

  1924—E. M. Forster25

  I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity—how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. . . . The Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he ascribes so freely to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.

  1925—Edith Wharton26

  Jane Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her sedateness; she never fails, but there are few or none like her.

  1927—Arnold Bennett27

  Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause. They are nearly all fanatics. They will not listen. If anybody “went for Jane,” anything might happen to him. He would assuredly be called on to resign from his clubs. I do not want to resign from my clubs. . . .

  She is marvellous, intoxicating . . . [but] she did not know enough of the world to be a great novelist. She had not the ambition to be a great novelist. She knew her place; her present “fans” do not know her place, and their antics would without doubt have excited Jane’s lethal irony.

  1928—Rebecca West28

  Really, it is time this comic patronage of Jane Austen ceased. To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. There are those who are deluded by the decorousness of her manner, by the fact that her virgins are so virginal that they are unaware of their virginity, into thinking that she is ignorant of passion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love, whose delicate reactions to men make the heroines of all our later novelists seem merely to turn signs, “Stop” or “Go” toward the advancing male.

  1931—D. H. Lawrence29

  This, again, is the tragedy of social life today. In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then, in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone. Already this old maid typifies “personality” instead of character, the sharp knowing in apartness instead of knowing in togetherness, and she is, to my feeling, thoroughly unpleasant, English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense of the word, just as Fielding is English in the good generous sense.

  1937—W. H. Auden30

  You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

  It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”

  Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

  The economic basis of society.

  1938—Ezra Pound, letter to Laurence Binyon31

  I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn’t as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when you doget a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn’t it worth any other ten?

  1938—Thornton Wilder32

  [Jane Austen’s novels] appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with Robinson Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Eliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.

  1938—H. G. Wells, dialogue from a character in a novel, perhaps expressing Wells’s own opinion, perhaps not33

  “The English Jane Austen is quite typical. Quintessential I should call her. A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies—with no guts at all.”

  1940—D. W. Harding34

  I gathered, she was a delicate satirist revealing with inimitable lightness of touch the comic foibles and amiable weaknesses of the people whom she lived amongst and liked. . . . This was enough to make me quite certain I didn’t want to read her. And it is, I believe, a seriously misleading impression. . . .

  In order to enjoy her books without disturbance, those who retain the conventional notion of her work must always have had slightly to misread what she wrote.

  1940—MGM plug for the movie Pride and Prejudice35

  Five charming sisters on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor! Girls! Take a lesson from these husband hunters!

  1944—Edmund Wilson36

  There have been several revolutions of taste during the last century and a quarter of English literature, and through them all perhaps only two reputations have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare’s and Jane Austen’s. . . . She has compelled the amaz
ed admiration of writers of the most diverse kinds, and I should say that Jane Austen and Dickens rather queerly present themselves today as the only two English novelists . . . who belong in the very top rank with the great fiction-writers of Russia and France. . . . That this spirit should have embodied itself . . . in the mind of a well-bred spinster, the daughter of a country clergyman, who never saw more of the world than was made possible by short visits to London and a residence of a few years in Bath and who found her subjects mainly in the problems of young provincial girls looking for husbands, seems one of the most freakish of the many anomalies of English literary history.

  1954—C. S. Lewis37

  She is described by someone in Kipling’s worst story as the mother of Henry James. I feel much more sure that she is the daughter of Dr. Johnson: she inherits his commonsense, his morality, even much of his style. I am not a good enough Jamesian to decide the other claim. But if she bequeathed anything to him it must be wholly on the structural side. Her style, her system of values, her temper, seem to me the very opposite of his. I feel sure that Isabel Archer, if she had met Elizabeth Bennet, would have pronounced her “not very cultivated,” and Elizabeth, I fear, would have found Isabel deficient in both “seriousness” and in mirth.