The Jane Austen Book Club
Page 24
1955—Lionel Trilling38
The animality of Mark Twain’s repugnance is probably to be taken as the male’s revulsion from a society in which women seem to be at the center of interest and power, as a man’s panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose essay “Jane Austen, A Depreciation,” is a summa of all the reasons for disliking Jane Austen, expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain’s; he implies that a direct sexual insult is being offered to men by a woman author.
1957—Kingsley Amis39
Edmund and Fanny are both morally detestable and the endorsement of their feelings and behaviour by the author . . . makes Mansfield Park an immoral book.
1968—Angus Wilson40
As to the trickle of critics hostile to Jane Austen, from Victorian times onwards, they have been either temperamentally off key like Charlotte Brontë, Mark Twain, or [D. H.] Lawrence, or insufficiently informed like Professor Garrod, or critical only partially, like Mr. Amis in his unwillingness lightly to undertake inviting Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram to dine; her less intelligent, more fulsome admirers have been more an embarrassment to her high reputation than her hostile critics.
1974—Margaret Drabble41
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine.
1979—Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar42
Austen’s story is especially flattering to male readers because it describes the taming not just of any woman but specifically of a rebellious, imaginative girl who is amorously mastered by a sensible man. No less than the blotter literally held over the manuscript on her writing desk, Austen’s cover story of the necessity for silence and submission reinforces women’s subordinate position in patriarchal culture. . . . At the same time, however . . . under this cover story, Austen always stimulates her readers “to supply what is not there.” [This last quotation is from Virginia Woolf.]
1980—Vladimir Nabokov43
Miss Austen’s is not a violently vivid masterpiece. . . . Mansfield Park . . . is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.
1984—Fay Weldon44
I also think . . . that the reason no one married her was the same reason Crosby didn’t publish Northanger Abbey. It was just all too much. Something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth: something capable of taking the world by its heels, and shaking it.
1989—Katha Pollitt, from her poem “Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels”45
This time round, they didn’t seem so comic.
Mama is foolish, dim or dead. Papa’s
a sort of genial, pampered lunatic.
No one thinks of anything but class.
1989—Christopher Kent46
An Oxford tutor, H. F. Brett-Smith, served during World War I as an advisor to hospitals on reading matter for wounded soldiers. “For the severely shell-shocked,” a former student recalled, “he selected Jane Austen.” . . .
While the French Revolution raged, Jane Austen barely looked up from her literary petit point. Who better to soothe minds unhinged at Passchendaele or the Somme? In the therapeutic calm of her pages history’s victims could escape from their nemesis.
1993—Gish Jen47
I think the next writer to have a really big influence on me was Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice was one of the books that I read backwards and forwards. I really wanted to be Elizabeth Bennet. Of course today, there are people who would say, “Oh, that’s so Anglo”; they think I should have been more influenced by Chinese opera or something.
1993—Edward W. Said48
Where Mansfield Park is concerned, however, a good deal more needs to be said. . . . Perhaps then Austen, and indeed, pre-imperialist novels generally, will appear to be more implicated in the rationale for imperialist expansion than at first sight they have been.
1995—Article about an essay by Terry Castle49
Was Jane Austen gay? This question, posed by the normally staid London Review of Books, was the headline for an essay by Stanford professor Terry Castle that subtly explored the “unconscious homoerotic dimension” of Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra. The implication has caused quite a kerfuffle among Austenites.
1996—Carol Shields50
Austen’s heroines are compelling because in a social and economic system that conspires to place them at a disadvantage, they exercise real power. . . . We look at Jane Austen’s novels . . . and see that her women not only know what they want, they have evolved a pointed strategy for how to go about getting it.
1996—Martin Amis51
Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors—all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself.
Each age will bring its peculiar emphasis, and in the current Austen festival our own anxieties stand fully revealed. We like to wallow in the accents and accoutrements of Jane’s world, but our response is predominantly sombre. We notice, above all, the constriction of female opportunity: how brief was their nubility, and yet how slowly and deadeningly time passed within it. We notice how plentiful were the occasions for inflicting social pain, and how interested the powerful were in this infliction. We see how little the powerless had to use against those who might hate them. We wonder who on earth will marry the poor girls. Poor men can’t. And rich men can’t. So who can?
1996—Anthony Lane52
No burden weighs more heavily on a writer’s shoulders than that of being much loved, but something unreachable in Austen shrugs off the weight.
1997—Editorial in Forbes53
“Drucker’s not a management theorist in the narrow, academic sense,” says Lenzner. . . . “He compares the strategic corporate alliances with the matrimonial alliances in Jane Austen novels.”
1997—Susan M. Korba54
For years, critics of Emma have been circling around the apparently disconcerting issue of the protagonist’s sexuality. . . . Claudia Johnson finds that . . . “transparently misogynist, sometimes even homophobic, subtexts often bob to the surface of the criticism about her.” Johnson cites Edmund Wilson’s ominous allusions and Marvin Mudrick’s dark hints about Emma’s infatuations with and preference for other women as examples of the unease aroused by this particular Austen heroine.
1999—David Andrew Graves55
For the last two years I have been using software as a tool for analyzing texts for patterns in word sequence and word frequency. . . . From the viewpoint of word frequency by semantic category, Emma stands as Jane Austen’s lightest and brightest novel, strongly positive, and with the lowest incidence of negative feeling, just as she promised us from the very first sentence.
1999—Andy Rooney56
I have never read anything Austen wrote. I just never got at reading Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. They seemed to be the Bobbsey Twins for grown-ups.
1999—Anthony Lane57
Nudity, sexual abuse, lesbianism, a dash of incest—will we never tire of Jane Austen?
2000—Nalini Natarajan58
A “commonsense” perception on the popularity of Austen in India would point to the translatability of Austenian situations into the context of the emergent Indian middle class. . . . The issues raised by my metacritique, or reading of recent criticism of the Austenian daughter, while quite removed
from the specificities of women’s reform and its narrativization in colonial Bengal, suggest a paradigm within which to discuss the interlocking of two cultures.
2002—Shannon R. Wooden, on the Austen movies59
Food control, a culturally pervasive defining feature of “femininity,” also pervades Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, Douglas McGrath’s Emma, and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless. . . . Without exception the heroine does not eat. . . . Conspicuous food consumption invariably signals the “bad” or ridiculous woman.
2002—Elsa Solender, past president of the Jane Austen Society of North America60
Having reviewed all the available films and critical reactions to them in the specialized libraries of London, Los Angeles, and New York, and having begged, bought, or borrowed a library of books and articles on adaptation from literature to film, I have reached one definitive conclusion about trying to re-create “Jane Austen’s World” faithfully and authentically on film in a way to satisfy Janeites. In a single word: Don’t!
2003—J. K. Rowling61
I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. . . . There’s a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales’s secretary.
NOTES
1. Jane Austen, The Works of Jane Austen, vol. 6: Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, London, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 431–435.
2. Ibid., pp. 436–439.
3. B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen and the Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), vol. 1, p. 40.
4. Mary Russell Mitford, Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. A. G. L’Estrange (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870), vol. 1, p. 300.
5. David Lodge, ed., Jane Austen’s Emma: A Casebook (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: Macmillan Education, 1991), p. 42.
6. Southam, Jane Austen and the Critical Heritage, vol. 1, p. 106.
7. A. J. Beveridge, Life of John Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916–1919), vol. 4, pp. 79–80.
8. [Thomas Henry Lister], unsigned review of Catherine Gore, Women As They Are, in Edinburgh Review, July 1830, p. 448.
9. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Friendships, Lives and Correspondence (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1980), vol. 2, p. 180.
10.The Academy, 1 (February 12, 1870), pp. 118–119.
11. Southam, Jane Austen and the Critical Heritage, vol. 1, pp. 224–225.
12. Anthony Trollope, “Miss Austen’s Timidity,” in Lodge, Jane Austen’s Emma: A Casebook, p. 51.
13. Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell, The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (London and New York: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 66.
14. Willa Cather, “The Demands of Art,” in Bernice Slote, ed., The Kingdom of Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 409.
15.The Academy, 53 (January/June 1898), pp. 262–263.
16. Mark Twain, Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing, ed. Mark Dawidziak (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), p. 128.
17. John Wiltshire, quoted in B. C. Southam, ed., Critical Essays on Jane Austen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. xiii.
18. Henry James, “The Lesson of Balzac,” in Leon Edel, ed., The House of Fiction (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), pp. 62–63.
19.The Academy, 69 (November 11, 1905), p. 1171.
20.The Academy, 74 (January/June 1908), p. 622.
21. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1957), pp. 50–51.
22. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), p. 109.
23. Quoted in Christopher Kent, “Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen,” in J. David Grey, ed., Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, MI, and London: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 59.
24. Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites,” in Craig Raine, ed., A Choice of Kipling’s Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 334.
25. E. M. Forster, “Jane Austen,” in Abinger Harvest (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 148.
26. Penelope Vita-Finzi, Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 21.
27. Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett, ed. Samuel Hynes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), pp. 256–257.
28. Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), pp. 263–264.
29. D. H. Lawrence, Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Martin Secker, 1931), pp. 92–93.
30. W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 21.
31. Ezra Pound, Letters from Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1950), p. 308.
32. Thornton Wilder, “A Preface for Our Town” (1938), in American Characteristics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 101.
33. H. G. Wells, The Brothers: A Story (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), pp. 26–27.
34. D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” Scrutiny, 8 (March 1940), pp. 346–347.
35. Quoted by Anthony Lane, “Jane’s World,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1995, p. 107.
36. Edmund Wilson, “A Long Talk About Jane Austen,” The New Yorker, June 24, 1944, p. 69.
37. C. S. Lewis, “A Note on Jane Austen,” in Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, 4, no. 4 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), p. 371.
38. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in Ian Watt, ed., Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 126.
39. Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?” in Watt, Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 142.
40. Angus Wilson, “The Neighbourhood of Tombuctoo: Conflicts in Jane Austen’s Novels,” in Southam, Critical Essays on Jane Austen, p. 186.
41. Margaret Drabble, “Introduction,” Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon (Great Britain: Penguin, 1974), p. 7.
42. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 154–155.
43. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fred Bowers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), p. 10.
44. Fay Weldon (1984), Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (New York: Taplinger, 1985), p. 97.
45. Katha Pollitt, “Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels,” The New Republic, August 7 and 14, 1989, p. 35.
46. Kent, “Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen,” p. 59.
47. Y. Matsukawa, “Melus Interview: Gish Jen,” Melus, 18, no. 4 (Winter 1993), p. 111.
48. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 84.
49. Belinda Luscombe, “Which Persuasion?” Time, August 14, 1995, p. 73.
50. Carol Shields and Anne Giardini, “Martians in Jane Austen?” Persuasions, 18 (December 16, 1996), pp. 196, 199.
51. Martin Amis, “Jane’s World,” The New Yorker, January 8, 1996, p. 34.
52. Anthony Lane, “The Dumbing of Emma,” The New Yorker, August 5, 1996, p. 76.
53. James W. Michaels, “Jane Austen Novels as Management Manuals,” Forbes, 159, no. 5 (March 10, 1997), p. 14.
54. Susan M. Korba, “ ‘Improper and Dangerous Distinctions’: Female Relationships and Erotic Domination in Emma,” University of North Texas Studies in the Novel, 29, no. 2 (Summer 1997), p. 139.
55. David Andrew Graves, “Computer Analysis of Word Usage in Emma,” Persuasions, 21 (1999), pp. 203, 211.
56. Quoted in Natalie Tyler, ed., The Friendly Jane Austen (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 231.
57. Anthony Lane, “All over the Map” (review of the film Mansfield Park), The New Yorker, November 29, 1999, p. 140.
58. Nalini Natarajan, “Reluctant Janeites: Daughterly Value in Jane Austen and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Swami,” in You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds., The Postcolonial Jane Austen (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 141.
59. Shannon R. Wooden, “ ‘You Even Forget Yourself’: The Cinematic Construction of Anorexic Women in the 1990’s Austen Films,” Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 2002, p. 221.
60. Elsa Solender, “Recreating Jane Austen’s World on Film.” Persuasions, 24 (2002), pp. 103–104.
61. Quoted at www.bloomsburymagazine.com.
• • •
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit
www.penguin.com/fowlerchecklist
Questions for Discussion
Jocelyn’s Questions
1. Austen’s books often leave you wondering whether all of her matches are good ideas. Troubling couples may include: Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon, Lydia Bennet and Wickham, Emma and Mr. Knightley, Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick. Do any of the matches in The Jane Austen Book Club create disquiet?
2. Do you like any of the movies based on Austen’s books? Do you ever like movies based on books? Have you seen any of the adaptations of Austen’s novels that star a Jack Russell terrier named Wishbone? Do you want to?