by John Mullan
Notes
Introduction
1 British Critic, July 1816, in Brian Southam, ed., Jane Austen. The Critical Heritage 1811–1870 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 71.
2 Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1816, ibid., p. 72.
3 Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, in J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2002), p. 140.
4 Henry Austen, ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’, ibid., p. 150.
5 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen at Sixty’, Nation and Athenaeum, 15 December 1923, reprinted in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 155.
6 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W.E.K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 14 March 1826, p. 114.
7 Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (1905) in Brian Southam, ed., Jane Austen, pp. 229–30.
8 Ibid, p. 300.
9 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1982), p. 13.
10 The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, ed. Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letter of 5 May 1950, p. 241.
11 Ibid., letter of 9 May 1950, p. 243.
12 Ibid., cited in Karlinsky introduction, p. 17.
Chapter 1: How Much Does Age Matter?
1 See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871. A Reconstruction (1981; reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 255.
2 R. A. Austen-Leigh, ed., Austen Papers 1704–1856, introduction by David Gilson (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1995), pp. 156–7.
3 William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, rev. Deirdre Le Faye (London: The British Library, 1989), p. 134, and Hazel Jones, Jane Austen and Marriage (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 39.
Chapter 2: Do Sisters Sleep Together?
1 London Review of Books, 17. 24 (14 December 1995), p. 4. For Terry Castle’s original article, see LRB, 17. 15 (3 August 1995), pp. 3–6. For the evidence, see Edward Copeland, ‘The Austens and the Elliots: A Consumer’s Guide to Persuasion’, in Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel (eds), Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and Her Profession (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 137.
2 Quoted in Kate Chisholm, Fanny Burney: Her Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 117.
3 See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 2009), for contemporary evidence of husbands and wives having separate bedrooms.
Chapter 3: What Do the Characters Call Each Other?
1 Just one of the peculiarities of terms of address in Austen’s fiction observed in Isaac Schapera, Kinship Terminology in Jane Austen’s Novels (London: The Royal Anthropological Institute, 1977), p. 2.
2 The novels in which they feature are Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747-8), Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), and Charlotte Smith, Emmeline (1788).
3 Maggie Lane, Jane Austen and Names (Bristol: Blaise Books, 2002)., pp. 12–13.
4 See E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1950; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 199.
5 Lane, Names, p. 33.
6 Ibid., p. 35.
Chapter 4: How Do Jane Austen’s Characters Look?
1 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Melvyn and Joan New (London: Penguin, 1997), Vol. VI, Ch. xxxviii, p. 388.
Chapter 5: Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?
1 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1996), Vol. II, Ch. viii, p. 95.
2 See Anne Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England (London: B. T. Batsford, 1979), pp. 60–6 and 82–5.
3 Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Costume for Births, Marriages and Deaths (London: A & C Black, 1972), pp. 244–5.
4 Buck, Dress, p. 60.
5 Cunnington and Lucas, Costume, p. 268.
6 Fanny Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1982), p. 53.
7 Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping 1800–1914 (1964; reprinted London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 59.
8 Linda Bree, introduction to Persuasion (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), p. 13.
9 Jane Austen, Catherine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford: World’s Classics 1993), p. 234.
10 See Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, p. 249.
11 See Deirdre Le Faye’s biographical index to Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 495.
Chapter 6: Why Is It Risky to Go to the Seaside?
1 Allan Brodie, Colin Ellis, David Stuart and Gary Winter, Weymouth’s Seaside Heritage (Swindon: English Heritage, 2006), p. 9.
2 David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure (London: Hambledon, 1999), p. 47.
3 See Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 141–2.
4 John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), p. 17.
5 Ibid., pp. 126–7.
6 Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, p. 134.
7 Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750–1840 (1994; reprinted London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 66–7.
8 Ibid., p. 272.
9 Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 262.
10 Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, p. 124.
Chapter 7: Why Is the Weather Important?
1 Nature, No. 388 (10 July 1997), p. 137.
Chapter 8: Do We Ever See the Lower Classes?
1 Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, p. 155.
2 See Pamela Horn, Flunkeys and Scullions: Life Below Stairs in Georgian England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), pp. 213–16.
3 Jane Austen Society Collected Reports 1949–1965, p. 251.
4 J. J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 7.
Chapter 9: Which Important Characters Never Speak in the Novels?
1 Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries Made upon men and matter, in Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 574.
2 See the essays in The Talk in Jane Austen, ed. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg (Edmonton, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press, 2002), especially those by Juliet McMaster and Jeffrey Herrle.
3 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 273.
Chapter 10: What Games Do Characters Play?
1 The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, Vol. VI, Minor Works, p. 325.
2 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Michael Slater (1978; reprinted London: Penguin, 1986), Ch. 1, p. 63.
3 See David Selwyn (ed.), Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), pp. 19, 35–9 and 51–5 for Austen examples.
Chapter 11: Is There Any Sex in Jane Austen?
1 Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), p. 138.
2 Ibid., p. 155.
3 See ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, in The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, Vol. V, p. 7.
4 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2001), Letter VIII, p. 20.
5 Lawrence Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660–1857 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 26.
6 See Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 78.
7 See Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, Ch. 2.
8 See Deirdre Le Faye’s biographical index to Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 566.
9 Its suggestiveness is definiti
vely analysed by Brian Southam, ‘“Rears” and “Vices” in Mansfield Park’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. LII, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. 23–3.
Chapter 12: What Do Characters Say When the Heroine Is Not There?
1 Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 157.
2 See for instance Norman Page, Speech in the English Novel (London: Longman, 1973), p. 106: ‘Jane Austen’s gentlemen are shown speaking only in the presence of ladies’.
Chapter 13: How Much Money Is Enough?
1 See Maggie Lane, A Charming Place: Bath in the Life and Novels of Jane Austen. (1988; reprinted Bath: Millstream Books, 2003), p. 36.
2 David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), pp. 274–7.
3 See Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, pp. 130–2.
4 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 171.
5 Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 24.
6 Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1850 (London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 63.
7 Copeland, Women Writing, p. 28.
8 Edward Copeland, ‘Money’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 321.
9 See G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 30–6.
10 Jones, Jane Austen and Marriage, p. 87.
11 Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (London: Hambledon, 2000), pp. 121–30.
12 Jones, Jane Austen and Marriage, p. 135.
13 Austen-Leigh and Austen Leigh, A Family Record, pp. 96 and 112. There is some dispute about the date of the purchase: see Robin Vick, ‘Mr. Austen’s Carriage’, in Jane Austen Society Collected Reports, 1999–2000, pp. 226–8.
14 Copeland, Women Writing, p. 31.
Chapter 14: Why Do Her Plots Rely on Blunders?
1 Tanner, Jane Austen, p. 143.
Chapter 15: What Do Characters Read?
1 Lord Byron, The Giaour. A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813), in Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, Vol. III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 80, ll. 1269–80.
2 A letter to Cassandra from Lyme Regis (14 September 1804, Letters, ed. Le Faye) includes a joke from Tristram Shandy, while her earliest surviving letter (9 January 1796, Letters, ed. Le Faye) involves a comparison between Tom Lefroy and Tom Jones. A later letter to her sister mentions the birth of her brother Frank’s second son and hopes that ‘if he ever comes to be hanged’ she and Cassandra will be too old to care. This odd sentiment is surely an allusion to Fielding’s description of Tom Jones as ‘certainly born to be hanged’, Tom Jones, Vol. III, Ch. ii, p. 103.
3 Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, p. 83.
4 James Edward Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 158.
Chapter 16: Are Ill People Really to Blame for Their Illnesses?
1 Tanner, Jane Austen, p. 99.
2 The Works of Jane Austen, ed. Chapman, Vol. VI, Minor Works, p. 321.
3 See Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England, pp. 147–50.
4 John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: The Picture of Health (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180.
5 Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, p. 216.
Chapter 17: What Makes Characters Blush?
1 Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 51.
2 Mary Ann O’Farrell, ‘Austen’s Blush’, in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1994), p. 127.
3 Fanny’s blushes are analysed in Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, pp. 76–89.
4 Katie Halsey, ‘The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen’s Blushes’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies (2006), Vol. 42, No. 3, p. 237.
Chapter 18: What Are the Right and Wrong Ways to Propose Marriage?
1 See Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 46–7.
2 An anthology of such manuals is Eve Tavor Bannet (ed.), British and American Letter Manuals, 1680–1810, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008).
3 David Fordyce, The New and Complete British Letter-Writer (London, 1800), pp. 75 and 82–3.
4 Jones, Jane Austen and Marriage, p. 26, and Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, p. 239.
5 Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce: A History of the Making and Breaking of Marriage in England, 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 88, 91.
6 Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, A Family Record, pp. 121–2.
Chapter 19: When Does Jane Austen Speak Directly to the Reader?
1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, in Woolf, Essays, IV, p. 148.
2 D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 1.
3 The Rambler, no. 97, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. IV, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 156.
4 Maria Edgeworth, Patronage (London, 1814), Vol. II, p. 101.
5 Mary Brunton, Self-Control, 2nd edition (Edinburgh, 1811), Vol. I, p. 84.
Chapter 20: How Experimental a Novelist Is Jane Austen?
1 Chapman, Vol. VI, pp. 428–30.
2 Samuel Richardson, preface to the third edition (1751) of Clarissa (1932; reprinted London: Dent, 1978), 4 vols, Vol. I, p. xiv.
3 Fanny Burney, Cecilia, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1988), p. 6.
4 Miller, Jane Austen, p. 27.
5 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1983; reprinted Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 5.
6 Ibid., p. 108.
7 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 46–9.
8 Jane Spencer, ‘Narrative Technique: Austen and Her Contemporaries’, in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
9 Brunton, Self-Control, p. 25.
10 Gillian Beer, introduction to Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1998), p. xxi.
11 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. 272.
12 Norman Page, Speech in the English Novel (London: Longman, 1973), p. 29.
13 Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 177–8.
14 P. D. James, ‘Emma considered as a detective story’, in Jane Austen Society Collected Reports 1996–2000, pp. 189–200.
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