For Paul
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Chapter 1 ‘Authors too ourselves’
Chapter 2 Praise and Pewter
Chapter 3 Mouldering in the Grave
Chapter 4 A Vexed Question
Chapter 5 Divine Jane
Chapter 6 Canon and Canonisation
Chapter 7 Jane Austen™
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Manuscript Sources
Select Bibliography
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
1. Manuscript of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ by Jane Austen (kind permission of Chawton House Library, Hampshire www.chawtonhouse.org).
2. The Revd George Austen (1731–1805).
3. Letter from Revd George Austen to Thomas Cadell, 1 November 1797 (by kind permission of the President and Scholars of Saint John Baptist College in the University of Oxford).
4. John Murray II, mezzotint after unknown artist, early 1800s (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
5. Royalty cheque from the firm of John Murray to Jane Austen, 1816 (John Murray Archive © Trustees of the National Library of Scotland).
6. Portrait of a man said to be the Revd James Stanier Clarke, LLD, FRS (1765–1834) by John Russell (1745–1806), c. 1790 (© V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum).
7. Silhouette of Cassandra Austen (1773–1845), undated (Jane Austen Memorial Trust).
8. Henry Austen (1771–1850), miniature c. 1820 (in family possession).
9. Jane Austen’s gravestone in Winchester Cathedral (© The Dean and Chapter of Winchester).
10. Richard Bentley, lithograph by Charles Baugniet, 1844 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
11. Title page of Sense and Sensibility, published by Richard Bentley & Co. in 1833.
12. James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798–1874), artist unknown (Jane Austen Memorial Trust).
13. Robert William Chapman, bromide print by Walter Stoneman, 1949 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
14. Chawton Cottage, photographed for The Bookman, January 1902 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Per 25805 c.2).
15. Dorothy Darnell and T. E. Carpenter at Chawton Cottage, late 1940s (Jane Austen Memorial Trust).
16. Jane Austen, pencil and watercolour drawing by Cassandra Austen, c.1810 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
17. Watercolour painting by James Andrews after Cassandra Austen, 1869 (private family collection).
18. Engraving after Cassandra Austen; the frontispiece to James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870 (© Bettman/Corbis).
19. Steel engraving from Evert A. Duyckinck’s Portrait Gallery of Eminent Men and Women, 1873, artist unknown.
20. Silhouette, said to be of Jane Austen, artist unknown (Patrick O’Connor Collection).
21. ‘Mr and Mrs Bennet’ from Pride and Prejudice, Allen and Macmillan, 1894; illustration by Hugh Thomson.
22. Jane Austen, woodcut by Félix Vallotton, from La Revue Blanche, January-April, 1898.
23. Lithograph portrait of Félix Fénéon by Maximilien Luce, from Mazas, 1894 (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009).
24. Cover of The Storyteller, May 1924 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Per 2561 d.46).
25. Cartoon from ‘Real Life Stories: Jane Austen’, Girl 20 October 1954, drawn by Eric Dadswell (© IPC Magazines).
26. Royal Mail commemorative stamps, 1975, designed by Barbara Brown.
27. Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in Robert Z. Leonard’s Pride and Prejudice, 1940 (© Turner Entertainment Co. A Warner Bros Entertainment Company. All rights reserved).
28. James McAvoy and Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane,2007 (Source: BFI).
29. ‘Jane Austen’, 1995 (© Theo Westenberger/Corbis).
Preface
‘What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her?
What is it all about?’
Joseph Conrad to H. G. Wells, 1901
When Jane Austen’s brother Henry wrote the first ‘Biographical Notice’ about the author for the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, he clearly thought his would be the last words on the subject. ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer,’ he wrote. ‘A life of usefulness, literature and religion was not by any means a life of event.’ As far as Henry and his siblings were concerned, the story of their sister’s authorship was over. A few of her remaining letters were bequeathed as keepsakes to nephews and nieces, others were destroyed or forgotten, the books went out of print, and Jane’s generation of Austens aged and died secure in the belief that the public’s curiosity about their sister – such as it was – had been satisfied.
But almost two hundred years and tens of thousands of books on Austen later, her fame and readership worldwide continue to grow. Her six completed novels are among the best-known, best-loved, most-read works in the English language. Practically over-looked for thirty or forty years after her death, the ‘tide of her fame’ that Henry James imagined had already ‘passed the high-water’ at the end of the nineteenth century has swollen and burst its banks. She is now a truly global phenomenon, known as much through film and television adaptations of her stories as through the books themselves, revered by non-readers and scholars alike. Her influence reaches from the decoration of tea-towels to a defence of extreme pornography, and her fans have included Queen Victoria, E. M. Forster, B. B. King (‘Jane Austen! I love Jane Austen!’)1 and the editor of the lad-mag Nuts. As the title of one Austen blog has it, ‘Jane Austen – She’s Everywhere!’, endlessly referenced and name-dropped and part of today’s multinational, multilingual, multicultural single currency.
The use of Austen’s name knows no generic boundaries. Who else is cited with equal approval by feminists and misogynists, can be linked to nineteenth-century anarchism, twenty-first-century terrorism and the National Trust, forms part of the inspiration behind works as diverse as Eugene Onegin and Bridget Jones’s Diary? During the 2006 World Cup Final, some viewers may have been momentarily distracted from the foot-and head-work of Zinedine Zidane by the Phillips advert behind the French goal announcing ‘Sense and Simplicity’, while a recent article about possible infiltration of US educational programmes by terrorists was titled ‘Osama Bin Laden a Huge Jane Austen Fan’. The phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice’ itself, sonorous, moralistic and nicely alliterative, has provided headline-writers with one of their readiest formulae, though, of course, Austen’s novel is rarely the subject of whatever follows; Test Match coverage, the stalemate in a steel strike, the fallout from an anti-Islamic newspaper article, or the description of Bob Woodward’s latest book about the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy: ‘A Heady Mix of Pride and Prejudice Led to War’. There is a long tradition of linking the phrase with public affairs; in 1900 the New York Times ran a letter about the conduct of the British in the Boer War under that title, as the writer had claimed, ‘Pride has made them believe themselves perfect; prejudice against things foreign has so isolated their army that it is now actually antiquated and worthy of the days of George III.’2 In the spring of 2007, it turned up in a headline about the birth of a child to the American Vice-President’s lesbian daughter, Mary: ‘Pride and Prejudice: Dick Cheney’s family values’.3
If Pride and Prejudice is the representative Austen title, its opening sentence is one of the most frequently abused quotes in the language, second only to ‘to be or not to be’. Marjorie Garber has called it a ‘cultural bromide’ and cited its forced use in articles on subjects as diverse as grape allergies, opera stars and restaurant services, as well as pieces about Austen and her books, of course.4 The mathematical neatness
of the sentence lends itself to appropriation: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a [blank] in possession of a [blank] must be in want of a [blank].’ Almost every day of the week, you’ll find it in a paper or on a website somewhere: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that an unemployed believer in possession of a missile-launcher must be in want of a Jehad’ or ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the acquisition and enhancement of literacy skills is a fundamental educational goal.’5
Austen’s success as an infinitely exploitable global brand, or conceptual product, is everything to do with recognition and little to do with reading. The Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant understood this at the very dawn of Janeism: ‘“The best judges” have here, for once, done the office of an Academy,’ she wrote in September 1870, suspicious of the fuss around the first biography, ‘[they have] laureated a writer whom the populace would not have been likely to laureate, but whom it has learned to recognise.’ The ‘universality of applause’ which Austen had already excited seemed to Oliphant ‘half-real half-fictitious’,6 the result of wishful thinking on the part of readers and exploitation by what Henry James later identified as ‘bookselling spirits’ and ‘the stiff breeze of the commercial’. If this was true in 1872, how much more so today, when Austen’s name bears such a weight of signification as to mean almost nothing at all. To many people, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, even ‘Jane Austen’, simply evokes the actor Colin Firth in a wet shirt, and for all her consistent topping of ‘Nation’s Favourite’ listings (in 2007 Pride and Prejudice was voted ‘the book the nation can’t do without’; the Bible came sixth), Austen’s texts remain unfamiliar to many readers. In 2007, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, an unpublished novelist, tested the alertness of eighteen contemporary British publishers by sending round the first chapters of Pride and Prejudice, with proper nouns slightly adjusted, under the title ‘First Impressions, by Alison Laydee’. It was rejected by all of them, but more surprisingly, only one editor seems to have recognised the manuscript’s origins and the presence of a hoax.7
But unlike many candidates for global celebrity, Austen is a genuinely great artist as well as a popular one, ‘an example of high culture in its least challenging form … at once formidable and non-threatening’, as the critic Claudia Johnson has said.8 Her ‘monoplot’, once described as ‘Boy meets Girl – Girl gets Boy’,9 fulfils every requirement of romance and erotic fantasy literature, but also contains matter for a lifetime’s rumination on relations between the sexes. Her clear prose style is extraordinarily accessible, while her irony allows illimitable interpretation.
Austen’s appeal has been powerful enough to threaten the jurisdiction of critics, and certainly of literary critics. She is one of few writers who inspire personal love and strong feelings of proprietorship. Virginia Woolf observed that Austen’s characters are so rounded and substantial that readers treat them ‘as if they were living people’,10 while more recently, Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin has remarked how ‘many readers feel strongly that she is their personal property, not to be tampered with or subjected to questions and theories’.11 The Web-connected world allows full indulgence of readers’ identification with the author and her works; there are hundreds of Austen blogs and sites, Austen Addicts, Lost in Austen, AustenProse (‘A daily celebration of the brilliance of Jane Austen’s writing’) and The Republic of Pemberley, a heavily ironised zone that promises, rather unnecessarily, to be ‘your haven in a world programmed to misunderstand all things Austen’. In the blogosphere, Austen’s novels are valued as self-help literature and dating aids (a popular interactive quiz is ‘Which Austen Heroine are You?’) and it is easy to imagine that there are plenty of contented readers doing what the characters in Karen Joy Fowler’s hit novel The Jane Austen Book Club intend to do, read ‘all Jane Austen all of the time’. Austen seems to proffer not just a read, but a creed: a whole way of life. An ardent Indian blogger with a tribute middle name, Mayank Austen Soofi, has imagined what it would be like if his dream of establishing a Jane Austen Society in Delhi came true:
Each Sunday evening, after completing their purchases in Daryaganj’s Sunday Book Bazaar, Austen admirers would gather in front of Urdu Bazaar and sit on the Jama Masjid stairs. Over doodh-waali chai and biskut, they would enjoy and appreciate Austen’s novels. There would also be a guest of honour at each meet. For instance, firangi backpackers from the unsanitary bowels of Paharganj would be invited to share how Delhi belly keeps them ‘in a continual state of inelegance’ while residents of North Delhi would complain of snobbish south Delhi’s myopic belief that their Delhi is the only Delhi (ah, ‘one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’)…. The society would also occasionally conduct walking tours in the city where you might pretend as if you are strolling the grassy verdant grounds of England, and not the sunny smoggy steamy lanes of Delhi. You can also hop by landmarks like Ghalib’s haveli in Ballimaran and recite his verses as passionately as Marianne Dashwood recited Shakespeare’s in Sense and Sensibility.12
* * *
The history of Austen’s fame is one of changing public tastes and critical practices. Edmund Wilson was wrong to say that ‘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’.13 While not experiencing revolutions of taste, public awareness and appreciation of Austen have varied hugely. The early editions of her books were small, sold only just well enough not to be an embarrassment, and were remaindered or pulped soon after her death. For most of the 1820s, she was out of print – her family thought forever. In the mid-nineteenth century – heyday of the Victorian triple-decker novel – Austen’s restrained Regency romances looked old-fashioned and irrelevant and met with very mixed critical responses. G. H. Lewes was an ardent advocate, but Charlotte Brontë thought her second-rate; Macaulay compared her with Shakespeare and pressed for a public monument, while Thomas Carlyle reviled the novels as ‘dismal trash’ and ‘dishwashings’. But by the end of the century, the journalist T. E. Kebbel announced that ‘all the reading world is now at Miss Austen’s feet’14 and a hundred years on, Austen is the only writer who is instantly recognisable by her first name.
There have been two big surges of ‘Austen mania’: one after the publication of the first biography, James Edward Austen-Leigh’s myth-mongering Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870; the other after the burst of film and television versions of Austen novels in the mid-1990s (starting with the BBC’s stupendously successful Pride and Prejudice). The first led to the late-Victorian cult of ‘Divine Jane’, the most camp and breathless literary phenomenon the world had known since ‘Bardolatry’; the second has taken Austen to the furthest corners of the world and to the heart of contemporary debate about marriage, morals and female empowerment. She is now a pivotal figure not simply in literature of all sorts (including romance fiction, chick-lit and style magazines) but in the heritage industry and multimedia.
Almost every major writer in the past hundred and fifty years has recorded an opinion of Jane Austen and, as Lionel Trilling remarked, ‘It is possible to say of … Austen, as probably we can say of no other writer, that the opinions which are held of her work are almost as interesting, and almost as important to think about, as the work itself.’15 Jane Austen will not just come out first, second or third (as Virginia Woolf said) in any arrangement of the greatest novelists, but has attained iconic status. How did she get to be this special, this useful to the culture, this important to the nation? How did a young woman who was happy to limit her scope to ‘three or four families in a Country Village’ conquer the world?
This book charts the growth of Austen’s fame, the changing status of her work and what it has stood for, or been made to stand for, in English culture over the past two hundred years. In the foreground is the story of Austen’s authorship, one of persi
stence, accident, advocacy and sometimes surprising neglect. Not only did Austen publish her books anonymously and enjoy very little success during her lifetime, but publication itself only came very late, after twenty years of unrewarded labour. I have sought to reconstruct these pre-fame years in the spirit of uncertainty through which Austen lived them. Her prized irony and famous manipulation of tone I believe owes much to it; part of the reason why she pleases us so much now is that she was, for years, pleasing only herself.
Notes - Preface
1. http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/romance/janeaustenaddict.html
2. New York Times, 30 January 1900.
3. Independent, 26 May 2007.
4. ‘The Jane Austen Syndrome’, Garber, pp. 199–210.
5. ‘The Jottings of Sheikh Osama bin Austen’, http://www.feedsfarm.com/article/872310db33673d1295a18f07ae323dfa91116b4b.html and http://www.edsw.usyd.edu.au/research/networks/aele/resources/BROCK_Rebutting_Andrew_Leigh.pdf.
6. CH, vol. 2, p. 19.
7. Guardian, 19 July 2007.
8. Copeland and McMaster, pp. 213 and 211.
9. By Sylvia Townsend Warner, in her Diaries (London, 1994), p. 250.
10. CH, vol. 2, p. 244.
11. Tomalin, p. 285.
12. http://thedelhiwalla.blogspot.com/2008/05/viewpoint-jane-austen-in-delhi.html
13. Watt, p. 35.
14. CH, vol. 2, p.41.
15. Trilling, p. 42.
CHAPTER 1
‘Authors too ourselves’
In 1869, Jane Austen’s first biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh, expressed surprise at how his aunt had managed to write so much in the last five years of her life, living in the close quarters of Chawton Cottage with her mother, sister, friend Martha Lloyd and a couple of servants. ‘She had no separate study to retire to,’ said James Edward, with evident pity, ‘and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all sorts of casual interruptions.’ Careful to conceal her occupation from ‘servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party’,1 he described how she wrote ‘upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper’. A squeaking swing door elsewhere in the cottage gave her warning whenever someone was approaching, and time to hide the latest sheet of ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’, ‘Persuasion’ or ‘Sanditon’.
Jane's Fame Page 1
