In attempting to give a physical description of his sister, Henry relied almost entirely on vague evocations of her ‘quiet, yet graceful’ deportment, elegant but not excessive height, sweet voice and happy ‘assemblage’ of features that were ‘separately good’. No chance of summoning up a mental image of Jane from that; and why would one need to? Henry was more revealing about his sister’s experience of authorship, while continuing to extol her sweet temper, intellectual modesty and unworldliness. ‘Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives,’ he claimed, ‘she became an authoress entirely from taste and inclination.’ He went on to say that Jane had hoarded her manuscripts for years with no thought of publication, and could only be prevailed upon ‘with extreme difficulty’ by her friends to offer them to the world. Henry depicts these strenuously encouraging friends as having superior judgment of the situation to that of the naïve author, whose anxiety about covering possible losses on her first book (such an un-Henrylike trait) and childish delight at turning a profit of £150 earn his fond admiration.
The message of the ‘Biographical Notice’ is, again and again, that the author of the four well-received novels was herself well loved, quiet, unambitious; a kindly wit and an acute but never unkind observer. Henry stresses that she was a very private person, and as such 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 an authoress.’
But his sister’s defining attribute, in Henry’s opinion, was her religious devotion. He ended his memoir – which as far as anyone in the family expected was literally going to be the last word on the subject of ‘Jane Austen’ – with a tribute to her piety and an assurance that her opinions ‘accorded strictly with those of our Established Church’. Then he signed and dated his work and sent it off to Murray. Amen.
* * *
As a publishing ‘event’, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, with a Biographical Notice of the Author, had far more interest to reviewers than any of the books which Austen had published in her lifetime, and prompted several thoughtful overviews of her achievement. Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, wrote a long piece on Austen in the Quarterly Review of January 1821 that placed her at the head of writers of the new realistic novel. A great deal of his essay was about this new style of novel and how much it had raised the status of the genre, ‘neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live and die’.10 ‘The delights of fiction, if not more keenly or more generally relished,’ he continued, ‘are at least more readily acknowledged by men of sense and taste; and we have lived to hear the merits of the best of this class of writings earnestly discussed by some of the ablest scholars and soundest reasoners of the present day.’11
Given that Whately is crediting Austen with a significant part in this radical improvement, it is strange that he thought no better of Northanger Abbey – a satire on the ‘old style’ novel in the manner of the new – than to give it only one paragraph out of his many thousands of words. Persuasion was the book he preferred, judging it ‘one of the most elegant fictions of common life we ever remember to have met with’.12 ‘Miss Austin’ (as he refers to her throughout) ‘has the merit of being evidently a Christian writer’; her works were morally useful without recourse to preaching (interesting praise from a professional moraliser). Whately also considered her to be virtually unique in being candid about her own sex:
Authoresses can scarcely ever forget the esprit de corps – can scarcely ever forget that they are authoresses . They seem to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female mind. Elles se peignent en buste, and leave the mysteries of womanhood to be described by some interloping male, like Richardson or Marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen half the rites, and is forced to spin from his own conjectures the rest. Now from this fault Miss Austin is free. Her heroines are what
one knows women must be, though one can never get them to acknowledge it.13
No one took up this point again for years, that Austen gave away more about how women think and behave than any previous writer had cared or thought right to do. Elizabeth Bennet’s reply to her sister’s question of how long she has loved Darcy – ‘It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley’14 – could be called a watershed in this context; a great joke about female materialism, and painfully shrewd about its causes. The range of follies which Austen’s women display might well have left the Archbishop reeling: Mrs Bennet, Lady Bertram, Mrs Norris, Mrs Elton, the Steele sisters, Fanny Dashwood, Elizabeth Elliot, Mrs Clay, Lady Catherine de Bourgh … all differentiated, all unique in their unpleasantness. Her heroines, too, are, like Emma Woodhouse, ‘faultless in spite of their faults’. The books exposed female fallibility so brilliantly and with such sporting candour that, as men picked up on the fact that these might not simply be ‘ladies’ novels’, Austen’s male readership grew enormously. Not just among the kinds of men who were relieved to find some genuinely attractive heroines in a novel, but among the misogynists too, of course.
An anonymous writer in the Retrospective Review was clearly among the former, and seems to have fallen madly in love with the dead author whose works ‘stole into the world without noise,
– they circulated in quiet, – they were far from being much extolled, – and very seldom noticed in the journals of the day’. He imagined her ‘strong in innocence as a tower, with a face of serenity, and a collectedness of demeanour, from which danger and misery – the very tawny lion in his rage – might flee discomfited, – a fragile, delicate, feeble and most feminine woman! … O lost too soon to us!’15 Few readers worked themselves up to such a pitch, and some forgot the convention of de mortuis nil nisi bonum enough to be forthrightly critical, like the reviewer in the British Critic who wrote, ‘in imagination, of all kinds, she appears to have been extremely deficient; not only her stories are utterly and entirely devoid of invention, but her characters, her incidents, her sentiments, are obviously all drawn from experience’. The same reviewer also accused Austen of ‘a want of delicacy’ in Northanger Abbey ‘in all the circumstances of Catherine’s visit’16 – the very last fault that anyone would think applicable to Austen today, when she is held up as the personification of rectitude and refinement.
Only the reviewer in Blackwood’s, in May 1818, seemed to be addressing the future millions who now revere Austen and hold her genius to be self-evident. He praised her truth to life, ‘seemingly exhaustless invention’, ‘good sense, happiness and purity’, but what made Austen really remarkable, in his eyes, was the extent to which she went against the grain of the time, ‘the prevailing love of historical, and at the same time romantic incident’ that Scott and Byron, Edgeworth and Godwin specialised in, and which the public seemed to love and crave. Her simple representations of common life, expressed ‘in pure English’, are thus presented as the truly bold and revolutionary works in an age of strenuous high romanticism. ‘Yet the time, probably, will return, when we shall take a more permanent delight in those familiar cabinet pictures, than even in the great historical pieces of our more eminent modern masters.’ ‘When this period arrives,’ the anonymous reviewer concluded, with remarkable prescience, ‘we have no hesitation in saying, that the delightful writer of the works now before us, will be one of the most popular of English novelists.’17
* * *
The actual number of Austen’s books in circulation was extremely small in the years immediately following her death, just a few thousand in total, but her readership grew
slowly (not least through the circulating libraries) and she began to have a certain impact on literary fashions. In 1821, Byron’s spurned mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, was trying to reprise the scandalous success of her 1816 roman-à-clef, Glenarvon, and in a letter to her friend Thomas Malthus said that though she was having trouble thinking of what to put in the new story, she had at least hit on a title, ‘Principle & passion’, ‘since the fashion is to call every thing in the manner of Pride & prejudice, sense & sensibility’.18 It was hardly the sort of influence Austen could have anticipated or desired, but shows how ‘fashion’ had picked up on certain reverberations around the books.
Such connections are likely to be tangential and predatory, as was the almost immediate appropriation of ‘Austen-like’ qualities by a long-forgotten set of 1820s novelists, characterised as the ‘silver-fork’ or ‘Dandy’ school. The name came from an acerbic article by William Hazlitt in 1827, condemning the vogue for escapist novels which idealised high society life in the age just gone, and concentrated on fashions and accessories rather than plot or characterisation: ‘A writer of this accomplished stamp’, Hazlitt wrote, ‘comes forward to tell you, not how his hero feels on any occasion, for he is above that, but how he was dressed … and also informs you that the quality eat fish with silver forks.’19
Henry Colburn was publisher of many of these utterly forgettable novels and advertised them as ‘by aristocrats, and for aristocrats’. Some were genuinely ‘By A Lady’, or even ‘By Lady A–’: Lady Charlotte Bury, Lady Morgan, Countess Blessington; but on the whole, the genre was sustained by and for the aspirant middle classes, who felt that they were gaining some sort of entrée into elite manners and mores through tales of aristocratic life such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham; or The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) or Thomas Lister’s Granby (1826). These, and the many inferior examples of the genre that rolled off Colburn’s presses in the 1820s and 30s, were fantasy literature for the Age of Reform, inventing a version of Regency England, its lost elegance and comforting social inequalities, around which readers could manufacture a little nostalgia.
Thomas Lister seems to have read Austen’s works with care and reproduced a great many scenes, characters and even names from them in his own novels. The bibliographer and critic David Gilson has spotted dozens of parallels with Austen in Granby, Herbert Lacy (1828) and Arlington (1832), from a flirtation scene like that between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland, to home theatricals involving a Crawford.20 Lister’s borrowings from Austen were clearly conscious: in Granby, a character called Lady Harriet says, ‘I hope you like nothing of Miss Edgeworth’s or Miss Austen’s. They are full of commonplace people, that one recognises at once.’21 But was Lister aiming these jokes at his readers generally, or just at his own circle, which included the very Countess Morley with whom Austen had corresponded briefly in 1815? The in-group was small and rather incestuous. In 1830, Lister married Countess Morley’s niece, one of whose friends, Emily Eden, was a would-be novelist also engaged in writing a story suspiciously close in plot, setting and tone to one of Austen’s: ‘Mrs Douglas had been an heiress which perhaps accounts for Mr Douglas having married her … He let her have a reasonable share of her own way … but kept his own opinion.’22 The Semi-Attached Couple was not published until the 1850s, but had been written in the 1830s, when Austen still seemed like a fairly untraceable source.
Lister, reviewing Catherine Gore’s Women as They Are in 1830, digressed on to the subject of Miss Austen’s novels, lamenting the fact that her art had not ‘in this age of literary quackery’ received its reward. Strikingly, he refers to her audience in the past tense: ‘It was even so with many of the readers of Miss Austen. She was too natural for them…. They did not consider that the highest triumph of art consists in its concealment; and here the art was so little perceptible, that they believed there was none.’
Lister possibly felt free to expound this past author’s virtues because it was, by 1830, very hard to get hold of a copy of any of her books; unlike his own novels, which sold well – better than Austen ever had (Granby went into three editions in the first year). It makes one wonder if his appropriation of bits of Northanger Abbey might have been casual attempts at plagiarism rather than wry acts of homage.
But it is likely that many of her early imitators hadn’t even read Austen’s novels; what they were attempting to do was not imitate her but replicate some of her effects, the generally conservative air of her stories and strong materialist undertow. Austen had introduced a ‘feel-good’ factor into the popular novel which no one had yet thought to analyse, but which people recognised as instantly gratifying, and desirable. The fact that Austen was in any way a model for the ‘silver-fork’ novelists says more for her power to represent social anxiety than for their power to interpret it. One of the most consistent criticisms made by early reviewers was that Austen’s novels were too concerned with ‘the middling sort’: it was a pity, for example, the Gentleman’s Magazine had said in 1816 that Austen had not thought to introduce in Emma ‘highlydrawn characters in superior life’ like those ‘which are so interesting in Pride and Prejudice’. For Lady Catherine de Bourgh to be thought of as raising the tone of Pride and Prejudice must be one of the more bizarre comments the book has ever prompted. Darcy one is meant to admire, of course, but only after he has gone through the rigorous de-classification (or perhaps middle-classification) demanded by the heroine. Her great coup is to gain a share in hereditary wealth without changing her own social attitudes one iota, and part of the reader’s satisfaction with the imagined outcome of the novel is that the marriage of Darcy and Elizabeth will combine his ‘aristocratic’ good breeding with her social inclusiveness; it rewards a fine-minded woman with the worldly goods which only aristocrats habitually received and tames the pride of old families who may not have recognised that their heritage is under threat of revolution if they don’t change.
During Jane’s lifetime, there had been a pirated edition of Emma in America and French translations of Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, none of which she is likely to have heard about. French translations proliferated in the following years, though their relationship to Austen’s originals was more exploitative than respectful. One translator, Isabelle de Montolieu, was already a popular novelist in her own right in Switzerland and it was her name, rather than Austen’s (which appeared in much smaller type on the title-page), that was meant to attract readers. The titles of some of these translations indicate how freely the core material was used: Raison et Sensibilité, ou Les Deux Manières d’Aimer, La Nouvelle Emma and La Famille Elliot, ou L’Ancienne Inclination (the latter interestingly nearer to Austen’s own working title, ‘The Elliots’, than Persuasion). Madame de Montolieu took other liberties, too, cutting scenes from the originals and adding new ones, with plenty of colouring. When the text of her La Famille Elliot was used instead of the original Persuasion by a Swedish translator in the 1830s, the resulting hybrid was predictably weird.23
Even further away, in Russia, Austen’s novels were becoming known without any translation. The author would have been amazed to hear that as early as June 1816, an article in a Russian journal praising contemporary English women novelists singled out the anonymous author of Emma for her successful ‘pictures of quiet family life’. And though there is no direct evidence that Alexander Pushkin ever read Pride and Prejudice, the similarities between the novel and his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin (published in serial form between 1825 and 1832), have convinced several critics that he knew the book very well, perhaps in one of its early French versions.24
A more traceable Austen influence can be found in a strange novel called Precaution, published in America only two years after Persuasion by a first-time author called James Fenimore Cooper. In later years, the story of Cooper’s debut was told over and over again by his daughter Susan, with decreasing amounts of clarity and consistency. Her father, a well-to-do and somewhat under-occupied retired Navy officer, was living t
he life of a country gent in Scarsdale, New York, and devoting his time mostly to landscape gardening. One of his projects was to build a ha-ha on his property, then and always ‘a novelty in this country’.25 Cooper hadn’t thought of turning his hand to writing until an occasion when, reading aloud from one of the many recent English novels to which his wife was addicted, he found it so vapid that he threw it down and declared he could write a better novel himself. His wife challenged him to do so, and the result was Precaution, a story of English life and manners, set in the last decades of the previous century.
As an exercise in marital defiance and sheer chutzpah, Precaution has its merits, but is not an easy or enjoyable read (George E. Hastings, who made a detailed study of the book in 1940, reckoned he was one of the very few people who had finished it) and in terms of Cooper’s later oeuvre it must represent one of the most bizarrely uncharacteristic books of any author. Cooper had not visited England in 1820, though the ha-ha suggests that he had read plenty about it (Mansfield Park, perhaps). In his daughter’s second-hand account, he was in two minds whether or not to seek publication, but did so after testing the novel out on his friend John Jay. The verdict of the Jay family was favourable, and Cooper went ahead with publication, though one of the ladies who had been at the reading ‘said that she had heard the tale before and that the author was a woman’.26
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