Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  53. Quoted in Miller, pp. 7–8. Brontë had sent him an embarrassingly confessional letter about her ambitions.

  54. Memoir, p. 112.

  55. ibid., p. 192.

  56. CH, vol. 2, p. 163.

  57. Austen-Leigh (1920), p. 64.

  58. Record, p. 282.

  59. Austen-Leigh (1920), p. 65.

  60. Memoir, p. 43.

  61. ‘Written at Winchester on Tuesday the 15th July 1817’, Selwyn, p. 17.

  62. Memoir, p. 190.

  63. ibid.

  64. CH, vol. 2, p. 163.

  65. ibid., pp. 168 and 170.

  66. ibid., p. 5.

  67. ibid., p. 181.

  68. Morgan Library; letter included with MS of ‘Lady Susan’.

  69. The artist is now thought to have been Ozias Humphry (1742–1810), whose monogram on the painting was documented in the 1980s, but which is no longer visible. For more on the intricacies of the Rice Portrait debate, see my article ‘Who’s that Girl?’, 14 April 2007, www.guardian.co.uk.

  70. Anon, ‘Jane Austen and her biographers’, p. 360.

  CHAPTER 5

  Divine Jane

  The novelist Margaret Oliphant made several shrewd remarks in her review of Austen-Leigh’s Memoir in 1870, at the very beginning of the burgeoning of Austen’s fame. Austen-Leigh had sought to impress readers with his aunt’s personal and professional modesty; his (unsurprising) view was that she had not got her due during her lifetime. Mrs Oliphant wondered rather how the author had subsequently achieved wider recognition: ‘To the general public … 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.’ She was surely right in thinking that Austen’s novels, as novels, were unlikely candidates for mass consumption and global fame, that there was a great deal about them, in fact, that was uncompromising and poker-ishly unbending, that their surface satisfactions hid other agendas, too privately interesting to the author to impel her to point them up. But Mrs Oliphant was also right that such considerations would make very little difference to the growth of Austen’s popularity. The widening audience was not for the novels so much as for the novels in combination with ‘Miss Austen’, and increasingly ‘Jane’.

  Several new biographies of Austen appeared in the 1880s and 90s, all heavily derivative of the Memoir, and in 1883 a Harvard undergraduate won a prize for his dissertation on Austen’s novels, the first time the author had been studied in the academy. Another American, Oscar Fay Adams (a friend of the poet James Russell Lowell), was the only one of the new biographers who attempted to do some original research, and was the first to travel around the sites significant to Austen in England, taking photographs as he went (reproduced in the second edition of his book). Most of his rivals in the field were only interested in recasting the published material to their own taste: Sarah Tytler, the first ‘unofficial’ biographer, filled her book with résumés of the novels, while Sarah Fanny Malden made what she could of the romantic episodes in Austen’s life, including the shadowy ‘seaside romance’ and a completely apocryphal story, promulgated by Sir Francis Doyle in the 1880s, of how Austen had once been engaged to a naval officer (à la Persuasion) and had been due to meet him on a walking tour of Switzerland with her father and sister, when news came of his death:

  The story adds that the young officer had overwalked himself, and became so alarmingly ill on his way that he had been carried to a cottage, where he lay for many days between life and death, incapable of communicating with the outer world until just before his death, when he rallied sufficiently to give the Austens’ address to those who were nursing him …1

  … and so forth, and so on, a complete fiction. Even Adams, with his quasi-scientific approach, felt the need for a softening process to go on, stating his aim as ‘to place [Austen] before the world as the winsome, delightful woman that she really was, and thus to dispel the unattractive, not to say forbidding, mental picture that so many have formed of her’.2

  In 1885, Jane Austen made it into the Dictionary of National Biography, an honour not granted to Mrs Inchbald or Charlotte Smith. The article was written by Leslie Stephen, the editor of the project, who kept his account brief and brisk, outlining Austen’s life, career and critical reception without deviating into the admiration ‘even to fanaticism’ that he noted ‘of innumerable readers’. His emphasis is on scale: her understanding of ‘the precise limits of her own powers’ (cue the little bit of ivory) and how, within her tiny world, she is ‘flawless’. His characterisation, derived from the only readily available sources, Austen-Leigh’s Memoir and Brabourne’s Letters (which he judges ‘trivial’ and affording ‘no new facts’), follows them in lauding her most mediocre accomplishments – ‘[she] could sing a few simple old songs in a sweet voice, and was remarkably dextrous with her needle’ – and thinking her art ‘unconscious’. But Stephen’s coolly appraising tone, that of the men’s-club cabal that ran London literary life in the 1880s and 90s, and his pivotal position in that influential society, admitted Austen, like a guest on the Savile’s annual Ladies’ Night, to a different locus of appreciation. As James Edward Austen-Leigh had noted of his aunt’s pre-eminent popularity among a group of ‘well-known literary men’ gathered at a country house, she appeared to have ‘the power of attracting powerful minds’.3

  It was important to Austen’s growing status that she was open to such ‘discovery’, and that it could be made to reflect flatteringly on the discoverer. James Edward Austen-Leigh’s view of who appreciated Jane Austen best during her lifetime had been an emphatic restatement of what his father had written, that ‘to her family alone/Her real & genuine worth was known’. Reflecting on ‘how coldly her works were first received, and how few readers had any appreciation of their peculiar merits’,4 James Edward claimed all the credit of perspicacity for the family: ‘if they had known that we, in our secret thoughts, classed her with Madame d’Arblay or Miss Edgeworth, or even with some other novel writers of the day whose names are now scarcely remembered, they would have considered it an amusing instance of family conceit’:

  To the multitude her works appeared tame and commonplace, poor in colouring and sadly deficient in incident and interest. It is true that we were sometimes cheered by hearing that a different verdict had been pronounced by more competent judges; we were told how some great statesman or distinguished poet held these works in high estimation; we had the satisfaction of believing that they were most admired by the best judges, and comforted ourselves with Horace’s ‘satis est Equitem mihi plaudere’. So much was this the case, that one of the ablest men of my acquaintance said, in that kind of jest which has much earnest in it, that he had established it in his own mind, as a new test of ability, whether people could or could not appreciate Miss Austen’s merits.5

  This idea (generated by Austen-Leigh’s friend R. H. Cheney) of Austen appreciation being some kind of ‘test’ or benchmark of taste and intellect had irresistible appeal, and featured prominently in many reviews of the Memoir. But the whole passage, with its insistence on ‘we and they’, was the strongest possible foundation for a literary cult emerging around Austen that addressed the club mentality rather than the subject’s actual achievements. Rather like a reversal of the Groucho Marx quip, ‘I don’t want to join a club that will accept me as a member,’ the idea of a society of Austen-appreciators self-selected for their superior discrimination held out a way to join a band of people linked by complacency over their own taste. Her snob value was guaranteed by this formula, and by 1894, George Saintsbury was confident that ‘a fondness for Miss Austen’ could be considered ‘itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge of vulgarity’.6

  As this supposedly exclusive interest spread, Mrs Oliphant’s wonder ‘that books so calm and cold and keen … would ever be popular’ was borne out by the books themselves having to adapt to the requirements of a mass market. Just as ‘Jane Austen’ had become ‘Jane’, the texts
on their own no longer seemed suitable vehicles for what could be read into them, and late nineteenth-century, post-Memoir, editions of Austen increasingly introduced illustrations – however poor or inappropriate – as decoration and to some extent distraction from the novel in hand. Austen’s characters had inspired such widespread affection by this date that there was a craving to give them a concrete shape, to ‘fix’ the best-loved of them in the public mind’s eye, in the way that modern film and television versions of the novels vie with each other through more and more ingenious or desperate casting to get just the ‘right’ Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot, or the right one for the audience of the moment. After a number of pre-Raphaelite-style illustrated editions in the 1870s and 80s (the Routledge Emma has an interestingly Ford Madox Brown-ish look), the 1890s saw a burst of incontinently decorated versions, from those by Edmund H. Garrett for the American market to Chris Hammond’s pen-and-ink pictures for George Allen, and the brothers C. E. and H. M. Brock’s separate sets of pictures for Macmillan and Dent. All tended towards sentimental caricature and there was no attempt at historical accuracy – one reviewer in 1903 complained with justice that the J. M. Dent illustrations made the characters ‘look rather as if they were dressed up for acting in their poke-bonnets, short waists, high stocks, and pantaloons’.7

  The 1894 Allen and Macmillan edition of Pride and Prejudice, with 160 illustrations by Hugh Thomson, showed what commercial potential was locked into the presentation of Austen’s novels. Thomson didn’t just impose his own mark on everything in the book (he even redrew the lettering of the title-page) but redrew the boundaries between the author’s ownership of a text and an interpreter’s, abducting Pride and Prejudice into the land of kitsch. It was an instant success: Thomson’s super-fussy fine pencil-work, the blandly interchangeable faces he gave to all the ‘attractive’ females (whose heads are much smaller than anyone else’s) and the exaggerated physiognomies of the ‘comic’ characters proved immensely popular; the edition sold 11,500 copies in its first year and was reprinted countless times until the middle of the next century. These were far higher sales than any previous edition of the novel, and earned more money for the illustrator than the author or her estate had ever seen.8 Though not universally admired (E. M. Forster called them ‘lamentable’), Thomson’s drawings have acquired a ‘classic’ status of their own, and an extensive set of printers’ first proofs from his Pride and Prejudice hang now in the sanctum of all things Austen, the Jane Austen House Museum, as if they represent an officially sanctioned way to visualise the story.

  The edition that was so stuffed with Thomson’s decorations was also notable for a preface, by Professor George Saintsbury, which revealed the spectacle of a respected critic and academic indulging in sentimental reverie about Austen’s characters and confiding that Elizabeth Bennet was top of his list of fictional heroines that ‘no man of taste and spirit’ could help falling in love with and wanting to marry.9 In the distinction he drew (pace Walt Whitman) between ‘loving by allowance’ and ‘loving with personal love’, Saintsbury let slip a new word:

  in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved ‘by allowance’, by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and proper thing to love them. And in the sect – fairly large and yet unusually choice – of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels.10

  Janites, or ‘Janeites’ as the spelling was adapted, now had a name, and a banner under which to rally.

  Leslie Stephen had commented acidly as early as 1876, ‘I never … knew a person thoroughly deaf to humour who did not worship Miss Austen. [Hers] seems to be the very type of that kind of humour which charms one large class of amiable persons; and Austenolatry is perhaps the most intolerant and dogmatic of literary creeds.’11 The coining of the term ‘Janeite’ by Saintsbury in 1894 showed how widespread and mainstream Austen fandom had become by then, far surpassing the sentimental cult of any other writer. Several influential middlebrow commentators seemed to have entirely lost their heads over the female paragon who had emerged from the biography; Austen Dobson and Richard Brimley Johnson both gushed about her charm and E. V. Lucas was delighted to see the spirit of criticism ‘disconcerted and defeated in the presence of the “divine chit-chat” of this little lady’.12 Lucas said there was ‘no middle way’ with Austen; you either idolised or ignored her, a formula that easily modulated from an argument about taste to a statement of belief. The American novelist and critic W. D. Howells, himself an ardent Janeite, remarked in 1890 on the transition that was taking place: ‘The story of “Pride and Prejudice” has of late years become known to a constantly, almost rapidly, increasing cult, as it must be called, for the readers of Jane Austen are hardly ever less than her adorers: she is a passion and a creed, if not quite a religion.’13

  Religious imagery began to appear everywhere, from Austen’s books being frequently described as ‘sacred’ and ‘immortal’ and her name ‘hallowed’, to a passage in Persuasion being called ‘one of the very sacred things of literature’.14 Howells was the first to name the author ‘the divine Jane’,15 and though he meant it semi-satirically, the sobriquet gained immediate currency. In 1900, the Earl of Iddesleigh proposed a magazine entirely devoted to Jane Austen and, in an article titled brazenly ‘The Legend of St Jane’, talked of his ‘worship’ at various ‘sacred spots’. By the early years of the new century even the distinguished academic A. C. Bradley felt free to presume when he lectured to a group of Cambridge undergraduates ‘that, like myself, you belong to the faithful’16 and that ‘the faithful enjoy comparing notes’, while Saintsbury, who was Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh, had by 1913 disintegrated to the point of declaring himself proud to be ‘an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least a squire) of the order of St Jane’.17

  A cult needs relics, pilgrims, a priesthood, a shrine. Austen’s first home in Steventon had been demolished in the 1820s and her last, the cottage at Chawton, was in use as estate-workers’ tenements and bore little resemblance to the house the author had known. Winchester was the only readily accessible pilgrimage site in the 1890s, and Americans the first palmers; they laid flowers on the gravestone in the cathedral and wandered up and down College Street, trying to identify the house where Jane Austen had died. Octavius le Croix, proprietor of the College Street tuck-shop, was so annoyed at being asked by tourists whether or not his was the right building that he petitioned his landlords, Winchester College, to put up a tablet on the outside. ‘They never buy anything and they waste my time,’ the disgruntled trader complained to a housemaster’s wife. However, a few months later he was asking for the sign to be removed again. The Americans had been silenced, but now he had a new lot of time-wasters in the shop, local people asking who Jane Austen was.18

  Local people might well have been puzzled by the Austen memorial stained-glass window that was installed in Winchester Cathedral in 1900, paid for by public subscription at the suggestion of Austen’s American biographer, Oscar Fay Adams. The artist, C. E. Kempe, was not, of course, allowed to represent Austen herself or her creations in the cathedral’s glass (however much some Janeites might have dreamed of it), but seems to have been hard pressed to find suitable alternative imagery. His design is so cryptically allusive as to be virtually meaningless: two rows of three figures, including David with his harp, St John, his gospel open at ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (in Latin) and several of the children of Korah, mentioned in 2 Chronicles 19–20 as spontaneous and joyful praisers of the Lord. If it weren’t for a barely legible inscription at the bottom of one panel (in Latin) that translates, ‘Remember in the Lord Jane Austen/who died July 18th, A.D. 1817’, I doubt that anyone would guess what or whom the window commemorates. The presence of St Augustine at the head
is meant to be a big clue, as one guide tells us: ‘his name, in its abbreviated form, is St Austin’.19 How much better it would have been if Church authority and precedent had allowed Kempe to include among the sons of Korah Mrs Elton with her ‘apparatus of happiness’, the strawberry trug and rustic hat, or Lady Bertram and Pug: both so instantly recognisable.

  Rudyard Kipling, a fervent Janeite, regarded Winchester as ‘the holiest place in England’ after Stratford20 and used to go out of his way to pass through the town on journeys down country. A rollicking quatrain which he published in the 1920s could have provided the cult of Austen, had they sought one, with the words for an anthem, and the nation with an alternative patron saint:

  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 honour unto England’s Jane!

  Janeites have never fought shy of blasphemous suggestions. David Rhydderch, in 1932, only half-jokingly, compared the author’s emergence from ‘long eclipse’ with that of another inspired virgin, the newly canonised Joan of Arc:

  Beside her tomb in Winchester, her name is writ on brass; and above, a Latin inscription beneath the harps of David in stained glass points her worth. The Maid of Orleans already looks down upon us; and the day is not far distant when the ‘Divine Jane’, like patience on a monument smiling at fame, will keep her company.21

  * * *

  The cult of Divine Jane provoked some violent reactions, none more so than Mark Twain’s. Twain found English literary taste and tradition oppressive, and Austen represented the worst of it to him; he thought her ‘impossible’ not just in literary terms, but socially and politically. Ralph Waldo Emerson had had a similarly strong antipathy, accusing Jane Austen of being ‘sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world’.22 No ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’ or little bits of ivory for him! Like Emerson, Twain loathed what he perceived as Austen’s artificiality and English spinster passionlessness, dismissing her characters as a bunch of ‘Presbyterians’. ‘I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin,’ he wrote to Joseph Twitchell. ‘Every time I read “Pride and Prejudice” I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.’23