The Jane Austen Book Club Part 20

1905-Henry James18 Practically overlooked for thirty or forty years after her death, she perhaps really stands there for us as the prettiest possible example of that rectification of estimate, brought about by some slow clearance of stupidity. . . . This tide has risen high on the opposite sh.o.r.e-risen rather higher, I think, than her intrinsic merit and interest. . . . Responsible . . . is the body of publishers, editors, ill.u.s.trators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their ''dear," our dear, everybody's dear Jane so infinitely to their material pur-pose....

The key to Jane Austen's fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her un-consciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarra.s.s-ment, she sometimes over her work basket... fell... into wool-gathering, and her dropped st.i.tches.. . were afterwards picked up as .. .

little master-strokes of imagination.

1905-Unsigned review ofJane Austen and Her Times, by G. E. Mitton19 Miss Mitton . . . reveals many virtues which we salute. She is a lover of books. She is hard-working....

Her expressions of opinion are naive and abundant and likely to give much plea-sure to those who contradict her: for example, in her mention of "Sense and Sensibility," she says very little and that of a dis-paraging kind about Mrs. Jennings; we, on the other hand, bow down to Mrs. Jennings as one of the few persons in fiction whom it is equally delightful to have met on paper and not to have met in the flesh.

1908-Unsigned review inThe Academy20 Northanger Abbeyis not the best example of Jane Austen's work, but the fact that the scene is mostly laid in Bath, one of the few towns in England which retain their proper character, makes it particularly attractive to foreigners. It has also a stronger romantic element than is usual with Jane Austen, which addsinterest for young people.

1913-Virginia Woolf21

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought... and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impedi-ments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

1913-G. K. Chesterton22 Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontes or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: hut it was pre-cious little of truth that was protected from her.

1917-Frederic Harrison, letter to Thomas Hardy23 [Austen was] a rather heartless little cynic ... penning satires about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves.... Not a breath from the whirlwind around her ever touched her Chippendale chiffonier or escritoire.

1924-Rudyard Kipling, epigraph to "The Janeites"24Jane 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.

1924-E. M. Forster25 I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed....

The Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he as-cribes so freely to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.

1925-Edith Wharton26 Jane Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her se-dateness; she never fails, but there are few or none like her.

1927-Arnold Bennett27 Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of de-fenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause. They are nearly all fanatics. They will not listen. If anybody "went for Jane," anything might happen to him. He would as-suredly be called on to resign from his clubs. I do not want to resign from my clubs. .

She is marvellous, intoxicating... [but] she did not know enough of the world to be a great novelist. She had not the am-bition to be a great novelist. She knew her place; her present "fans" do not know her place, and their antics would without doubt have excited Jane's lethal irony.

1928-Rebecca West28 Really, it is time this comic patronage of Jane Austen ceased. To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. There are those who are deluded by the decorous-ness of her manner, by the fact that her virgins are so virginal that they are unaware of their virginity, into thinking that she is ignorant of pa.s.sion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of craftsmans.h.i.+p, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love, whose delicate reactions to men make the heroines of all our later novelists seem merely to turn signs, "Stop" or "Go" toward the advancing male.

1931-D. H. Lawrence29 This, again, is the tragedy of social life today. In the old En-gland, the curious blood-connection held the cla.s.ses together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then, in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone. Already this old maid typ-ifies "personality" instead of character, the sharp knowing in apartness instead of knowing in togetherness, and she is, to my feeling, thoroughly unpleasant, English in the bad, mean, sn.o.bbish sense of the word, just as Fielding is English in the good generous sense.

1937-W. H. Auden30 You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as gra.s.s. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle cla.s.s Describe the amorous effects of "bra.s.s,"

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety The economic basis of society.

1938-Ezra Pound, letter to Laurence Binyon31 I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn't as Jane Austen would have writ-ten it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when youdo get a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn't it worth any other ten?

1938-Thornton Wilder32 [Jane Austen's novels] appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, withRobinson Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Eliot, Thackeray, and d.i.c.kens. The art is so consum-mate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.

1938-H. G. Wells, dialogue from a character in a novel, per-haps expressing Wells's own opinion, perhaps not33 "The English Jane Austen is quite typical. Quintessential I should call her. A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest b.u.t.terflies-with no guts at all."

1940-D. W. Harding34 I gathered, she was a delicate satirist revealing with inimitable lightness of touch the comic foibles and amiable weaknesses of the people whom she lived amongst and liked.... This was enough to make me quite certain I didn't want to read her. And it is, I believe, a seriously misleading impression. .

In order to enjoy her books without disturbance, those who retain the conventional notion of her work must always have had slightly to misread what she wrote.

1940-MGM plug for the moviePride and Prejudice35 Five charming sisters on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor! Girls!Take a lesson from these husband hunters!

1944-Edmund Wilson36 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 s.h.i.+fts of fas.h.i.+on: Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's.... She has compelled the amazed admiration of writers of the most diverse kinds, and I should say that Jane Austen and d.i.c.kens rather queerly present themselves today as the only two En-glish novelists . . . who belong in the very top rank with the great fiction-writers of Russia and France.... That this spirit should have embodied itself.., in the mind of a well-bred spinster, the daughter of a country clergyman, who never saw more of the world than was made possible by short visits to London and a residence of a few years in Bath and who found her subjects mainly in the problems of young provincial girls looking for husbands, seems one of the most freakish of the many anomalies of English literary history.

1954-C. S. Lewis37 She is described by someone in Kipling's worst story as the mother of Henry James. I feel much more sure that she is the daughter of Dr. Johnson: she inherits his common-sense, his morality, even much of his style. I am not a good enough Jamesian to decide the other claim. But if she bequeathed anything to him it must be wholly on the structural side. Her style, her system of values, her temper, seem to me the very opposite of his. I feel sure that Isabel Archer, if she had met Elizabeth Bennet, would have pro-nounced her "not very cultivated," and Elizabeth, I fear, would have found Isabel deficient in both "seriousness"

and in mirth.

1955-Lionel Trilling38 Theanimality 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 centre of interest and power, as a man's panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, al-though represented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose es-say "Jane Austen, A Depreciation," is asumma of all the rea-sons for disliking Jane Austen, expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain's; he implies that a direct s.e.xual insult is being offered to men by a woman author.

1957-Kingsley Amis39 Edmund and f.a.n.n.y are both morally detestable and the en-dors.e.m.e.nt of their feelings and behaviour by the author... makesMansfield Park an immoral book.

1968-Angus Wilson40 As to the trickle of critics hostile to Jane Austen, from Victo-rian times onwards, they have been either temperamentally off key like Charlotte Bronte, 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 embarra.s.sment to her high reputation than her hos-tile critics.

1974-Margaret Drabble41 There are some writers who wrote too much. There are oth-ers who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote noth-ing 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 ma.n.u.script on her writing desk, Austen's cover story of the necessity for silence and submission reinforces women's sub-ordinate 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 Mans-field 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 marvellous 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 cla.s.s.

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 sh.e.l.l-shocked," a former student recalled, "he selected Jane Austen." .

While the French Revolution raged, Jane Austen barely looked up from her literary pet.i.t point. Who better to soothe minds unhinged at Pa.s.schendaele or the Somme? In the ther-apeutic 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 hooks 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 in-fluenced by Chinese opera or something.

1993-Edward W. Said48 WhereMansfield 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 impli-cated 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 staidLondon Review of Books, was the headline for an essay by Stanford professor Terry Castle that subtly explored the "un-conscious h.o.m.oerotic dimension" of Austen's letters to her sis-ter Ca.s.sandra. The implication has caused quite a kerfuffle among Austenites.

1996-Carol s.h.i.+elds50 Austen's heroines are compelling because in a social and eco-nomic system that conspires to place them at a disadvantage, they exercise real power. . . . We look at Jane Austen's nov-els ... and see that her women not only know what they want, they have evolved a pointed strategy for how to go about get-tingit.

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-cla.s.s provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself.

Each age will bring its peculiar emphasis, and in the cur-rent 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 pa.s.sed 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 inForbes53 "Drucker's not a management theorist in the narrow, aca-demic sense," says Lenzner He compares the strategic corporate alliances with the matrimonial alliances in Jane Austen novels."

1997-Susan M. Korba54 For years, critics ofEmma have been circling around the ap-parently disconcerting issue of the protagonist's s.e.xuality. Claudia Johnson finds that transparently misogynist, sometimes even h.o.m.ophobic, 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 a.n.a.lyzing texts for patterns in word sequence and word fre-quency.... From the viewpoint of word frequency by seman-tic category,Emma stands as Jane Austen's lightest and bright-est novel, strongly positive, and with the lowest incidence of negative feeling, just as she promised us from the very first sentence.

1999-Andy Rooney, correspondence with Emily Auerbach, quoted in Natalie Tyler56 I have never read anything Austen wrote. I just never got at readingPride and Prejudice orSense and Sensibility. They seemed to be the Bobbsey Twins for grown-ups.

1999-Anthony Lane57 Nudity, s.e.xual 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 situa-tions into the context of the emergent Indian middle cla.s.s.... 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 narrativiza-tion 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 "femi-ninity," also pervades Ang Lee'sSense and Sensibility, Roger Mich.e.l.l'sPersuasion, Douglas McGrath'sEmma, and Amy Heckerling'sClueless....

Without exception the heroine does not eat.... Conspicuous food consumption invariably signals the "bad" or ridiculous woman.