The Jane Austen Book Club (27 page)

What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there
in
her? What is it all about?

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 shore—risen rather higher, I think, than . . . her intrinsic merit and interest. . . . Responsible . . . is the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their “dear,” our dear, everybody's dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose. . . .

The key to Jane Austen's fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her
unconsciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes over her work basket . . . fell . . . into woolgathering, and her dropped stitches . . . were afterwards picked up as . . . little master-strokes of imagination.

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 pleasure to those who contradict her: for example, in her mention of “Sense and Sensibility,” she says very little and that of a disparaging 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.

Northanger Abbey
is 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 adds interest for young people.

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
impediments; 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.

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës 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: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.

[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.

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 honor unto England's Jane.

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 ascribes so freely to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.

Jane Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her sedateness; she never fails, but there are few or none like her.

Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders 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 assuredly 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 ambition 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.

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 decorousness 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 passion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of
craftsmanship, 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.

This, again, is the tragedy of social life today. In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes 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 typifies “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, snobbish sense of the word, just as Fielding is English in the good generous sense.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn't as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when you
do
get a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn't it worth any other ten?

[Jane Austen's novels] appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with
Robinson Crusoe
, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Eliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate 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.

“The English Jane Austen is quite typical. Quintessential I should call her. A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies—with no guts at all.”

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.

Five charming sisters on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor! Girls! Take a lesson from these husband hunters!

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. . . . She has compelled the amazed admiration of writers of the most diverse kinds, and I should say that Jane Austen and Dickens rather queerly present themselves today as the only two English 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.

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 commonsense, 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 pronounced her “not very cultivated,” and Elizabeth, I fear, would have found Isabel deficient in both “seriousness” and in mirth.

The
animality
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 center of interest and power, as a man's panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose essay “Jane Austen, A Depreciation,” is a
summa
of all the reasons for disliking Jane Austen, expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain's; he implies that a direct sexual insult is being offered to men by a woman author.

Edmund and Fanny are both morally detestable and the endorsement of their feelings and behaviour by the author . . . makes
Mansfield Park
an immoral book.

As to the trickle of critics hostile to Jane Austen, from Victorian times onwards, they have been either temperamentally off key like Charlotte Brontë, 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 embarrassment to her high reputation than her hostile critics.

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote
nothing 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.

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 manuscript on her writing desk, Austen's cover story of the necessity for silence and submission reinforces women's subordinate 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.]