The Jane Austen Book Club (28 page)

Miss Austen's is not a violently vivid masterpiece. . . .
Mansfield 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 marvelous genius in that child.

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.

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 class.

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 shell-shocked,” a former student recalled, “he selected Jane Austen.” . . .

While the French Revolution raged, Jane Austen barely looked up from her literary petit point. Who better to soothe minds unhinged at Passchendaele or the Somme? In the therapeutic calm of her pages history's victims could escape from their nemesis.

I think the next writer to have a really big influence on me was Jane Austen.
Pride and Prejudice
was one of the books 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 influenced by Chinese opera or something.

Where
Mansfield 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 implicated in the rationale for imperialist expansion than at first sight they have been.

Was Jane Austen gay? This question, posed by the normally staid
London Review of Books
, was the headline for an essay by Stanford professor Terry Castle that subtly explored the “unconscious homoerotic dimension” of Austen's letters to her sister Cassandra. The implication has caused quite a kerfuffle among Austenites.

Austen's heroines are compelling because in a social and economic system that conspires to place them at a disadvantage, they exercise real power. . . . We look at Jane Austen's novels . . . and see that her women not only know what they want, they have evolved a pointed strategy for how to go about getting it.

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

Each age will bring its peculiar emphasis, and in the current 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 passed 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?

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.

“Drucker's not a management theorist in the narrow, academic sense,” says Lenzner. . . . “He compares the strategic corporate alliances with the matrimonial alliances in Jane Austen novels.”

For years, critics of
Emma
have been circling around the apparently disconcerting issue of the protagonist's sexuality. . . . Claudia Johnson finds that . . . “transparently misogynist, sometimes even homophobic, 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.

For the last two years I have been using software as a tool for analyzing texts for patterns in word sequence and word frequency. . . . From the viewpoint of word frequency by
semantic category,
Emma
stands as Jane Austen's lightest and brightest novel, strongly positive, and with the lowest incidence of negative feeling, just as she promised us from the very first sentence.

I have never read anything Austen wrote. I just never got at reading
Pride and Prejudice
or
Sense and Sensibility.
They seemed to be the Bobbsey Twins for grown-ups.

Nudity, sexual abuse, lesbianism, a dash of incest—will we never tire of Jane Austen?

A “commonsense” perception on the popularity of Austen in India would point to the translatability of Austenian situations into the context of the emergent Indian middle class. . . . 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 narrativization in colonial Bengal, suggest a paradigm within which to discuss the interlocking of two cultures.

Food control, a culturally pervasive defining feature of “femininity,” also pervades Ang Lee's
Sense and Sensibility,
Roger Michell's
Persuasion,
Douglas McGrath's
Emma,
and Amy Heckerling's
Clueless
. . . . Without exception the heroine does not eat. . . . Conspicuous food consumption invariably signals the “bad” or ridiculous woman.

Having reviewed all the available films and critical reactions to them in the specialized libraries of London, Los Angeles, and New York, and having begged, bought, or borrowed a library of books and articles on adaptation from literature to film, I have reached one definitive conclusion about trying to re-create “Jane Austen's World” faithfully and authentically on film in a way to satisfy Janeites. In a single word: Don't!

I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. . . . There's a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary.