Bloom's Classic Critical Views: Jane Austen

Bloom’s Classic Critical Views

ja n e au st e n

Bloom’s Classic Critical Views Jane Austen Geoffrey Chaucer Charles Dickens Ralph Waldo Emerson Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman

Bloom’s Classic Critical Views

ja n e au st e n

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: Jane Austen Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jane Austen / [edited by] Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s classic critical views) A selection of important older literary criticism on Jane Austen. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9560-7 ISBN-10: 0-7910-9560-6 1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Bloom’s classic critical views : Jane Austen. PR4037.J285 2007 823’.7—dc22

2007013635

Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Series design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents

QQQ Series Introduction

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Introduction by Harold Bloom

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Biography

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Personal Mary Russell Mitford (1815) Henry Austen “Biographical Notice of the Author” (1818) Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1834) James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (1913)

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General Archbishop Whately “Modern Novels” (1821) Sir Walter Scott (1822) Unsigned “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are—or The Manners of the Day” (1830) Frances Ann Kemble (1831) Maria Jane Jewsbury “Literary Women, no. II: Jane Austen” (1831) Sara Coleridge “Letter to Emily Trevenen” (1834) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1839) George Henry Lewes “Recent Novels: French and English” (1847) Charlotte Brontë (1848) George Eliot “The Progress of Fiction As an Art” (1853) Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1855) George Henry Lewes “The Novels of Jane Austen” (1859) David Masson (1859)

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25 27 27 32 32 33 33 34 35 35 45

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Thomas Babington Macaulay “Madame D’Arblay” (1860) G.F. Chorley “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford” (1870) T.E. Kebbel “Jane Austen” (1870) Edward FitzGerald (1870) John W. Hales (1873) George William Curtis “Editor’s Easy Chair” (1881) Henry Morley (1881) George Barnett Smith “More Views of Jane Austen” (1885) Andrew Lang “Letter to Jane Austen” (1886) Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1887) James Ashcroft Noble (1889) Goldwin Smith (1890) W.B. Shubrick Clymer “A Note on Jane Austen” (1891) William Dean Howells (1891) Walter Raleigh “Jane Austen” (1894) George Saintsbury (1896) Edmund Gosse (1897) Vida D. Scudder (1898) Janet Harper “The Renascence of Jane Austen” (1900) Earl of Iddesleigh “A Chat about Jane Austen’s Novels” (1900) William Dean Howells “Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet” (1901)

46 47 50 53 54 54 55 55 57 60 62 62 66 79 79 83 85 86 87 87 94

Works

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Pride and Prejudice Unsigned (1813) Mary Russell Mitford (1814) Henry Crabb Robinson (1819) Sir Walter Scott (1826) Charlotte Brontë (1848) W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860) James Oliphant “Scott and Jane Austen” (1899) Francis Hovey Stoddard “Growth of Personality in Fiction” (1900) William Dean Howells “Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet” (1901) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Pride and Prejudice” (1913)

103 103 104 104 105 105 106 108 111 114 118

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Contents Sense and Sensibility Henry Crabb Robinson (1839) W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860) Julia Kavanagh “Miss Austen’s Six Novels” (1863) William Dean Howells “Three of Jane Austen’s Heroines” (1901)

Emma Sir Walter Scott “Emma” (1815) William C. Macready (1834) Charlotte Brontë (1850) W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860) Anthony Trollope “Emma” (1865) Margaret Oliphant (1882) William Dean Howells “Three of Jane Austen’s Heroines” (1901) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Emma” (1913) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Opinions of Emma” (1913) Mansfield Park William C. Macready (1836) W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860) Adolphus Alfred Jack “Miss Austen” (1897) Hiram M. Stanley “Mansfield Park” (1897) William Dean Howells “Three of Jane Austen’s Heroines” (1901) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Mansfield Park” (1913) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Opinions of Mansfield Park” (1913) Northanger Abbey Anonymous “Northanger Abbey and Persuasion” (1818) Henry Crabb Robinson (1842) Thomas Babington Macaulay “Journal” (1876) Margaret Oliphant (1882) William Dean Howells “Anne Eliot and Catherine Morland” (1901)

119 119 119 124 125 128 128 134 135 136 137 139 141 144 145 148 148 149 149 151 155 157 159 159 159 164 165 166 167

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Persuasion Maria Edgeworth (1818) W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860) Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1886) William Dean Howells “Anne Eliot and Catherine Morland” (1901) William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Persuasion” (1913)

170 170 171 171 174 179

Chronology

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Index

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Series Introduction QQQ

Bloom’s Classic Critical Views is a new series presenting a selection of the most important older literary criticism on the greatest authors commonly read in high school and college classes today. Unlike the Bloom’s Modern Critical Views series, which for more than twenty years has provided the best contemporary criticism on great authors, Bloom’s Classic Critical Views attempts to present the authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections range from contemporary reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American tradition, including Henry James, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold, and many more. Some of the critical essays and extracts presented here have appeared previously in other titles edited by Harold Bloom, such as the New Moulton’s Library of Literary Criticism. Other selections appear here for the first time in any book by this publisher. All were selected under Harold Bloom’s guidance. In addition, each volume in this series contains a series of essays by a contemporary expert, who comments on the most important critical selections, putting them in context and suggesting how they might be used by a student writer to influence his or her own writing. This series is intended above all for students, to help them think more deeply and write more powerfully about great writers and their works.

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Introduction by Harold Bloom QQQ

Jane Austen’s principal precursors were Shakespeare and the major eighteenthcentury English novelist Samuel Richardson. The influence of the heroines of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, Rosalind of As You Like It in particular, is palpable upon Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice and Emma Woodhouse of the equally superb novel she entitles. Richardson is now out of fashion yet always returns. In my judgment, no other novel in the language rivals Clarissa, a work as long and complex as Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In our age of the digest and the screen, when deep reading wanes, most students, if they encounter Clarissa at all, employ a severely cut version, which is as maimed as a truncated Proust would be. Dr. Samuel Johnson set Clarissa above all other novels, while gloomily observing that reading it for the plot might lead to self-hanging. You read Shakespeare for his thinking, his wisdom, his uncanny mastery of language, and his ability to construct alternative worlds that seem wholly natural. Most of all, I return to William Hazlitt and to A.C. Bradley and meditate endlessly upon Shakespeare’s characters: Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Cleopatra, and a hundred more. I return frequently to Richardson for his two great persons: Clarissa Harlowe and her abductor and despoiler, Lovelace. Clarissa, after Shakespeare’s greatest characters, is the largest instance in the language of a heroine of the Protestant Will. By this I mean that in his extraordinary novel (1747–48), Richardson gave us an utterly convincing secular saint, who incarnates the English Protestant sensibility. The peculiar, dominant mark of such a sensibility is its exaltation of the right of private judgment. Clarissa and her descendants—Austen’s Elizabeth and Emma, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, Henry James’s Isabel Archer and Millie Theale, Virginia Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway—live by xi

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the Inner Light. I omit D.H. Lawrence’s Ursula Brangwen, who incarnates her creator’s Nonconformist heritage, because her struggle with Lawrence’s surrogate, Rupert Birkin, is an even wilder version of the Protestant Will run rampant than his paramour Ursula can summon up. In Austen, the secularization of Protestantism and its drives follows the model of Richardson, who brilliantly moved Shakespearean inwardness into the unitary plot of a single action: courtship between the sexes. Elizabeth and Darcy resolve their agon by an ultimate exchange of spiritual estimates that works to confirm their mutual self-esteem. Subtle as Austen’s ironies are, they remain visible because they are so controlled, whereas the ChaucerianShakespearean ironies of courtship frequently are too huge to be readily discerned. This hardly is a disadvantage to Austen, since her comic genius surpasses that of anyone in the language since Shakespeare himself.

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Biography t

Jane Austen (1775–1817)

t Jane Austen was born in Steventon in Hampshire, England, on December 16, 1775, the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. Jane was educated at home by her father, then in 1783 she was sent with her sister Cassandra to attend a school run by a Mrs. Cawley—first at Oxford, then at Southhampton—where Jane almost died of putrid fever. During 1784–85 Jane and Cassandra went to the Abbey School in Reading Austen started writing around 1787, perhaps inspired by the plays put on by her family in the neighboring barn or in the parsonage where her father was rector. Among her juvenilia are Love and Freindship (as the author spelled it in her manuscript), a burlesque of love stories and romances written about 1790; History of England completed in 1791 by, as Austen labeled herself, “a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian”; Catharine, an unfinished novel about an orphan girl; and several other works. She included many of these writings in a three-volume manuscript collection, which she completed copying in 1793. During 1794–96 Austen wrote a novel entitled Elinor and Marianne, followed in 1796 by First Impressions. The latter was offered in 1797 to a publisher named Cadell but was rejected by him without a reading. In that year, Austen began rewriting Elinor and Marianne, retitling the work Sense and Sensibility. In 1798 she wrote a novel entitled Susan. This parody of gothic novels was sold to a publisher for £10 in 1803 but never appeared, and was published only posthumously in a revised version under the title Northanger Abbey. Around 1799 Austen wrote another novel entitled Lady Susan. An unfinished novel entitled The Watsons probably dates from between 1800 and 1805. In 1801 Austen’s family moved to Bath. Around this time, Jane apparently had a love affair with a clergyman. The next year she received a marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, a friend of one of her brothers, but she turned him down because she did not love him. 



Biography

A year after her father’s death in 1805, the family moved again to Southampton and then, in 1809, to the village of Chawton, near Alton in Hampshire. Each move represented a downward step on the socioeconomic scale. During this time, however, Austen’s writing finally began to see print. Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, although only as “by a Lady.” Austen then revised First Impressions, and it appeared as Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Mansfield Park, begun in 1811, was published in 1814, followed by Emma the next year. Some scholars believe that this novel is an extensive reworking of The Watsons. Persuasion, her last novel, was written in 1817. In May of that year, the family went to Winchester to seek medical attention for Jane, who had developed Addison’s disease. She died two months later, on July 18, 1817. Much of Austen’s work appeared posthumously, beginning with the joint publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818. In the 1920s her juvenilia began to appear, as well as a fragment of a novel, later known as Sanditon, written in early 1817.

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Mary Russell Mitford (1815) Mary Russell Mitford is best known for her novel Our Village, based on her own observations. Students investigating literary history and issues of gender might look at Mitford’s friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as her admiration for Austen, in terms of a growing and mutually supportive community of women writers.

QQQ

Apropos to novels, I have discovered that our great favorite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman; that mamma knew all her family very intimately; and that she herself is an old maid (I beg her pardon—I mean a young lady) with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers; and a friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of “single blessedness” that ever existed, and that, till Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin, upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now; she is still a poker, but a poker of whom every one is afraid. It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is rather formidable. Most writers are good-humored chatterers—neither very wise nor very witty; but, nine times out of ten (at least in the few that I have known), unaffected and pleasant, and quite removing by their conversation any awe that may have been excited by their works. But a wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk, is terrific indeed! After all, I do not know that I can quite vouch for this account, though the friend from whom I received it is truth itself; but her family connections must render her disagreeable to Miss Austen, since she is the sister-in-law of a gentleman who is at law with Miss A.’s brother for the greater part of his fortune. —Mary Russell Mitford, Letter to Sir William Elford (April 3, 1815)

Henry Austen “Biographical Notice of the Author” (1818) Five months after Jane Austen’s death, her older brother Henry published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion together, since neither work had been released during the writer’s lifetime. In the “Biographical Notice” that Henry attached to this publication, he reveals her identity as the author



Jane Austen for the first time. During her life, Austen had published anonymously. Students looking at Austen as a feminist (or antifeminist) or researching private versus public spheres in pre-Victorian England will find this crucial. Henry compares Austen to Frances D’Arblay (or Fanny Burney) and Maria Edgeworth, both well-known and mostly well-respected writers who also published their first works anonymously. Although their writings were often quite popular, women authors were sometimes criticized by those who believed that a woman’s place was in the home or private sphere. Some even compared women writers to prostitutes, selling themselves for public approbation. The possibility of public scorn might have influenced Austen’s decision to publish anonymously. She may also have done so out of modesty, as Henry writes, “no accumulation of fame would have induced her . . . to affix her name to any productions of her pen.” If this is true, we must ask why her favorite brother revealed her identity. Students studying Austen’s life story should pay close attention to personal ties her early biographers may have had to her family. The first writings about Austen were composed by family members: nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, grandnephew Lord Brabourne, and grandnephew and nephew William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Henry focuses on Austen’s disposition more than on her writing abilities, using words such as “faultless” and “perfect,” which indicate that he might be exaggerating his sister’s good character. Since Henry chooses to reveal Jane’s identity in his piece, he likely wants to emphasize her outstanding moral qualities in order to avoid possible scandal. There is perhaps no other writer whose biography has been so exclusively maintained by her family. This control was initiated both to strengthen the family’s ties to such an important writer and to protect Austen’s (and thus the family’s) reputation. Austen’s sister, Cassandra, burned or edited letters written around times of family crisis, creating gaps in the sequence of the author’s correspondence. Because of the protectiveness the family exercised regarding its esteemed daughter’s life, there are limits to what is known about Jane Austen. Students may want to compare writings about Austen in order to determine historical context or to disentangle, if possible, Austen’s life from her work. Henry focuses on the purity of Austen’s life, while William Dean Howells, Edmund Gosse, and George William Curtis separate her life from her work by claiming that Austen “writes wholly as an artist,” as Curtis states. It is perhaps more popular, as can be noted in the writings of James Oliphant and Charlotte Brontë, to weave Austen’s life and work together until they become indistinguishable. The lives of women writers often became a part of reviews of their writing, the logic being that if a

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woman’s real life was somehow scandalous, her writing must be equally so. As a result, many readers give Austen only partial or qualified credit for her work, claiming that she was only writing down what occurred right in front of her.

QQQ The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public. And when the public, which has not been insensible to the merits of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, shall be informed that the hand which guided that pen is now mouldering in the grave, perhaps a brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than simple curiosity. Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event. To those who lament their irreparable loss, it is consolatory to think that, as she never deserved disapprobation, so, in the circle of her family and friends, she never met reproof; that her wishes were not only reasonable, but gratified; and that to the little disappointments incidental to human life was never added, even for a moment, an abatement of goodwill from any who knew her. Jane Austen was born on the 16th of December, 1775, at Steventon, in the county of Hants. Her father was Rector of that parish upwards of forty years. There he resided, in the conscientious and unassisted discharge of his ministerial duties, until he was turned of seventy years. Then he retired with his wife, our authoress, and her sister, to Bath, for the remainder of his life, a period of about four years. Being not only a profound scholar, but possessing a most exquisite taste in every species of literature, it is not wonderful that his daughter Jane should, at a very early age, have become sensible to the charms of style, and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language. On the death of her father she removed, with her mother and sister, for a short time, to Southampton, and finally, in 1809, to the pleasant village of Chawton, in the same county. From this place she sent into the world those novels, which by many have been placed on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth. Some of these novels had been the gradual performances of her previous life. For though in composition she was equally rapid and correct, yet an invincible distrust of her own judgement induced her to withhold her works from the public, till time and many perusals had satisfied her that the charm of recent composition was dissolved. The natural constitution, the regular habits, the quiet and happy occupations of our authoress, seemed to



Jane Austen

promise a long succession of amusement to the public, and a gradual increase of reputation to herself. But the symptoms of a decay, deep and incurable, began to shew themselves in the commencement of 1816. Her decline was at first deceitfully slow; and until the spring of this present year, those who knew their happiness to be involved in her existence could not endure to despair. But in the month of May, 1817, it was found advisable that she should be removed to Winchester for the benefit of constant medical aid, which none even then dared to hope would be permanently beneficial. She supported, during two months, all the varying pain, irksomeness, and tedium, attendant on decaying nature, with more than resignation, with a truly elastic cheerfulness. She retained her faculties, her memory, her fancy, her temper, and her affections, warm, clear, and unimpaired, to the last. Neither her love of God, nor of her fellow creatures flagged for a moment. She made a point of receiving the sacrament before excessive bodily weakness might have rendered her perception unequal to her wishes. She wrote whilst she could hold a pen, and with a pencil when a pen was become too laborious. The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and vigour. Her last voluntary speech conveyed thanks to her medical attendant; and to the final question asked of her, purporting to know her wants, she replied, ‘I want nothing but death.’ She expired shortly after, on Friday the 18th of July, 1817, in the arms of her sister, who, as well as the relator of these events, feels too surely that they shall never look upon her like again. Jane Austen was buried on the 24th of July, 1817, in the cathedral church of Winchester, which, in the whole catalogue of its mighty dead, does not contain the ashes of a brighter genius or a sincerer Christian. Of personal attractions she possessed a considerable share. Her stature was that of true elegance. It could not have been increased without exceeding the middle height. Her carriage and deportment were quiet, yet graceful. Her features were separately good. Their assemblage produced an unrivalled expression of that cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence, which were her real characteristics. Her complexion was of the finest texture. It might with truth be said, that her eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek. Her voice was extremely sweet. She delivered herself with fluency and precision. Indeed she was formed for elegant and rational society, excelling in conversation as much as in composition. In the present age it is hazardous to mention accomplishments. Our authoress would, probably, have been inferior to few in such acquirements, had she not been so superior to most in higher things. She had not only an excellent taste for drawing, but, in her

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earlier days, evinced great power of hand in the management of the pencil. Her own musical attainments she held very cheap. Twenty years ago they would have been thought more of, and twenty years hence many a parent will expect their daughters to be applauded for meaner performances. She was fond of dancing, and excelled in it. It remains now to add a few observations on that which her friends deemed more important, on those endowments which sweetened every hour of their lives. If there be an opinion current in the world, that perfect placidity of temper is not reconcileable to the most lively imagination, and the keenest relish for wit, such an opinion will be rejected for ever by those who have had the happiness of knowing the authoress of the following works. Though the frailties, foibles, and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection, yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness. The affectation of candour is not uncommon; but she had no affectation. Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. Where extenuation was impossible, she had a sure refuge in silence. She never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression. In short, her temper was as polished as her wit. Nor were her manners inferior to her temper. They were of the happiest kind. No one could be often in her company without feeling a strong desire of obtaining her friendship, and cherishing a hope of having obtained it. She was tranquil without reserve or stiffness; and communicative without intrusion or self-sufficiency. She became an authoress entirely from taste and inclination. Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives. Most of her works, as before observed, were composed many years previous to their publication. It was with extreme difficulty that her friends, whose partiality she suspected whilst she honoured their judgement, could prevail on her to publish her first work. Nay, so persuaded was she that its sale would not repay the expense of publication, that she actually made a reserve from her very moderate income to meet the expected loss. She could scarcely believe what she termed her great good fortune when Sense and Sensibility produced a clear profit of about £150. Few so gifted were so truly unpretending. She regarded the above sum as a prodigious recompense for that which had cost her nothing. Her readers, perhaps, will wonder that such a work produced so little at a time when some authors have received more guineas than they have written lines. The works of our authoress, however, may live as long as those which have burst on the world with more eclat. But the public has not been unjust; and our authoress was far from thinking it so. Most gratifying to her was the applause which from time to time reached

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her ears from those who were competent to discriminate. Still, in spite of such applause, so much did she shrink from notoriety, that 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. She read aloud with very great taste and effect. Her own works, probably, were never heard to so much advantage as from her own mouth; for she partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse. She was a warm and judicious admirer of landscape, both in nature and on canvass. At a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men. Her reading was very extensive in history and belles lettres; and her memory extremely tenacious. Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse. It is difficult to say at what age she was not intimately acquainted with the merits and defects of the best essays and novels in the English language. Richardson’s power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in Sir Charles Grandison, gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high. Without the slightest affectation she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals. Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals. The style of her familiar correspondence was in all respects the same as that of her novels. Every thing came finished from her pen; for on all subjects she had ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen. It is not hazarding too much to say that she never dispatched a note or letter unworthy of publication. One trait only remains to be touched on. It makes all others unimportant. She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature. On serious subjects she was well-instructed, both by reading and meditation, and her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church. —Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 1818

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Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1834) I remember Jane Austen, the novelist, a little child: she was very intimate with Mrs. Lefroy, and much encouraged by her. Her mother was a Miss Leigh, whose paternal grandmother was a sister of the first Duke of Chandos. Mr. Austen was of a Kentish family, of which several branches have been settled in the Weald, and some are still remaining there. When I knew Jane Austen I never suspected that she was an authoress; but my eyes told me that she was fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full. The last time I think that I saw her was at Ramsgate in 1803: perhaps she was then about twenty-seven years old. Even then I did not know that she was addicted to literary composition. —Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, Autobiography, 1834, Vol. 2, p. 41

James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870) James Edward Austen-Leigh was the son of Austen’s oldest brother, James. He was nineteen years old when Austen died. Most of the material for his book came from letters and the reminiscences of other family members. The Austen family generally disapproved of “outsiders” writing about their famous relative, and therefore many Austen biographies written in the first century after her death are by family members. Students exploring topics involving historical context or gender issues will note that when James writes of Austen’s accomplishments he does not mention formal education or training. Upper-class women in Austen’s time were expected to play music and sing, learn languages, and perhaps dabble in reading. James mentions that Austen “was not highly accomplished according to the present [1870] standard,” because upper-class women of the mid- to late Victorian era were expected to possess even more domestic attributes. There were strides made toward gender equality in the nineteenth century, but Victorians also saw a backlash. Women were purported to be “angels in the house,” making the home an ideal domain for a man to inhabit. For many, being cast in this role was a step backward, though some women, despite their domestic encapsulation, assumed and enjoyed unique positions of power. Throughout the era, several women, including George Eliot, the Brontës, and Elizabeth Gaskell, were following in Austen’s footsteps by producing works of their own. Students examining historical context should look at James’s references to historians. James also acknowledges changing perceptions of history

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Jane Austen in the early nineteenth century when he writes that critical enquiry into the usually received statements of the old historians was scarcely begun in Austen’s time. The Romantic period saw a transformation from the unquestioned reception of historical “fact” to the use of history as a means of answering contemporary questions as well as a method open to critique. Historians were no longer viewed as objective regurgitators of information; they were beginning to be seen as real people with their own biases, individuals who may have left some questions unanswered but still might hold useful information for the current world. James’s mention of Austen’s acquaintance with periodicals is no small thing, as throughout the nineteenth century periodicals were a primary source of information and literature. Writers such as Charles Dickens realized great success printing their novels in serial form, one chapter included in each subsequent issue of a particular periodical for a given duration. James notes that Austen was familiar with Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, George Crabbe, William Cowper, and to a lesser extent, Sir Walter Scott. All of these writers were well known and respected in their time, and, of course, all were men. These writers’ influence on Austen’s work could be explored by students researching intertextuality, examining one work in light of another, and the evolution of literary forms such as the novel. Students discussing biographical representation may recognize that, according to James, Austen paid attention to the style and content of the writing, rather than spending much time on the lives and personalities of the writers themselves.

QQQ In person she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If not so regularly handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders. At the time of which I am now writing, she never was seen, either morning or evening, without a cap; I believe that she and her sister were generally thought to have taken to the garb of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required; and that, though remarkably neat in their dress as in all their ways, they were scarcely, sufficiently regardful of the fashionable, or the becoming. She was not highly accomplished according to the present standard. Her sister drew well, and it is from a drawing of hers that the likeness prefixed

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to this volume has been taken. Jane herself was fond of music, and had a sweet voice, both in singing and in conversation; in her youth she had received some instruction on the pianoforte; and at Chawton she practised daily, chiefly before breakfast. I believe she did so partly that she might not disturb the rest of the party who were less fond of music. In the evening she would sometimes sing, to her own accompaniment, some simple old songs, the words and airs of which, now never heard, still linger in my memory. She read French with facility, and knew something of Italian. In those days German was no more thought of than Hindostanee, as part of a lady’s education. In history she followed the old guides—Goldsmith, Hume, and Robertson. Critical enquiry into the usually received statements of the old historians was scarcely begun. The history of the early kings of Rome had not yet been dissolved into legend. Historic characters lay before the reader’s eyes in broad light or shade, not much broken up by details. The virtues of King Henry VIII. were yet undiscovered, nor had much light been thrown on the inconsistencies of Queen Elizabeth; the one was held to be an unmitigated tyrant, and an embodied Blue Beard; the other a perfect model of wisdom and policy. Jane, when a girl, had strong political opinions, especially about the affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement defender of Charles I. and his grandmother Mary; but I think it was rather from an impulse of feeling than from any enquiry into the evidences by which they must be condemned or acquitted. As she grew up, the politics of the day occupied very little of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family. She was well acquainted with the old periodicals from the Spectator downwards. Her knowledge of Richardson’s works was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of our light literature have called off the attention of readers from that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends. Amongst her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high. It is well that the native good taste of herself and of those with whom she lived, saved her from the snare into which a sister novelist had fallen, of imitating the grandiloquent style of Johnson. She thoroughly enjoyed Crabbe; perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute and highly finished detail; and would sometimes say, in jest, that, if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe; looking on the author quite as an abstract idea, and ignorant and regardless what manner

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of man he might be. Scott’s poetry gave her great pleasure; she did not live to make much acquaintance with his novels. —James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of ]ane Austen, 1870, Ch. 5

William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (1913) Although early biographical material on Austen should be approached with a critical sensibility, given that most of it was written by biased family members, this intimate sketch of Austen provides an outline of her personality (the authors even note the qualities and traits of Austen that come through in her books) and a glimpse of her literary influences.

QQQ Jane Austen was now between thirty-three and thirty-four years old. She was absolutely free from any artistic self-consciousness, from any eccentricity of either temper or manner. “Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles; so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible women only by that peculiar genius which shines out clearly . . . in her works.” Her tastes were as normal as her nature. She read English literature with eagerness, attracted by the eighteenth-century perfection of style—and still more by the return to nature in Cowper and the introduction of romance in Scott—but repelled by coarseness, which she found even in the Spectator and the presence of which in Fielding made her rank him below Richardson. As for the latter, “Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the ‘Cedar Parlour,’ was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.” Her “dear Dr. Johnson” was a constant companion; and a younger friend was found in Crabbe, whom—as she used to pretend—she was quite prepared to marry: not knowing at the time whether he had a wife living or not. As to her other tastes, she greatly delighted in the beauties of nature, and no doubt would have enjoyed foreign travel, had not that pleasure been quite out of her reach. Her attitude to music, as an art, is more doubtful. She learnt to play the piano in her youth, and after spending many years without an instrument, took it up again on settling at Chawton; but she says herself that she did this in order to be able to play country-dances for her nephews and nieces; and when she goes to a concert she sometimes

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remarks on her inability to enjoy it. A concert in Sydney Gardens, however, was not perhaps likely to offer to the hearer many examples of high art; and we have no means of knowing whether, if she had had a chance of being introduced to classical music, it would have appealed to her, as it sometimes does to intellectual people who have been previously quite ignorant that they possessed any musical faculty. We are told that she had a sweet voice, and sang with feeling. “The Soldier’s Adieu” and “The Yellow-haired laddie” survive as the names of two of her songs. She was extraordinarily neat-handed in anything which she attempted. Her hand-writing was both strong and pretty; her hemming and stitching, over which she spent much time, “might have put a sewing machine to shame”; and at games, like spillikins or cup-and-ball, she was invincible. If this description does not seem to imply so wide a mental outlook as we wish to see in a distinguished author, we must remember that Jane Austen (as her nephew tells us) “lived in entire seclusion from the literary world,” and probably “never was in company with any person whose talents or whose celebrity equalled her own.” She was in the middle of a small family circle, the members of which were well-educated according to the fashion of the times, intelligent, and refined; but not especially remarkable for learning or original thought. They accepted the standards and views of their generation, interpreting them in a reasonable and healthy manner. She had therefore no inducement, such as might come from the influence of superior intellects, to dive into difficult problems. Her mental efforts were purely her own, and they led her in another direction; but she saw what she did see so very clearly, that she would probably have been capable of looking more deeply into the heart of things, had any impulse from outside induced her to try. Her vision, however, might not have remained so admirably adapted for the delicate operations nearer to the surface which were her real work in life. Jane’s person is thus described for us by her niece Anna, now becoming a grown-up girl and a keen observer: “The figure tall and slight, but not drooping; well balanced, as was proved by her quick firm step. Her complexion of that rare sort which seems the particular property of light brunettes; a mottled skin, not fair, but perfectly clear and healthy; the fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, and the rather small, but well-shaped, nose.” This is a delightful description; but she adds that in spite of all this, her aunt was not regularly handsome, though most attractive. As to her charm and lovableness there is absolute unanimity among all those who were near enough to her to know what she really was. Jane had by this time seen a good deal of society, and enjoyed it, though with a certain critical

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aloofness which belonged to her family, and which was hardly to be avoided by so clever a person as herself. This critical spirit was evidently a quality of which she endeavoured to rid herself as of a fault; and one of her nieces, who was too young to know her aunt intimately, until almost the end of her life, was able then to say: “She was in fact one of the last people in society to be afraid of. I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing. She was naturally shy and not given to talk much in company, and people fancied, knowing that she was clever, that she was on the watch for good material for books from their conversation. Her intimate friends knew how groundless was the apprehension and that it wronged her.” She was not only shy: she was also at times very grave. Her niece Anna is inclined to think that Cassandra was the more equably cheerful of the two sisters. There was, undoubtedly, a quiet intensity of nature in Jane for which some critics have not given her credit. Yet at other times she and this same niece could joke so heartily over their needlework and talk such nonsense together that Cassandra would beg them to stop out of mercy to her, and not keep her in such fits of laughing. Sometimes the laughter would be provoked by the composition of extempore verses, such as those given in the Memoir celebrating the charm of the “lovely Anna”; sometimes the niece would skim over new novels at the Alton Library, and reproduce them with wilful exaggeration. On one occasion she threw down a novel on the counter with contempt, saying she knew it must be rubbish from its name. The name was Sense and Sensibility—the secret of which had been strictly kept, even from her. The niece who shared these hearty laughs with her aunts—James’ eldest daughter, Anna—differed widely from her cousin, Edward’s daughter, Fanny. She was more brilliant both in looks and in intelligence, but also more mercurial and excitable. Both occupied a good deal of Jane’s thoughts and affections; but Anna must have been the one who caused her the most amusement and also the most anxiety. The interest in her was heightened when she became engaged to the son of Jane’s old friend, Mrs. Lefroy. Anna’s giddiness was merely that of youth; she settled down into a steady married life as the careful mother of a large family. She cherished an ardent affection for her Aunt Jane, who evidently exercised a great influence on her character. Jane Austen’s literary work was done mainly in the general sitting-room: liable at any moment to be interrupted by servants, children, or visitors—to none of whom had been entrusted the secret of her authorship. Her small sheets of paper could easily be put away or covered with blotting-paper, whenever the creaking swing-door (which she valued for that reason) gave notice that anyone was coming.

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Her needlework was nearly always a garment for the poor, though she had also by her some satin stitch ready to take up in case of the appearance of company. The nature of the work will help to contradict an extraordinary misconception—namely, that she was indifferent to the needs and claims of the poor: an idea probably based on the fact that she never used them as “copy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. She was of course quite ignorant of the conditions of life in the great towns, and she had but little money to give, but work, teaching, and sympathy were freely bestowed on rustic neighbours. A very good criterion of her attitude towards her own characters is often furnished by their relations with the poor around them. Instances of this may be found in Darcy’s care of his tenants and servants, in Anne Elliot’s farewell visits to nearly all the inhabitants of Kellynch, and in Emma’s benevolence and good sense when assisting her poorer neighbours. —William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, “Sense and Sensibility,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, 1913, pp. 189–192

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Archbishop Whately “Modern Novels” (1821) Whately first mentions Austen as a Christian writer, but his discussion of her “practical utility” is even more thought provoking. Many reviewers and scholars believe that nondidactic works hold no value. Students reading Austen might ask whether her works teach specific lessons, and whether the books have value beyond the lessons they impart.

QQQ

Miss Austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive. She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels, (as Coelebs was designated, we will not say altogether without reason,) a ‘dramatic sermon.’ The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon. In fact she is more sparing of it than would be thought desirable by some persons; perhaps even by herself, had she consulted merely her own sentiments; but she probably introduced it as far as she thought would be generally acceptable and profitable: for when the purpose of inculcating a religious principle is made too palpably prominent, many readers, if they do not throw aside the book with digust, are apt to fortify themselves with that respectful kind of apathy with which they undergo a regular sermon, and prepare themselves as they do to swallow a dose of medicine, endeavouring to get it down in large gulps, without tasting it more than is necessary. The moral lessons also of this lady’s novels, though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: her’s is that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions. Her fables appear to us to be, in their own way, nearly faultless; they do not consist (like those of some of the writers who have attempted this kind of common-life novel writing) of a string of unconnected events which have little or no bearing on one main plot, and are introduced evidently for the sole purpose of bringing in characters and conversations; but have all that compactness of plan and unity of action which is generally produced by a sacrifice of probability: yet they have little or nothing that is not probable; the story proceeds without the aid of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or

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natural consequences of what has preceded; and yet (which is a very rare merit indeed) the final catastrophe is scarcely ever clearly foreseen from the beginning, and very often comes, upon the generality of readers at least, quite unexpected. We know not whether Miss Austin ever had access to the precepts of Aristotle; but there are few, if any, writers of fiction who have illustrated them more successfully. The vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and air of unstudied ease in the scenes represented, which are no less necessary than probability of incident, to carry the reader’s imagination along with the story, and give fiction the perfect appearance of reality, she possesses in a high degree; and the object is accomplished without resorting to those deviations from the ordinary plan of narrative in the third person, which have been patronized by some eminent masters. We allude to the two other methods of conducting a fictitious story, viz. either by narrative in the first person, when the hero is made to tell his own tale, or by a series of letters; both of which we conceive have been adopted with a view of heightening the resemblance of the fiction to reality. At first sight, indeed, there might appear no reason why a story told in the first person should have more the air of a real history than in the third; especially as the majority of real histories actually are in the third person; nevertheless, experience seems to show that such is the case: provided there be no want of skill in the writer, the resemblance to real life, of a fiction thus conducted, will approach much the nearest (other points being equal) to a deception, and the interest felt in it, to that which we feel in real transactions. We need only instance Defoe’s Novels, which, in spite of much improbability, we believe have been oftener mistaken for true narratives, than any fictions that ever were composed. Colonel Newport is well known to have been cited as an historical authority; and we have ourselves found great difficulty in convincing many of our friends that Defoe was not himself the citizen, who relates the plague of London. The reason probably is, that in the ordinary form of narrative, the writer is not content to exhibit, like a real historian, a bare detail of such circumstances as might actually have come under his knowledge; but presents us with a description of what is passing in the minds of the parties, and gives an account of their feelings and motives, as well as their most private conversations in various places at once. All this is very amusing, but perfectly unnatural: the merest simpleton could hardly mistake a fiction of this kind for a true history, unless he believed the writer to be endued with omniscience and omnipresence, or to be aided by familiar spirits, doing the office of Homer’s Muses, whom he invokes to tell him all that could not otherwise be known. . .

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Let the events, therefore, which are detailed, and the characters described, be ever so natural, the way in which they are presented to us is of a kind of supernatural cast, perfectly unlike any real history that ever was or can be written, and thus requiring a greater stretch of imagination in the reader. On the other hand, the supposed narrator of his own history never pretends to dive into the thoughts and feelings of the other parties; he merely describes his own, and gives his conjectures as to those of the rest, just as a real autobiographer might do; and thus an author is enabled to assimilate his fiction to reality, without withholding that delineation of the inward workings of the human heart, which is so much coveted. Nevertheless novels in the first person have not succeeded so well as to make that mode of writing become very general. It is objected to them, not without reason, that they want a hero: the person intended to occupy that post being the narrator himself, who of course cannot so describe his own conduct and character as to make the reader thoroughly acquainted with him; though the attempt frequently produces an offensive appearance of egotism. The plan of a fictitious correspondence seems calculated in some measure to combine the advantages of the other two; since, by allowing each personage to be the speaker in turn, the feelings of each may be described by himself, and his character and conduct by another. But these novels are apt to become excessively tedious; since, to give the letters the appearance of reality, (without which the main object proposed would be defeated,) they must contain a very large proportion of matter which has no bearing at all upon the story. There is also generally a sort of awkward disjointed appearance in a novel which proceeds entirely in letters, and holds together, as it were, by continual splicing. Miss Austin, though she has in a few places introduced letters with great effect, has on the whole conducted her novels on the ordinary plan, describing, without scruple, private conversations and uncommunicated feelings: but she has not been forgetful of the important maxim, so long ago illustrated by Homer, and afterwards enforced by Aristotle, of saying as little as possible in her own person, and giving a dramatic air to the narrative, by introducing frequent conversations; which she conducts with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakspeare himself. Like him, she shows as admirable a discrimination in the characters of fools as of people of sense; a merit which is far from common. To invent, indeed, a conversation full of wisdom or of wit, requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but the converse does not hold good: it is no fool that can describe fools well; and many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior characters, have

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failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones, which it is necessary to introduce in order to give a faithful representation of real life: they exhibit to us mere folly in the abstract, forgetting that to the eye of a skilful naturalist the insects on a leaf present as wide differences as exist between the elephant and the lion. Slender, and Shallow, and Aguecheek, as Shakspeare has painted them, though equally fools, resemble one another no more than Richard, and Macbeth, and Julius Caesar; and Miss Austin’s Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Rushworth, and Miss Bates, are no more alike than her Darcy, Knightley, and Edmund Bertram. Some have complained, indeed, of finding her fools too much like nature, and consequently tiresome; there is no disputing about tastes; all we can say is, that such critics must (whatever deference they may outwardly pay to received opinions) find the Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night very tiresome; and that those who look with pleasure at Wilkie’s pictures, or those of the Dutch school, must admit that excellence of imitation may confer attraction on that which would be insipid or disagreeable in the reality. Her minuteness of detail has also been found fault with; but even where it produces, at the time, a degree of tediousness, we know not whether that can justly be reckoned a blemish, which is absolutely essential to a very high excellence. Now, it is absolutely impossible, without this, to produce that thorough acquaintance with the characters, which is necessary to make the reader heartily interested in them. Let any one cut out from the Iliad or from Shakspeare’s plays every thing (we are far from saying that either might not lose some parts with advantage, but let him reject every thing) which is absolutely devoid of importance and of interest in itself; and he will find that what is left will have lost more than half its charms. We are convinced that some writers have diminished the effect of their works by being scrupulous to admit nothing into them which had not some absolute, intrinsic, and independent merit. They have acted like those who strip off the leaves of a fruit tree, as being of themselves good for nothing, with the view of securing more nourishment to the fruit, which in fact cannot attain its full maturity and flavour without them. . . . On the whole, Miss Austin’s works may safely be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the direct effort at the former, of which we have complained, as sometimes defeating its object. For those who cannot, or will not, learn any thing from productions of this kind, she has provided entertainment which entitles her to thanks; for mere innocent amusement is in itself a good, when it interferes with no greater; especially as it may occupy the place of some

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other that may not be innocent. The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a new pleasure, would have deserved well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless. Those, again, who delight in the study of human nature, may improve in the knowledge of it, and in the profitable application of that knowledge, by the perusal of such fictions as those before us. —Archbishop Whately, “Modern Novels’’ Quarterly Review, January 1821, pp. 359–63, 375–76

Sir Walter Scott (1822) By the way did you know Miss Austen Authoress of some novels which have a great deal of nature in them—nature in ordinary and middle life to be sure but valuable from its strong resemblance and correct drawing. —Sir Walter Scott, Letter to Joanna Baillie (February 10, 1822)

Unsigned “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are— or the Manners of the Day” (1830) Miss Austen has never been so popular as she deserved to be. Intent on fidelity of delineation, and averse to the commonplace tricks of her art, she has not, in this age of literary quackery, received her reward. Ordinary readers have been apt to judge of her as Partridge, in Fielding’s novel, judged of Garrick’s acting. He could not see the merit of a man who merely behaved on the stage as any body might be expected to behave under similar circumstances in real life. He infinitely preferred the ‘robustious periwig-pated fellow,’ who flourished his arms like a windmill, and ranted with the voice of three. It was even so with many of the readers of Miss Austen. She was too natural for them. It seemed to them as if there could be very little merit in making characters act and talk so exactly like the people whom they saw around them every day. 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. Her works, like wellproportioned rooms, are rendered less apparently grand and imposing by the very excellence of their adjustment. It must perhaps be confessed, that she availed herself too little of the ordinary means of attracting attention and exciting interest. Her plots are very simple, formed upon the most rigid view of probabilities, excluding every thing romantic or surprising, or calculated

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to produce a very powerful emotion, and including only such events as occur in every-day life. Her characters are, for the most part, commonplace people, little distinguished by their mental qualities from the mass of their fellow-creatures, of secondary station, and hardly ever exhibited through that halo of rank and wealth which makes many an ill-drawn sketch pass current with a credulous public. ‘Materiam superabat opus,’ may be said of her works. No novelist perhaps ever employed more unpromising materials, and by none have those materials been more admirably treated. Her forte lay not so much in describing events, as in drawing characters; and in this she stands almost alone. She possessed the rare and difficult art of making her readers intimately acquainted with the characters of all whom she describes. We feel as if we had lived among them; and yet she employs no elaborate description—no metaphysical analysis—no antithetical balance of their good and bad qualities. She scarcely does more than make them act and talk, and we know them directly. In the ridicule of human foibles, she showed great delicacy and address. She never railed in set terms, and seldom launched the shafts of direct satire; but she made us equally sensible of the absurdity or unreasonableness which she wished to expose,—perhaps without even having recourse to one single condemnatory expression. A nicely-regulated vein of humour runs through her writings, never breaking out into broad mirth, but ever ready to communicate a pleasing vivacity to the current of her story. To the above merits may be added those of the purest morality, and most undeviating good sense. Few, if any, fictitious writings have a more decided tendency to improve the hearts of those who read them; and this end is gained without any thing that could be called sermonizing even by the most impatient. In dialogue she also excelled. Her conversations are never bookish—they are just what might have been said; and they are eminently characteristic. We have seen a good deal of spirited dialogue, in which the parts might be transposed and given to other interlocutors, with very little injury to the effect of the whole. This is never the case in the conversations introduced by Miss Austen. Every thing that is said, however short and simple, belongs peculiarly to the person by whom it is uttered, and is indicative of their situation, or turn of mind: And yet they do not seem to talk for effect; they merely say just what it seems most natural that they should have said. —Unsigned, “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are—or The Manners of the Day,” Edinburgh Review, July 1830, pp. 449–50

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Frances Ann Kemble (1831) Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of Miss Austen’s novels. What wonderful books those are! She must have written down the very conversations she heard verbatim, to have made them so like, which is Irish. —Frances Ann Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, July 31, 1831

Maria Jane Jewsbury “Literary Women, no. II: Jane Austen” (1831) A writer who was left (with her father) to care for several younger brothers and sisters after her mother died in 1819, Jewsbury understood only too well what it meant for a woman to combine domestic duty with the compulsion to write. While Jewsbury died young, of cholera at the age of 33, the following piece remains one of the best-known articles on Austen written by a woman. It is clear that Jewsbury took inspiration from Austen, writing, “For those who may doubt the possibility of engrafting literary habits on those peculiarly set apart for the female sex, and for those who may doubt how far literary reputation is attainable, without a greater sacrifice to notoriety than they may deem compatible with female happiness and delicacy, it is pleasant to have so triumphant a reference as Miss Austen.” It seems that Jewsbury is speaking directly to those who have objected to her own penchant for writing, and it would be interesting for students to study letters and diaries to learn how many women directly referenced Austen as a role model. This is notable in terms of gender studies as well as the evolution of the novel, as students might look at the number of women who wrote novels before and after Austen, including the number of women who appear to have influenced Austen herself. Was there a particular female writing style that would have required women to be influenced more by other female writers? In terms of biographical study, was there a particular class of women who wrote, or a particular class that read and was influenced by Austen? Jewsbury seems determined to defend Austen’s reputation (inasmuch as such a defense was even necessary) by remarking that Austen did not seek fame through writing, a practice that would most certainly have been deemed improper for a woman of the time. Jewsbury would be surprised and perhaps dismayed to hear twentieth- and twenty-first-century

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Jane Austen readers calling Austen a feminist with particular agendas embedded in her writing. Jewsbury emphasizes the morals she finds inherent to Austen’s novels, again a quality popularly expected or required more of women’s writing than of men’s. These opinions give rise to a fascinating opportunity for comparisons and contrasts between centuries. Students might look into early reception of Austen’s works and ask themselves if people then were much more inclined to take Austen at face value, characterizing her as a harmless woman writer who never neglected other womanly duties. Then students can look at recent readings of Austen and ask themselves whether readers and scholars today, who label Austen a feminist and find new meaning and commentary in her novels, are seeing only what they want to see—what modern readers and critics require of novelists considered worth studying. Was Austen a feminist, or do we call her so today because we cannot bear the idea that she might have been content with the life she led, and the unbalanced and unequal gender roles that characterized the times in which she lived?

QQQ

In the slight sketches which will from time to time occupy a page of the Athenaeum, we shall alternate between the dead and the living, the past time and the present, and thus tincture criticism with biography. Would that the interesting and gifted woman whose name is prefixed to this paper, could be numbered among the living! Would that, instead of closing her works with the saddened feeling, that the source whence so much pure amusement emanated is sealed for ever, we could glance over the list of books “nearly ready for publication,” and find another announced by the same author. Miss Austen, however, has been dead fourteen years; and from what has been laid before the public of a biographical nature, (slight as that is,) there seldom appears to have been a more beautiful accordance between an author’s life and writings; in fact, in the life and education of Miss Austen, may be discerned many of the causes of the excellencies that mark her works. Her father was a clergyman, a scholar, a man of fine general taste, and for forty years he resided on his living, (Steventon, in Hants,) conscientiously discharging its ministerial duties in his own person. Miss Austen was thus placed from infancy under two influences, calculated to mature female intellect in the happiest manner—rural life, and domestic intercourse at once polished, intellectual, and affectionate. The four years prior to his death were spent at Bath; and after that event, she resided with her mother and sister in the pleasant village of Shawton [sic], Hants; from thence she sent her novels into the world, and there, in May 1817, she died, after a slow insidious decline of

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many months. She was only forty-two when this event occurred, and though some of her works had been the gradual composition of her previous life, she was upwards of thirty before the first (“Sense and Sensibility”) was published. For those who may doubt the possibility of engrafting literary habits on those peculiarly set apart for the female sex, and for those who may doubt how far literary reputation is attainable, without a greater sacrifice to notoriety than they may deem compatible with female happiness and delicacy, it is pleasant to have so triumphant a reference as Miss Austen. Being dead, she may be quoted without impropriety. Placed by Providence in easy and elegant circumstances—endowed preeminently with good sense, and a placid unobtrusive temperament, she passed unscathed through the ordeal of authorship, and, in addition to exciting enthusiastic affection in immediate friends, received the general good-will of all who knew her. This alone is a high tribute to the benevolence of her temper, and the polish of her manners in daily life; for in print, her peculiar forte is delineating folly, selfishness, and absurdity—especially in her own sex. In society, she had too much wit to lay herself open to the charge of being too witty; and discriminated too well to attract notice to her discrimination. She was, we suspect, like one of her own heroines, “incurably gentle,” and acted on the principle of another, that “if a woman have the misfortune of knowing anything, she should conceal it as well as she can.”26 Besides this, whilst literature was a delightful occupation, it was not a profession to Miss Austen; she was not irrational enough to despise reputation and profit when they sought her, but she became an authoress entirely from taste and inclination;27 and in her judgment made her severely critical because she published her works, her unambitious temper was amply satisfied with the attention bestowed upon them by the public. Unlike that of many writers, Miss Austen’s fame has grown fastest since she died; there was no éclat about her first, or second, or third appearance; the public took time to make up its mind; and she, not having staked her hopes of happiness on success or failure, and not being obliged by circumstances to stake something more tangible on these results, could afford to wait for the decision of her claims. Those claims have long been established beyond a question; but the merit of first recognizing them, belongs less to reviewers than to general readers. The able article in the Quarterly Review for 1821, was founded on a posthumous work, when the praise or blame of ten thousand critics were equally unimportant to the author. So retired, so unmarked by literary notoriety, was the life Miss Austen led, that if any likeness was ever taken of her, (and the contrary supposition would seem strange,) none has ever

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been engraved; and of no woman, whose writings are as numerous and distinguished, is there perhaps so little public beyond the circle of those who knew her when alive— A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye.28 With regard to her genius, we must adventure a few remarks. She herself compares her productions to a little bit of ivory two inches wide,29 worked upon with a brush so fine that little effect is produced after much labour. It is so; her portraits are perfect likenesses, admirably finished, many of there gems, but it is all miniature-painting; and, satisfied with being inimitable in one line, she never essayed canvas and oils—never tried her hand at a majestic daub. Her “two inches of ivory” just describes her preparations for a tale of three volumes. A village—two families connected together—three or four interlopers, out of whom are to spring a little tracasserie30—a village or a country town, and by means of village and country town visiting and gossiping, a real plot shall thicken, and its “rear of darkness” never be scattered till six pages off Finis. The plots are simple in construction, and yet intricate in development; the main characters, those that the reader feels sure are to love, marry, and make mischief, are introduced in the first or second chapter; the work is all done by half a dozen people; no person, scene, or sentence, is ever introduced needless to the matter in hand—no catastrophes, or discoveries, or surprises of a grand nature are allowed—neither children nor fortunes are lost or found by accident—the mind is never taken off the level surface of life—the reader breakfasts, dines, walks, and gossips, with the various worthies, till a process of transmutation takes place in him, and he absolutely fancies himself one of the company. Yet the winding up of the plot involves a surprise; a few incidents are entangled at the beginning in the most simple and natural manner, and till the close one never feels quite sure how they are to be disentangled. Disentangled, however, they are, and that in a most satisfactory manner. The secret is, Miss Austen was a thorough mistress in the knowledge of human character; how it is acted upon by education and circumstance; and how, when once formed, it shows itself through every hour of every day, and in every speech to every person. Her conversations would be tiresome but for this; and her personages, the fellows to whom may be met in the streets or drank tea with at half an hour’s notice, would excite no interest. But in Miss Austen’s hands we see into their hearts and hopes, their motives, their struggles within themselves; and a sympathy is induced, which, if extended to daily life and the world at large, would make the reader

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a more amiable person. We think some of Miss Austen’s works deficient in delineations of a high cast of character, in an exalted tone of thought and feeling, a religions bias that can he seen as well as understood; Miss Austen seemed afraid of imparting imagination to her favourites, and conceived good sense the ultima Thule of moral possessions.31 . . . Characters of another grade, those very troublesome persons to draw, heroes and heroines, have in Miss Austen’s pages spirit and reality. The hero is not a suit of fashionable clothes, and a set of fashionable phrases; the heroine is not a ball-dress, a fainting fit, and a volume of poetry; they too are taken from life, and are distinguished one from another. . . . We sometimes feel that Miss Austen’s works deal rather too largely with the commonplace, petty, and disagreeable side of human nature—that we should enjoy more frequent sketches of the wise and high-hearted—that some of the books are too completely pages out of the world. . . . Miss Austen was sparing in her introduction of nobler characters, for they are scattered sparingly in life, but the books in which she describes them most we like most; they may not amuse so much at the moment, but they interest more deeply and more happily. . . . Her death has made a chasm in our light literature, the domestic novel with its home-born incidents, its “familiar matter of today,”32 its slight array of names and great cognizance of people and things, its confinement to country life, and total oblivion of costume, manners, the great world, and “the mirror of fashion.”33 Every species of composition, is, when good, to be admired in its way; but the revival of the domestic novel would make a pleasant interlude to the showy, sketchy, novels of high life. Notes 26. In Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine Catherine Morland feels “heartily ashamed of her ignorance” about a particular topic of discussion. Austen’s narrator intervenes: “A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can” (chapter XIV). 27. A direct quotation from Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (London: John Murray, 1818). 28. Wordsworth, “Song” (She dwelt among th’untrodden ways), first published in Lyrical Ballads, 1800.

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29. See her letter to her nephew, J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816, p. 343. This was quoted by Henry Austen in a “Postscript” to his “Biographical Notice.” 30. French: turmoil, bother, fuss. 31. The ancient Greek and Latin name for the most northerly lauds (above Britain), hence, the highest degree attainable. 32. Quoting the poet’s conjecture about the Erse song he hears, in Wordsworth’s poem, The Solitary Reaper (1807). 33. The subtitle of such publications for ladies, read by Austen and others, as La Belle Assemblée and Ladies Monthly Museum, and mentioned in novels of Scott and Edgeworth. —Maria Jane Jewsbury, “Literary Women, no. II: Jane Austen,” The Athenaeum 200 (August 27, 1831), pp. 553–54

Sara Coleridge “Letter to Emily Trevenen” (1834) Sara Coleridge was a poet and the daughter of one of the famous Lake Poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This excerpt provides insight into what three of the best-known Romantic poets (Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) thought of Austen. Students may want to compare Austen with these Romantics in terms of writing style and content.

QQQ . . . the delicate mirth, the gently-hinted satire, the feminine decorous humour of Jane Austen, who, if not the greatest, is surely the most faultless of female novelists. My Uncle Southey and my father had an equally high opinion of her merits, but Mr. Wordsworth used to say that though he admitted that her novels were an admirable copy of life, he could not be interested in productions of that kind; unless the truth of nature were presented to him clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination, it had scarce any attractions in his eyes. —Sara Coleridge, Letter to Emily Trevenen (August 1834), Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. Edith Coleridge, 1874, Vol. 1, p. 75

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1839) I am amusing myself with Miss Austen’s novels. She has great power and discrimination in delineating common-place people; and her writings are a

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capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much. Those who have not power to fill up gaps and bridge over chasms as they read, must therefore take particular delight in such minuteness of detail. It is a kind of Bowditch’s Laplace in the romantic astronomy. But readers of lively imagination naturally prefer the original with its unexplained steps, which they so readily supply. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Journal, May 23, 1839

George Henry Lewes “Recent Novels: French and English” (1847) What we most heartily enjoy and applaud, is truth in the delineation of life and character: incidents however wonderful, adventures however perilous, are almost as naught when compared with the deep and lasting interest excited by any thing like a correct representation of life. That, indeed, seems to us to be Art, and the only Art we care to applaud. To make our meaning precise, we should say that Fielding and Miss Austen are the greatest novelists in our language. . . . Now Miss Austen has been called a prose Shakspeare; and, among others, by Macaulay. In spite of the sense of incongruity which besets us in the words prose Shakspeare, we confess the greatness of Miss Austen, her marvellous dramatic power, seems more than any thing in Scott akin to the greatest quality in Shakspeare. —George Henry Lewes, “Recent Novels: French and English,” Fraser’s Magazine, December 1847, p. 687

Charlotte Brontë (1848) You say I must familiarise my mind with the fact that ‘Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no “sentiment” ’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), ‘no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’; and then you add, I must ‘learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.’ The last point only will I ever acknowledge. Can there be a great artist without poetry? —Charlotte Brontë, Letter to George Henry Lewes (January 18, 1848)

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George Eliot “The Progress of Fiction As an Art” (1853) George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), a novelist who, at the time this review was written, was the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. Eliot, who assumed the male pseudonym in the hope that her work would be taken seriously, is known as a novelist who was unafraid to take on controversial issues of her time. Her novels, of which Middlemarch is perhaps the best known, are sweeping in scope and crowded with fully delineated characters from various social classes. It is not unusual to find Austen and Eliot discussed together, exemplified here in the pieces by Andrew Lang and George Barnett Smith. Eliot’s novels are often favorably compared to Austen’s in terms of both women’s sense of social consciousness. Students interested in gender or comparative studies might also note that many works about Austen discuss her style and content as inherently female, while Eliot’s is often regarded as masculine, making the two writers a fascinating study in comparisons and contrasts. Finally, in the 42-year gap between Austen’s last novel and Eliot’s first, England had moved from the Romantic age to the Victorian, and the Industrial Revolution was well under way. Queen Victoria’s empire was expanding, making it much more possible for writers, male and female, to move and look outside England for inspiration and exposure. Students interested in historical or biographical studies may note that historical context is a crucial part of understanding not only a writer’s work, but a writer’s evaluation of other works as well.

QQQ Without brilliancy of any kind—without imagination, depth of thought, or wide experience, Miss Austin, by simply describing what she knew and had seen, and making accurate portraits of very tiresome and uninteresting people, is recognised as a true artist, and will continue to be admired, when many authors more ambitious, and believing themselves filled with a much higher inspiration, will be neglected and forgotten. There is an instinct in every unwarped mind which prefers truth to extravagance, and a photographic picture, if it be only of a kitten or a hay-stack, is a pleasanter subject in the eyes of most persons (were they brave enough to admit it), than many a glaring piece of mythology, which those who profess to worship High Art find themselves called upon to pronounce divine. People will persist in admiring what they can appreciate and understand, and Wilkie will keep his place among national favourites when poor Haydon’s Dentatus is turned to

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the wall. But Miss Austin’s accurate scenes from dull life, and Miss Burney’s long histories of amiable and persecuted heroines, though belonging to the modern and reformed school of novels, must still be classed in the lower division. As pictures of manners, they are interesting and amusing, but they want the broader foundation, the firm granite substratum, which the great masters who have followed them have taught us to expect. They show us too much of the littlenesses and trivialities of life, and limit themselves so scrupulously to the sayings and doings of dull, ignorant, and disagreeable people, that their very truthfulness makes us yawn. —George Eliot, “The Progress of Fiction As an Art,” Westminster Review, October 1853, p. 358

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1855) Students of the political elements that inform literature may want to compare Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s political poetry with Austen’s novels that “don’t go far” in that arena. Barrett Browning was outspoken about events in England and Italy, her home after she married. Several scholars claim to have found political statements in Austen’s novels as well.

QQQ She (Mary Russell Mitford) never taught me anything but a very limited admiration of Miss Austen, whose people struck me as wanting souls, even more than is necessary for men and women of the world. The novels are perfect as far as they go—that’s certain. Only they don’t go far, I think. It may be my fault. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letter to John Ruskin (November 5, 1855)

George Henry Lewes “The Novels of Jane Austen” (1859) George Henry Lewes was a philosopher and literary critic who dabbled in writing novels but eventually focused on studying science and reviewing the work of others. He is perhaps best known for his 24-year affair with George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), for whom he left his wife and with whom he lived until his death in 1878. Lewes mentions several other Austen reviewers in this piece: Sir Walter Scott, Currer Bell (the pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë), and Thomas

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Jane Austen Babington Macaulay. Students will find it valuable to read each of these cited reviewer’s thoughts on Austen and compare them, perhaps noting how Lewes interprets each writer’s review of Austen and considering whether he treats them fairly. Students of comparative literature might also note that several Austen reviewers recommend a particular work of hers and will want to read these Austen works and determine why a particular reviewer likes one work better than another. Acknowledging that Austen is a low-ranking member of the group of great artists, Lewes states that her works have little or no mass appeal. In the paragraph beginning, “We are touching here on one of her defects,” Lewes demonstrates his disregard for popular writing because it is often well received only by a non-discriminating readership: “Emotion is in its nature sympathetic and uncritical: a spark will ignite it.” Many readers look for the extreme passion and picturesque elements and miss the genius of Austen’s detail and dramatic presentation. This is a point of view that generally holds true today; if a writer is widely popular, he or she is not considered sufficiently literary. Stephen King and Jennifer Crusie are two twenty-first-century authors who are particularly outspoken about the literary community’s unwillingness to embrace their work, due in large part, they claim, to their mass popularity. Students of comparative literature and literary theory might study not only the definition of popularity but the effects that it can have on an author’s chances of entering the literary canon. On a related topic, readers might look at how “art” is and can be defined and how and why such definitions change over time. Students of popular culture could investigate writers who do not appear to be attempting to produce “art,” and how their works are at times disdained by literary communities. Students might also look at which works sustain popularity over time, which are made into popular films (as opposed to “art” films), and which are most often taught in schools and universities.

QQQ But the real secret of Miss Austen’s success lies in her having the exquisite and rare gift of dramatic creation of character. Scott says of her, “She had a talent for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied me. What a pity such

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a gifted creature died so early!”1 Generously said; but high as the praise is, it is as much below the real excellence of Miss Austen, as the “big bow-wow strain” is below the incomparable power of the Waverley Novels. Scott felt, but did not define, the excellence of Miss Austen. The very word “describing” is altogether misplaced and misleading. She seldom describes anything, and is not felicitous when she attempts it. But instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself. If ever living beings can be said to have moved across the page of fiction, as they lived, speaking as they spoke, and feeling as they felt, they do so in Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park. What incomparable noodles she exhibits for our astonishment and laughter! What silly, good-natured women! What softlyselfish men! What lively, amiable, honest men and women, whom one would rejoice to have known! But all her power is dramatic power; she loses her hold on us directly she ceases to speak through the personal; she is then like a great actor off the stage. When she is making men and women her mouthpieces, she is exquisitely and inexhaustibly humorous; but when she speaks in her own person, she is apt to be commonplace, and even prosing. Her dramatic ventriloquism is such that, amid our tears of laughter and sympathetic exasperation at folly, we feel it almost impossible that she did not hear those very people utter those very words. In many cases this was doubtless the fact. The best invention does not consist in finding new language for characters, but in finding the true language for them. It is easy to invent a language never spoken by any one out of books; but it is so far from easy to invent—that is, to find out—the language which certain characters would speak and did speak, that in all the thousands of volumes written since Richardson and Fielding, every difficulty is more frequently overcome than that. If the reader fails to perceive the extraordinary merit of Miss Austen’s representation of character, let him try himself to paint a portrait which shall be at once many-sided and interesting, without employing any but the commonest colours, without calling in the aid of eccentricity, exaggeration, or literary “effects;” or let him carefully compare the writings of Miss Austen with those of any other novelist, from Fielding to Thackeray. It is probably this same dramatic instinct which makes the construction of her stories so admirable. And by construction, we mean the art which, selecting what is useful and rejecting what is superfluous, renders our

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interest unflagging, because one chapter evolves the next, one character is necessary to the elucidation of another. In what is commonly called “plot” she does not excel. Her invention is wholly in character and motive, not in situation. Her materials are of the commonest every-day occurrence. Neither the emotions of tragedy, nor the exaggerations of farce, seem to have the slightest attraction for her. The reader’s pulse never throbs, his curiosity is never intense; but his interest never wanes for a moment. The action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors as well as spectators of the little drama. One of the most difficult things in dramatic writing is so to construct the story that every scene shall advance the denouement by easy evolution, yet at the same time give scope to the full exhibition of the characters. In dramas, as in novels, we almost always see that the action stands still while the characters are being exhibited, and the characters are in abeyance while the action is being unfolded. For perfect specimens of this higher construction demanded by art, we would refer to the jealousy-scenes of Othello, and the great scene between Celimene and Arsinoe in The Misanthrope; there is not in these two marvels of art a verse which does not exhibit some nuance of character, and thereby, at the same time, tends towards the full development of the action. So entirely dramatic, and so little descriptive, is the genius of Miss Austen, that she seems to rely upon what her people say and do for the whole effect they are to produce on our imaginations. She no more thinks of describing the physical appearance of her people than the dramatist does who knows that his persons are to be represented by living actors. This is a defect and a mistake in art: a defect, because, although every reader must necessarily conjure up to himself a vivid image of people whose characters are so vividly presented; yet each reader has to do this for himself without aid from the author, thereby missing many of the subtle connections between physical and mental organisation. It is not enough to be told that a young gentleman had a fine countenance and an air of fashion; or that a young gentlewoman was handsome and elegant. As far as any direct information can be derived from the authoress, we might imagine that this was a purblind world, wherein nobody ever saw anybody, except in a dim vagueness which obscured all peculiarities. It is impossible that Mr Collins should not have been endowed by nature with an appearance in some way heralding the delicious folly of the inward man. Yet all we hear of this fatuous curate is, that “he was a tall heavylooking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his

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manners were very formal.” Balzac or Dickens would not have been content without making the reader see this Mr Collins. Miss Austen is content to make us know him, even to the very intricacies of his inward man. It is not stated whether she was shortsighted, but the absence of all sense of the outward world—either scenery or personal appearance—is more remarkable in her than in any writer we remember. We are touching here on one of her defects which help to an explanation of her limited popularity, especially when coupled with her deficiencies in poetry and passion. She has little or no sympathy with what is picturesque and passionate. This prevents her from painting what the popular eye can see, and the popular heart can feel. The struggles, the ambitions, the errors, and the sins of energetic life are left untouched by her; and these form the subjects most stirring to the general sympathy. Other writers have wanted this element of popularity, but they have compensated for it by a keen sympathy with, and power of representing, the adventurous, the romantic, and the picturesque. Passion and adventure are the sources of certain success with the mass of mankind. The passion may be coarsely felt, the romance may be ridiculous, but there will always be found a large majority whose sympathies will be awakened by even the coarsest daubs. Emotion is in its nature sympathetic and uncritical: a spark will ignite it. Types of villany never seen or heard of out of books, or off the stage, types of heroism and virtue not less hyperbolical, are eagerly welcomed and believed in by a public which would pass over without notice the subtlest creations of genius, and which would even resent the more truthful painting as disturbing its emotional enjoyment of hating the bad, and loving the good. The nicer art which mingles goodness with villany, and weakness with virtue, as in life they are always mingled, causes positive distress to young and uncultivated minds. The mass of men never ask whether a character is true, or the events probable; it is enough for them that they are moved; and to move them strongly, black must be very black, and white without a shade. Hence it is that caricature and exaggeration of all kinds—inflated diction and daubing delineation—are, and always will be, popular: a certain breadth and massiveness of effect being necessary to produce a strong impression on all but a refined audience. In the works of the highest genius we sometimes find a breadth and massiveness of effect which make even these works popular, although the qualities most highly prized by the cultivated reader are little appreciated by the public. The Iliad, Shakespeare and Moliere, Don Quixote and Faust, affect the mass powerfully; but how many admirers of Homer would prefer the naivete of the original to the epigrammatic splendour of Pope?

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The novelist who has no power of broad and massive effect can never expect to be successful with the great public. He may gain the suffrages of the highest minds, and in course of time become a classic; but we all know what the popularity of a classic means. Miss Austen is such a novelist. Her subjects have little intrinsic interest; it is only in their treatment that they become attractive; but treatment and art are not likely to captivate any except critical and refined tastes. Every reader will be amused by her pictures, because their very truth carries them home to ordinary experience and sympathy; but this amusement is of a tepid nature, and the effect is quickly forgotten. Partridge expressed the general sentiment of the public when he spoke slightingly of Garrick’s “Hamlet,” because Garrick did just what he, Partridge, would have done in presence of a ghost; whereas the actor who performed the king powerfully impressed him by sonorous elocution and emphatic gesticulation: that was acting, and required art; the other was natural, and not worth alluding to. The absence of breadth, picturesqueness, and passion, will also limit the appreciating audience of Miss Austen to the small circle of cultivated minds; and even these minds are not always capable of greatly relishing her works. We have known very remarkable people who cared little for her pictures of every-day life; and indeed it may be anticipated that those who have little sense of humour, or whose passionate and insurgent activities demand in art a reflection of their own emotions and struggles, will find little pleasure in such homely comedies. Currer Bell may be taken as a type of these. She was utterly without a sense of humour, and was by nature fervid and impetuous. In a letter published in her memoirs she writes,—“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. . . . I had not read Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her elegant ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”2 The critical reader will not fail to remark the almost contemptuous indifference to the art of truthful portrait-painting which this passage indicates; and he will understand, perhaps, how the writer of such a passage was herself incapable of drawing more than characteristics, even in her most successful efforts. Jane Eyre, Rochester, and Paul Emmanuel, are very vigorous sketches, but the reader observes them from the outside, he does not penetrate their souls, he does not know them. What is said respecting the want of open

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country, blue hill, and bonny beck, is perfectly true; but the same point has been more felicitously touched by Scott, in his review of Emma: “Upon the whole,” he says, “the turn of this author’s novels bears the same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly-adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. It is neither so captivating as the one, nor so grand as the other; but it affords those who frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social habits.” Scott would also have loudly repudiated the notion of Miss Austen’s characters being “mere daguerreotypes.” Having himself drawn both ideal and real characters, he knew the difficulties of both; and he well says, “He who paints from le beau ideal, if his scenes and sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling them with the ordinary probabilities of life; but he who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader. . . . Something more than a mere sign-post likeness is also demanded. The portrait must have spirit and character as well as resemblance; and being deprived of all that, according to Bayes, goes to ‘elevate and surprise,’ it must make amends by displaying depth of knowledge and dexterity of execution.” While defending our favourite, and giving critical reasons for our liking, we are far from wishing to impose that preference on others. If any one frankly says, “I do not care about these pictures of ordinary life: I want something poetical or romantic, something to stimulate my imagination, and to carry me beyond the circle of my daily thoughts,”—there is nothing to be answered. Many persons do not admire Wordsworth, and cannot feel their poetical sympathies aroused by waggoners and potters. There are many who find no enjoyment in the Flemish pictures, but are rapturous over the frescoes at Munich and Berlin. Individual tastes do not admit of dispute. The imagination is an imperious faculty, and demands gratification; and if a man be content to have this faculty stimulated, to the exclusion of all other faculties, or if only peculiar works are capable of stimulating it, we have no right to object. Only when a question of Art comes to be discussed, it must not be confounded with a matter of individual feeling; and it requires a distinct reference to absolute standards. The art of novel-writing, like the art of painting, is founded on general principles, which, because they have their psychological justification, because they are derived from tendencies of the human mind, and not, as absurdly supposed, derived from “models of composition,” are of universal application. The law of colour, for

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instance, is derived from the observed relation between certain colours and the sensitive retina. The laws of construction, likewise, are derived from the invariable relation between a certain order and succession of events, and the amount of interest excited by that order. In novel-writing, as in mechanics, every obstruction is a loss of power; every superfluous page diminishes the artistic pleasure of the whole. Individual tastes will always differ; but the laws of the human mind are universal. One man will prefer the humorous, another the pathetic; one will delight in the adventurous, another in the simple and homely; but the principles of Art remain the same for each. To tell a story well, is quite another thing from having a good story to tell. The construction of a good drama is the same in principle whether the subject be Antigone, the Misanthrope, or Othello; and the real critic detects this principle at work under these various forms. It is the same with the delineation of character: however various the types, whether a Jonathan Oldbuck, a Dr Primrose, a Blifil, or a Falstaff—ideal, or real, the principles of composition are the same. Miss Austen has generally but an indifferent story to tell, but her art of telling it is incomparable. Her characters, never ideal, are not of an eminently attractive order; but her dramatic ventriloquism and power of presentation is little less than marvellous. Macaulay declares his opinion that in this respect she is second only to Shakespeare. “Among the writers,” he says, “who, in the point we have noticed, have approached nearest the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace—all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings . . . And all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy powers of description, and that we only know them to exist by the general effect to which they have contributed.”3 The art of the novelist consists in telling the story and representing the characters; but besides these, there are other powerful though extraneous sources of attraction often possessed by novels, which are due to the literary talent and culture of the writer. There is, for example, the power of description, both of scenery and of character. Many novels depend almost entirely on this for their effect. It is a lower kind of power, and consequently much more frequent than what we have styled the art of the novelist; yet it may be very puissant in the hands of a fine writer, gifted with a real sense of the picturesque. Being very easy, it has of late become the resource of weak writers; and the prominent position it has usurped has tended in two ways

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to produce weariness—first, by encouraging incompetent writers to do what is easily done; and, secondly, by seducing writers from the higher and better method of dramatic exposition. Another source of attraction is the general vigour of mind exhibited by the author, in his comments on the incidents and characters of his story: these comments, when proceeding from a fine insight or a large experience, give additional charm to the story, and make the delightful novel a delightful book. It is almost superfluous to add, that this also has its obverse: the comments too often painfully exhibit a general weakness of mind. Dr Johnson refused to take tea with some one because, as he said, “Sir, there is no vigour in his talk.” This is the complaint which must be urged against the majority of novelists: they put too much water in their ink. And even when the talk is good, we must remember that it is, after all, only one of the side-dishes of the feast. All the literary and philosophic culture which an author can bring to bear upon his work will tend to give that work a higher value, but it will not really make it a better novel. To suppose that culture can replace invention, or literature do instead of character, is as erroneous as to suppose that archaeological learning and scenical splendour can raise poor acting to the level of fine acting. Yet this is the common mistake of literary men. They are apt to believe that mere writing will weigh in the scale against artistic presentation; that comment will do duty for dramatic revelation; that analysing motives with philosophic skill will answer all the purpose of creation. But whoever looks closely into this matter will see that literature—that is, the writing of thinking and accomplished men—is excessively cheap, compared with the smallest amount of invention or creation; and it is cheap because more easy of production, and less potent in effect. This is apparently by no means the opinion of some recent critics, who evidently consider their own writing of more merit than humour and invention, and who are annoyed at the notion of “mere serialists,” without “solid acquirements,” being regarded all over Europe as our most distinguished authors. Yet it may be suggested that writing such as that of the critics in question can be purchased in abundance, whereas humour and invention are among the rarest of products. If it is a painful reflection that genius should be esteemed more highly than solid acquirements, it should be remembered that learning is only the diffused form of what was once invention. “Solid acquirement” is the genius of wits, which has become the wisdom of reviewers. Be this as it may, we acknowledge the great attractions which a novel may receive from the general vigour and culture of the author; and acknowledge that such attractions form but a very small element in Miss Austen’s success.

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Her pages have no sudden illuminations. There are neither epigrams nor aphorisms, neither subtle analyses nor eloquent descriptions. She is without grace or felicity of expression; she has neither fervid nor philosophic comment. Her charm lies solely in the art of representing life and character, and that is exquisite. We have thus endeavoured to characterise, in general terms, the qualities which her works display. It is less easy to speak with sufficient distinctness of the particular works, since, unless our readers have these vividly present to memory (in which case our remarks would be superfluous), we cannot hope to be perfectly intelligible; no adequate idea of them can be given by a review of one, because the “specimen brick” which the noodle in Hierocles thought sufficient, and which really does suffice in the case of many a modern novel, would prove no specimen at all. Her characters are so gradually unfolded, their individuality reveals itself so naturally and easily in the course of what they say and do, that we learn to know them as if we had lived with them, but cannot by any single speech or act make them known to others. . . . The reader who has yet to make acquaintance with these novels is advised to begin with Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park; and if these do not captivate him, he may fairly leave the others unread. In Pride and Prejudice there is the best story, and the greatest variety of character: the whole Bennet family is inimitable: Mr Bennet, caustic, quietly, indolently selfish, but honourable, and in some respects amiable; his wife, the perfect type of a gossiping, weak-headed, fussy mother; Jane a sweet creature; Elizabeth a sprightly and fascinating flesh-and-blood heroine; Lydia a pretty, but vain and giddy girl; and Mary, plain and pedantic, studying “thorough bass and human nature.” Then there is Mr Collins, and Sir William Lucas, and the proud foolish old lady Catherine de Bough, and Darcy, Bingley, and Wickham, all admirable. From the first chapter to the last there is a succession of scenes of high comedy, and the interest is unflagging. Mansfield Park is also singularly fascinating, though the heroine is less of a favourite with us than Miss Austen’s heroines usually are; but aunt Norris and Lady Bertram are perfect; and the scenes at Portsmouth, when Fanny Price visits her home after some years’ residence at the Park, are wonderfully truthful and vivid. The private theatricals, too, are very amusing; and the day spent at the Rushworths’ is a masterpiece of art. If the reader has really tasted the flavour of these works, he will need no other recommendation to read and re-read the others. Even Persuasion, which we cannot help regarding as the weakest, contains exquisite touches, and some characters no one else could have surpassed.

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We have endeavoured to express the delight which Miss Austen’s works have always given us, and to explain the sources of her success by indicating the qualities which make her a model worthy of the study of all who desire to understand the art of the novelist. But we have also indicated what seem to be the limitations of her genius, and to explain why it is that this genius, moving only amid the quiet scenes of every-day life, with no power over the more stormy and energetic activities which find vent even in every-day life, can never give her a high rank among great artists. Her place is among great artists, but it is not high among them. She sits in the House of Peers, but it is as a simple Baron. The delight derived from her pictures arises from our sympathy with ordinary characters, our relish of humour, and our intellectual pleasure in art for art’s sake. But when it is admitted that she never stirs the deeper emotions, that she never fills the soul with a noble aspiration, or brightens it with a fine idea, but, at the utmost, only teaches us charity for the ordinary failings of ordinary people, and sympathy with their goodness, we have admitted an objection which lowers her claims to rank among the great benefactors of the race; and this sufficiently explains why, with all her excellence, her name has not become a household word. Her fame, we think, must endure. Such art as hers can never grow old, never be superseded. But, after all, miniatures are not frescoes, and her works are miniatures. Her place is among the Immortals; but the pedestal is erected in a quiet niche of the great temple. Notes 1. Lockhart, Life of Scott, viii. 292. Compare also vol. x. p. 143. 2. Life of Charlotte Bronte, ii. 54. 3. Art. on “Madame D’Arblay,” Edin. Rev., vol. lxxvii. p. 561. —George Henry Lewes, “The Novels of Jane Austen,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1859, pp. 104–13

David Masson (1859) Masson’s characterization of Austen as thoroughly feminine is common, and begs the question: Is there any difference between “masculine” and “feminine” writing? Students examining gender, feminist, or psychological issues might investigate such divisions and strict categorizations. Masson claims to know men “in ecstasies” with Austen’s books, while women complain that Austen reveals “too many of their secrets.”

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Among these lady-novelists, Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen were, undoubtedly, the first in talent. So far as they remind us of previous novelists of the other sex, it is most, as might be expected, of Richardson; but, while resembling him in minuteness of observation, in good sense, and in clear moral aim, they present many differences. All in all, as far as my information goes, the best judges unanimously prefer Miss Austen to any of her contemporaries of the same order. They reckon her Sense and Sensibility, her Pride and Prejudice, her Mansfield Park and her Emma (which novels were published in her life-time), and also her Northanger Abbey and her Persuasion (which were published posthumously) as not only better than anything else of the kind written in her day, but also among the most perfect and charming fictions in the language. I have known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies with them; and the only objection I have heard of as brought against them by ladies is, that they reveal too many of their secrets. —David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles, 1859, pp. 188–89

Thomas Babington Macaulay “Madame D’Arblay” (1860) Thomas Babington Macaulay was a historian, poet, and politician. He was one of the first to argue for copyright laws protecting authors, and readers will note the number of times that this review of Austen is quoted or mentioned by other writers. The significance of Macaulay’s comparison of Austen to Shakespeare cannot be overemphasized, and students of literary history might choose to research this connection further. Macaulay does not claim that Austen purposefully imitates Shakespeare. Instead he simply notes a similarity in the ways the two writers created their characters, stating that Austen has “approached nearest to the manner of the great master.” Students can compare Austen’s various clergymen to decide whether Macaulay’s determination of Austen’s gift for nuance is accurate. Students can do further study by comparing and contrasting other similarly situated Austen characters: sisters, fathers, daughters, or young single women. Macaulay mentions characters from well-known European plays: Harpagon and Jourdain from two seventeenth-century plays by Molière and Joseph Surface and Sir Lucius O’Trigger from two eighteenth-century plays by Richard Sheridan. This comparison offers an opportunity for

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students exploring the history and evolution of literature to study changes and similarities in writing over several centuries.

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It is the constant manner of Shakspeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature. Shakspeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for instance, four clergymen, none of whom, we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed. —Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Madame D’Arblay” (1843), Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, 1860, Vol. 5, pp. 307–08

G.F. Chorley “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford” (1870) Chorley compares Austen only to other women writers (Radcliffe, Burney, Smith, Bennet, and Opie), at a time when it was generally more conventional to compare Austen to male writers and then claim that

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Jane Austen she fell short of their talent. Students might take this opportunity to ask themselves if there is in fact a community of women writers that excludes men, and vice versa. Should male and female writers be compared to one another, or should male writers only be held to the standards of other male writers, and female writers to females? This question has been debated for centuries, and today is at the forefront of literary and gender studies due to the proliferation of “chick lit,” which seems to inherently lay claim to only the female domain. Some scholars would call Austen the “chick lit” writer of her time, stating that there is something unquestionably female about her style and content. Students may want to read Austen’s works and a selection of other women’s writing from the time period to determine whether this statement is defensible. Chorley mentions one male writer, Horace Walpole, as he discusses the prevalence of “supernatural fiction” in Austen’s time. Walpole and Ann Radcliffe wrote in a genre termed gothic fiction, which Austen pokes fun at in her novel Northanger Abbey. The real supernatural fiction appeared in 1818, just after Austen’s death. Widely considered the first science-fiction novel ever written, Frankenstein was published by a young woman named Mary Shelley and stands in stark contrast to the “quiet,” “real” novels of Austen. Students may want to look at Austen and Mary Shelley together, as a study in comparisons and contrasts. Both were young women writers, both concerned with women’s lives and issues, and both exceedingly popular in their time and consistently afterward. Students might ask themselves why Chorley uses terms such as “courageous self-knowledge” and “boldness” to describe a woman who wrote “quiet novels [that] have become classics.” Chorley seems astonished that such a young woman could write so clearly about the world immediately around her. He also seems to be assuming (by his use of the phrase “self-knowledge”) that Austen was writing about herself. Students could study the effects of a writer’s age on her style, content, and public reception. (Keep in mind that what might be considered “old” in one time period is not in another, so ground the comparisons in historical context.) The “boldness” in Austen that Chorley refers to might also be rooted in her statements about society, which he claims are “as clear as if she had braved society.” Read Austen’s books and search for the ways in which she upholds or condemns societal norms, behaviors, and attitudes. One method would be to compare the heroines Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot to figure out what they have in common. From this, one can safely assume that Austen respected these characteristics and behaviors. Students might also use this opportunity

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to examine conduct and etiquette books of Austen’s time to determine what was considered generally acceptable and popular.

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Pride and Prejudice, the first of Miss Austen’s half-dozen novels, which will be read so long as any one cares for English domestic fiction, was begun when its writer was twenty-one years of age, in October, 1796,—and completed in about ten months. Sense and Sensibility was commenced immediately after the completion of Pride and Prejudice (1797), and Northanger Abbey was composed in the following year (1798). The courageous self-knowledge which could prompt and carry through such undertakings, under such circumstances, is a noticeable fact. These stories were written in the time of supernatural fiction, made popular by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and by the writings of Anne Radcliffe—a time, it might have been predicated, when the appeal of so delicate a voice and so delicate a touch as Miss Austen’s would entirely fail of effect. But we are proud to believe, that, in England at least, everything which is real makes a way, not to be closed up, but to be widened as years go on, and as with them the powers of comparison are developed. These quiet novels have become classics. So much can hardly be said of many of the works by the other female novelists. By the side of Emma and Persuasion, Evelina—ushered into fame by a patron no less authoritative and powerful than Dr. Johnson—as a work of art, is coarse and farcical. The Austen novels have outlasted the tales of Mrs. Bennet and Charlotte Smith, and that kind-hearted, illicit Quakeress, Amelia Opie; though each of these as it came was the delight of novel readers, and all appealed to emotions more serious and to passions more high-flown than can be excited by the cares and concernments of everyday people in country villages, passing lives sparingly marked by sin or sorrow. . . . By those who have studied character distinct from its outward manifestations, as expressed in conformity to uses and customs, there will be found in Miss Austen’s novels an expression of firm and original courage as clear as if she had braved society, whether theoretically or practically. The boldness which will vindicate for persons of mediocre intellect souls to be saved and feelings to be tortured, and which by such vindication can interest and compel a jaded, hurrying public, eager for changing excitements, to pause and to listen—is surely no common quality; but it has within itself a promise and an assurance of enduring reputation. —G.F. Chorley, “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford,” Quarterly Review, January 1870, pp. 200–03

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T.E. Kebbel “Jane Austen” (1870) The believability of Austen’s characters is a recurring theme in many reviews of her work, and T.E. Kebbel’s assessment proves to be no exception. He compares Austen to Samuel Richardson, whose popular novels Pamela and Clarissa center on female characters, of which, according to Kebbel, Richardson “was in total ignorance.” Austen, on the other hand, writes of what she knows, and perhaps the fusion of her life and her work is an advantage in making her characters that much more believable. Students might investigate dialogue and style in Austen and Richardson to determine, according to the norms and standards of the times in which they wrote, which seems more natural. Kebbel notes that readers of his time cannot fully relate to Austen’s characters because she writes so exclusively of the time in which she lived, the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. One could argue that this is true of any sixty-year span, but it is particularly true of nineteenth-century England. The first steam engine appeared in 1829, Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837, and the Industrial Revolution and imperialist expansion that ensued brought about significant and often overwhelming changes. Students can study the historical contexts of writers such as Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde to learn just how impossible it may have been for each of these authors to write their works at any other time or place. According to Kebbel, “Miss Austen belongs essentially to the eighteenth-century school of literature” because her work contains little or no romance, by which he means the passion and emotion often aroused by and related to nature. Austen is not regarded as a Romantic, even though she wrote during the time now termed the Romantic age, which produced writers such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Lord Byron. Austen is also not included as an eighteenth-century (or Enlightenment) writer, sometimes merely because most of her work was written in the early nineteenth century. Austen cannot be wholly included in the Victorian writing tradition, partly because she died before the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the coronation of Victoria, and partly because her work does not contain the grit and social consciousness that characterizes much of the writing in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Students might research works from all three time periods (the Enlightenment, Victorian, and Romantic eras) and determine for themselves which, if any, of these categories Austen most naturally fits into. Kebbel alludes to sensation fiction, popular in the Victorian age, when he writes of books that contain “a mystery, an explosion, and a

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reconciliation.” The most popular sensation writers of the nineteenth century were Wilkie Collins and M.E. Braddon. By contrast, Kebbel claims that Austen’s marriage-centered plots and emphasis on characters rather than action make her writing “the purest of treats.” Certainly there was far less scandal in Austen’s work than in Collins’s or Braddon’s, but students should feel free to question whether Kebbel’s assessment of Austen’s work as having “no bad hearts” and no “crime, calamity, and anguish” is altogether accurate.

QQQ We have yet to mention two of Miss Austen’s most characteristic excellencies—her dialogue and her style. In regard to the former we must of course remember what a vast change in this respect has passed over society since she wrote. For all that, the dialogues in Miss Austen’s novels strike us as much more natural than the dialogues in Richardson’s, upon whom she had apparently endeavored to form her own. But her genius was too strong for her. She wrote, moreover, only upon those scenes of life with which she was perfectly familiar; whereas Richardson was in total ignorance of the habits and conversation of that society which it was his ambition to describe. There is something very quaint about the conversations in Miss Austen’s novels, but we cannot help feeling certain that it was exactly what people of that class in those days would have said. When Anne Elliott, a young lady of the period, advises Captain Bennick, a young officer in the navy, who is given to quoting Byron, to go through a course of our best English moralists, she does so in perfect good faith, and without a suspicion of wrong. But how charming is the art that can make us accept this as the perfectly natural thing for her to have said on the occasion. The conversation between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland, on the first night of their meeting in the Bath ball-rooms, is another instance of the same kind, though not so striking perhaps at the first. There is, of course, always a difficulty in placing one’s self entirely en rapport with any writer who describes the living manners of his or her own age, which is at a long distance from his own. Do what we can, we feel solitary in their company. When we read a writer of our own day who describes the manner of a hundred years ago, we feel that we have a companion in our enjoyment. That cannot be felt by any one who reads Miss Austen. Her style deserves the highest commendation. It has all the form and finish of the eighteenth century, without being in the least degree stilted or unnatural. It has all the tone of good society without being in the least degree insipid. For a specimen of crisp, rich English, combining all the vigour of the

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masculine with all the delicacy of the feminine style, we suggest the opening chapter of Northanger Abbey as a model for any young lady writer of the present age. No doubt Miss Austen belongs essentially to the eighteenth-century school of literature. There is little we should now call romance in any one of her five novels. They are good genteel-comedies. They play over the surface of life, and represent its phenomena with the most finished elegance. But they do not stir the deeper passions, or more tumultuous emotions of our nature. We should question if a single page that Miss Austen has written has ever moistened the eyelid of the most impressionable man, woman, or child who has lived since she first began to write. On the other hand, the quiet fun, the inexhaustible sly humour, the cheerful healthy tone, the exquisite purity, and the genuine goodness which are reflected in every line she wrote, carry us down the sluggish stream of her stories without either weariness or excitement, and with a constant sense of being amused, refreshed, and benefited. In these respects she has been compared to Addison. And we think the comparison a just one. . . . It was a necessity of Miss Austen’s method that her plots should be less interesting than her persons. In fact, of the plot regular, with a mystery, an explosion, and a reconciliation, she presents no specimen; and our curiosity, we must own, is but faintly stimulated by the doubts and fears which beset her heroes and heroines en route for the altar. And it is a most remarkable circumstance that there is no other interest in her novels but what arises out of a passion to which she was herself a stranger. So many young men and so many young ladies stand up in couples as if they were going to dance a quadrille, and the various entanglements which await them form the whole action of the piece. Now one goes wrong, and now another, sometimes with serious, but oftener with comic, consequences. A few dresses are torn, and once a lady has a fall. But there are no bad hearts, and all winds up comfortably with the usual refreshments. Crime, calamity, and anguish enter not this placid sphere. Tragedy is not allowed to show even the tip of her buskin. Poverty and disgrace are hinted at, but, like murder, are excluded from the stage. In three words, the story is redolent always of the quiet respectability, the prosperous dulness, and the ignorance of passion which encircled Miss Austen’s existence, and narrowed the range of her experience. But as soon as her personages begin to talk and unfold their own characters to our gaze, we cease to care how they act, how they are situated, or what is in store for them. The exhibition of human nature, unadulterated by sensational incidents, is the purest of treats. And that is what she gives to perfection.

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To those critics who would ask us what moral purpose Miss Austen proposed to herself in these delineations of common-place society, it is perhaps enough to reply that every picture of human life, however trite or conventional, must have a moral of its own if we have only eyes to see it. Without plunging into any such profound question as the ethics of art in general, we may affirm that nearly all Miss Austen’s novels have a very plain moral, and one that admits of easy application. All of them have a family likeness, and a general tendency to bring out into prominent relief the peril of being guided by appearances. The danger to which a young lady is exposed by imagining too readily that a polite gentleman is in love with her; and the danger to which a young gentleman is exposed by imagining too readily that a good-natured girl is in love with him; the misunderstandings that arise from careless conversation, from exaggerated reserve, from overrated pretensions, from all the little mistakes which create the common embarrassments of ordinary society; these are the minor mischiefs which her pen is devoted to setting in their proper light, and no man or woman turned forty will deny that such work may be of great utility, or that anybody who chooses to read her novels with a view to practical instruction may learn a great deal from them. Our space will not allow us to illustrate these remarks by examples. But we refer our readers more particularly to Emma and Persuasion in confirmation of the truth of them. —T.E. Kebbel, “Jane Austen,” Fortnightly Review, February 1870, pp. 190–93

Edward FitzGerald (1870) As to which is the best of all I can’t say: that Richardson (with all his twaddle) is better than Fielding, I am quite certain. There is nothing at all comparable to Lovelace in all Fielding, whose Characters are common and vulgar types—of Squires, Ostlers, Ladies’ maids, etc., very easily drawn. I am equally sure that Miss Austen cannot be third, any more than first or second: I think you were rather drawn away by a fashion when you put her there: and really old Spedding seems to me to have been the Stag whom so many followed in that fashion. She is capital as far as she goes: but she never goes out of the Parlour; if but Magnus Troil, or Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding’s Brutes, would but dash in upon the Gentility and swear a round Oath or two! I must think the Woman in White, with her Count Fosco, far beyond all that. Cowell constantly reads Miss Austen at night

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after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it composes him—like Gruel: or like Paisiello’s Music, which Napoleon liked above all other, because he said it didn’t interrupt his Thoughts. —Edward FitzGerald, Letter to W.F. Pollock (December 24, 1870)

John W. Hales (1873) Miss Austen is without a rival in the field she occupied. In any of the highest creative ages Scott would assuredly have taken an eminent place. But in comprehensiveness of power can either of these immortal artists be ranked above Chaucer? What we wish to emphasize is not only the depth but the breadth of Chaucer’s genius. It was a mere fragment of human life that Miss Austen saw with a clearness and an intelligence and a reproductive power that defy panegyric. —John W. Hales, Notes and Essays on Shakespeare, 1873, p. 72

George William Curtis “Editor’s Easy Chair” (1881) They (her novels) are perfectly simple and intelligible. The course of the tale is not clogged with description or moralizing. They deal with the great theme of the novelist, match-making, and no writer ever attended more strictly than Miss Austen to the business in hand. Her novels are marvels of clearness, and they have a delightfully shrewd humor. The Austen stories have all the misunderstandings and embarrassments and doubts and delays which become the course of true love. There are no extravagances in them, no sublimated raptures and dark despairs. It is good, honest, every-day match-making among every-day people, and the unintelligent reader does not find himself in the least degree bewildered by the style or the characters. The very finish, the cabinet and microscopic completeness, facilitate the comprehension and the enjoyment of them by unintelligence, while the shrewd humor, and the neat touches of characterization, and the portraiture of certain aspects of English country life and society, commend them to the most intelligent. A distinguished English scholar said to a lecturer who had extolled the tales of Charlotte Bronte, “I am afraid you do not know that Miss Austen is the better novelist.” If the scholar had explained, doubtless he would have said, in comparing Miss Bronte or George Eliot with Miss Austen—and the three are the chief of their sex in this form of English literature—that her distinction

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and superiority lie in her more absolute artistic instinct. She writes wholly as an artist, while George Eliot advocates views, and Miss Bronte’s fiery page is often a personal protest. In Miss Austen, on the other hand, there is in kind, but infinitely less in degree, the same clear atmosphere of pure art which we perceive in Shakespeare and Goethe. It is a thread of exceeding fineness with which she draws us, but it is spun of pure gold. There are no great characters, no sweep of passion, no quickening of soul and exaltation of purpose and sympathy, upon her page, but there is the pure pleasure of a Wattean. —George William Curtis, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1881, pp. 308–09

Henry Morley (1881) Henry Morley compares Austen with novelist Henry Fielding, which offers a marked contrast to William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur AustenLeigh’s contention that their relative disliked Fielding’s style. Reading Fielding and Austen together will offer students an opportunity to find similarities and differences, and to speculate whether Austen purposefully imitated Fielding or attempted to set herself apart from him.

QQQ She painted such pictures of real life as she had seen as a girl in a quiet country parsonage. Like Wordsworth, she sought to show the charm that lies under the common things about us, and with a fine feminine humour, under sentences clear, simple, and exactly fitted to expression of a shrewd good sense, she came nearer to Fielding than any novelist who wrote before the reign of Queen Victoria. —Henry Morley, Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria, 1881, pp. 111–12

George Barnett Smith “More Views of Jane Austen” (1885) George Barnett Smith writes that “novels are supposed to give a false picture of life and manners.” A relatively new genre in Austen’s time, the novel was difficult to define, and usually not respected as highly as poetry. Students can look at origins and theories of the novel to discuss notable changes in the genre’s development and reception.

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The principal reasons . . . for Miss Austen’s hold upon the reading public—a hold which we may reasonably believe will be constant and enduring—are not far to seek. Adopting a totally different course from Mrs. Radcliffe and her school, she substituted reality for excitement. The change was agreeable and refreshing. It has been observed that, although novels are supposed to give a false picture of life and manners, this is not necessarily so. As regards many novelists, unquestionably the accusation is true, but no one can really feel its applicability to the works of Jane Austen. Her characters are not unnatural, neither are her incidents in the least degree improbable. She too thoroughly understands human nature to exaggerate its sentiments beyond recognition. Miss Austen is also a moral writer in the highest sense—that is, there is a high tone pervading all her works; this is no more than the natural outcome of her own life and character. But she has also great literary claims. Besides her capacity for minute detail as affecting her dramatis personae, already insisted upon, she has vivid powers of description, all the more effective, perhaps, because they are held in check by a sound judgment and a well-balanced imagination. She never exhausts a scene by what is called word-painting. She indicates its main features, and describes the general effect it produces upon the spectator, rather than recapitulates the size, weight, and colour of its various component elements. To say that she has a strong insight into female character is almost superfluous. George Eliot does not enter more deeply into the workings of the female mind and heart than she does. Add to all these claims that our author’s novels are perfectly unexceptionable from every point of view, and that they combine rational amusement with no small degree of instruction, and we have advanced tolerably sufficient grounds for the continuous favour with which they have been and are still regarded. The critic who said that these novels added a new pleasure to existence was not wide of the mark. In Miss Austen’s later books, the most exacting may discover a maturity of thought and a felicity of expression seldom attained by members of her craft; and these augured still greater achievements in the future had her life been spared. In no instance is it possible to sum up the claims and characteristics of a writer of the first rank in a single phrase; but if it were demanded that we should attempt this in the case of Jane Austen, we should aver that her writings have not become obsolete, and never will become obsolete, because they are just and faithful transcripts of human nature. It is in this all-important respect that she is able to touch the hand of Shakespeare. —George Barnett Smith, “More Views of Jane Austen,” Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1885, pp. 44–45

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Andrew Lang “Letter to Jane Austen” (1886) Madam,—If to the enjoyments of your present state be lacking a view of the minor infirmities or foibles of men, I cannot but think (were the thought permitted) that your pleasures are yet incomplete. Moreover, it is certain that a woman of parts who has once meddled with literature will never wholly lose her love for the discussion of that delicious topic, nor cease to relish what (in the cant of our new age) is styled ‘literary shop.’ For these reasons I attempt to convey to you some inkling of the present state of that agreeable art which you, madam, raised to its highest pitch of perfection. As to your own works (immortal, as I believe), I have but little that is wholly cheering to tell one who, among women of letters, was almost alone in her freedom from a lettered vanity. You are not a very popular author: your volumes are not found in gaudy covers on every bookstall; or, if found, are not perused with avidity by the Emmas and Catherines of our generation. ‘Tis not long since a blow was dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at your character as an author by the publication of your familiar letters. The editor of these epistles, unfortunately, did not always take your witticisms, and he added others which were too unmistakably his own. While the injudicious were disappointed by the absence of your exquisite style and humour, the wiser sort were the more convinced of your wisdom. In your letters (knowing your correspondents) you gave but the small personal talk of the hour, for them sufficient; for your books you reserved matter and expression which are imperishable. Your admirers, if not very numerous, include all persons of taste, who, in your favour, are apt somewhat to abate the rule, or shake off the habit, which commonly confines them to but temperate laudation. ’Tis the fault of all art to seem antiquated and faded in the eyes of the succeeding generation. The manners of your age were not the manners of to-day, and young gentlemen and ladies who think Scott ‘slow,’ think Miss Austen ‘prim’ and ‘dreary.’ Yet, even could you return among us, I scarcely believe that, speaking the language of the hour, as you might, and versed in its habits, you would win the general admiration. For how tame, madam, are your characters, especially your favourite heroines! how limited the life which you knew and described! how narrow the range of your incidents! how correct your grammar! As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth, and Catherine: women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and the parish’s concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings

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and interesting doubts. Who can engage his fancy with their match-makings and the conduct of their affections, when so many daring and dazzling heroines approach and solicit his regard? Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden fleursde-lys—ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical importance. With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant Italian musicians—maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the corner. When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where are your Emmas and Elizabeths? Your volumes neither excite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States, as well as in France and at home. You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open. Knowing Lydia and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost insignificant characters? With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even now, in the circulating library. How Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped: all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites of our time. Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary’s legs and the softness of Kitty’s cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham’s whiskers, you would have left a romance still dear to young ladies. Or, again, you might entrance fair students still, had you concentrated your attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henry Crawford. These should have been the chief figures of Mansfield Park. But you timidly decline to tackle Passion. ‘Let other pens,’ you write, ‘dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.’ Ah, there is the secret of your failure! Need I add that the vulgarity and narrowness of the social circles you describe impair your popularity? I scarce remember more than one lady of title, and but very few lords (and these unessential) in all your tales. Now, when we all wish to be in society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and

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we get lords (and very queer lords) even from Republican authors, born in a country which in your time was not renowned for its literature. I have heard a critic remark, with a decided air of fashion, on the brevity of the notice which your characters give each other when they offer invitations to dinner. ‘An invitation to dinner next day was despatched,’ and this demonstrates that your acquaintance ‘went out’ very little, and had but few engagements. How vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy ‘keep his breath to cool his porridge.’ I blush for Elizabeth! It were superfluous to add that your characters are debased by being invariably mere members of the Church of England as by law established. The Dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that glides from Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look for in vain among your studies of character. Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown sound to you; so how can you help us in the stress of the soul’s travailings? You may say that the soul’s travailings are no affair of yours; proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty of the novelist. I only remember one reference, in all your works, to that controversy which occupies the chief of our attention—the great controversy on Creation or Evolution. Your Jane Bennet cries: ‘I have no idea of there being so much Design in the world as some persons imagine.’ Nor do you touch on our mighty social question, the Land Laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty ‘of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.’ There, madam, in that cruelly unjust performance, what a text you had for a tendenz-romanz. Nay, you can allow Kitty to report that a Private had been flogged, without introducing a chapter on Flogging in the Army. But you formally declined to stretch your matter out, here and there, ‘with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story.’ No ‘padding’ for Miss Austen! In fact, madam, as you were born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Physiology, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation. Your heroines are not passionate, we do not see their red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the manner of our frank young Maenads. What says your best successor, a lady who adds fresh lustre to a name that in fiction equals yours? She says of Miss Austen: ‘Her heroines have a stamp of their own. They have a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart. . . . Love with them does not mean a passion as much as an interest, deep and silent.’ I think one prefers them so, and that Englishwomen should be more like Anne Elliot

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than Maggie Tulliver. ‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone,’ said Anne; perhaps she insisted on a monopoly that neither sex has all to itself. Ah, madam, what a relief it is to come back to your witty volumes, and forget the follies of to-day in those of Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet! How fine, nay, how noble is your art in its delicate reserve, never insisting, never forcing the note, never pushing the sketch into the caricature! You worked, without thinking of it, in the spirit of Greece, on a labour happily limited, and exquisitely organised. ‘Dear books,’ we say, with Miss Thackeray—’dear books, bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting.’ —Andrew Lang, “Letter to Jane Austen,” Letters to Dead Authors,1886

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1887) Like David Masson and G.F. Chorley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson distinguishes male writing from female writing, noting that Austen initiated the female tradition of “the minute delineation of character and manners, leaving to men the bolder school of narrative romance.” Higginson mentions some of Austen’s female predecessors, but claims that Austen’s talent surpasses them all. His terms are defined fairly clearly, letting readers know what he considers specifically female and particularly male in writing style and content, but it might be fascinating for students to research other terms that are not often clearly defined, such as “popular.” What really makes a work popular? Longevity? Its earnings? In many literary circles, popularity bears a negative connotation, so it might be useful to consider when and why popularity is positive, and when and how it is considered a drawback. Higginson mentions very few writers possessing the same characteristics of Austen, and seems surprised to note that these protégés are men, a response that likely stems from the proliferation of adventure writing by men during the mid- to late nineteenth century. As the British empire expanded to cover about one-quarter of the earth’s landmasses, men were traveling and writing about their experiences. H. Rider Haggard, for example, wrote King Solomon’s Mines and other novels about Africa in the Victorian age. Women were comparatively restricted to their homes, and thus did far less writing about harrowing adventures.

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Students focusing on politics and travel can research the ways in which the British empire’s geographical expansion contributed to writings of the time.

QQQ It is a curious fact that Paris, to which the works of Jane Austen were lately as unknown as if she were an English painter, has just discovered her existence. Moreover, it has announced that she, and she only, is the founder of that realistic school which is construed to include authors so remote from each other as the French Zola and the American Howells. The most decorous of maiden ladies is thus made to originate the extreme of indecorum; and the good loyal Englishwoman, devoted to Church and King, is made sponsor for the most democratic recognition of persons whom she would have loathed as vulgar. There is something extremely grotesque in the situation; and yet there is much truth in the theory. It certainly looked at one time as if Miss Austen had thoroughly established the claim of her sex to the minute delineation of character and manners, leaving to men the bolder school of narrative romance. She herself spoke of her exquisitely wrought novels as her “little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which,” she said, “I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labor.” Yet in the opinion of Sir Walter Scott and all succeeding critics, the result was quite worth the effort, Scott saying that he himself did the “big bow-wow style as well as anybody,” but that all the minuter excellences were peculiarly her province. As a result, she has far surpassed in fame her immediate contemporaries of her own sex. Madame D’Arblay (Fanny Burney), Miss Porter, Mrs. Opie, and even Miss Edgeworth, are now little read, while Miss Austen’s novels seem as if they were written yesterday. But the curious thing is that of the leading novelists in the English tongue to-day it is the men, not the women, who have taken up Miss Austen’s work, while the women show more inclination, if not to the “big bow-wow style” of Scott, at least to the novel of plot and narrative. Anthony Trollope among the lately dead, James and Howells among the living, are the lineal successors of Miss Austen. Perhaps it is an old-fashioned taste which leads me to think that neither of these does his work quite so well as she; but they all belong to the same photographic school; each sets up his apparatus and takes what my little nephew called a “flannelly group” of a household, or a few households, leaving the great world of adventure untouched.

—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men, 1887, pp. 156–57

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James Ashcroft Noble (1889) James Ashcroft Noble’s opinions of Austen are similar to those of Edward Fitzgerald, among others. She did what she did very well, they contend, though she did not somehow do enough. Noble complains of “her steady avoidance of the heights and depths of human nature.” He and several other critics compare Austen to particular writers. In this case, Austen is compared to George Sand, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë—all women who wrote during the mid- to late nineteenth century. Students can attempt to determine whether these writers were influenced by Austen and, if so, to what extent. Those concerned with the evolution of the novel might find it fascinating to make educated guesses as to whether these three women imitated Austen in some way, or whether they purposefully developed their own distinctive and different writing styles and content.

QQQ

Her work displays creative imagination, wonderful power of observing, fine feeling for dramatic situation, and perfect command of her literary vehicle; but we cannot help feeling conscious of a certain lack of weight which comes of her steady avoidance of the heights and the depths of human nature. We are charmed always, but seldom, if ever, deeply moved. Though in various respects Jane Austen may be compared favourably with George Sand, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte, we feel that these writers have spells of which she knew not the secret. It is in virtue of their combination of veracious and uncompromising realism with unfailing vivacity and ever-present grace that the novels of Jane Austen are unique in literature. —James Ashcroft Noble, Academy, August 11, 1889, pp. 96–97

Goldwin Smith (1890) Criticism is becoming an art of saying fine things, and there are really no fine things to be said about Jane Austen. There is no hidden meaning in her; no philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to bring to light; nothing calling in any way for elaborate interpretation. We read in a recent critique of a work of fiction by Balzac, “Serephita, the marvellous creature whose passage from Matter to Spirit, from the Specialist to the Divine conditions, is the theme of Balzac’s genius, in this case is intended to typify the final function of a long course of steadfast upward working by a soul which has, by many reincarnations, won its way past the Instinctive and Abstractive spheres of existence, and has at length attained that delicate

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balance of the material and spiritual which is the last possible manifestation on the earthly plane.” Jane Austen’s characters typify nothing, for their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing. Perfect in her finish and full of delicate strokes of art, her works require to be read with attention, not skimmed as one skims many a novel, that they may be fully enjoyed. But whoever reads them attentively will fully enjoy them without the help of a commentator. Some think that they see a difference between the early and the later novels. It is natural to look for such a difference, but for ourselves we must confess that we see it not. In the first set and in the last set the style appears to us to be the same; in both equally clear, easy, and free from mannerism or peculiarity of any kind. In both there is the same freedom from anything like a straining after point and epigram, while point and epigram are not wanting when there is natural occasion for them. There are the same archness and the same quiet irony. The view of life, society, and character is essentially the same: at least, we should be surprised if any great contradiction or variation could be produced. It has been said that Northanger Abbey shows above all the rest of the novels the freshness and briskness of youth, and this has been ascribed to its having been out of the hands of the writer, so that it could not, like its fellows of the same epoch, undergo revision. It is, as we have shown, a comic travesty of the romantic school: to its satirical character its special friskiness is due. An autumnal mellowness of tone and sentiment has been discovered in Persuasion. For this it has been already said there seems to be some foundation: it would be wonderful indeed if there were none. The sound of the vesper bell is sometimes heard. Perhaps there is something in the tender and suffering character of Anne Elliot congenial to the melancholy of the parting hour. Yet there are things fully as sharp and as nearly verging on cynicism in the later novels as in the earlier. There is nothing more closely verging on cynicism in the whole series than the passage in Persuasion mocking the “large fat sighs” of Mrs. Musgrove over the early death of her worthless son. There are novelists who seem to think that we can do without a plot, provided they give us elaborate delineations of character or even picturesque descriptions of scenery. But it is difficult, as we have already said, to create an interest in character apart from action; while picturesque descriptions of scenery, except as the merest accessories, become tedious, word-painting being, in fact, not painting at all, but a draft on the imagination of the reader, who has to put together a landscape in his mind’s eye, out of the verbal

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materials furnished him, and soon grows weary of the effort. Walter Scott always gives us a good plot, a plot at least which carries us on and excites our interest in the actors. We have endeavoured to show by analysis that in this respect Jane Austen is not wanting, though in some of her plots there are weaknesses which we have had occasion to mark. It is true, we say once more, that her plots are very unlike those of a sensation novel. Where the sensation novel gives us murder, and perhaps carnage on a still larger scale, adulteries, bigamies, desperate adventures and hairbreadth escapes, she manages to amuse and almost to excite us with the scrape into which Emma gets by her attempt to make a match between Harriet and Mr. Elton, or the catastrophe produced by the sudden return of Sir Thomas Bertram in the midst of the theatricals at Mansfield Park. Lord Brabourne has justly observed that the heroines of Jane Austen’s novels are better than the heroes. It could hardly fail to be so. It could hardly be given to men or women to understand the character of the other sex as thoroughly as that of their own. Shakespeare’s women are inferior in interest to his men with the single exception of Lady Macbeth, who is more man than woman, though she betrays her womanhood by breaking down at last under the moral strain of conscious guilt, while nothing can pierce her consort’s heart but the sword of Macduff. The phrase “heroes and heroines” is objectionable in the case of novels in which there is nothing heroic. But the principal figure, to use a more suitable phrase, in each of Jane Austen’s novels is not a man, but a woman or a pair of women; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth, in Sense and Sensibility the sisters Elinor and Marianne, in Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland, in Emma Miss Woodhouse, in Mansfield Park Fanny Price, in Persuasion Anne Elliot. Each of them has a very distinct character, with a charm of its own, and is, we have no doubt, a true woman. Of the principal male figures hardly one can be said to have a very distinct character except Darcy, and Darcy, as we have seen, is made to do and say things which no man of his supposed character and sense would do or say. Edward Ferrars hardly has a character at all. There is nothing very marked in those of Henry Tilney or Edmund Bertram; nor does either of them, or any one of the whole set, play any part which specially calls for the male forces, qualities, or passions. Female critics greatly admire Knightley, but the interest which we feel in Knightley is derived not so much from anything striking in himself or in the part which he plays, as from his being the natural supplement of Emma, the corrective of her little faults and the support to which her charming weakness clings. After all, the manufacture of heroes is difficult. Perfection does not interest. Of all Scott’s heroes not one is interesting except

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the Master of Ravenswood, and in his case the interest is not so much that of character as that of circumstance. It is in the secondary characters of Jane Austen, the imperfect, the comic, and even the bad that we delight. That the comic characters are sometimes overdrawn has been already admitted, and the apology has been given. There never was a Tartuffe or a M. Jourdain any more than there was a Mr. Collins or a Mr. Woodhouse, a General Tilney or a Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and there is a basis in human nature for the comic characters of Jane Austen as well as for the comic characters of Moliere. It is marvellous that Jane Austen’s range being so narrow she should have been able to produce such variety. But narrow we must remember her range was, and recurrences or partial recurrences of the same characters and incidents are the consequence. We cannot help seeing the likeness between Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, while Edward Ferrars is a feeble germ of both. We have several pairs of sisters, and sisterly affection is a constant theme. There is a close resemblance between Wickham and Willoughby, and a considerable resemblance between both of them and Henry Crawford. To say this may seem to be flying in the face of Macaulay, who has said, “She [Jane Austen] has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom—Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.” But this eulogy, with all deference be it said, however eloquent, will not bear comparison with the facts. Henry Tilney shines more in small talk than Edmund Bertram, and his figure catches some of the special liveliness which pervades the travesty; but otherwise the two characters might be transposed without injury to either novel. Mr. Elton, on the other hand, the clerical idol of school-girls, essentially low and mean, with his vulgar and flashy wife, is

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distinguished from Henry and Edmund by the broadest difference of colour which Jane Austen’s palette could supply. It may be added that neither Henry Tilney nor Edmund Bertram belongs to the middle class; both of them belong to the aristocracy, though each is a younger son. In doing justice to Jane Austen and recommending her in preference to the unwholesome products of sensationalism and the careless manufactures of literary hacks, we do not mean to take a leaf from the crown of those who have dealt with nobler and more entrancing themes. The subjects which presented themselves to her were of the kind with which, and with which alone, she was singularly qualified by her peculiar temperament as well as by her special gifts and her social circumstances to deal. But the lives of these genteel idlers after all were necessarily somewhat vapid, and void of anything heroic in action or feeling as well as of violent passion or tragic crime. Few sets of people, perhaps, ever did less for humanity or exercised less influence on its progress than the denizens of Mansfield Park and Pemberley, Longbourn and Hartfield, in Jane Austen’s day. As they all come before us at the fall of the curtain, we feel that they, their lives and loves, their little intrigues, their petty quarrels, and their drawing-room adventures, are the lightest of bubbles on the great stream of existence, though it is a bubble which has been made bright for ever by the genius of Jane Austen. —Goldwin Smith, Life of Jane Austen, 1890, pp. 185–91

W.B. Shubrick Clymer “A Note on Jane Austen” (1891) The first thing to notice about this excerpt is the number of references to other reviewers, many of whom appear in this volume. Clymer mentions Andrew Lang, Archbishop Whately, Goldwin Smith, and Margaret Oliphant, and alludes to Thomas Babington Macaulay in places as well. For the most part, Clymer agrees with the other reviewers. He thinks, for example, as Macaulay does, that Austen’s work contains a perceptible element that “eludes analysis.” Students may want to compare and contrast several of these reviews. Clymer most specifically counters Whately’s argument that Austen is a didactic writer by claiming, “It is not easy to fancy Jane Austen writing for the edification of her readers, or trying to teach anybody.” In comparing reviewers such as Clymer and Whately, students might ask why Whately would respond so strongly to what he saw as Austen’s didacticism and, conversely, why Clymer claims that her works contain no instructive dimension. Such comparisons and

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contrasts not only lend insight to Austen’s novels, but offer a critical lens through which students can see that reviewers often pursue their own critical agendas. Clymer also mentions several novel writers, including Austen’s contemporaries and many others who came before and after her. Comparing Austen to any one of the writers he mentions would make for an enlightening study. George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, William Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope are cited, to name a few. Clymer’s comparison of Austen and Guy de Maupassant offers a fascinating (albeit brief) example of how such literary comparison can be used to reach conclusions about both authors. Clymer refers to such a long list of novelists in his piece in order to establish Austen as the link between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, “Her work is the thread by which it is traceable the continuance, through a romantic age, of the strain of realism that marks Thackeray and Trollope as descendants of Fielding and Richardson.” Late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century literary studies delineated and identified time periods such as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the earlynineteenth-century Romantic period, and the mid- to late-nineteenthcentury Victorian age. Such categorizations often lead readers and scholars to believe that all writers from one period are alike and that they are always distinct from writers of other periods. Austen is perhaps the clearest exception to such generalizations, as she has never fully belonged to any period of literature. Students examining historical context should look for the threads in Austen of which Clymer speaks and attempt to determine if he is correct in surmising that Austen is the link between centuries, then examining whether she is the only one. This investigation may lead to a study of the periods themselves and will allow students to contribute to ongoing academic conversations regarding the three time periods’ differences and similarities. How did an Enlightenment event such as the French Revolution contribute to habits, laws, and sensibilities in the Victorian age, for example?

QQQ The scrutinizing criticism to which Jane Austen has for some time past been subjected omits explicit statement of a fundamental fact, which it yet fully establishes by implication, namely, that she is provincial. The word provinciality, as commonly used to suggest rudeness or lack of polish, is naturally avoided by a eulogist. Yet the connotation of disparagement

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attaching to it is perhaps as accidental as that attaching to the word curiosity, which, Arnold insists, indicates, except in English, the “disinterested love of a free play of the mind” requisite to real criticism. May not the term provinciality, used by Arnold in a sense anything but complimentary, serve, for lack of a better, to sum up qualities as different from those it suggests to him, as the two sets of qualities suggested by the term curiosity are different from each other? As another instance, where can a more striking difference be found than that between philology as commonly understood to mean linguistic study, and philology of which the purpose is, according to recent authority, “the comprehension of human life as recorded in the monuments of language”? The difference in each case is an intrinsic difference in spirit. A passage from Mr. Pater’s appraisal of Lamb may help, more than pages of hair-splitting, to define the spirit in which Jane Austen may properly be called provincial: “And, working ever close to the concrete, to the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere abstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem with great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect understanding of it.” This, and more to the like effect, points clearly to the spirit which is not provincial, which inhabits the metropolis, the centre, as distinguished, on the one hand, from the suburban spirit of such a writer as Leigh Hunt, who, dealing often with much the same sort of subject as Lamb, scarcely ever, try as he may to be impressive, conveys a sense of any wider world than is lighted from his hearth; and as distinguished, on the other hand, from the spirit which, content to enjoy “human nature’s daily food” without counting the pulsations of the “whole woful heart of things, “charms us in such a book as Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. Call them what you will, Jane Austen’s simple pictures of the life she saw differ from Balzac’s Scenes de la vie de province, or George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life, or from Middlemarch, which is a study of provincial life, or from The House of the Seven Gables, not so essentially in scene or incident as in spirit. Balzac and George Eliot and Hawthorne all attempt to let the reader into a larger world of ideas than Jane Austen ever dreamed of. In so far as they succeed, they set astir “that vague hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man” which should, it has been said, be felt to pervade a great work of fiction. In so far as Jane Austen is incapable of attempting anything of the kind, she is in one sense provincial. That is her limitation. In the recognition of that limitation

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lies much of her strength and of her charm—just as, conversely, Hunt’s irritating weakness may be traced to his mistaking the limits of his powers. Concentration of interest in one place and within a narrow social range, steadiness of observation, sureness of touch, firmness of handling, accurate adjustment of parts always with a view to total effect, nice discrimination of individual members of the same class, exquisite precision and high finish, permeating humor—these are among the obvious characteristics which, combining with an essentially feminine treatment—shown by her noticing, from the woman’s point of view, things no man would ever think of noticing, by her women being better than her men, and by the absence of scenes between men—identify her among novelists many of whom share with her some, though perhaps none all, of these means to an artistic end. On the present inartistic generation of Americans, overrun with novels, and not keenly relishing the local flavor in provincial life, of which in this country the “march of improvement” is rapidly effacing what vestiges remain, such qualities as those just enumerated can be expected to make no very deep impression. The Deserted Village fails—if it fail—to bore us through a certain grace of the verse and of the pictures, rather than from any real interest we take in the subject. The Vicar of Wakefield doubtless bores more of us than would willingly admit the fact. Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines naturally bore a great many of us. Yet their fortunes are, at least as treated by her, intrinsically quite as interesting as those of the Primrose family, about whom we are presumed to be enthusiastic. One who should follow Rogers’s example in reading an old book whenever a new book is published, might do worse than begin, if not, as Mr. Austin Dobson suggests, with the Vicar, then with the serene Persuasion, or the match-contriving Emma. Jane Austen was, in Mr. Andrew Lang’s words, “born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or Religious Open-mindedness;” she was not borne down with the sense of an allimportant mission; she had no reform to preach, no faith to promulgate, no system to expound; she wrote merely because she delighted in doing what she must have felt she did well, for every page shows that she tried always to do her best. Yet, coming at about the middle of the period of a century and a half which separates us from Richardson, publishing at the precise moment when Scott was rising to his highest fame as a novelist, she is, surprised as she would have been to be told so, a significant landmark in the course of British fiction. An article attributed to Scott and an excellent article by Whately1 tell the story of the appearance of a new star and do full justice to its brilliance. Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, the first novelists in England (for Defoe’s

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stories of adventure are not precisely novels as the term is now understood), had been followed by a romantic and by a sentimental school, the former growing from Horace Walpole, through Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe, to Scott; and the latter including men so dissimilar as Sterne, Mackenzie, and Goldsmith. The sentimentalists were virtually a thing of the past, and the romanticists were in full career when Jane Austen, cutting loose from both influences, set again on a firm basis the realistic study of manners taught her by Richardson and Fielding. Small and slender though it be, her work is the thread by which is traceable the continuance, through a romantic age, of the strain of realism that marks Thackeray and Trollope as descendants of Fielding and Richardson. She belongs to a small group of women who excelled in what has been well called “fictitious biography;” of that group—comprising Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, and herself, who “have all,” Scott says in his journal, “given portraits of real society far superior to anything man, vain man, has produced of the like nature”—she is incontestably the finest artist. Of recent British novelists, Trollope is most obviously her inheritor, for, though he lacks her acute tact, his work is of essentially the same class as hers—high comedy of manners, and nothing else. Unconsciously, too, she was a forerunner of another group of novelists, represented at present perhaps most completely by M. Guy de Maupassant. Could she have foreseen what was coming, there is no reason to suppose she would have shrunk from the association as perturbing to maidenly susceptibilities; her minute acquaintance with Richardson, the outspoken habit of her time, a hint or two in her letters, show the likelihood that her objection to the form taken for the moment by French fiction would, like ours, be to some extent offset, could she read it, by admiration of the skill of some of the writers, all the more that she knew French. She and M. Guy de Maupassant are, indeed, in odd contrast, and yet closely alike. His range is perhaps as narrow as hers: he avowedly goes out of his way in search of the unhackneyed, whereas she obviously makes her arrows of the wood that happens to lie in her path. Her characters are apt to be ladies and gentlemen; his are usually, as Mr. Henry James points out, the reverse. Her plots turn on domestic “involvements;” by no stretch of language could his atmosphere be termed domestic. Finally, his view of life is morbidly gloomy and depressing; hers is wholesomely cheerful and enlivening. In subject, character, situation, and total effect they differ widely; in delicacy, not in manner, of treatment, there is a strong resemblance between them—though always with a marked difference. The aim of each is to isolate on a small stage a small group of characters intimately known to the author, and to let the interaction

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of the characters tell the story. Her story is always simple and coherent, usually rapid—though, to be sure, “celerity” is, in Sir Thomas Browne’s words, occasionally “contempered with cunctation,” and uniformly ends in marriage; his is generally simple, not always rapid, supremely indifferent to so conventional an institution as marriage. On laying down the book you know, in either case, everything the author means you to know; and in either case you have learned it by observing the picture of what the author had first observed, not from comments. The Frenchman would have you draw from his picture specific inferences about life as he has shown it; the Englishwoman asks you to draw no inference whatever. He is, as is common with Frenchmen, nearly destitute of humor; her “delicate subsatirical humor” is a motive power, quickening what might otherwise be inert, keeping the reader at the writer’s point of view, distinguishing the story from a transcript, the miniature from a photograph. His French, though more contemporary, is not more highly finished nor more idiomatic than her English. Each accomplishes the prime object, dramatic presentation—a faculty which she had, it has beeen said, “by birthright,” and which he acquired after years of sedulous study under the great artist who wrote Madame Bovary. Pierre et ]ean has by Mr. Henry James been reckoned perfect, and to Fortcomme la mort, an especially well-named book, praise as unstinted has been given by M. Jules Lemaitre; enthusiasts might perhaps be found to speak as unqualifiedly of Emma. All three I admit that I find, in parts, hard reading. The marvellous craftsmanship shown in the French books leaves on me an impression—which the more recent Notre Coeur only confirms—of amazingly subtile study of a kind of thing I am not especially fond of studying; the equally admirable skill expended on the English book rather makes me regret my inability to sympathize fully with a state of affairs really significant two or three generations ago. Emma has, however, over the others the inalienable superiority of humor to misplaced seriousness; it professes to be no more than the record of the pre-matrimonial career of an attractive girl—a subject of “enduring freshness,” whereas they profess further dramatically to represent psychological problems which they certainly do not satisfactorily dispose of. Jane Austen, in brief, attempts only what lies within her restricted scope; M. Guy de Maupassant probably tries to transcend his limits. The novel of greatest interest to the present generation, I suppose, would be the one which should deal with the complex life of to-day as simply and directly as the three novels I have mentioned deal with small bits of life, which should apply to George Eliot’s subjects Jane Austen’s or M. Guy de Maupassant’s treatment. That may be an unattainable ideal, for

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even Tourgueneff, who in some of his books approaches it, does not quite reach it any more than Landor in Pericles and Aspasia or George Eliot in Middlemarch overcomes all the difficulties, though in one of these cases the objective method, and in the other the analytic, reaches a high degree of excellence. Yet, that a treatment as objective as Jane Austen’s or Landor’s would necessarily be inadequate to unravel the tangled web of life in which we of the last decade of the nineteenth century are inextricably caught, is, at best, not proved. The problem is not the same as that presented to Shakespeare, or to Fielding; but has it yet been shown to be more difficult of solution than theirs were? or less amenable to genius as strong as theirs? M. Guy de Maupassant holds that a man, being shut out by his individuality from entering into the recesses of another man’s nature, and explaining his motives for acts any one of which may, given the circumstances and antecedents and temperament, be with some certainty predicted, cannot, by analysis, do more than substitute himself for a character in a book. If that is true, can the analytic method in fiction lead anywhere except back again to the objective, by which most of the famous novels of the world have, until recently, been produced?2 However vain such speculation may be, George Eliot, with her analytic processes, and Jane Austen, with her synthetic results, at any rate mark pretty well each other’s limitations. An incarnation of the admirable qualities of both would be, if not a monster, a literary Messiah. The notion of some such doubly endowed creature as I have fancied occurred to me soon after the publication of Middlemarch, which I happened to read the same week that I first read Mansfield Park, with a view to contrasting Miss Crawford and Rosamund Vincy. Both books pleased me so much that I forthwith set about eagerly reading almost everything of each of the authors, of neither of whom had I previously read a line. Ever since then they have stood to me for the genius not quite artist enough for her task, and the artist with not quite an interesting enough subject for her powers. Of the two, George Eliot does the larger, not necessarily the better, thing; Jane Austen does with greater perfection what she undertakes. Her workmanship, at its best, is, indeed, flawless. Though extracts from a novel are sure to be unsatisfactory samples by which to judge of it as a whole, yet something of Jane Austen’s way of doing things may be shown by comparison of passages in the much-despised letters published by Lord Brabourne, with passages in the novels. The letters, which are invariably spoken of by critics as in every way beneath notice—Mr. Goldwin Smith going so far as to say that “the editor’s sauce, in fact, is better than the meat”—are, of course, not literature, like some of Gray’s and

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Cowper’s and Lamb’s and Shelley’s, but they are divertingly natural, trivial, sisterly prattle; and, though not carefully written, nor wholly suitable for publication, they are no less really of the same stuff as her novels than Lamb’s are of the same stuff as his essays. The matter and the manner of the artistic product are in each case discernible in the casual and more diluted work. Not to press the analogy, this bit from a letter to her sister Cassandra: “Only think of Mrs. Holder’s being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her”—may, for illustration of the point, so far as Jane Austen is concerned, be set beside the following passage in Emma, written not more than a year or two later: “The great Mrs. Churchill was no more. “It was felt as such things must be felt. Everybody had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness toward the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Goldsmith tells us that when lovely woman stoops to folly she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill fame. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least twenty-five years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted before to be seriously ill. The event acquitted her of all the fancifulness and all the selfishness of imaginary complaints. “ ‘Poor Mrs. Churchill! No doubt she had been suffering a great deal— more than anybody had ever supposed—and continual pain would try the temper. It was a sad event a great shock—with all her faults what would Mr. Churchill do without her? Mr. Churchill’s loss would be dreadful indeed. Mr. Churchill would never get over it.’ Even Mr. Weston shook his head and looked solemn, and said, ‘Ah, poor woman, who would have thought it!’ and resolved that his mourning should be as handsome as possible; and his wife sat sighing and moralizing over her broad hems with a commiseration and good sense true and steady.” The suggestion of the fictitious by the actual, of which more instances might be found, is here obvious enough. The elaboration of detail, though of course partly for fun, is not wasted; for Mrs. Churchill, heretofore a very minor personage, in dying starts a new set of relations among the characters, which leads finally to the train of incidents with which the story closes; the first hint of those new relations immediately follows the passage quoted, which in a way serves to group the characters afresh in characteristic attitudes about the incident which has suddenly become for a moment central. The passage is illustrative not so especially of humor as of the use, constantly made in these novels, of trivial incident in

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forwarding the plot. The links are sometimes as much hidden in unemphatic dialogue as they usually are in Landor’s Conversations. Hence the close attention demanded of a reader by both those writers. Some of Jane Austen’s scenes are as denuded of superfluity as his, so that the meaning is to be got only on condition of mentally supplying stage-directions which are left out. The scene of Louisa Musgrove’s unlucky jump is a case in point. All is hurry and agitation and movement, but for the most part merely implied in the words of the several characters. Read hastily, it is tame; read attentively, it is as rapid and close in construction, and as fully provides for every character at every moment as if it were Scribe’s. The development of plot and of character by means of dialogue is as distinguishing a trait of Jane Austen as of any novelist, and is better understood by none than by her. Charles Reade and Trollope, each in his way, use dialogue very largely and very well. Reade’s is dramatic in the histrionic sense that it may be put, with scarcely the change of a word, into the mouths of actors; Trollope’s is the verbatim report of the voluminous talk of his personages; Jane Austen’s differs from both in being not so literal a transcript, and in being more essentially a tissue of character manifested in speech. The whole character is shown chiefly by the dialogue in her books; the other authors need more supplementary comment to complete the character. Her way may or may not be the best; she, at any rate, is unsurpassed in that special thing; for, though perhaps nothing of hers is so concentrated and penetrating as Mr. Crawley’s, “Peace, woman,” to Mrs. Proudie, that is an almost unique stroke in Trollope, who habitually is as diffuse as she is concise. On all these points, and on several others, it would be possible to expatiate to an indefinite extent. The difficulty of finding short specific illustrations of an essence which disappears under analysis, is, however, great; and a list of abstract qualities unaccompanied by concrete instances of their occurrence, is as dull and useless as the balance-sheet of a railway company in which you own no stock. The final result produced by the fusion of qualities in her novels is that the characters remain very distinct in the recollection. The total effect of many novels of great interest is that, through lack of this special faculty of characterization, the subject overpowers the individual characters, which become perhaps types, but more probably puppets only slightly different from a hundred other inhabitants of the land of fiction. Such personages are, of course, lost in the crowd; hers are safe from that fate, for, though they may not move us deeply, they can scarcely be forgotten. It remains to speak separately of the novels, which together constitute a little corner of creation to be mistaken for no other. In Northanger Abbey the point of departure

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from the Radcliffe school is marked; novels of highly wrought mystery are parodied. Not to go into a consideration of the amusing ridicule that saves this rather immature book from being dull—for that has been done again and again—it may suffice here to mention the last paragraph as a witty take-off on the elaborate conclusion of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The book may be regarded as associating its author in the field of burlesque with Fielding and Thackeray, each of whom early indulged his sportive propensities in that sort of attack on the school of fiction from which he departed, and each of whom, it may be whispered, did it better than she. Mansfield Park and Emma are said to show the influence of Miss Edgeworth’s didacticism, though neither was ever called, like Cozlebs, a “dramatic sermon.” It is not easy to fancy Jane Austen writing for the edification of her readers, or trying to teach anybody but the children who were so fond of her and of the “long, circumstantial stories” she used to invent for their amusement; even them she would, in all probability, have taught rather through her personal charm than by appending moral tags to the fairy tales she told them, or by imparting categorical information. If any of her novels are didactic, it is, I am inclined to believe, incidentally, not intrinsically. No charge so grave has been brought against Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; they may owe their escape to the chronological accident that Miss Edgeworth did not begin to publish until after they were written. For my own part, I do not see that Emma is a whit more didactic than Pride and Prejudice. As to the relative power to amuse—the thing she wrote for: primarily, to amuse herself—of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, opinions will differ. The number is small of those who do not regard them all somewhat as the passengers on board the Indiaman in the story regarded that monument of tediousness, The Memories of Clegg the Clergyman, which not even the offer of the “two volumes in duodecimo, handsomely bound,” could prevail with anyone but the boatswain, “a man of strong and solid parts, to hazard the attempt” of reading straight through. Of the small number who read them, there are probably few who find no dull places. Pride and Prejudice—rated by Trollope second only to Henry Esmond—though a less mature piece of work than Mansfield Park, is more continuously amusing. It opens brilliantly; Mansfield Park rather tamely. The most concise and accurate summary of Pride and Prejudice is Mr. Goldwin Smith’s: “Philip Darcy is Pride; Elizabeth Bennet is Prejudice; and the plot is the struggle of their mutual attraction against their mutual repulsion, ending in love and marriage.” The plot of Mansfield Park is the more varied; the types in Pride and Prejudice are the more sharply contrasted. A competent judge of several literatures has called

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Mansfield Park a “great book;” Mrs. Oliphant rates it low. Fanny Price and Miss Crawford are interesting, especially in their effect on each other; the latter is unlike any other of Jane Austen’s characters, and is certainly a striking figure. Without attempting nice discrimination among the three books, it is safe to say that, whereas Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, though surely characteristic, contain incidents that would, off-hand, not suggest her, Emma shows to perfection throughout the qualities that distinguish its author among novelists. In all three there is some caricature, but very little in consideration of the opportunity. Think what Dickens would have made, for instance, of Mr. Woodhouse’s nervous solicitude lest the horses should wet their feet in a quarter of an inch of snow. Instead of yielding to the temptation to caricature, she is usually content with quietly showing peculiarities in action, and in contrast to other peculiarities, which she contrives to introduce repeatedly without harping on them. Her heroines’ peculiarities are treated with shrewd cunning. She does not, as some novelists do, make you feel that a subordinate character is better drawn than a principal. This is one test of her craft, for of course it is easier to sketch a subordinate distinctly enough to give the reader no sense of blurred individuality, than it is to round out, by strokes differing but slightly from one another and constantly repeated, a personage that is kept continually in the foreground—to leave an impression of Miss Bates or of Mrs. Elton, for instance, being better done than Emma. It is not so, however; Emma is as peculiarly herself as Desdemona. The earliest article on Jane Austen in the Quarterly, already mentioned, after a lively synopsis of the dexterously twined ins and outs of Emma’s maiden life, which is animated by the very spirit of the book, goes on to say that “there are cross-purposes enough (were the novel of a more romantic cast) for cutting half the men’s throats and breaking all the women’s hearts. But at Highbury Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn, instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire. All these entanglements bring on only a train of mistakes and embarrassing situations, and dialogues at balls and parties of pleasure, in which the author displays her peculiar powers of humor and knowledge of human life. The plot is extricated with great simplicity.” It has even been said, with some plausibility, that there is too much plot for the interest, which consequently falls flat. Those persons, however, who think Emma and the other heroines insipid dolls, may be reminded of the end of one of the cleverest chapters in Daniel Deronda. When Gwendolen and Grandcourt have met, and had the conversation in which the pauses are as interesting at least as the speeches, and, after a few more incidents, Gwendolen is left pondering

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whether or not she shall accept him, George Eliot, in one of the essays that contain so much of what is best in the books whose symmetry they mar, thus touches, with words fitting Emma almost as closely as Gwendolen, on the province of the young girl: “Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?—in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigor making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy. “What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.” Anne Elliot has been spoken of as a nineteenth-century Viola. Though there may be a point or two of similarity, it is not easy to fancy her writing “loyal cantons of contemned love,” or singing “them loud even in the dead of night,” or making “the babbling gossip of the air cry out Olivia!” Sir Walter, the consequential, pompous, and vain, is a not altogether unworthy descendant of Malvolio. But any such fanciful notion of Persuasion in tow astern of Twelfth Night seems less to the purpose than Whately’s unaffected avowal that “on the whole, it is one of the most elegant fictions of common life we ever remember to have met with.” Anne Elliot differs from Jane Austen’s other heroines: patient and submissive, tender and winning, full of a womanly sensibility not incompatible with sense, she is a heroine of a kind, in a situation of a kind, new, it is said, to British fiction in the early years of this century. However that may be, the book shows broader sympathies, deeper observation, and perhaps more perfect symmetry, balance, poise, than the others. The always flexible, unobtrusive style, in which reduction of emphasis is carried sometimes to the verge of equivocation, concealing the author, yet instinct with her presence, in none of her books approximates more nearly to Cardinal Newman’s definition—“a thinking out into language.” In general, the qualities that appear in the others are in Persuasion perhaps more successfully fused than before. Through it runs a strain of pathos unheard in its predecessors, which in the chapter before the last combines

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in harmony with the other motives in a way not suggested in the previous novels. That chapter is as well composed as Thackeray’s chapters about Waterloo. As Shelley, toward the end of his life, with more complete control of his material, gave promise of more satisfying work than any he had done, so Jane Austen, always master of her material, gave evidence, in her last book, of wider scope. Persuasion does not, of course, like Vanity Fair, echo the distant hum of the whole of the human life; it is, however, a “mirror of bright constancy.” Jane Austen’s observation, unusually keen always—and that is no mean qualification, for has not humor its source in observation?— here unites with the wisdom of forty to make a picture softer in tone, more delicate in modelling, more mellow, than its companions of her girlhood, or than its immediate predecessors in her later period. The book marks the beginning of a third period, beyond the entrance to which she did not live to go. It is not pretended that she would, with any length of life, have produced heroic paintings of extensive and complicated scenes, for that was not her field; it may reasonably be supposed that, had she lived, her miniatures might, in succeeding years, have shown predominantly the sympathetic quality which in Persuasion begins to assert itself. Arnold says that Homer is “rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought,” and adds that he is “also, and above all, noble.” Jane Austen, usually rapid, simple, plain, and natural, is not noble in the sense in which Arnold uses the word; nor is there quite enough of the divine madness in her method to crown her a genius. Scott, not always rapid, simple, plain, and natural, occupies the throne of nobility and genius. It is the last to which she would have aspired; her attributes are rather those of the artist. She kept her hazel eyes open in the narrow world she lived in, saw accurately and humorously its gently undulating surface, and, without exaggeration of the importance of her subject or distortion of its relations, expressed, for love of the work, and with rare skill, what she felt. The reader who, amid the conflict of our “fierce intellectual life,” is insensible to “the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment,” loses the unique opportunity for tranquil enjoyment afforded by the high comedy of manners of the provincial Jane Austen, the artist. Notes 1. Quarterly Review, vol. xiv., October 1815; vol. xxiv., January 1821. 2. M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the other hand, states, in the preface to Chérie, his belief that “la derniere Evolution du roman, pour arriver à

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devenir tout a fait le grand livre des temps modemes, c’est de se faire un livre de pure analyse.” —W.B. Shubrick Clymer, “A Note on Jane Austen,” Scribner’s Magazine, March 1891, pp. 377–84

William Dean Howells (1891) Which brings us again, after this long way about, to the divine Jane and her novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. —William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction, 1891, Sec. 15

Walter Raleigh “Jane Austen” (1894) This Sir Walter Raleigh was a writer and professor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not to be confused with the Sir Walter Raleigh who established a colony in North Carolina in the sixteenth century. Raleigh agrees with Thomas Babington Macaulay and Goldwin Smith in their estimations that Austen’s writing is comparable to William Shakespeare’s, though Raleigh pointedly writes that Shakespeare’s work “exhibits the less majestic calm.” Raleigh also agrees with George Henry Lewes that Austen’s work cannot be fully appreciated by the reader who is unable to perceive or appreciate the nuances present in her work, which remain “inaudible to gross ears.” Misreading Austen as less than perfection is clearly, according to Raleigh, the fault of the reader. Students exploring topics related to literary theory may want to study reader response, to help determine how much responsibility lies with the writer and how much lies with the reader in the unique partnership entered into when reading a book. Raleigh offers the observation that “the real Jane Austen” cannot be found in any of her books. He writes that “Her own views on the subject of marriage she does not trouble to explain,” meaning that she does not provide narrative commentary in her works in order to interpret events

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QQQ The comparison between Jane Austen and Shakespeare, suggested by Macaulay, is curiously attractive. Both left scant record of their personal convictions and emotions; indeed the Sonnets are a fuller confession than can be gathered from all the letters and remains of the later writer. Enthusiastic students of Miss Austen have ransacked her novels for traces of her affairs of the heart, and of her political and religious opinions, in a manner and with a result that recall the efforts of Shakesperian commentators. There is at least a semblance of likeness in the attitude that each assumed to friends and family, to Stratford and to Seventon; the purchaser of New Place who did not collect and publish his own works may be compared, perhaps mistakenly, with the lady who refused literary society and wrote for her own and her sister’s diversion. The stirring events of the times they lived in are as little reflected

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or recorded in the pages of one as of the other. These may be resemblances merely fanciful. What is not fanciful is the sameness of artistic impersonality, of serene abstraction from life, that characterises both writers equally. Of the two, Shakespeare, eternally susceptible to temptation by a gleam of poetry, exhibits the less majestic calm. He can hardly be content for long with the supremacy of an inferior kingdom. “The hand which drew Miss Bates,” says Mr. Goldwin Smith, in his admirable Life of Jane Austen, “though it could not have drawn Lady Macbeth, could have drawn Dame Quickly or the nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ” The same hand, had it attempted the description of the murder of the little princes in Richard III., would never have slipped into the poetic metaphor that gives to Shakespeare’s hired assassins so unreal an air. The perfection of Miss Austen’s workmanship has been seized upon by unfavourable critics and used as a weapon of offence. She is perfect, they allege, only as some are virtuous, because she has no temptation; she lives in an abject world, dead to poetry, visited by no breath of romance, and is placidly contented with her ant-hill, which she describes with great accuracy and insight. It would be unjust to this type of criticism to interpret it merely as a complaint that one who was of unsurpassed power in comedy and satire did not forego her gifts and take up with romance and tragedy. If it has a meaning worth considering, it means that even the comedy of life has in it shades of pathos and passion to which she is constitutionally blind. And this is to mistake her art. The world of pathos and passion is present in her work by implication; her delicious quiet mirth, so quiet as to be inaudible to gross ears, is stirred by the incongruity between the realities of the world as she conceives them, and these realities as they are conceived by her puppets. The kingdom of Lilliput has its meaning only when it is seen through the eyes of Gulliver. A rabbit fondling its own harmless face affords no matter of amusement to another rabbit, and Miss Austen has had many readers who have perused her works without a smile. Sympathy with her characters she frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, not in that sturdy young patrician Emma, not even in Anne Elliot of Persuasion, is the real Jane Austen to be found. She stands for ever aloof. Those who wish to enjoy her art must stand aloof too, and must not ask to be hurried through her novels on a personally conducted tour, with their admirations and dislikes prepared for them. What, perhaps, has led hasty or unintelligent critics strangely to misread her is that she never obtrudes the contrast spoken of above; hardly ever, even as narrator, speaks in her own person. By the most delicate of irony she allows the opinions and feelings of her characters to colour her own matter-of-fact narration. “There certainly are not so many

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men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them,” she remarks, on the first page of Mansfield Park. Stupid readers, who ought to be in her books instead of outside them and trying to read them, agree with her; good serious critics, on the trail of fine sentiments, exclaim in sorrow that she says a hundred things like this. But she is thinking of the matrimonial prospects of the three Misses Ward, and putting herself at the point of view of the family, with a certain subtle literary politeness that is charm itself. Her own views on the subject of marriage she does not trouble to explain. But the folly of some of her characters implies the existence of wisdom; the selfishness and pettiness of others involve the ideas of disinterestedness and magnanimity, just as a picture painted in cold tints would lose its meaning if there were no blue and red in the scheme of the universe. To ask for all colours, always, within the limits of the frame, is absurd. She compares her own work to miniature-painting on ivory, “on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.” In loving elaboration of detail she resembles no other writer so much as a special favourite of hers, Cowper, whose letters display the same voluminous fearlessness in the treatment of the trivial, with a like happy result. To quote her except by pages at a time would be to do her an injustice. Here are no sudden white-heats of exalted imagination or momentary illuminations of the abysses of human life, but a steady stream of daylight on familiar objects, a perfect proportion, and a clearness that seems to the inexpert to be due to emptiness. The absolute transparency of her style, the medium in which her creations live and move, is illusive in its nature; her readers can pass from the commonplaces of life to the actions and speeches of her fictitious characters with so little sense of shock, so faint a realization that they are passing from life to a convention, that it is not to be wondered at if her craft has been ignored or denied. Art was never applied to average material with so little ostentation and so wonderful an effect. Her characters do not grow in her mind as she writes, but step fully realized from her mind into the book. In the opening pages of each of her novels there occur traits of character which can be truly appreciated only on a second reading. Her close observation and untiring realism might entitle her books to be used as historical documents— authoritative descriptions of middle-class life in the English counties during the period of the Napoleonic war. Only her satirical effects at times betray the freedom with which she is handling and shaping the material supplied by life. Satire is the element in which she lives. It would be difficult to name an English author, except perhaps Swift, whose works are more intimately

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pervaded with the spirit of satire. Their methods and scope are, of course, utterly different: there is not a trace of the savage indignation of Swift to be found in all her writing. And yet her power, wielded by a less gentle and submissive temper, would have furnished a very efficient light-armed auxiliary to the war engaged in by Gulliver. She has the true fighter’s instinct for the weak point in the adversary’s armour, although she exhibits it only in the tourney of a summer’s day. It is amusement, not victory, that she seeks, and her feats are like that feat of Saladin in The Talisman, who although he could not cleave an iron mace asunder with a broadsword, could cut a veil of gossamer as it floated in the air. —Walter Raleigh, “Jane Austen,” The English Novel, 1894, pp. 261–66

George Saintsbury (1896) George Saintsbury is the first writer to explicitly mention irony as an integral part of Austen’s novels. Students might surmise why irony in Austen remained largely undiscussed until the close of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was overlooked because, as Saintsbury mentions, readers did not expect to find irony in women’s writing.

QQQ They (her novels) had no enormous or sudden popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, at once recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is not too much to say that by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit has been acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm and discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she is the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father of the nineteenth century romance. One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are misleading. Northanger Abbey was written more than twenty years before it appeared, and the bulk of Pride and Prejudice (which some hold to be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at least as Northanger Abbey. That is to say, almost at the very time of the appearance of Camilla (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson,

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though a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote Evelina was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day. The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted; the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting some readers, the delicate and ever present irony either escaping or being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third class. But the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen’s method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high compliment—a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic “Janites” have ventured—inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort, “Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?” It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about the method, which, with the addition of a certain nescio quid, giving it its modern difference, may be said to combine the peculiarities of Fielding and of Richardson, though it works on a much smaller scale than either. It has the intense and pervading, though not the exuberant and full-blooded, livingness of Fielding, and it also has something not unlike a feminine counterpart and complement of his pervading irony; while it is not unlike Richardson in building up the characters and the stories partly by an infinity of tiny strokes of detail, often communicated in conversation, partly by the use of an exceedingly nice and delicate analysis of motive and temperament. It is in the former respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all, women who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine gift; and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do not as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers to Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray—even if it be not improper to use the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than difference—in

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the use of this potent but most double-edged weapon. Her irony indeed is so subtle that it requires a certain dose of subtlety to appreciate it, and it is not uncommon to find those who consider such personages as Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice to be merely farcical, instead of, as they are in fact, preachers of the highest and most Shakespearian comedy. But there would be no room here to examine Miss Austen’s perfections in detail; the important thing for the purposes of this history is to observe again that she “set the clock,” so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to be nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded violent and romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very least degree on describing popular or passing fashions, amusements, politics; but confined herself to the most strictly ordinary life. Yet she managed in some fashion so to extract the characteristics of that life which are perennial and human, that there never can be any doubt to fit readers in any age finding themselves at home with her, just as they find themselves at home with all the greatest writers of bygone ages. And lastly, by some analogous process she hit upon a style which, though again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and therefore now reviled as “stilted” and formal by those who have not the gift of literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, and, save in the merest externals, is neither ancient nor modern. —George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, 1896, pp. 128–31

Edmund Gosse (1897) It has long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be compared is Shakespeare. It is obvious that she has nothing of his width of range or sublimity of imagination; she keeps herself to that two-inch square of ivory of which she spoke in her proud and simple way. But there is no other English writer who possesses so much of Shakespeare’s inevitability, or who produces such evidence of a like omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. She never mixes her own temperament with those of her characters, she is never swayed by them, she never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. Among the creators of the

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world, Jane Austen takes a place that is with the highest and that is purely her own. . . . It is difficult to say that she was influenced by any predecessor, and, most unfortunately, of the history of her mind we know almost nothing. Her reserve was great, and she died before she had become an object of curiosity even to her friends. But we see that she is of the race of Richardson and Marivaux, although she leaves their clumsy construction far behind. She was a satirist, however, not a sentimentalist. One of the few anecdotes preserved about her relates that she refused to meet Madame de Stael, and the Germanic spirit was evidently as foreign to her taste as the lyricism born of Rousseau. She was the exact opposite of all which the cosmopolitan critics of Europe were deciding that English prose fiction was and always would be. Lucid, gay, penetrating, exquisite, Jane Austen possessed precisely the qualities that English fiction needed to drag it out of the Slough of Despond and start it wholesomely on a new and vigorous career. —Edmund Gosse, A Short History of Modern English Literature, 1897, pp. 295–97

Vida D. Scudder (1898) Using Scudder’s words as inspiration, students discussing historical context may want to examine the extent to which contemporary readers rely on Austen’s novels as offering lucid and accurate portraits of real life in early-nineteenth-century England. Scudder would perhaps argue that we accord the novels a realism they do not actually achieve and that Austen’s fictive and subjective representations of her time period are of dubious documentary value.

QQQ Miss Austen, in the last generation, in the very heyday of the romantic imagination, had written her modest and undying sketches of the life she knew, the tranquil life that lingered unchanged in the by-ways of England. Her conditions and temperament conspired to impose limitations which make her art perhaps more enduring than that of her great successors, since from very scarcity of material she was forced to individualize after much our present manner. But on account of these very limitations, her work has slight value as social evidence to the wider phases of contemporary life. —Vida D. Scudder, Social Ideals in English Letters, 1898, pp. 129–30

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Janet Harper “The Renascence of Jane Austen” (1900) As to Miss Austen’s style, we can scarcely define its attraction, for in it we get no music, no magic, no caressing phrases; it is not trenchant; we carry away no glittering epigrams, but it is apt and spirited, and has that indefinable felicitous touch that genius alone gives. The qualities without which no sustained writing can exist—knowledge, observation, toleration, and expression—are all there, deepening and mellowing towards the end, and make a solid foundation on which to rest her easy, graceful dialogue, in which part of her art she might be said to be without a rival. —Janet Harper, “The Renascence of Jane Austen,” Westminster Review, April 1900, p. 445

Earl of Iddesleigh “A Chat about Jane Austen’s Novels” (1900) The Earl of Iddesleigh’s initial argument, his originating premise, is that Austen’s range is narrow not because she was incapable of expanding her authorial scope but because she chose to write about a limited part of society. In this excerpt, Iddesleigh agrees with Walter Raleigh in his assertion that there is no harm in being exceptionally good at one literary mode rather than just passably capable at a range of them. The remainder of the Earl of Iddesleigh’s writing reflects on Austen’s individual characters, first the men and then the women. It is clear that Iddesleigh avoids criticizing Austen in any respect, but he does find fault with a number of her characterizations. He attributes these errors to Austen’s very personal point of view, rather than to her abilities as an author. Various statements throughout his text support this: “perhaps she shows her contempt for them a little too plainly” and “I cannot fancy that Austen thought much of her, or she would not have allowed her to be so entirely eclipsed by the vivacious and winning Mary Crawford.” Clearly Iddesleigh feels strong personal connections (or a lack thereof) with particular characters, and he assumes that Austen feels likewise, rather than considering that she constructs certain characters with a specific intention to further the larger all-encompassing story she is trying to tell. This notion speaks to Austen’s ability as a psychological author, rather than a plot-centered writer. Several reviewers mention that she is far more concerned with aspects of personality in her novels than with action.

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Jane Austen Students would do well to look at the beginnings of the psychological novel, sometimes called psychological realism, and perhaps determine when and where such writing began as well as when and how (or perhaps if) it became popular. Does Austen’s focus on character make her less likely to be included in any category of popular fiction, in her century or in our own? All of Austen’s major novels have been made into films, some several times, so students interested in film and the transition from novel to movie might investigate what makes Austen’s work so compelling onscreen, particularly since there is little action in her books. Another important task for students could involve following in Iddesleigh’s footsteps and elaborating on Austen’s characterizations. Iddesleigh groups characters according to type: Austen’s “bad young men,” for example. Students might look at several Austen characters of the same description in order to determine the nuances or gaps in their characterizations, as well as possibly Austen’s overall perception of such general character categories.

QQQ In proceeding to speak of Miss Austen’s writings I am mainly guided by the wish to protest against one or two erroneous views which still exist among the unconverted, and primarily against the idea that her range was narrow. This delusion arises in great part from her own famous expression about her books, which she declares to be work upon ‘a little bit of ivory two inches wide,’ and to be done ‘with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour.’ The sentence shows plainly enough that Miss Austen’s modesty concealed her greatness from her own eyes, but its precise signification does not strike me as very obvious. It must, no doubt, imply that she restrained her genius within certain limits. What those limits were, we have to inquire; but my own impression is that they applied to events and not to characters, and that Miss Austen only bound herself by a determination that all the circumstances in her stories should be such as might occur in ordinary life. It is frequently alleged, however, that she confined herself too much to the middle classes of society. That she left the lower classes alone must be admitted and possibly regretted. Certainly one would have been glad to have learned what James himself thought of that ‘corner into Vicarage Lane’ which Mr. Woodhouse so dreaded, and to have listened to Nanny indulging herself in a free criticism on her mistress, Mrs. Norris. But of the aristocratic element we have plenty. There is General Tilney with his “very old friends the Marquis of Longtown and General Courteney.” He belongs to trie pre-revolutionary era, and many things might be done by

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him which have since become impossible. Though her tastes and manners are very different, Lady Catherine de Bourgh is of the same type. Darcy has blue blood in his veins, and Anne Elliot is dainty and high-bred to the tips of her fingers; while of all the great ladies in fiction, Eleanor Tilney strikes me as one of the most charming and quite the most truly drawn. Surely the whole House of Lords envied that unnamed Viscount who became her husband. There is another allegation that Miss Austen’s men are limited. This, again, may partly arise from a remark made by herself that ‘they’ (meaning Mr. Knightley and Edmund Bertram) ‘are very far from being what I know English gentlemen often are.’ It may also find some imaginary support in the fact noticed by the late Sir Frederick Pollock, that there is no scene of any consequence in the novels in which some woman is not on the stage. Now, the charge that an author’s characters are limited may mean either that they are accused of individually lacking depth or breadth or force, or else of being too much alike and wanting variety. Miss Austen’s men assuredly do not fail in this latter way, so it is only the power and skill with which they are presented to us that require examination. I will at once venture to assert that there are three of Miss Austen’s creations—Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Bennet, and Mr. Collins—who defy criticism. In this respect and in their own degree they resemble even Falstaff and Don Quixote. How they come to be what they are seems miraculous. The first is a nervous invalid, the second a cleverish embittered squire, and the third a fulsome clergyman. Such personages promise little enough, but there is added to them ‘the consecration and the poet’s dream,’ and they stand forth high among the ranks of the immortals. There I leave them. No words of mine shall profane their glory. It is a long step downwards to what I shall call Miss Austen’s ‘bad young men,’ with whom I think she has come most near to failure. But even here she provides us with ample variety. Willoughby is weak, Wickham is a ne’erdo-well, John Thorpe is vulgar and conceited, and Henry Crawford proves in the end to be a slave to his own desires. Of course they are all selfish, but so is every ‘bad young man.’ I have lately remarked much praise bestowed upon John Thorpe by critics from whom it is presumptuous to differ. If any of them should chance to see this article, I ask them to forgive my presumption, and I base my plea upon the pain I am inflicting on myself in finding fault with one of Miss Austen’s characters, instead of joining in the commendations of judges for whose opinions I entertain the most profound respect. But I lament to say that to me John Thorpe appears dreadfully crude. With Wickham and Willoughby Miss Austen never seems entirely at home. They

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are necessities to her stories, and perhaps she shows her contempt for them a little too plainly. Still, there is a ring of genuine passion in Willoughby’s love for Marianne. Indeed, of all Miss Austen’s lovers they are the most stormy pair. Henry Crawford is treated, as he deserves, with much more respect. He is painted with great care, and due weight is allowed to his many good qualities. We recognise it as quite natural that the two Miss Bertrams should pull caps for his favour. Though his weakness ultimately ruins him, he is far from being weak all round. Miss Austen really seems to have hesitated as to his fate. Up to the final catastrophe she left it possible for him to marry Fanny and become a virtuous country gentleman. Edmund would have been lucky to have secured Mary, but the difficulty may have been Maria. Her marriage with Mr. Rushworth had got to bring about its own punishment, and the elopement presented the most obvious means. It is an easy transition from Henry Crawford to the ‘good young men,’ who again differ widely from each other. In one of them, as I think, Miss Austen has achieved a splendid success. Henry Tilney is absolutely true and absolutely charming. He is an English gentleman of the very best kind— gay, witty, and helpful, with a full sense of the duties and responsibilities of life. Our knowledge of him is complete, and our liking for him never wavers. He is delightful at the outset, when he astonishes Mrs. Allen by his intimate acquaintance with muslin, and he remains delightful up to the final visit to Fullerton, when he so thoughtfully preserves Catherine from any conscientious objection to his suit. With the exception of a brief spell of parental opposition, the course of Henry Tilney’s love is perfectly smooth. This is as it should be with such a fascinating hero, to whom we may imagine that any of Miss Austen’s heroines, excepting Anne Elliot, who was nearly thirty, must have succumbed. Darcy himself might have found in him a victorious rival. Darcy, however, is an admirable lover, and his courtship, with its changing fortunes, is most interesting. I cannot quite believe in all the expressions attributed to him when he first proposed to Elizabeth in the ‘humble abode’ of Mr. Collins, but I think that is the only occasion on which his ‘Pride’ runs away with him. From the time of the meeting at Pemberley he is quite excellent. His overwhelming love for Elizabeth is powerfully shown in the scenes at Pemberley and Lambton, and so are the difficulties which he found in displaying it after the return to Longbourn. Darcy is one of the heroes who is worthy of his bride. Frank Churchill is another, only he is more than worthy of the unattractive Jane Fairfax. If he pushes too far the principle that all is fair in love and war, his high spirits and cheerfulness easily earn our forgiveness, while his

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famous hair-cutting expedition to London is one of those touches of which Miss Austen alone is capable. Almost equally fine is the petulant outburst of temper when Jane at last opposes his wishes, and which Emma humanely cures by pointing out the door of the dining-room in Donwell Abbey. For the rest of the lovers I care less. Bingley is pleasing enough as far as he goes, but he is not of first-rate consequence, and I must own to finding Edmund Bertram and Captain Wentworth rather dull. Mr. Knightley is surely just a wee bit ponderous, while in Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon seem to me to stand on a quite inferior level. It would be gross flattery to Mr. Elton to call him either a lover or a hero, but he is a good specimen of the tame cat with very ugly claws. He would be altogether detestable only that we are bound to remember in his excuse that Emma did treat him in a truly maddening style. She would have annoyed most people by offering them Harriet Smith instead of herself, but a snob like Mr. Elton must have been specially offended by such a proposal. Another disagreeable gentleman is Sir Walter Elliot, and it is sad to think that his selfish vanity was never disturbed. There was no Emma in the circles in which he lived. In such minor characters as Sir Thomas Bertram, Charles Musgrove, Admiral Croft, and William Price we get examples of Miss Austen’s exact fidelity to nature. If you want to know what a respectable head of a family is like, you need only look at Sir Thomas. Charles Musgrove is emphatically the eldest son of a country gentleman, living on good terms with his father but with a separate establishment. Admiral Croft is bluff and hearty, as an admiral ought to be after a successful career, and William Price is a gallant sailor lad whom everyone except Miss Norris is forced both to like and admire. But there is one other officer, Captain Harville in Persuasion, about whom there is a peculiar interest. Miss Austen shrank from emotional display, but when Captain Harville, who is mourning for the loss of his sister, is mentioned it is usually with the most delicate tenderness. Persuasion was completed in 1816, and by that time Miss Austen’s health had begun to fail, while in the preceding year she had been greatly distressed by the dangerous illness of her brother Henry. These sorrows may have influenced her treatment of Captain Harville, but in any case it is a further and a remarkable proof of her powers. In passing on to Miss Austen’s women it is natural to ask what other author or authoress can show such a gallery of feminine portraits, so numerous, so diverse, so true, so elaborate, and all so good? The answers of the faithful can be anticipated. But the faithful, though thus far agreed, differ widely over the merits of the separate pictures. No one should speak too positively in such a matter, but to me it seems that where many are great, Emma is the greatest of all.

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‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,’ writes Miss Austen, and I believe it is speciously argued that after these words the most respectful conduct on the part of her worshippers is to carry out her expectations and dislike Emma. At any rate many of them do so, and Miss Austen has spared no pains to provide them with good reasons for their unfavourable verdict. There is not an atom of mercy shown, but Emma’s faults and follies are laid before us by a ruthless hand, and they are quite horribly real. Emma did really come within an ace of ruining Harriet Smith’s life when she so unjustifiably forced her to refuse Robert Martin. She did really allow herself to discuss with Frank Churchill the probability of Mr. Dixon preferring Jane Fairfax to the wife he had just married, and she did in truth barbarously insult poor Miss Bates. How could Miss Austen still like her? The answer is perhaps twofold. From an artistic point of view, Miss Austen must have quite loved Emma, who provided her with such superlative opportunities for fooling, and in whom she has obtained one of her most conspicuous triumphs. In spite of her sins, Emma is adored by all connected with her, and we are made to feel that their adoration is natural. Who but Miss Austen could have brought out such a result? Secondly, we may notice that Miss Austen always cares more for the active virtues, with which Emma was well endowed, than she does for their passive sisters. Emma did shocking things, but then she did nice things that more than counterbalanced them, and she was thus in Miss Austen’s eyes much superior to any character which is mainly composed of negative qualities. We ourselves must look at Emma all round. We must remember how everything contributed to make her what we call spoilt. From her early girlhood she was mistress of all around her. Fancy the position of a young lady, rich, vigorous, handsome, and prosperous, whom only one person in the world ever ventured to criticise, and that person her lover! But whether we like Emma or not, we cannot deny her great distinction. In all comedy she has few equals. We see her under a great many different and striking aspects, and she is always an actual living person. It is said that every one has a double, and I used to know a lady who in her youth must, I am sure, have been Emma’s very image. Experience also enables me to vouch for the accuracy of the description of Emma’s shifts to keep herself away from Harriet and Mr. Elton during the walk from the cottage, and of her disappointment when she overheard their conversation and found it was impersonal. I was once a spectator of a similar scene, and I fear that through masculine obtuseness I was a nuisance to the lady who acted the part of Miss Woodhouse.

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And, lastly, Emma is such glorious fun. Her imagination does stretch to such immeasurable lengths. Who but herself could have conceived the ‘ingenious and animating suspicion’ about Jane Fairfax and Mr. Dixon and have remained quite blind to the significance of Frank Churchill’s conduct? and of whom else could it be written ‘Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first she thought it was a good deal, and afterwards but little’? For my own part, it is with pride that I avow myself to be regardless of Emma’s misdoings, and to be subjugated by her imperious charm. It is, I suppose, generally agreed that Miss Austen’s three principal heroines are Emma, Elizabeth Bennet, and Anne Elliot. None of them surpasses Eleanor Tilney in truth, grace, and dignity, nor do they rival Catherine Morland in exquisite and captivating simplicity; but they are worked out with greater elaboration. There is, in a word, more of them. Elizabeth is probably the most popular of the three, and it may be said of her that she is the wittiest young lady who has appeared in fiction since the days of Shakespeare. Some do not like Emma, and some think Anne deficient in that liveliness to which Miss Austen has accustomed us, but I believe that the hostile critic of Eliza Bennet has not yet been discovered. Anne Elliot is older and more grave than any of the other heroines, and she is unlike them all. Miss Austen’s failing health may have had some influence on the portrait, but in quiet beauty it cannot be excelled. Of Eleanor Tilney I have already had occasion to speak, but there remains for me the happiness of a word about Catherine Morland. Catherine is sometimes called a lucky girl, and her worthy parents no doubt regarded her in this light, but no luck could possibly exceed her deserts. There is a subtle entrancing freshness about her like that of the morning rose That untouched stands, and there is a perfectly unending delight in her views of life and proceedings. How Miss Austen would have marvelled if she could have foreseen that Mrs. Radcliffe’s immortality would come to depend upon Catherine’s adventure with the mislaid collection of washing-bills! I am not quite certain who ought to come next to the five just mentioned, but I incline to Mary Crawford, though Marianne Dashwood is more amusing. Marianne, indeed, with her ‘Sensibility’ gives Miss Austen finer opportunities of poking fun at her heroine than she gets anywhere except with Emma and Catherine Morland. Her noble resolve to lie awake for the whole night after Willoughby’s departure, which she believed was to be only

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for a short time, and her miserable condition on the next day, did, no doubt, depress her family, but we can only find her romantic spirit exhilarating. Elinor Dashwood, her sister, is perhaps a little overburdened with ‘Sense,’ and Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is rather a poor creature. She is full of the passive virtues, but I cannot fancy that Miss Austen thought much of her, or she would not have allowed her to be so entirely eclipsed by the vivacious and winning Mary Crawford. I have now run through the list of the chief heroines, and the moment has arrived at which I must give utterance to a reflection which applies to them all, and w