IN WHICH JANE AUSTEN’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS COMMENT ONMansfield Park, OPINIONS COLLECTED AND RECORDED BY AUSTEN HERSELF1
My Mother—not liked it so well as P. & P.—Thought Fanny insipid.—Enjoyed Mrs Norris.—
Cassandra [sister]—thought it quite as clever, tho’ not so brilliant as P. & P.—Fond of Fanny.—Delighted much in Mr Rushworth’s stupidity.—
My Eldest Brother [James]—a warm admirer of it in general.—Delighted with the Portsmouth Scene.
Mr & Mrs Cooke [godmother]—very much pleased with it—particularly with the Manner in which the Clergy are treated.—Mr Cooke called it ‘the most sensible Novel he had ever read.’—Mrs Cooke wished for a good Matronly Character.—
Mrs Augusta Bramstone [elderly sister of Wither Bramstone]—owned that she thought S & S.—and P. & P. downright nonsense, but expected to like M P. better, & having finished the 1st vol.—flattered herself she had got through the worst.
Mrs Bramstone [wife of Wither Bramstone]—much pleased with it; particularly with the character of Fanny, as being so very natural. Thought Lady Bertram like herself.—Preferred it to either of the others—but imagined that might be her want of Taste—as she does not understand Wit.—
IN WHICH JANE AUSTEN’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS COMMENT ONEmma2
My Mother—thought it more entertaining than M. P.—but not so interesting as P. & P.—No characters in it equal to Ly Catherine & Mr Collins.—
Cassandra—better than P. & P.—but not so well as M. P.—
Mr & Mrs J. A. [James Austen]—did not like it so well as either of the 3 others. Language different from the others; not so easily read.—
Captn. Austen [Francis William]—liked it extremely, observing that though there might be more Wit in P & P—& an higher Morality in M P—yet altogether, on account of it’s [sic] peculiar air of Nature throughout, he preferred it to either.
Mr Sherer [vicar]—did not think it equal to either M P—(which he liked the best of all) or P & P.—Displeased with my pictures of Clergymen.—
Miss Isabella Herries—did not like it—objected to my exposing the sex in the character of the Heroine—convinced that I had meant Mrs & Miss Bates for some acquaintance of theirs—People whom I never heard of before.—
Mr Cockerelle—liked it so little, that Fanny wd not send me his opinion.—
Mr Fowle [friend since childhood]—read only the first & last Chapters, because he had heard it was not interesting.—
Mr Jeffery [editor of the Edinburgh Review] was kept up by it three nights.
IN WHICH CRITICS, WRITERS, AND LITERARY FIGURES COMMENT ON AUSTEN, HER NOVELS, HER ADMIRERS, AND HER DETRACTORS THROUGH TWO CENTURIES
1812—Unsigned review of Sense and Sensibility3
We will, however, detain our female friends no longer than to assure them, that they may peruse these volumes not only with satisfaction but with real benefits, for they may learn from them, if they please, many sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life, exemplified in a very pleasing and entertaining narrative.
1814—Mary Russell Mitford, review of Pride and Prejudice4
It is impossible not to feel in every line of Pride and Prejudice, in every word of “Elizabeth,” the entire want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved of such a man as Darcy. Wickham is equally bad. Oh! they were just fit for each other, and I cannot forgive that delightful Darcy for parting them. Darcy should have married Jane.
1815—Sir Walter Scott, review of Emma5
Upon the whole, the turn of this author’s novels bears the same relation to that 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 to those who frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social habits; and what is of some importance, the youthful wanderer may return from his promenade to the ordinary business of life, without any chance of having his head turned by the recollection of the scene through which he has been wandering.
1826—Sir Walter Scott eleven years later, after Austen’s death, his enthusiasm having grown6
Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement 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 to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!
1826—Chief Justice John Marshall, letter to Joseph Story7
I was a little mortified to find you had not admitted the name of Miss Austen into your list of favorites. . . . Her flights are not lofty, she does not soar on an eagle’s wings, but she is pleasing, interesting, equable, yet amusing. I count on your making some apology for this omission.
1830—Thomas Henry Lister8
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 wind-mill, 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.
1848—Charlotte Brontë, letter to G. H. Lewes9
What a strange lecture comes next in your letter! 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, one 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?
1870—Unsigned review of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen10
Miss Austen has always been par excellence the favourite author of literary men. The peculiar merits of her style are recognised by all, but, with the general mass of readers, they have never secured what can fairly be called popularity. . . . It has always been known that Miss Austen’s private life was unruffled by any of the incidents or passions which favour trade of the biographer. . . . It fits in with our idea of the authoress, to find that she was a proficient in the microscopic needlework of sixty years since, that she was never in love, that she “took to the garb of middle age earlier than her years or her looks required.” . . .
The critics of the day were . . . in the dark. . . . She was not conscious herself of founding a new school of fiction, which would inspire new canons of criticism.
1870—Margaret Oliphant11
Miss Austen’s books did not secure her any sudden fame. They stole into notice so gradually and slowly, that even at her death they had not reached any great height of success. . . . We are told that at her death all they had produced of money was but seven hundred pounds, and but a moderate modicum of praise. We cannot say we are in the least surprised by this fact; it is, we think, much more surprising that they should at length have climbed into the high place they now hold. To the general public, which loves to sympathise with the people it meets in fiction, to cry with them, and rejoice with them, and take a real interest in all their concerns, it is scarcely to be expected that books so calm and cold and keen, and making so little claim upon their sympathy, would ever be popular. . . . They are rather of the class which attracts the connoisseur, which charms the critical and literary mind.
1870—Anthony Trollope12
Emma, the heroine, is treated almost mercilessly. In every passage of the book she is in fault for some folly, some vanity, some ignorance,—or indeed for some meanness. . . . Nowadays we dare not make our heroines so little.
1894—Alice Meynell13
She is a mistress of derision rather than of wit or humour. . . . Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter. . . . The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest in Miss Austen’s indifference to children. They hardly appear in her stories except to illustrate the folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as children; they are her subjects as spoilt children, and as children through whom a mother may receive flattery from her designing acquaintance, and may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. . . . In this coldness or dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Brontë.
1895—Willa Cather14
I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that. They are so few, the ones who really did anything worth while; there were the great Georges, George Eliot and George Sand, and they were anything but women, and there was Miss Brontë who kept her sentimentality under control and there was Jane Austen who certainly had more common sense than any of them and was in some respects the greatest of them all. . . . When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
1898—Unsigned article in The Academy15
It is sometimes my fortune at a week-end to . . . have discovered a cosy old inn on the Norfolk coast where there are no golf-links, some flight shooting, an abundance of rabbits to pop at, a plain, good dinner to be had, and a comfortable oak room in which to spend the evening. For the sake of convenience I will call my friends . . . Brown and Robinson. . . .
Brown is a flourishing journalist, and therefore, entirely destitute alike of definite opinion and principle. . . . It is his business to keep a finger on the public pulse and allot space accordingly.
Robinson is an ardent young student, busily employed in devouring literature wholesale. . . . It was he that started the talk about Jane Austen. . . .
“I like Di [Vernon],” said the student, “but [Sir Walter] Scott did not take her through her paces as well as Lizzie [Elizabeth Bennet] is taken. She is not shown in as many different moods and tempers. She is too perfect. It was the way of Scott. All his heroines . . . are spotless. Elizabeth has a thousand faults . . . is often blind, pert, audacious, imprudent; and yet how splendidly she comes out of it all! Alive to the very tips of her fingers . . .”
“It does my heart good to see that youth is still capable of enthusiasm,” said the journalist, “but my dear chap, after another twenty years, when I hope to see you a portly husband and father who has ceased to think much of heroines either in fact or fiction, your ideals will be completely changed. You will like much better to read about Mrs. Norris saving three-quarters of a yard of baize out of the stage-curtain, and Fanny Price will be more interesting to you than Elizabeth.”
“Not a bit of it,” stoutly rejoined the student. “Mrs. Norris is quite interesting to me now. . . .”
1898—Mark Twain16
Every time I read “Pride and Prejudice” I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
1901—Joseph Conrad to H. G. Wells17
What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?
1905—Henry James18
Practically overlooked for thirty or forty years after her death, she perhaps really stands there for us as the prettiest possible example of that rectification of estimate, brought about by some slow clearance of stupidity. . . . This tide has risen high on the opposite shore—risen rather higher, I think, than . . . her intrinsic merit and interest. . . . Responsible . . . is the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their “dear,” our dear, everybody’s dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose. . . .
The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her unconsciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes over her work basket . . . fell . . . into woolgathering, and her dropped stitches . . . were afterwards picked up as . . . little master-strokes of imagination.
1905—Unsigned review of Jane Austen and Her Times, by G. E. Mitton19
Miss Mitton . . . reveals many virtues which we salute. She is a lover of books. She is hard-working. . . . Her expressions of opinion are naive and abundant and likely to give much pleasure to those who contradict her: for example, in her mention of “Sense and Sensibility,” she says very little and that of a disparaging kind about Mrs. Jennings; we, on the other hand, bow down to Mrs. Jennings as one of the few persons in fiction whom it is equally delightful to have met on paper and not to have met in the flesh.
1908—Unsigned review in The Academy20
Northanger Abbey is not the best example of Jane Austen’s work, but the fact that the scene is mostly laid in Bath, one of the few towns in England which retain their proper character, makes it particularly attractive to foreigners. It has also a stronger romantic element than is usual with Jane Austen, which adds interest for young people.
1913—Virginia Woolf 21
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought . . . and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.
1913—G. K. Chesterton22
Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.
1917—Frederic Harrison, letter to Thomas Hardy23
[Austen was] a rather heartless little cynic . . . penning satires about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves. . . . Not a breath from the whirlwind around her ever touched her Chippendale chiffonier or escritoire.
1924—Rudyard Kipling, epigraph to “The Janeites”24
Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love, and honor unto England’s Jane.
1924—E. M. Forster25
I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity—how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. . . . The Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he ascribes so freely to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.
1925—Edith Wharton26
Jane Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her sedateness; she never fails, but there are few or none like her.
1927—Arnold Bennett27
Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause. They are nearly all fanatics. They will not listen. If anybody “went for Jane,” anything might happen to him. He would assuredly be called on to resign from his clubs. I do not want to resign from my clubs. . . .
She is marvellous, intoxicating . . . [but] she did not know enough of the world to be a great novelist. She had not the ambition to be a great novelist. She knew her place; her present “fans” do not know her place, and their antics would without doubt have excited Jane’s lethal irony.
1928—Rebecca West28
Really, it is time this comic patronage of Jane Austen ceased. To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. There are those who are deluded by the decorousness of her manner, by the fact that her virgins are so virginal that they are unaware of their virginity, into thinking that she is ignorant of passion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love, whose delicate reactions to men make the heroines of all our later novelists seem merely to turn signs, “Stop” or “Go” toward the advancing male.
1931—D. H. Lawrence29
This, again, is the tragedy of social life today. In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then, in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone. Already this old maid typifies “personality” instead of character, the sharp knowing in apartness instead of knowing in togetherness, and she is, to my feeling, thoroughly unpleasant, English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense of the word, just as Fielding is English in the good generous sense.
1937—W. H. Auden30
You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
1938—Ezra Pound, letter to Laurence Binyon31
I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn’t as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when you doget a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn’t it worth any other ten?
1938—Thornton Wilder32
[Jane Austen’s novels] appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with Robinson Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Eliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.
1938—H. G. Wells, dialogue from a character in a novel, perhaps expressing Wells’s own opinion, perhaps not33
“The English Jane Austen is quite typical. Quintessential I should call her. A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies—with no guts at all.”
1940—D. W. Harding34
I gathered, she was a delicate satirist revealing with inimitable lightness of touch the comic foibles and amiable weaknesses of the people whom she lived amongst and liked. . . . This was enough to make me quite certain I didn’t want to read her. And it is, I believe, a seriously misleading impression. . . .
In order to enjoy her books without disturbance, those who retain the conventional notion of her work must always have had slightly to misread what she wrote.
1940—MGM plug for the movie Pride and Prejudice35
Five charming sisters on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor! Girls! Take a lesson from these husband hunters!
1944—Edmund Wilson36
There have been several revolutions of taste during the last century and a quarter of English literature, and through them all perhaps only two reputations have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare’s and Jane Austen’s. . . . She has compelled the amazed admiration of writers of the most diverse kinds, and I should say that Jane Austen and Dickens rather queerly present themselves today as the only two English novelists . . . who belong in the very top rank with the great fiction-writers of Russia and France. . . . That this spirit should have embodied itself . . . in the mind of a well-bred spinster, the daughter of a country clergyman, who never saw more of the world than was made possible by short visits to London and a residence of a few years in Bath and who found her subjects mainly in the problems of young provincial girls looking for husbands, seems one of the most freakish of the many anomalies of English literary history.
1954—C. S. Lewis37
She is described by someone in Kipling’s worst story as the mother of Henry James. I feel much more sure that she is the daughter of Dr. Johnson: she inherits his commonsense, his morality, even much of his style. I am not a good enough Jamesian to decide the other claim. But if she bequeathed anything to him it must be wholly on the structural side. Her style, her system of values, her temper, seem to me the very opposite of his. I feel sure that Isabel Archer, if she had met Elizabeth Bennet, would have pronounced her “not very cultivated,” and Elizabeth, I fear, would have found Isabel deficient in both “seriousness” and in mirth.
1955—Lionel Trilling38
The animality of Mark Twain’s repugnance is probably to be taken as the male’s revulsion from a society in which women seem to be at the center of interest and power, as a man’s panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose essay “Jane Austen, A Depreciation,” is a summa of all the reasons for disliking Jane Austen, expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain’s; he implies that a direct sexual insult is being offered to men by a woman author.
1957—Kingsley Amis39
Edmund and Fanny are both morally detestable and the endorsement of their feelings and behaviour by the author . . . makes Mansfield Park an immoral book.
1968—Angus Wilson40
As to the trickle of critics hostile to Jane Austen, from Victorian times onwards, they have been either temperamentally off key like Charlotte Brontë, Mark Twain, or [D. H.] Lawrence, or insufficiently informed like Professor Garrod, or critical only partially, like Mr. Amis in his unwillingness lightly to undertake inviting Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram to dine; her less intelligent, more fulsome admirers have been more an embarrassment to her high reputation than her hostile critics.
1974—Margaret Drabble41
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine.
1979—Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar42
Austen’s story is especially flattering to male readers because it describes the taming not just of any woman but specifically of a rebellious, imaginative girl who is amorously mastered by a sensible man. No less than the blotter literally held over the manuscript on her writing desk, Austen’s cover story of the necessity for silence and submission reinforces women’s subordinate position in patriarchal culture. . . . At the same time, however . . . under this cover story, Austen always stimulates her readers “to supply what is not there.” [This last quotation is from Virginia Woolf.]
1980—Vladimir Nabokov43
Miss Austen’s is not a violently vivid masterpiece. . . . Mansfield Park . . . is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.
1984—Fay Weldon44
I also think . . . that the reason no one married her was the same reason Crosby didn’t publish Northanger Abbey. It was just all too much. Something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth: something capable of taking the world by its heels, and shaking it.
1989—Katha Pollitt, from her poem “Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels”45
This time round, they didn’t seem so comic.
Mama is foolish, dim or dead. Papa’s
a sort of genial, pampered lunatic.
No one thinks of anything but class.
1989—Christopher Kent46
An Oxford tutor, H. F. Brett-Smith, served during World War I as an advisor to hospitals on reading matter for wounded soldiers. “For the severely shell-shocked,” a former student recalled, “he selected Jane Austen.” . . .
While the French Revolution raged, Jane Austen barely looked up from her literary petit point. Who better to soothe minds unhinged at Passchendaele or the Somme? In the therapeutic calm of her pages history’s victims could escape from their nemesis.
1993—Gish Jen47
I think the next writer to have a really big influence on me was Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice was one of the books that I read backwards and forwards. I really wanted to be Elizabeth Bennet. Of course today, there are people who would say, “Oh, that’s so Anglo”; they think I should have been more influenced by Chinese opera or something.
1993—Edward W. Said48
Where Mansfield Park is concerned, however, a good deal more needs to be said. . . . Perhaps then Austen, and indeed, pre-imperialist novels generally, will appear to be more implicated in the rationale for imperialist expansion than at first sight they have been.
1995—Article about an essay by Terry Castle49
Was Jane Austen gay? This question, posed by the normally staid London Review of Books, was the headline for an essay by Stanford professor Terry Castle that subtly explored the “unconscious homoerotic dimension” of Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra. The implication has caused quite a kerfuffle among Austenites.
1996—Carol Shields50
Austen’s heroines are compelling because in a social and economic system that conspires to place them at a disadvantage, they exercise real power. . . . We look at Jane Austen’s novels . . . and see that her women not only know what they want, they have evolved a pointed strategy for how to go about getting it.
1996—Martin Amis51
Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors—all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself.
Each age will bring its peculiar emphasis, and in the current Austen festival our own anxieties stand fully revealed. We like to wallow in the accents and accoutrements of Jane’s world, but our response is predominantly sombre. We notice, above all, the constriction of female opportunity: how brief was their nubility, and yet how slowly and deadeningly time passed within it. We notice how plentiful were the occasions for inflicting social pain, and how interested the powerful were in this infliction. We see how little the powerless had to use against those who might hate them. We wonder who on earth will marry the poor girls. Poor men can’t. And rich men can’t. So who can?
1996—Anthony Lane52
No burden weighs more heavily on a writer’s shoulders than that of being much loved, but something unreachable in Austen shrugs off the weight.
1997—Editorial in Forbes53
“Drucker’s not a management theorist in the narrow, academic sense,” says Lenzner. . . . “He compares the strategic corporate alliances with the matrimonial alliances in Jane Austen novels.”
1997—Susan M. Korba54
For years, critics of Emma have been circling around the apparently disconcerting issue of the protagonist’s sexuality. . . . Claudia Johnson finds that . . . “transparently misogynist, sometimes even homophobic, subtexts often bob to the surface of the criticism about her.” Johnson cites Edmund Wilson’s ominous allusions and Marvin Mudrick’s dark hints about Emma’s infatuations with and preference for other women as examples of the unease aroused by this particular Austen heroine.
1999—David Andrew Graves55
For the last two years I have been using software as a tool for analyzing texts for patterns in word sequence and word frequency. . . . From the viewpoint of word frequency by semantic category, Emma stands as Jane Austen’s lightest and brightest novel, strongly positive, and with the lowest incidence of negative feeling, just as she promised us from the very first sentence.
1999—Andy Rooney56
I have never read anything Austen wrote. I just never got at reading Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. They seemed to be the Bobbsey Twins for grown-ups.
1999—Anthony Lane57
Nudity, sexual abuse, lesbianism, a dash of incest—will we never tire of Jane Austen?
2000—Nalini Natarajan58
A “commonsense” perception on the popularity of Austen in India would point to the translatability of Austenian situations into the context of the emergent Indian middle class. . . . The issues raised by my metacritique, or reading of recent criticism of the Austenian daughter, while quite removed from the specificities of women’s reform and its narrativization in colonial Bengal, suggest a paradigm within which to discuss the interlocking of two cultures.
2002—Shannon R. Wooden, on the Austen movies59
Food control, a culturally pervasive defining feature of “femininity,” also pervades Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, Douglas McGrath’s Emma, and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless. . . . Without exception the heroine does not eat. . . . Conspicuous food consumption invariably signals the “bad” or ridiculous woman.
2002—Elsa Solender, past president of the Jane Austen Society of North America60
Having reviewed all the available films and critical reactions to them in the specialized libraries of London, Los Angeles, and New York, and having begged, bought, or borrowed a library of books and articles on adaptation from literature to film, I have reached one definitive conclusion about trying to re-create “Jane Austen’s World” faithfully and authentically on film in a way to satisfy Janeites. In a single word: Don’t!
2003—J. K. Rowling61
I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. . . . There’s a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales’s secretary.
1. Jane Austen, The Works of Jane Austen, vol. 6: Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, London, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 431–435.
2. Ibid., pp. 436–439.
3. B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen and the Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), vol. 1, p. 40.
4. Mary Russell Mitford, Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. A. G. L’Estrange (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870), vol. 1, p. 300.
5. David Lodge, ed., Jane Austen’s Emma: A Casebook (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: Macmillan Education, 1991), p. 42.
6. Southam, Jane Austen and the Critical Heritage, vol. 1, p. 106.
7. A. J. Beveridge, Life of John Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916–1919), vol. 4, pp. 79–80.
8. [Thomas Henry Lister], unsigned review of Catherine Gore, Women As They Are, in Edinburgh Review, July 1830, p. 448.
9. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Friendships, Lives and Correspondence (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1980), vol. 2, p. 180.
10.The Academy, 1 (February 12, 1870), pp. 118–119.
11. Southam, Jane Austen and the Critical Heritage, vol. 1, pp. 224–225.
12. Anthony Trollope, “Miss Austen’s Timidity,” in Lodge, Jane Austen’s Emma: A Casebook, p. 51.
13. Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell, The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (London and New York: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 66.
14. Willa Cather, “The Demands of Art,” in Bernice Slote, ed., The Kingdom of Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 409.
15.The Academy, 53 (January/June 1898), pp. 262–263.
16. Mark Twain, Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing, ed. Mark Dawidziak (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), p. 128.
17. John Wiltshire, quoted in B. C. Southam, ed., Critical Essays on Jane Austen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. xiii.
18. Henry James, “The Lesson of Balzac,” in Leon Edel, ed., The House of Fiction (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), pp. 62–63.
19.The Academy, 69 (November 11, 1905), p. 1171.
20.The Academy, 74 (January/June 1908), p. 622.
21. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1957), pp. 50–51.
22. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), p. 109.
23. Quoted in Christopher Kent, “Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen,” in J. David Grey, ed., Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, MI, and London: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 59.
24. Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites,” in Craig Raine, ed., A Choice of Kipling’s Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 334.
25. E. M. Forster, “Jane Austen,” in Abinger Harvest (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 148.
26. Penelope Vita-Finzi, Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 21.
27. Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett, ed. Samuel Hynes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), pp. 256–257.
28. Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), pp. 263–264.
29. D. H. Lawrence, Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Martin Secker, 1931), pp. 92–93.
30. W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 21.
31. Ezra Pound, Letters from Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1950), p. 308.
32. Thornton Wilder, “A Preface for Our Town” (1938), in American Characteristics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 101.
33. H. G. Wells, The Brothers: A Story (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), pp. 26–27.
34. D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” Scrutiny, 8 (March 1940), pp. 346–347.
35. Quoted by Anthony Lane, “Jane’s World,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1995, p. 107.
36. Edmund Wilson, “A Long Talk About Jane Austen,” The New Yorker, June 24, 1944, p. 69.
37. C. S. Lewis, “A Note on Jane Austen,” in Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, 4, no. 4 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), p. 371.
38. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in Ian Watt, ed., Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 126.
39. Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?” in Watt, Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 142.
40. Angus Wilson, “The Neighbourhood of Tombuctoo: Conflicts in Jane Austen’s Novels,” in Southam, Critical Essays on Jane Austen, p. 186.
41. Margaret Drabble, “Introduction,” Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon (Great Britain: Penguin, 1974), p. 7.
42. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 154–155.
43. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fred Bowers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), p. 10.
44. Fay Weldon (1984), Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (New York: Taplinger, 1985), p. 97.
45. Katha Pollitt, “Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels,” The New Republic, August 7 and 14, 1989, p. 35.
46. Kent, “Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen,” p. 59.
47. Y. Matsukawa, “Melus Interview: Gish Jen,” Melus, 18, no. 4 (Winter 1993), p. 111.
48. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 84.
49. Belinda Luscombe, “Which Persuasion?” Time, August 14, 1995, p. 73.
50. Carol Shields and Anne Giardini, “Martians in Jane Austen?” Persuasions, 18 (December 16, 1996), pp. 196, 199.
51. Martin Amis, “Jane’s World,” The New Yorker, January 8, 1996, p. 34.
52. Anthony Lane, “The Dumbing of Emma,” The New Yorker, August 5, 1996, p. 76.
53. James W. Michaels, “Jane Austen Novels as Management Manuals,” Forbes, 159, no. 5 (March 10, 1997), p. 14.
54. Susan M. Korba, “ ‘Improper and Dangerous Distinctions’: Female Relationships and Erotic Domination in Emma,” University of North Texas Studies in the Novel, 29, no. 2 (Summer 1997), p. 139.
55. David Andrew Graves, “Computer Analysis of Word Usage in Emma,” Persuasions, 21 (1999), pp. 203, 211.
56. Quoted in Natalie Tyler, ed., The Friendly Jane Austen (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 231.
57. Anthony Lane, “All over the Map” (review of the film Mansfield Park), The New Yorker, November 29, 1999, p. 140.
58. Nalini Natarajan, “Reluctant Janeites: Daughterly Value in Jane Austen and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Swami,” in You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds., The Postcolonial Jane Austen (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 141.
59. Shannon R. Wooden, “ ‘You Even Forget Yourself’: The Cinematic Construction of Anorexic Women in the 1990’s Austen Films,” Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 2002, p. 221.
60. Elsa Solender, “Recreating Jane Austen’s World on Film.” Persuasions, 24 (2002), pp. 103–104.
61. Quoted at www.bloomsburymagazine.com.
• • •
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit
www.penguin.com/fowlerchecklist