A Game of Speculation

Abstract

Jane Austen has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. Not many scholars (and hopefully fewer and fewer readers) attach much credence to the image of the retired spinster, marooned in villages and rectories in the backwaters of Hampshire, but equally not many have tried to alter our perception of Austen quite as dramatically as Jocelyn Harris does in this remarkable book. Harris places Austen at the centre of the Regency communications hub, weaving information from letters, gossip, newspapers, city visits, stage performances, and satirical prints into her fiction, and evincing a fascination with celebrity culture that makes her as connected to the contemporary moment as any devotee of ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ or Twitter. In the spectrum of Austen studies, the book stands at the opposite end to the restricted, censored, and official family view of the author as the polite, neutral observer of the domestic world. In response to Henry Austen’s verdict that his sister’s life was ‘singularly barren’ of important events, involving ‘few changes and no great crisis’ (p. 144), Harris presents an Austen enmeshed in the politics of her day and fascinated by the luminaries and notables of Regency culture, where ‘specific satirical allusions to celebrities, scandals, and controversies’ were profoundly ‘significant for her creativity’ (p. xvii). Instead of a fiction working with ‘essential’ human traits, Harris sees an author happy to use her novels for score-settling on behalf of the Burney family, prepared to revise Mansfield Park (1814) at the proof stage in order to piggyback on the success of Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage (1814), satirising the Prince Regent and the duke of Clarence (both future kings – not bad for a mousey, non-political author), and basing a series of characters on the celebrities of her day, with Elizabeth Bennet’s dazzle borrowed from the ‘arch’ and ‘bewitching’ (p. 218) persona that Shakespearean actress Dorothy Jordan had made part of her ‘brand’.