Jane Austen: irony and authority

Abstract

Courtship as power play is the subject of all Jane Austen’s novels; playing with — or against — power is the substance of them. And through irony, by pointing to the limits of definitive and assertive language, Jane Austen suggests a powerful and pleasurable relation women in patriarchy may have to discursive authority. The veiling signature insists on the dignity of femininity itself as “Currer Bell,” “George Eliot,” “Fanny Fern,” or “Mrs. Humphry Ward” do not. It implies, as if modestly, that all ladies speak in the same voice — Austen was of course not the only one to write as one —, which with pointedly feminine obliqueness will avoid such blunt signifiers as proper names, and say precisely what one might expect it appropriately to say, and no more. As A Lady, Austen seems now to represent and speak for British civility, perhaps even civilization, at its toniest.