Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen by Jocelyn Harris, and: The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen by Jocelyn Harris, and: The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser Natasha Duquette SATIRE, CELEBRITY, AND POLITICS IN JANE AUSTEN, by Jocelyn Harris. Transits: Literature, Thought and Culture, 1650–1850. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. 388 pp. $105.85 cloth; $49.99 paper; $47.50 ebook. THE MAKING OF JANE AUSTEN, by Devoney Looser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 308 pp. $25.90 cloth; $16.44 paper; $19.95 ebook. In the bicentenary anniversary year of Jane Austen’s death, two giants who loom large in the landscape of Austen scholarship—Jocelyn Harris and Devoney Looser—released monographs on Austen and celebrity. Harris’s Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen examines how public figures, such as the Prince Regent, were subtly lampooned in Austen’s novels. Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen traces the construction of Austen as a public figure. As Harris’s title implies and Looser’s argument reveals, celebrity and politics are deeply intertwined. These monographs firmly position Austen as a writer of political import both because she commented incisively on the corruption of national leaders in her own day (Harris) and because her words and her image were later deployed by conservative politicians and progressive political activists alike (Looser). These monographs also illustrate, quite literally, how viewing Austen through a political lens places her work in dialogue with visual culture, from the caricatures that influenced her in her lifetime to the colorful suffragette banners that bore her name. In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, Harris speculates that Austen was commenting in her novels on figures ranging from Captain James Cook to the Prince Regent and his brother William, the Duke of Clarence. It was not uncommon for women writers to remark on public figures. Helen Maria Williams laments Cook’s death, for example, in The Morai: An Ode, which was appended to Andrew Kippis’s Life of James Cook (1788). Harris mentions Kippis’s biography but not Williams’s poem. It would have been interesting to see Austen’s views of public figures assessed alongside the ideas of the much more explicitly political Williams. Harris does comment on Austen’s parallels with Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and, to a lesser extent, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and then observes: “Women who commented upon public affairs were derided as ‘satirists,’ meaning well-read women who combined the intellectual capacity of a bluestocking with the severity of a shrew” (p. 144). Harris partly has in mind John Wilson Croker’s recommendation that Barbauld desist from satire. If Austen ever received similar advice, we have no record of it. Perhaps she escaped reprimand because she veiled her satire in fictional characters. The most fascinating aspect of Harris’s study is the way she traces Austen’s commentary on King George III and his son the Prince Regent. [End Page 357] Due to his father’s illness, the prince ruled as Regent from 1811 to 1820. One of the most striking full-color caricatures Harris reproduces in her study is a George Cruikshank series titled “Gent, No Gent, Re gent!!” (1816), which depicts the prince’s devolution into alcoholism. Missing from Harris’s study are Cassandra Austen’s visual caricatures of British monarchs created by hand for her sister Jane’s History of England (1791). Harris draws a direct line between the mocking of royal buffoonery in published caricatures such as Cruikshank’s and the satire of male vanity in Jane Austen’s novels. Most convincingly, she suggests that in Mansfield Park (1814), King George III’s absence from the throne is signified by Sir Thomas Bertram’s journey to the West Indies, which leaves his household in the hands of his alcoholic son. Even more boldly, Harris argues that in Emma (1815), Austen depicts George III through the ailing and elderly Mr. Woodhouse, which positions Emma as the Prince Regent. The gender-bending here is amusing, but the parallel is less clear. Harris also considers the lives of two women whose fame rose in London during Austen’s lifetime: Dorothy Jordan and Sarah Baartman. The actress Jordan was subjected to misogynist satire in caricatures, and...