The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas Miranda Burgess Janine Barchas, The Lost Books of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019. Pp. 284. $35.00 cloth. For at least the past two decades, the characteristic gesture of new books on Jane Austen's novels has been the pivot: a turning away from the critical tradition coupled with a movement toward new arguments, both motions fluid and reflexive. From the standpoint of recent scholarship, Austen criticism has had much to rethink. The posthumous, possibly anxious, family hagiography that shaped Victorian understandings of Austen's novels was met by mid-twentieth-century critics' pathologization of her irony, which then gave way, perhaps dialectically, to an equation between this presumed disinterest and a culpable disengagement, especially from history.1 Twenty-first-century Austens have been less "safe," to borrow [End Page 323] from Clifford Siskin and Deidre Lynch's characterizations of the novels, than this miniaturizing tradition had assumed: less proper, perhaps meaner or queerer, certainly more accommodating to the range of readerly imagination.2 The key word here is "more." The best critical pivots emphasize the capaciousness of novels that do a great deal more than preach to their readers and chasten their heroines, even as they continue to be convincingly read as doing these things. An especially strong thread in recent Austen scholarship has been reception history, precisely because of its additive, generous quality. Lynch, Claudia Johnson, and Devoney Looser, in particular, have detailed the diversity of Austen reception, low, high, and middlebrow, luxurious and Puritan, popular and canonical, considering the transmedial repackaging of plots and characters as well as the varieties of readers.3 Janine Barchas's illuminating The Lost Books of Jane Austen extends this thread in Austen scholarship by making a pivot of its own, turning not only toward new arguments but also, and more importantly, toward striking methodological innovations. Like Looser, Barchas emphasizes material culture as an object of reception study. Barchas's specific focus, however, is the vicissitudes of letterpress. The opening sentence of Lost Books conveys her main claim: that "Cheap books make authors canonical" (ix). In five wide-ranging, detailed chapters, Barchas investigates the print-historical scaffolding of Austen's canonicity: the publisher ingenuity and inventive range of uses that made her work ubiquitous at a time when, as William St Clair has pointed out, the terms of authorial copyright made it cheaper and easier to reprint old books than to publish new ones.4 The first chapter of Lost Books tracks the emergence and fate of the Austen paperback, from the Victorian dime novels and (apparent) penny dreadfuls that first "created… the People's Jane" to the mid-twentieth-century Penguins and Pocket Books that made parallel claims to stripped-down wartime worthiness and disposable portability, foregrounding the text over the book-object that contained it (44). Here we importantly see canonicity emerge in lockstep with ephemerality. The subsequent chapters examine the marketing of disposable editions as product tie-ins, especially by soap companies drawn by, and contributing to, Austen's sanitary reputation; the purchase of one publisher's worn stereotype plates by others for reissue in new bindings, the consequent downcycling of editions from luxury to disposable as the plates were used and reused, and the recirculation of cover designs across low- and higher-priced editions over decades; the uses of Austen in Christian educational settings and the way the resulting binding conventions were redeployed to help consolidate suffragist and other radical audiences; the emergence of the prestige paperback, or throwaway book as serious, re-readable volume; and the "pinking" of Austen in cover images aimed at addressing, or perhaps establishing, new and specialized types of female reading audiences, a scene that also comprehends the feminization of the English major in American colleges after 1960 via illustrations and jacket blurbs that reasserted Austen's safety against the threats posed by the counterculture (232). As she unfolds these histories, Barchas speculates on the process of pruning that ultimately narrowed the list of canonical novelists from those inhabiting "books worth keeping" solely for their historical interest, and therefore not often enough kept, to those whose survival no longer...