The Talk in Jane Austen ed. by Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg

Abstract

variety of meanings in Latin, some nuanced, some contradictory, and it already exists as a noun in English denoting one’s bodily constitution. On second thought, Latin may yet offer directives both out of and into the grayness of theory by way of the trinity of auctor, habitus and cultus, terms whose multiple ambiguities alone will do. Despite its weaknesses, McCaig’s reading in, and into, the Munro Papers is a lively and welcome cultural studies approach to Munro’s pros­ pects and spectacular progress as a writer starting out in the 1950s. To a lesser degree, it is also welcome as a spirited account of the scholarly joys and frustrations of publishing archival research. Klaus P. Stick University of Ottawa Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg, eds. The Talk in Jane Austen. Edmonton: University o f Alberta Press, 2002. xxiii + 269. cdn $29.95 paper. The fifteen essays in this stimulating collection were originally presented as papers at a three-day conference held at Jasper Park Lodge in May 1999, co-convened by the editors, Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg, together with Juliet McMaster. Participants at the meeting could enjoy spectacular mountain scenery, as well as the talks; readers of the volume, in recompense, have access to expanded and documented versions of the papers. This is an Edmonton production: seven of the contributors are associated with the city or with the University of Alberta and the book is published by the University of Alberta Press. A somewhat garish cover avoids current controversy over the Austen portraits by depicting not the novelist but a young, female professor, dressed in a faux-Regency version of a green academic gown, talking vociferously to her class in front of a purple blackboard inscribed with the names of Austen’s novels. The running-heads for each essay have been oddly dropped to the foot of the page and printed in a tiny, barely legible font; otherwise, the volume is elegantly designed. A brief but suggestive editorial introduction considers the nature and function of talkers and talking in Austen’s novels, and notes the surprising scarcity of previous work on the subject. (Patricia Howell Michaelson’s Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen 252 ISabor [2002], which contains a fine chapter on “Reading Austen, Practicing Speech,” appeared at about the same time as the collection, too late for use by the contributors.) Three of the essays in The Talk in Jane Austen are concerned with single novels: Kay Young, Nora Foster Stovel, and Steven D. Scott all focus on Pride and Prejudice, while Linda Bree writes on Persua­ sion. Austen’s other novels also receive considerable attention, but Sense and Sensibility is somewhat under-represented, while the juvenilia, “Lady Susan,” “The Watsons,” and “Sanditon” are not considered at all. The Talk in Jane Austen is divided into four sections—“Categories and Analysis,” “Aggression and Power,” “Subtexts and Ironies,” and “Specula­ tions and Possibilities”—although the editors note disarmingly that “this grouping is tentative, after-the-fact, and hardly scientific” (xix). Leading off the volume is a characteristically learned and incisive piece by Jocelyn Harris, author of Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (1989), one of the best of the numerous books on Austen to appear in the last two decades. Harris takes three stereotypes of women, “the silent woman, the shrew, and the bluestocking” (3), and considers how Austen rewrites and reformulates them. In relating Austen’s treatment of her female speakers to the age-old suppression of women’s voices, Harris continues the work of her book: Austen’s art of memory extends to her consideration of the ways in which writers from Aristotle on have maintained an embargo on women’s speech. Bruce Stovel, in a deft analysis of true conversation as an exchange of ideas, as opposed to pseudo-conversation in which opinions are merely asserted, ranges widely among the novels. Isobel Grundy focuses on two of Austen’s most egregiously voluble talkers: John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey and Miss Bates in Emma. Grundy also looks at some precursors of Austen’s great talkers, such as the inimitably garrulous Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Kay Young considers...