Austen's Fiction Research Articles

Pride, Prejudice, and Skeptical Intimacy

Pride, Prejudice, and Skeptical Intimacy D. T. Walker (bio) Epistemological perspectives on Jane Austen's fiction have been reworked a good deal lately, but the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of this reworking have yet to be thoroughly explored. Austen's debt to Enlightenment philosophy, once dismissed as superficial and secondhand, has been convincingly established in studies by Felicia Bonaparte, Peter Knox-Shaw, Nicole Coonradt, and others.1 Of these, Bonaparte's reading of Pride and Prejudice (1813) makes the most pointed case for a new Austenian epistemology. Situating that novel firmly within the milieu of eighteenth-century empiricism, Bonaparte argues that its theory of knowledge is a fundamentally skeptical one: Austen stresses, thematically and narratively, the uncertainty of all knowledge claims, painstakingly shapes her syntax and diction to describe appearances and probabilities rather than facts, and presents observation and evidence, more than reasoning or tradition, as the bases of Elizabeth Bennet's moral agency.2 Such readings powerfully clarify the material-historical ground upon which Austen's protagonists must operate: the faculty of judgment itself, long of special interest to her readers, emerges in another recent account as a dynamic tool for the provisional management of ongoing indeterminacies.3 Austen's irony, released from the didactic and moralistic channels into which past criticism has sometimes shunted it,4 once more flourishes in these readings. We recognize an author who builds restless cogitation into her every word and whose authoritativeness as a writer is wielded in part to unsettle the very idea of authority. It is only through incessant inquiry, Bonaparte concludes, that Austen's characters might have any functional semblance of truth "despite the skepticism of the empiricist position, despite the profoundly reflexive reality of its subjective point of view, and despite the relative nature of any truth it claims to find."5 If this thesis has a shortcoming, it coincides with its most notable strength: namely, that the story it tells is so familiar. It is for "primarily epistemological reasons," Bonaparte writes, that Austen concerns herself so minutely with Elizabeth Bennet's thought process—"not as a limitation of character . . . but as [End Page 433] an obstacle to knowledge." Elizabeth's central function in such an account is to surmount epistemological setbacks and assemble (if imperfectly) a working approximation of reality: "Austen's development of her heroine is essentially philosophic, all her other acquisitions being ancillary to this end."6 This is at once satisfying and unsatisfying. Although Bonaparte usefully argues that knowledge in the traditional sense is unattainable, the quest for knowledge—and, notably, the valence and consequences of its absence—look much as they do in classic criticism by D. D. Devlin, Jan Fergus, Tony Tanner, and others.7 Elizabeth forms her judgments, in traditional pedagogical readings, on the basis of reliable authority; for Bonaparte, she judges "despite" the absence of any such authority. Even as it rightly questions the possibility of ultimate intelligibility in Austen's novel, this account accepts it as an epistemic and ethical ideal. Uncertainty, acknowledged to pervade her fictive society to the end, comes across nonetheless as more of a bug than a feature. What would Elizabeth's courtship with Mr. Darcy look like if the skepticism posited at Pride and Prejudice's heart, and the irony roiling its surface, were not philosophical "obstacle[s]" to be overcome, but were afforded dramatic and affective consequence in their own right? The novel's structure seems to demand as much. The culminating scene of the couple's betrothal is as remarkable for sustaining epistemological tensions as for easing romantic ones. Mindsets here are understated, even speculative, and conveyed through deliberate approximation and cliché: "The happiness which [Elizabeth's] reply produced, was such as [Darcy] had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do."8 Yet this mediate view, which calls the psychological continuity of the protagonists openly into question, supports the most jubilant emotional effusion of the novel, comprising "happiness," "gratitude," "pleasure," "delight," and "love" (406–7). The trajectory of Austen's knowledge plot, at the very crux of its conclusion, seems to eschew anything...

"A Pair of Fine Eyes": Jane Austen's Treatment of Sex

"A Pair of Fine Eyes":Jane Austen's Treatment of Sex Alice Chandler It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen's novels are about courtship and marriage. But it is a truth almost as universally ignored that they are also very much about sex. As a social force, as an embodiment of value systems, as an index of personal maturity, the role of marriage in Jane Austen's work has been ably and extensively examined. But as the consummation of sexual attraction between a man and a woman and as the reconciliation of "maleness" and "femaleness," her conception of marriage has seldom been discussed. One reason for the imbalance of emphasis lies in our preconceptions about her personality. Few critics consciously share Marvin Mudrick's view of a Jane Austen armored in impenetrable wit and muslin against the "personally involving aspects of sex" and the "unknown adult commitment of sexual love." But his vision of her as a defensively ironic "genteel spinster" does represent a popular and subtly pervasive stereotype. The phrases he uses about her—"routed by the sexual question," "fogged in bourgeois morality," opposed to "sexual vitality," and in favor of "frigidity as a standard of sexual conduct"—while inaccurate in themselves, serve to suggest the kinds of presuppositions to which Jane Austen has been subject and which have rendered the sexual aspects of her work less visible than they should be.1 A second reason that the sexual element in Jane Austen's fiction has tended to be ignored lies in her art itself. The coolness and deftness of her surface and the interplay of irony and wit have made her novels seem more purely cerebral than they are and have reinforced the presumptions about her temperament. A merciless satirist of false or excessive feeling, she has wrongly been seen as suspicious of all feeling; and her very desire to subsume sex within marriage has somehow made her seem to be endorsing marriage without sex. Because the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction make it almost impossible for the hero and heroine to touch and even, at a certain level of frankness, to speak, [End Page 36] the tendency has been to see the overt levels of plot and dialogue as reflecting her total vision of sex and marriage. And yet her novels are no less subtle and realistic here than in their depiction of any other forms of human relationship. I shall try in this essay to redress the balance and, particularly in the first portion, to single out and emphasize Jane Austen's handling of physical sexuality. Jane Austen's books treat many other serious themes as well: art and nature, feeling and reason, freedom and order, the individual and society. It is precisely because all these issues come to a focus in marriage and are dramatized in her novels through the incidents of wooing and wedding that we cannot leave sex out. If marriage is the ultimate source of social order and the very soul of the status quo, it achieves this harmony only through the disruptive and disorderly force of sex. The predominant novelist of social stability, Jane Austen is also the chronicler of the sexual selectivity that creates it. As a writer whose books all end with marriages, her problem was not that she failed to recognize the foreplay of attraction and repulsion, of looking and liking, of teasing and touching that can lead to matrimony, but that she could not express her views directly. Her indirections, however, are surprisingly subtle and frank. In studying Jane Austen's "indirections'' we must be aware of the limited range of explicit statement allowed to a novelist of her generation. Although the easy eighteenth-century conventions of her youth allowed her to read what she later termed the "impassioned and most exceptionable parts of Richardson," and, as we shall see, the more indelicate portions of Shakespeare, even male authors by the turn of the century could no longer speak freely of plackets and bosoms.2 We have only to look at Scott—by all accounts a clubbish man in company—to see how pervasively these taboos affected fiction. For a woman, of course, the...

Eudora Welty House and Garden

Eudora Welty House and Garden Bridget Edwards, Director April of 2016 marked the tenth anniversary of the public opening of the Eudora Welty House, renamed the Eudora Welty House and Garden (EWHG) in 2013. We celebrated this milestone with a week of special events. We launched it with the inauguration of Second Saturday open hours and a talk by long-time Welty friend Patti Carr Black. Black discussed the curation of her 1995 exhibit, "Other Places," which highlights twenty of Welty's 1930s photographs of New Orleans and New York City, Welty's two other beloved cities outside of Jackson. This exhibit was on display in the Education and Visitors Center during 2016. Maggie Stevenson took the lead in orchestrating our second "pop-up" art exhibit, which presented Welty-themed work done by Mississippi artists. We hosted the Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony on a Sunday, which was sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation, and opened the Welty House for tours to student winners, their families, and teachers. The week also included our annual celebration of Welty's birthday on April 13, which was held in conjunction with our spring plant sale. Over nine hundred people visited the EWHG during the anniversary week. We enthusiastically stretched ourselves in a new direction last year with "Jane Austen in the Eudora Welty Garden." This was our first mini-film series, and it was held in the Camelia Room of the Welty garden. Independent scholar Carolyn Brown proposed the idea in the fall of 2015 and served as the content specialist for the three-part series that aimed to combine Welty's love of Austen's fiction, cinema, and good times in the garden! Emma, Pride and Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version), and the Bollywoood adaptation of the latter, Bride and Prejudice, were shown over three Friday nights in May, September, and October. I served as the [End Page 126] lead staff member on this project, done in partnership with Jackson-based Crossroads Film Society and the Mississippi regional chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (MS-JASNA). The series was funded by a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council with assistance from MS-JASNA. The Museum Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History contributed marketing and technical assistance as well as funds to provide moviegoers with popcorn and lemonade. Dr. Brown spoke at each screening and distributed handouts highlighting Welty's connections to each film. The weather cooperated nicely, and the series was a robust success, drawing just under four hundred moviegoers. We hope to do it again in the fall of 2017. The series was especially successful in drawing younger people to the site and noticeably increased our Facebook "likes"! Education and Outreach Specialist Isabel Gray accomplished a great deal this year, starting with the completion of the EWHG's first Educator's Field Trip Guide for teachers. The guide is 25 pages and includes information for planning a trip, the history of the house and garden, a Welty family timeline, curricular connections showing how a trip meshes with state educational standards across a variety of disciplines, resources for teachers before and after a visit, games, and a host of other activities. Gray's excellent work was fittingly praised by many in the Department. The guide can be found at www.mdah.ms.gov/welty/resources. Gray also curated her first exhibit, which opened to the public in mid-February. Dear Miss Welty: A Rotating Selection of Correspondence is drawn from "fan mail" found in the Welty Collection at the Archives. She chose a wonderfully diverse selection of letters and telegrams to scan and display, ranging from notes by Presidents John Kennedy and Bill Clinton to a 1983 letter by an eight-year-old girl from San Francisco beseeching Welty's understanding and friendship as they endured their common predicament of having such an unusual name. The famed 1943 letter to Welty from William Faulkner is also on display. Gray is currently choosing the next rotation of letters; they will highlight correspondence relating to life in Jackson and area friends and fans. We continue with our quarterly book signings and readings, a collaboration with Lemuria Books. We had...

Jane Austen's Mental Maps

The idea of 'mental maps' can be used to explore the way in which readers reconstruct place and landscape in Austen's fiction. Notwithstanding valuable research on Austen and landscape, that reconstruction is difficult because Austen seldom describes landscape and we are cut off from her assumptions about it by the reshaping of nature by Romanticism and by the Industrial Revolution. Austen had a practical as well as an aesthetic awareness of land, and sought to represent it accurately. Her interest in the landscape is explored by comparison with William Cobbett. To examine how space and landscape in Austen's novels are reimagined today, the article discusses three films based on them: Sense and Sensibility (1995), and versions of Emma produced by ITV and BBC (1996, 2009). In these films space is readily constructed expressively, psychologically or symbolically, but a dimension of Austen's realism is lost, and is replaced with elements of fantasy.

Austen and Translation: National Characters, Translatable Heroines, and the Heroine as Translator

The nexus “Austen and translation” is among the most recurrent in contemporary studies of the author's reception and has generated a significant body of research on renditions of the novels in other languages. This essay contends that, however relevant and valuable, this approach stands in need of critical and methodological revision. Moving beyond a notion of translation as interlinguistic and intertextual transposition, it explores the novelist's canon in light of the emergent concept of “cultural translation.” In this perspective, the essay examines such categories as patriotism and national character, translation of self, translatable heroines, and the heroine as translator, with reference to Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. Through this multiple approach, Austen's fiction becomes visible as deeply involved in metaphorical forms of translation, particularly those concerning the transformation of individuals and selves. The challenge that this essay sets itself, as well as any further reflection on “Austen and translation,” is to verify what happens when we take this nexus beyond an exclusive concern with intertextual transference and questions of adequacy in order to reassess the presence of translation and translatability within the novelist's output.

Matters of fact in Jane Austen: history, location, and celebrity

In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen's novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates. Barchas is the first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen's fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online. According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tension between truth and invention that characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity culture during the Regency, a phenomenon recently accepted by scholars. The names Austen plucks from history for her protagonists (Dashwood, Wentworth, Woodhouse, Tilney, Fitzwilliam, and many more) were immensely famous in her day. She seems to bank upon this familiarity for interpretive effect, often upending associations with comic intent. Barchas re-situates Austen's work closer to the historical novels of her contemporary Sir Walter Scott and away from the domestic and biographical perspectives that until recently have dominated Austen studies. This forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the beloved writer's work.

Becoming the gentleman: British literature and the invention of modern masculinity, 1660-1815

Gentlemen and their Knowledge of the World The Politics of Alexander Pope's Urbanity Popular Writing and the Promise of Gentility from The Connoisseur to Evelina Austen's Fiction in the Age of Commerce Sir Walter Scott and the Gentrification of Empire

The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the Food Plot

This essay argues that modern Anglo-American reading practices are structured by a system of value that defines the social against material appetite. This system of value is at root novelistic, based in an uneven narrative and characterological dichotomy between sexual desire and gustatory appetite, between the marriage plot that gives the nineteenth-century novelistic social its privileged form and what I call “the food plot.” And it is Jane Austen, I argue, who made this dichotomy central to the way we read. Situating Austen's fiction in relation to Malthusian political economy and shifting conceptions of literary character, I trace how the Austenian marriage plot that so crucially shaped the nineteenth-century British novel trains us to be primarily interested in a form of heterosexually structured interiority that measures its depth, in part, through its distance from appetite.

Review ofJane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts(Oxford University and King's College London, 2010)

Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts unifies in freely available, digital format c. 1100 extant manuscript pages written by Jane Austen. The project, which was previewed...

Revisiting Classics: Relevance of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Although many readers and critics of the present era might consider Jane Austen's fictional writings to be outdated and clichéd, her work nevertheless retains an undying appeal. During the last decade of the twentieth century the English-speaking world has experienced an Austen renaissance as it has been treated to a number of film and television adaptations of her work. The reasons for viewers and readers enjoying and identifying with Austen's fiction are numerous. This paper contends that the 'mutual cognitive environment' which Jane Austen so skilfully and dexterously creates in her masterpiece Pride and Prejudice, accounts for its present day relevance and appeal. This claim will be elucidated and established through an analysis of the novel within the framework of the concept of a 'mutual cognitive environment' as explicated by Sperber and Wilson in their discussion of Relevance Theory (2002:249). The contention is prompted by the assumption that a comprehensive account of how this 'mutual cognitive environment' is created by Austen and the process of its interpretation by readers should generate accounts of how this text gives rise to particular effects. Further, the paper maintains that for the present-day reader of Pride and Prejudice this environment is created due to the interaction of contextual assumptions which include knowledge of hierarchical social status, predicament of women in a male-dominated society, and human traits.

Jane Austen on Love and Pedagogical Power

This essay notes initially recent prominence of theories of pedagogy that attempt to "de-mystify" it and reveal troubling power relations, and their subsequent contention that love is impossible in the student-teacher relationship. "Pedagogical" interpretations of Jane Austen's fiction, however, see pedagogy as essential to love. I argue that this is so precisely because of the power dynamics involved; drawing on Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel's analysis of the "Lord-Bondsman," I suggest that Austen portrays the loving relationship as inherently involving the occupation and subsequent exchange of roles as superior and inferior, incarnated as "teacher" and "student."

Historicizing Literary Cognitivism

Historicizing Literary Cognitivism Suzanne Keen Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xv, 179. $35.00. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xiv, 273. $60.00. New books by Alan Richardson and Blakey Vermeule represent the continuing historicizing project of recent works in literary cognitivism published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. As Lisa Zunshine writes in her Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Johns Hopkins, 2010), "investigating the role of universally shared features of human cognition in historically specific forms of cultural production" (2) extends the aims of Raymond Williams in seeing literary art as continuous with everyday life and social institutions, while protecting cognitivists from the charges of ahistorical universalizing. Anxious to correct the impression that cognitive science applied to literature demotes texts to mere records of the human mind/brain in ordinary action, Zunshine asserts that contextual cognitivists aim "not merely to use such artifacts to illustrate a particular scientific hypothesis about one particular feature of human cognition" (3). Instead, cognitivists restore the missing "evolved human brain" to a more integrated matrix of culture, author, reader, and text (8) in discussions of techniques, representations, and influence. Alan Richardson, whose prior work British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) established the impact of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century discoveries about nerves and brains on the imagery of Romantic writers, stakes the claim of "neural historicism": "The question now is not why should students of literature engage with work in the mind and brain sciences but how?" (Neural Sublime, ix). Richardson and Vermeule demonstrate several different modes of how that engagement might be carried out, intersecting with traditional sources and influences studies and with narrative theory, among other modes relevant to students and teachers of eighteenth-century literature. [End Page 535] The books engage with eighteenth-century texts to different degrees. Blakey Vermeule begins disarmingly with an account of her students' resistance to regarding J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as a response to Richardson's Clarissa (ix) (a position her tenth chapter brilliantly defends); indeed, her range of reference in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? is extremely broad, extending from Homer to Ian McEwan. Roughly half the book concerns more conventionally recognizable eighteenth-century fictions. Chapter 5, "The Fantasy of Exposure and Narrative Development in Eighteenth-Century Britain," treats Caleb Williams and Pamela, with glancing references to Pope's poetry. Chapter 6, "God Novels," explores what Vermeule names the "high mind-reading tradition" (129) by examining narrative techniques in Tom Jones and Clarissa. Chapter 7, "Gossip and Literary Narratives," briefly considers Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), Patricia Meyer Spacks's Gossip (1985), Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994), and William Warner's Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). Chapter 8, "What's the Matter with Miss Bates?," discusses Jane Austen's fiction, while chapter 9, "Mind Blindness," discusses Swift and Hogarth in a broader consideration of eighteenth-century satire. Chapter 10 returns to Clarissa by way of its reflections on Coetzee. The eighteenth century and especially the eighteenth-century novel serve as home base for Vermeule's discursive orbits. Alan Richardson's briefer book also demonstrates disparate interests, in the sublime, the status of mental images, apostrophe, Theory of Mind, sibling incest, and the speech known as motherese (or parentese), but its center of gravity is Romanticism. As Richardson writes, each chapter seeks to "reorient an unresolved issue within Romantic studies by recourse to cognitive theory, to indicate new possibilities for cognitive literary criticism, and to introduce readers to a given area in cognitive, neuroscientific, or evolutionary thought" (xii). Richardson's literary historical commitments keep the period at the center of discussions of Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. Burke on the sublime, Bentham on incest avoidance, Herder, Rousseau, and William Smellie on theories of language supply the sources and influences at the heart of Richardson's contextualizing "neural...

“A HINT OF IT, WITH INITIALS”: ADULTERY, TEXTUALITY AND PUBLICITY IN JANE AUSTEN'S LADY SUSAN

In spite of Jane Austen's professed “eye” for an adulteress, comparatively little attention has been paid to adultery and divorce as themes and contexts of her fiction. Her unpublished epistolary novel Lady Susan has a distinctive status in Austen's oeuvre, recognized as being exemplary of her “style” and yet atypical of her later achievement. A neglected context for the novel is the extensive reporting of adultery trials in contemporary print culture and the moral panic concerning adultery in the 1780s and 1790s, focusing initially on the adulteress as the brazen woman of fashion and later as a figure of sentimentalized abjection. A particularly notorious case, that involving Lady Henrietta Grosvenor and George III's brother, the Duke of Cumberland, is directly alluded to in Lady Susan. The textual strategies of adultery trial literature, particularly its emphasis on indirection through the use of detail or “hint”, had a long-term influence on the development of Austen's fiction and her positioning of herself as a professional writer after the 1790s.

Haunted Heroines: The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery

Haunted Heroines:The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery Kathleen Ann Miller (bio) Using its popular competition "The Great Wednesday Compare," John Mutford's literary online discussion forum "The Book Mine Set" posted a challenge in 2007, asking readers to vote on whether Jane Austen or L. M. Montgomery, best known for her canonical children's classic Anne of Green Gables (AGG), was their favorite author.1 One blogger responded, "Wow, I'm really surprised at the number of people picking Montgomery over Austen! Although L. M. Montgomery has a huge place in my heart, I'm going to have to vote for Jane again. . . . It makes me sad not to be able to vote for Montgomery, which I would have done if she'd been up against almost anyone else." Many bloggers offered similar sentiments; the "Sophie's choice" of selecting between Montgomery and Austen proved, for many, almost too much to bear.2 By examining message boards and blog posts, we can see that, especially for female readers, these two authors share a hallowed place in the collective memory, due to girls' culture and youthful reading. Both authors have created texts that female readers read and re-read, generation after generation; and their works have earned not only devotion, but international popularity and successful film and merchandising industries. Yet, despite a host of similarities linking them, there have been few critical discussions that consider Austen and Montgomery together. According to Miriam Rheingold Fuller, whose "Jane of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Reworking of Austen's Legacy" (2009) is the first critical study to undertake an extended comparison of Austen and Montgomery, "Many 'Janeites' are 'Anneites' too, and for very similar reasons: Austen and Montgomery both write domestic romances in rural settings; both critique society's mistreatment of women; and, most significantly, both create compelling, memorable heroines." She continues, [End Page 125] The connections between Anne Shirley, Austen's heroines, and Montgomery herself are extremely complex. . . . I believe Montgomery enjoyed Austen's novels because she strongly identified—or in some cases wished to identify—with her heroines, and that she incorporates many elements of Austen's plots and heroines in the first three Anne books3 to help rewrite her own life through writing Anne's.4 Fuller claims that Anne's experience rewrites the romantic scenarios of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot in order to "alter them to reshape her fictional self and to comment on Austen's treatment of her heroines". Although Fuller does cite examples connecting Montgomery's Anne to other heroines in Austen's fiction, Fuller is most concerned with Montgomery's repetition and manipulation of Austen's courtship narratives, in both her fiction and her journals. In her essay's opening, though, Fuller also asserts that Anne is like an Austen heroine other than Elizabeth, Emma, or Anne, because she "frightens herself with Gothic fancies." Here Fuller makes a direct allusion to the heroine of Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland, and indirectly references one of the most memorable scenes in Anne of Green Gables (AGG, 1908), the incident of the Haunted Wood. Although Austen's Northanger Abbey offers an extended satire of the Gothic genre, Montgomery uses the brief, but unforgettable, Gothic intrusion of the Haunted Wood for parodic and didactic purposes similar to Austen's. In both Northanger Abbey and AGG, Gothic intrusions into these realistic female bildungsromane serve as a means of social instruction for the heroines and discipline for their Gothic imaginations. Moreover, these texts suggest that correct reading practices can lead to right uses of reason in the social sphere and that novels can further the goal of female education—both for their heroines and for their readers. Furthermore, Austen and Montgomery posit that once the false teachings of Gothic romances—their improper reading and imaginative practices—are swept away, then the heroines will be prepared for their own real-life romantic courtship narratives. Ultimately, though each writer cautions against letting the female imagination run wild, neither writer denies the power of the imagination nor suggests that a woman's life can be negotiated through reason...

Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (review)

Reviewed by: Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History Olivia Murphy Jillian Heydt-Stevenson , Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. x + 275. £40 hardback. 1 4039 6410 6. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, which addresses a range of issues and offers several new and persuasive readings of Jane Austen's novels, is nevertheless most significant for successfully exploding the persistent cliché that there is no sex in Jane Austen. 'Prostitution and pornography, sodomy and syphilis' are some of the subjects Heydt-Stevenson sets out to recover from centuries of criticism hampered by fond images of a 'dear Aunt Jane' who is allowed to be gently and innocently humorous, but never bawdy, outrageous or grotesque. This work of recovering the earthier aspects of Austen's fiction should enrich our reading of the novels by making her less-polite language – her hints, winks and nudges – transparent. As useful and entertaining as this project of recovery is, it is Heydt-Stevenson's skilful articulation of Austen's technique of juxtaposition and comparison (the 'unbecoming conjunctions' of the title), which could be claimed as the book's most important contribution to Austen scholarship. Austen's strategic use of doubling and contrasting in her novels has been noted by many critics, and indeed for a long time it routinely informed analyses of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions moves beyond these critical commonplaces to investigate the novels' incessant shadowing – of Elizabeth Bennet by her sister Lydia and by Charlotte Lucas; of Fanny Priceby Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park; of Persuasion's Mrs. Smith by Mrs. Clay – as a kind of structural double entendre, whose more troubling, secondary meaning has been overlooked by a determinedly naïve, protectively censorial readership. Through the prism of the unbecoming conjunction (a phrase lifted from Persuasion's disconcerting examination of the grieving Mrs. Musgrove's 'fat sighings') Heydt-Stevenson sets out to explore three interconnected subjects: various kinds of fashionable consumption in Austen's novels; their emphasis on physicality and the relationship between mind and body; and the novels' bawdy content and suppressed sexuality. The book's study of fashionable consumption demonstrates the utility of careful historicizing in recovering meaning from the seeming minutiae of Austen's novels. The usefulness of this approach is most apparent in Heydt-Stevenson's discussion of objects such as portraits in miniature, filigree work and hair jewellery, which for Austen's contemporaries were charged with emotional, political and social significance. While at times this examination of numerous disparate forms of conspicuous Regency-era consumption seem to be somewhat tangential to the book's central argument, it is nevertheless interesting in its own right, and provides an illuminating historical gloss on Austen's novelistic representations of her consuming society. Of the various kinds of fashionable consumption the book touches on, hair jewellery (that is, rings and brooches decorated with woven human hair) stands out as most successfully intertwining the book's concerns with the body and its place in Austen's fiction. As Heydt-Stevenson argues, for Austen's contemporaries hair jewellery was a popular sentimental commodity. Those manufacturing the jewellery (ostensibly out of hair provided for them by their customers) capitalized on the vogue for demonstrations of sensibility, but also aroused anxieties in consumers about the provenance of the hair in their jewellery: substitutions were presumably easy to effect and almost impossible to trace. Heydt-Stevenson analyses the function of hair jewellery in Sense and Sensibility, where the hair in Edward Ferrars's ring is at different times assumed to have come from the heads of three different women. Like the novel's frequent use of mistaken identities and substitutions (particularly of lovers), hair jewellery was at once highly emotionally charged, and symbolic of the fact that – like the market for goods – the marriage market was essentially impersonal. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions next seeksto recover the 'bodies' of characters within Austen's fiction, particularly the responsive bodies of her heroines and anti-heroines. This strategy of feminist criticism comes rather late to studies of Austen, who has been generally considered an author unusually reticent about her...

Jane Austen and the Gentrification of Commerce

In fifth chapter of Persuasion (1817), Jane Austen's narrator describes desolation of heroine Anne Elliot as Anne contemplates impending departure from family's ancestral home in Somersetshire countryside. The move, to smaller rented quarters in city of Bath, is a sad one. In language that has come to haunt criticism of novel, narrator observes: Anne, though dreading possible heats of September in all white glare of Bath, and grieving to forego all influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in country, did not think that, every thing considered, she wished to remain (23). The heroine's mood is as mercurial as it is doleful in span of a sentence moving between dread, regret and resignation. Yet what has always struck critics is way Somersetshire scenery seems to function here, and elsewhere, as a kind of objective correlative for not only Anne's but also Austen's mood. Autumnal is word used to describe Persuasion, last novel Austen completed before death and work that critics often call most personal. There is no need to rehearse reasons why this critical commonplace, linking Anne's autumn with Austen's, is teeming with fallacies a judgment Claudia Johnson rendered some time ago.1 Rather, question that must be asked is: what does perceived autumnal mood of novel have to do with its supposed critique of aristocratic authority? The question asks us to consider relationship between novel's political and personal dimensions, and it also requires that we negotiate a more complex politics than is often assumed. For once one looks into it, regret Anne expresses appears to be related to heroine's of degradation in family's social position, a feeling of injured pride articulated moment Anne crosses threshold of apartment in Bath. Though she acknowledges that new home was undoubtedly best in Camden-place, she sigh[s] that her father should feel no degradation in his change; should see nothing to regret in duties and dignity of resident land-holder (90-91). Such sentiments are commonly expressed in Austen's fiction, but what is their role in a novel whose other distinguishing feature is its attack on aristocratic prerogative? Most attempts at historicizing Persuasion focus on novel's exaltation of Captain Wentworth, a naval officer and man of sense whose worth trumps claims of lineage (167). The novel's hero has even acquired what we might call meta-heroic status within Austen criticism. A typical commentator singles out Wentworth as the only Jane Austen hero who lifts a finger to better his

Classics and trash: reading austen in the 1990s

This essay investigates the interaction between high art and popular ulture as it affects the reception and the status of Jane Austen as a cultural icon of he 1990s. Austen's writing contains its own version of this discordant elationship. In particular,Mansfield ParkandEmmaare texts which draw attention to the act of reading and highlight the embedded scripts of other, popular narratives and genres which inform them. The discrimination between reading practices and communities thus constitutes a site of debate common both to Austen's contemporaries and to the 1990s. In this context current controversies surrounding “Austenmania” are examined with reference to a range of populist approaches to Austen's fiction, including discussion groups on the World Wide Web, sequels to the novels and analysis of two cinematic adaptations ofEmmawhich adopt divergent interpretative positions.

Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (review)

REVIEWS 99 Loaisel; he quotes copiously from it, under various categories: "Un romantique 'préromantique ,'" "L'Ossianisme tréogatien," "Débat sur les sources de René et Atala," and so on. It is here especially that, faced with evaluations like "un des plus féconds parmi les auteurs de troisième ordre du xvrae siècle finissant" (Baldensperger, quoted on p. 54), "Loaisel tout d'abord est de ceux que leur médiocrité même rend curieusement sensibles à toutes les influences ambiantes" (Mornet, quoted on p. 73), and "Dolbreuse ... œuvre médiocre, mais d'une saveur singulière" (Monglond, quoted on pp. 88-89), we begin to question whether this author was worth still one more study. It is not that Giménez intends to confute these severe critics. He admits that Loaisel's besetting sin is "prolixité" and that "sentimentalité" is his "marque propre" (p. 14): why then does he keep hammering away at what is so clear anyway? Why not in his overview subordinate all the obvious flaws to a celebration of the critics' and his own gradual uncovering of whatever it is that does not allow us to forget about Loaisel? The third part of the book, though still tributary to many previous critics and scholars, who are quoted abundantly, is more personal. This section, the book's principal contribution to ongoing Loaisel studies, is a "thematic" reading of his best-known work, Dolbreuse ou l'homme du siècle, ramené à la vérité par le sentiment et par la raison (1785). Giménez quotes much from the text as he goes along; he compares Loaisel's treatment of natural scenery, the feeling of melancholy, temptations of the flesh, humiliation and redemption, and many other themes, to that of better-known writers; he makes reference to all the standard critical works relevant to the various themes and motifs he considers. In a day when, I fear, practically all our students and most of our colleagues find even La Nouvelle Héloïse unreadable, there is little chance that many will be led by this study to pick up Loaisel's derivative and much paler praise of conjugal love, study of sexual sin and repentance, and examination of wounded sensibility. But Giménez's study points out that the specialist, if he or she has not already done so, simply must pay attention to Loaisel. Giménez makes it very plain that Dolbreuse is (along with narratives by such as Baculard d'Arnaud and Sade) a key text in the series that starts with Rousseau and then via René and Oberman connects the eighteenth-century roman sensible with the nineteenth-century fictional mainstream. In the first Appendix Giménez gives a highly interesting summary of the recently rediscovered Héloïse et Abeilard, ou Les Victimes de l'Amour of Loaisel. One wishes that he had added a more extensive critical evaluation of the literary merits of this 1803 historical novel, written almost at the end of Loaisel's career. All sorts of tables and indexes, which make the wealth of information available in this compendium very easy to find, conclude the volume. Charles A. Porter Yale University Maaja A. Stewart. Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1993. xi + 209pp. ISBN 0-8203-1540-0. In an era of books composed by hastily stringing together guest lectures, conference papers, and essays first published elsewhere, Maaja A. Stewart has resisted the current mode of academic production and written a single, sustained, densely layered treatment of the political and economic realities informing Jane Austen's fiction—with particular attention to gender as a constitutive element of those realities. She places Austen in the 100 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 historical context of the "second phase of British imperialism," which she dates from the battle of Plassey (1757) to the 1813 Charter Act—a period marked by the American Revolution, the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, and the passage in Parliament of a bill abolishing the slave trade. She sets out to investigate how imperialism affected women's lives and how contemporary narratives registered as...

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Corruption: Ehtics and Power in Florence, 1600–1770. By Jean‐Claude Waquet.Four Cheshire Townships in the Eighteenth Century. By Charles F. Foster.The Making of Johnson's Dictionary 1746–1773. By Allen Reddick.The First Women Actresses: Women and Drama 1600–1700. By Elizabeth Howe.Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru. Edited by John R. Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe and Anthony McFarlane.The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787: the Enlightenment Debate on Toleration. By Geoffrey Adams.The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. General Editor: Paul Langford.Revenue and Reform. The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773. By H. V. Bowen.A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, 1791 and 1991. Edited by Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen.The Sociable Humanist. The Life and Works of James Harris, 1709–1780. By Clive T. Probyn.Heder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment. By Robert E. Norton.Ossian Revisited. Edited by Howard Gaskill.Jane Austen. By Meenakshi Mukherjee.The Language of Jane Austen. By Myra Stokes.Reading Character in Jane Austen's Emma. By Marjet Berendsen.Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen's Fiction. By Glenda Hudson.Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon. By Jane Austen.Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion. Edited by Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells.Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth‐Century English Novel. By Madeleine Kahn.Rhetorics of Order / Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature. Edited by J. Douglas Canfield and J. Paul Hunter.The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth‐Century Verse Epistle. By William C. Dowling.Chracter and Consciousness in Eighteenth‐Century Fiction. By Elizabeth Kraft.Seductive Forms: women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. By Ros Ballaster.Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825. Edited with an introduction by Jeffrey N. Cox.The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 1771–1772, 1773–1776, 1777–1781. The Hyde Edition. Edited by Bruce Redford.Silence and Sound: Theories of Poetics from the Eighteenth Century. By Richard Bradford.Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art. By Ruben Quintero.Designs on Turth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock‐Epic. By Gregory G. Colomb.The Dream of my Brother: An Essay on Johnson's Authority. By Frederic V. Bogel.Samuel Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales. Edited by Gwin Kolb.Dr Johnson: Interviews and Recollections. Edited by Norman Page.A Dr Johnson Chronology. By Norman Page.Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism. By Edward TomarkenThe Eighteenth‐Century Short Title Catalogue (microfiche edition).Reading william Blake. By Stephen C. Behrendt.Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. By Jon Mee.Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. By Lorraine Clark.Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan: ‘The Intelligencer’ Edited by James Woolley.Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteeth Century, 275.Le Cæur et la Raison. Recueil d'études sur le dix‐huitième Siècle. By Roland Mortier.Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 278.Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Séville. By John Dunkley.Journal d'observations sur les principaux hôpitaux et sur quelques prisons d'Angleterre (1787). By Jacques Tenon.Dictionnaire des Constituants. By Edna Hindie Lemay and collaborators.Correspondance générale d'Helvétius, volume III. Edition critique préparée par Peter Allan, Alan Dainard, Marie‐Thérèe Inguenaud, Jean Orsoni et David Smith.The Press in the French Revolution. Edited by Harvey Chisick.Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics. By Lesley Sharpe.Vernunft als Weisheit: Studien zum späten Lessing. By Ingrid Strohschneider‐Kohrs.Early Modern Germany, 1477–1806. By Michael Hughes.Gelehrsamkeit und Leidenschaft. Das Leben der Ernestine Christine Reiske 1735–1798. By Anke Bennholdt‐Thomsen and Alfredo Guzzoni.Romanticism and the Sciences. Edited by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine.Clergé et pastorale en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle: le diocèse de Londres. By Viviane Barrie‐Curien.The Scottish Interior. Georgian and Victorian Decor. By Ian Gow.Hogarth. By Ronald Paulson. ‘Modern Moral Subject’ 1697–1732.‘The Virtuous Tribe of Arts and Sciences’: Studies in the Eighteenth‐Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts. Edited by D. G. C. Allan and John L. Abbott.Discourses on Art. By Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by Pat Rogers.Allan Ramsay 1713–1784. By Alastair Smart.Recollections of R. J. S. Stevens. An Organist in Georgian London. Edited by Mark Argent.

Sibling love and incest in Jane Austen's fiction

Acknowledgements References to Jane Austen's Novels Preface to the 1998 Reprint Introduction Antecedents and Successors Incestuous Sibling Relationships: Mansfield Park, Emma and Sense and Sensibility Sisterhood, Education and Marriage Fairy Godmothers and Ugly Sisters: the Cinderella Motif in Austen's Fiction Patrimonial Issue: Dutiful and Prodigal Brothers Notes Index