Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic

241 Pages·2013·4.782 MB·English

by  Olivia Murphy (auth.)

Jane Austen the Reader
Jane Austen the Reader
The Artist as Critic
Olivia Murphy
© Olivia Murphy 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-29240-7
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First published 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-45090-9 ISBN 978-1-137-29241-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137292414
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Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction ix
1 ‘From Reading to Writing It Is But One Step’: Jane Austen,
Criticism and the Novel in the Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries 1
2 What’s Not in Austen?: Critical Quixotry in ‘Love and
Freindship’ and Northanger Abbey 30
3 Texts and Pretexts: Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice 53
4 ‘A Good Spot for Fault-Finding’: Reading Criticism in
Mansfield Park 91
5 ‘Hints from Various Quarters’: Emma and the ‘Plan of a Novel’ 121
6 ‘Bad Morality to Conclude With’: Persuasion and the Last Works 153
Appendix: What Happened to Jane Austen’s Books? 177
Notes 183
Bibliography 212
Index 226
v
List of Illustrations
1 Novelists in three Romantic-era novel anthologies: Harrison’s
Novelist’s Magazine (1780–89), Barbauld’s British Novelists (1810)
and Walter Scott’s Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–24) 22
2 Photograph of Godmersham Library Catalogue (1818), n.p. South
Case books: Specimens of the British Poets – Lyell’s Principles of
Geology. Reproduced with the permission of Richard Knight from
a manuscript held by the Knight Collection at Chawton House
Library 179
3 Photograph of loose sheet, found within Godmersham Library
Catalogue (1818), n.p. Reproduced with the permission of Richard
Knight from a manuscript held by the Knight Collection at
Chawton House Library 180
vi
Acknowledgements
The research for this book was made possible by the generosity, advice and
assistance of many people, too many to name here, but to each of whom
I am indebted. Chief among these are Mr James Fairfax, Professor John
White and Ailsa White, and the contributors to the Oxford-Australia Fund
and the University of Sydney travelling scholarships fund. For access to and
kind assistance with their collections I thank the staff and librarians of the
Bodleian Library, the Oxford English Faculty Library, Sir Michael Scholar
and the librarians of St John’s College, Oxford, the Provost and librarians
of Worcester College, Oxford, the British Library, the National Library of
Australia, Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, Anne Garner at the
New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, Clara Drummond and Declan
Kiely at the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Jacqui Grainger at Chawton
House Library.
I am obliged to Richard Knight for permission to include images from
the Knight Collection’s Godmersham Catalogue, housed at Chawton House
Library. The cover image is reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University.
The first inklings of this book formed under the kind and encouraging
supervision of Professor Kathryn Sutherland. I have endeavoured to make
clear where ideas expressed in this book were originally hers – all of my
arguments have been polished and strengthened by her careful criticisms
of its drafts. Professors William Christie, Jocelyn Harris, Margaret Harris
and Gordon McMullan, and Drs Gillian Dow, Freya Johnson and Tiffany
Donnelly each gave expert advice on the work in progress and delivered it
from many faults – those that remain are mine alone. Paula Kennedy and
Ben Doyle at Palgrave were compassionately patient with a neophyte author.
I would not have begun, let alone completed this book, without the sup-
port of my partner Kathryn Wood, and my father Jim Murphy. It was my
mother Janine Murphy who first introduced me to Jane Austen, and this
book is dedicated to her memory.
vii
List of Abbreviations
E J ane Austen, Emma (1816), ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. B. C.
Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
L J ane Austen’s Letters, 4th edn, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford
University Press, 2011)
MP J ane Austen, Mansfield Park (1813), ed. R. W. Chapman, rev.
B. C. Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
MW J ane Austen, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev.
B. C. Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
NA J ane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ed. R. W. Chapman, rev.
B. C. Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
P J ane Austen, Persuasion (1818), ed. R. W. Chapman, rev.
B. C. Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
PP J ane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), ed. R. W. Chapman, rev.
B. C. Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
Recess S ophia Lee, The Recess: or A Tale of Other Times (1783–85), 3 vols
facsimile, foreword J. M. S. Tompkins, intro. Devendra P. Varma
(New York: Arno Press, 1972)
SS J ane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), ed. R. W. Chapman, rev.
B. C. Southam (Oxford University Press, 1988)
TL [ James Austen] The Loiterer, a Periodical Work, First Published at
Oxford in the Years 1789 and 1790 (Dublin: William Porter, 1792)
viii
Introduction
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading
– Jane Austen, PP, 55
‘Mischievous reading’, as one moralist wrote at the turn of the nineteenth
century, ‘is worse than unsophisticated ignorance.’1 This book is about one
of English literature’s most mischievous readers, a reader who was also (and
not coincidentally) one of its greatest writers. How did Jane Austen come to
write six novels that are still widely regarded as some of the highest achieve-
ments of the genre? The answer lies in understanding what Austen read, and
how she read it.
Jane Austen the Reader shows how the books Austen read – and, moreover,
the critical way in which she read them – influenced her writing, and her
innovations in literary realism. Austen’ s role as a critical reader has long been
overlooked, but her contribution to the development of literary criticism is as
significant as her contribution to the development of the novel as a genre. In
fact, the two are intertwined. Austen’ s criticism of novelistic conventions, of
individual works and of abstract – often hostile – commentary on the genre
as a whole inspired her writing, from juvenile squibs to polished masterpieces.
By reading Austen ’s novels for their literary criticism, as much as for their
creativity, we can gain new insights into her artistic practices. We can also
learn to read all kinds of literature in new ways, by reading with Austen. As
Terry Eagleton has written, ‘criticism is not an innocent discipline, and never
has been’.2 Austen’s disruptive, even dangerous criticism reveals her reading
material in a new light, one that is rarely flattering to the established institu-
tions of her time, or the placid assumptions of our own.
Most of the books Austen read have fallen out of fashion, if not out
of print. Aside from specialists in the field, few living people have read,
or would even want to read, the novels of Austen’ s contemporaries and
competitors. Acknowledging this, I have attempted where possible to give
sufficient details of character or context to make my argument clear; more
basic information is readily available online. I have tried, however, to retain
enough quotations to convey the impressions of Austen ’s reading, and the
frequently hilarious experience (whether intended by the author or other-
wise) of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reader. The book’s
many epigraphs I hope will act, therefore, as a sort of twenty-first-century
commonplace book, mining a few of the ‘beauties’ of this literary period for
the delight of the non-specialist.
That Austen was a writer steeped in the literature of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries has long been recognised by scholars as diverse
ix
x Introduction
as Marilyn Butler , Jocelyn Harris , Claudia L. Johnson and Margaret Kirkham.
The assertion that Austen ’s reading and her writing are closely linked has
become a critical commonplace, and has arguably promoted the rediscovery
and reprinting of works by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Inchbald , Ann
Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith . Yet the nature of the relationship between
Austen ’s reading and her novels remains both unclear and unexplained, and
each new identification of Austen ’s allusive practice seems to beg the same
question: why, if Austen ’s writing is so firmly grounded in the literature of
her contemporaries, is her own work so strikingly and consistently different?
Jane Austen the Reader seeks to answer this question by exploring the rela-
tionship between Austen’ s fiction and the wide range of works that can be
seen as the inspiration – or provocation – for her novels. What this shows
is that it was not only as a passive consumer seeking entertainment, nor as
a writer, searching for ideas, that Austen engaged with literature, but as a
critical reader: interrogating and evaluating the literature of her day, and
articulating through her own novels her vision of that evolving form.