Jane Austen’s Lovers and Other Studies in Fiction and History from Austen to le Carré

254 Pages·1988·24.588 MB·English

by  John Halperin (auth.)

JANE AUSTEN'S LOVERS AND OTHER STUDIES
IN FICTION AND HISTORY FROM AUSTEN TO
LE CARRE
By the same author
THE LANGUAGE OF MEDITATION
EGOISM AND SELF-DISCOVERY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
TROLL OPE AND POLITICS
GISSING: A LIFE IN BOOKS
C. P. SNOW: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN
Editor
THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL
JANE AUSTEN: BICENTENARY ESSAYS
TROLL OPE CENTENARY ESSAYS
Works edited
Gissing, DENZIL QUARRIER
Gissing, THE EMANCIPATED
Gissing, WILL WARBURTON
Gissing, IN THE YEAR OF JUBILEE
James, THE GOLDEN BOWL
Meredith, THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL
Trollope, LORD PALMERSTON
Trollope, SIR HARRY HOTSPUR OF HUMBLETHW AITE
Trollope, DR. WORTLE'S SCHOOL
Trollope, THE BELTON ESTATE
Trollope, THE AMERICAN SENATOR
Jane Austen's Lovers
and Other Studies in Fiction and
History from Austen to Ie Carre
John Halperin
Centennial Professor of English
Vanderbilt University
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
© lohn Halperin 1988
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998 978-0-333-43443-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written perrnission.
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be Iiable to crirninal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
First published 1988
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LID
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Typeset by Wessex Typesetters
(Division of The Eastem Press Ud)
Frome, Somerset
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Halperin, lohn
lane Austen's Lovers and Other Studies in Fiction and
History from Austen to le Carre
1. English fiction - 19th century-
History and criticism 2. English fiction -
20th century - History and criticism
I. Title
823'.009 PR861
ISBN 978-1-349-19334-9 ISBN 978-1-349-19332-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19332-5
In Memoriam
Gordon N. Ray, 191~1986
and
Donald R. Howard, 1927-1987
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 Jane Austen's Lovers 7
2 The Novelist as Heroine in Mansfield Park: A Study in
Autobiography 27
3 On The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 48
4 Trollope's Conservatism 57
5 Trollope's Phineas Finn and History 85
6 Trollope, James, and the International Theme 108
7 On The Golden Bowl 118
8 Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, and A Pair of Blue
Eyes 130
9 How Gissing Read Dickens 141
10 Eminent Victorians and History 154
11 Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf: Another View 174
12 Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James 193
13 Barbara Pym and the War of the Sexes 201
14 Between Two Worlds: The Novels of John Ie Carre 215
Index 239
vii
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following for kind permission to reprint the
essays which appear in this volume: the editors of Studies in
English Literature for "Jane Austen's Lovers" (vol. 25, Autumn
1985, 719-36); the editors of Modern Language Quarterly for "The
Novelist as Heroine in Mansfield Park: A Study in Autobiography"
(vol. 44, June 1983, 136-56); the Oxford University Press for "On
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," from the World's Classics edition of
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith, edited by John
Halperin (1984, pp. vii-xviii); Duke University Press for "Trollope's
Conservatism," South Atlantic Quarterly (vol. 82, Winter 1983, 56-
78); the editors of English Studies for "Trollope's Phineas Finn and
History" (vol. 59, Spring 1978, 121-37); the Modern Humanities
Research Association and the editors of the Yearbook of English
Studies for "Trollope, James, and the International Theme" (vol. 7,
January 1977, 141-7); the New American Library for "On The
Golden Bowl," from the Meridian and New American Library
edition of The Golden Bowl by Henry James, edited by John
Halperin (1972, 1973, 1975, pp. 549-60); the Modern Humanities
Research Association and the editors of Modern Language Review
for "Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, and A Pair of Blue Eyes" (vol.
75, October 1980,738-45); Duke University Press for "How Gissing
Read Dickens," South Atlantic Quarterly (vol. 83, Summer 1984,
312-22); the editors of the Virginia Quarterly Review for "Eminent
Victorians and History" (vol. 56, Summer 1980, 433--54); the editors
of the Dalhousie Review for "Bloomsbury and Virginia W 001£:
Another View" (vol. 59, Autumn 1979, 426-42); Louisiana State
University Press for "Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James," Henry
James Review (vol. 7, Autumn 1986, 45-8); Macmillan Press Ltd
for "Barbara Pym and the War of the Sexes," from The Life and
Work of Barbara Pym, ed. Dale Salwak (London and Iowa City,
1987, pp. 88-100); Duke University Press for "Between Two
Worlds: The Novels of John Ie Carre," South Atlantic Quarterly
(vol. 79, Winter 1980, 17-37).
I should also like to thank the following for encouragement,
advice, or help in preparing the present volume and its contents
for publication: Frances Arnold, Edith Baras, Joanne Ferguson,
Oliver Ferguson, Roma Gill, Donald Greene, Elaine P. Halperin,
viii
Acknowledgments ix
Diana Hobby, Glenda Hudson, Alberta Martin, Douglas Matthews,
Mary Sue McAlister, Florence Muncy, Ira B. Nadel, Hershel Parker,
Heddy Richter, Valery Rose, Dale Salwak, and Virginia Shaefer.
J.H.
Introduction
We murder to dissect.
- Wordsworth
These essays were written between 1971 and 1985, and published
between 1972 and 1987. With only a few exceptions they reflect
my interest in historical and biographical studies, and any reader
who may be hoping to find in this volume a dazzling display of
critical virtuosity is going to be disappointed. One might perhaps
detect a vaguely structuralist approach in the essay on The Golden
Bowl, written in 1971 as the introduction to a paperback edition of
the novel; like most students of literature who came of age in the
1960s, I read the structuralists as they published, and there is
some concern in that essay with figurative language and with the
relation of the novel's operative metaphors to each other and to
the wider issues of the text in which they appear. In the essay on
Barbara Pym, the latest of those in this volume to be written,
there are, admittedly, similar concerns - and I must confess that I
found that piece, written in 1985, the most difficult of this group
to compose; by the time of its submission I had largely lost
interest in the approach it had to take, which is that of a "pure"
reading of several novels. For, as structuralism gave way to
deconstruction and worse, the new movements in textual criticism
struck me as increasingly faddish and irrelevant. By the 1980s I
was absorbed by the only concern which now seems to me to
justify the profession of criticism, a concern which can, at times,
enable the critic to make a contribution to contemporary,
"relevant" elucidation of classic literature - not so much the
relation of the component parts of a text to one another, but
rather the illumination of the historical and biographical milieux
in which texts are brought into being and by which their nature is
determined: the relation, to put it bluntly, of art to "real" life. For
the last fifteen years, as most of these essays may testify, my
overriding interest has been in the connections between literature
and the cultural moment at which it is composed and by which its
shape is molded.
This may seem to some an ossified approach to artistic endeavor
at a time when the new schools of criticism are trumpeting forth
1