Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood

408 Pages·2005·5.05 MB·English

by  Kathryn Sutherland

Jane Austen’s Textual Lives
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Jane Austen’s Textual Lives:
From Aeschylus to Bollywood
KATHRYN SUTHERLAND
1
3
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Preface
This book traces three histories which impel one another with varying
degrees of attention through the twentieth century. One is a history of Jane
Austen’slifeandworksthroughtheirtextualdissemination;asecondoVersa
picture of the development of English studies in which textual criticism’s
original and primary place is recovered; and a third is a more occasional
investigation, by means of speciWc example, of the history of Oxford Uni-
versity Press and its role in shaping a canon of English texts. But Wrst and
foremost, this is a book about Jane Austen, an author who with very few
others occupies a position within English-speaking cultures which is both
popular and canonical, accessible and complexly inaccessible, Wxed and
certain,yetwonderfullyamenabletoshiftsofsensibilityandculturalassump-
tions. What we would now call her Regency production values—a pleasant
blur of stately homes, English gardens, and empire-line dresses—coexist
comfortably with a high critical appreciation of the modernist import of
her technical innovations as a novelist; while the reassuringly limited pre-
occupations of her leisured middle classes combine eVortlessly with lurid
insights into sexual deviance and colonial misappropriation. Her novels’
standing appears as decisively settled as our appetite for their reinvention is
determinedly unappeased and unsettling. Since the mid-1990s, it seems, she
hasrarely been out of thenewspapers, receiving thekind of media attention
any living writer might envy.
My main enquiry in this world of familiar impermanence has been into
thosethingswehavetakenforgrantedaspermanentorpriortoenquiryand
interpretation—assimplythere.BythisImeanJaneAusten’stexts.Mysubject
is the ways in which Jane Austen is transmitted and transformed through
texts: her manuscripts, the early published volumes, modern editions, biog-
raphies, continuations, and Wlm versions; my concern is with the cultural
context of each of these and with the kinds of authority invested in them.
Jane Austen’s rise to celebrity status at the end of the nineteenth century
waseVectivelymanagedbythefamilyforwhomtheinventionandpreserva-
tionofacomfortableVictorianreputationforadisruptiveandwittyRegency
novelist was of paramount importance. Between 1870, when James Edward
vi Preface
Austen-Leigh’s biographical Memoir of his aunt Wrst appeared, and 1913, the
year in which William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (James Edward’s
youngest son and grandson) published their expanded Life and Letters, Jane
Austen was marketed sentimentally (and on occasion cynically) as the lady
novelistoftheHampshirecountryside.Theimagewasmaintainedinpartby
the anxious family censorship and edited release or suppression of the
manuscript writings left unpublished in Austen’s lifetime—the irreverent
juvenilia and the later experimental Wction. With R. W. Chapman’s Clar-
endon Press edition of The Novels of Jane Austen in 1923 the pendulum
swung to the opposite extreme, and a previously accessible and increasingly
popular body of Wction was subjected to the kind of textual probing and
provingreservedtillthenbyscholarsforClassicalGreekandRomanauthors
obscured by centuries of attrition. Chapman’s heavyweight intervention
inaugurated simultaneously the modern textual critical engagement with
Jane Austen and with the novel form, but it was to be almost Wfty years
before theClarendonPress deemedit necessary to recalibratethereputation
ofanotherpopularEnglishnovelistinthisway.Furthermore,withtheAusten
record settled according to a pre-First-World-War standard for Classical
texts, Chapman’s edition held the Weld for the rest of the twentieth century.
Chapman’s text was (and is) Jane Austen’s text.
Untilrelativelyrecently,ithasnotbeenconsiderednecessaryorfashionable
to think critically about the work that editing does. Yet editions of literary
texts are textual performances as much as any other critical reading; and the
cultural and interpretative identity of editing is as fundamental to the
experience of producing and reading literature as it is to the performance
andappreciationofmusic.Wemightgofurtherandsaythatediting’scritical
performances eVectively forestall subsequent encounters by establishing text
as a selected and censored space whose workings are largely undeclared.
Chapman’s Austen text did massive ideological work scarcely recognized in
the subsequent intensive critical industry of the second half of the twentieth
centuryandoddlyexemptfromtheculturalpurposesthatAusten’snovelsand
Austen studies were at that time made to serve. So my concern is with Jane
Austen’stextualidentitiesasameanstoexplorethewiderissueofwhattextis
andwhatitmeanstostabilizeanddestabilizeparticulardeWnitionsoftextand
particular texts. It seems at the very least worth considering how Austen
studies have combined so successfully two contradictory impulses: one, a
belief in the eYcacy of close reading to deliver diverse interpretations; the
other,anuncriticalconWdenceintheauthorityofthetextonthepagetobear
Preface vii
andresistthisscrutiny.Somysubjectiseditingasapriorcriticalactivity,one
thatcircumscribeseverysubsequentcriticalengagement;anditisanattempt
to instil textual scepticism and broadmindedness. The integration of
textual criticism as a usual and on occasion a leading activity within literary
criticismextendsfarbeyondtherangeofthisbook;butIhopethecaseforit
is made here.
The Wrst three chapters oVer three speciWc encounters with three kinds of
textual work and with the problems and clues they present: the cultural
reparation served by Chapman’s edition of the novels; the fractured and
partisanrecordofalifeprovidedbyfamilybiography;andtheactsofwriting
performed by the manuscript hand. Each poses and attempts to address a
particularquestion.InthecaseofChapter1thebasicquestionmightbeput
like this: how good is the authoritative Chapman edition of Austen; but
equally what are the values implicit in asking the question? In Chapter 2
I consider the resistant and repetitive material of the Austen biography
industry. Jane Austen’s enduring appeal as the subject for biography both
deWesandisfuelledbythepaucityoftheevidence;butwhatisthenatureof
the evidence, how has it been constructed and in response to what criteria,
and in what sense might it be useful to think of the biographer as a textual
critic? In particular, how might thinking about the textual origins of a life
helpdispelthenotionthatalifehasanauthentictext?Chapter3examinesthe
evidence of the working manuscripts—the fragment of The Watsons, the
cancelled ending to Persuasion, and the unWnished Sanditon—as challenges
to our image of a writer constituted exclusively through print. The striking
factaboutthemanuscriptsisthattheyexistonlyformaterialAustendidnot
seethroughtopublication;inthecaseofthelater,workingmanuscriptsthere
is the possibility that they will give us access to a creative process—the
processes of writing and revision—otherwise denied us. What does the
evidence of the working drafts suggest about Austen’s practices as a writer?
about the way her writing evolved and even about the form in which her
manuscriptsmayhavegonetopress?aboutthediVerencebetweentextinits
manuscript and print states?
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 return to, resituate, and retextualize these initial
encounters with edited text, biographical record, and acts of writing. The
picture of Austen’s writing life that emerges in Chapter 4 compares the
diVerence between the familial context of her early writing up to the time
she left Steventon in 1801 and what I suggest was the more private and
uncounselled manner in which the mature novels took shape; it then con-
viii Preface
siders how after her death the family re-annexed this private space through
copyings, continuations, and living re-enactments of the Wction. Chapter 5
usesevidenceoftheworkingmanuscriptsandtheprobableearlynineteenth-
century publishing- and printing-house practices by which the novels were
turned into print to reconsider the acts of intervention by which the Chap-
man edition was established. Here close attention to the 1814, Wrst-edition
textofMansWeldPark,whichChapmancriticizedasthe‘worstprinted’ofher
novels, leads to precise reXections on the importance of voice to meaning in
Austen’s writings and attempts to make the case for a fresh reading of the
novels, in which an aural and oral (heard and spoken) element in the text,
removed by well-meaning editorial attempts to present it in the approved
form for written language, is shown to be essential. Finally, Chapter 6 sets
side by side two extremes in the history of textual dissemination in the
twentiethcentury:bythetheorizingandpracticeoftheone,scholarlyediting,
Austen’s reputation and texts were Wxed and accorded the highest cultural
status; by the other, their adaptation for screen, they have been exuberantly
unWxed and proved amenable to our most Wckle contemporary imaginings.
While screen adaptation aYrms the availability of Jane Austen’s material
socialarttovisualcomprehensionandpleasure,whathasledmeonthrough
the book’s argument has been an interest in sound and voice—a conviction
that the voices talking around her in the private and public scenes of life
became thevoicestalkinginsideherheadthatshecouldn’tstopherselffrom
listeningto;andthatvoicesheardandtherhythmsofconversationstructure
her mature novels as audio-experiences. There are important diVerences
betweenoursenseoftextsasprimarilyvisualorauditoryforms,madestarkly
evidentincinema,wherewhatweheardependssomuchonwhatwesee.The
history of printed text, too, has been a steady suppression of the acoustic
trace.WhatpromptedmyinterestinAustenbiographywasthefactthather
niece Anna Lefroy thought it worth recording on paper her memory of her
grandfather, Jane’s father, enquiring of Jane and Cassandra’s whereabouts.
‘Ithoughtitso odd’, Annawrote, ‘to hearGrandpapaspeakof themas‘‘the
Girls’’.‘‘WherearetheGirls?’’‘‘AretheGirlsgoneout?’’’InJaneAusten’scase
we miss something vital in her textual transmission if we lose those visual
forms which keep her auditory depths alive.
Kathryn Sutherland
St Anne’s College
Oxford
Acknowledgements
My work for this book has involved many debts of gratitude and it is a
pleasuretoacknowledgethemhere.Agenerousgrantofayear’spaidleavein
2003–4, funded by HEFCE and the Special Paid Leave Scheme of the
University of Oxford, allowed me the time to complete the research and do
muchofthewriting.IamgratefultotheHumanitiesDivisionatOxfordfor
the award and to John Barnard, who cheerfully and expertly took up my
teaching in the English Faculty Graduate School during my absence.
Projectspursuedintensely,asthishasbeen,attractnewfriendshipsandtax
old ones. Once again Deirdre Le Faye shared with me her Jane Austen
scholarship, responding with wonderful speed and kindness to my least
enquiry.Icouldscarcelyhavecontemplatedthisstudywithouttheassistance
ofDavidGilson’smonumentalBibliographyofJaneAusten(correctededition,
1997). It has been my constant companion for the past four years, while
David himself has been generous and punctilious in oVering advice. Claire
LamontandJimMcLavertyreadalargepartofthemanuscriptinWrstdraft,
providingdetailedcomment,encouragement,andmuchmore.Clairebegan
methinkingcriticallyaboutJaneAusten’stextswhen,astextualadvisertothe
newPenguinEdition(1995–8),shearguedthecasefortheimportanceoftheir
earliestprintedstates.IammoregratefultoJimthanheprobablyrealizesfor
discussionovertheyearsandforhisattemptstoclarifymyideasandtoughen
up my arguments. I hope he has saved me from some errors; if he hasn’t, it
isn’thisfault.Ihavebeeninspiredandencouragedbyconversationswithand
timely interventions from Lyndall Gordon, Jocelyn Harris, Tom Keymer,
AnnPasternakSlater,andPeterSabor.Genevie`veBaudonAdamsreadmore
of the manuscript than a Frenchwoman, sceptical of Jane Austen’s appeal,
shouldhavebeenrequiredtodo,andmysisterMoiraWardhaughlistenedin
public and private and as always gave me support.
PartsofChapters2and3weredeliveredastalkstotheJaneAustenSociety,
inLondonandatChawton,whiletheshortcodatoChapter2,onportraitsof
JaneAusten,beganlifeasapapergivenattheUniversityofMagdeburg.My
thanks to Brian Southam and members of the Jane Austen Society for a
reception equally sympathetic and acute; and in Magdeburg to Bernd-Peter