Jane Austen's Achievement

Also by Juliet McMaster THACKERAY: THE MAJOR NOVELS TROLLOPE'S PALLISER NOVELS:

THEME AND PATTERN

Jane Austen's Achievement

Papers delivered at the Jane Austen Bicentennial Conference at the University of Alberta

Edited by JULIET McMASTER

© The Macmillan Press Ltd 1976 with the exception of Chapter 5 which is © Barbara Hardy 197 5

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without permission Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1979 978-0-333-21127-4

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Contributors ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction xv

1 Sanditon: the Seventh Novel B. C. Southam 1

2 The Business of Marrying and Mothering Lloyd W. Brown 27

3 The Great Tradition Revisited Norman Page 44

4 'A Developement of Self: Character and Personality in Jane Austen's Fiction A. Walton Litz 64

5 Properties and Possessions in Jane Austen's Novels Barbara Hardy 79

6 Jane Austen: Poet George Whalley 106

Index 135

Acknowledgements

The Edmonton conference which brought these speakers together was a delightful as well as a distinguished occasion, but now, regrettably, it is a past one. Those who were there will remember that the one shadow over the conference was the absence of Lionel Trilling, who had then just gone into hospital. His paper was to have been on 'Why we read Jane Austen' - and there is no one who would have been more fit to tell us about ourselves as well as the author we were gathered to celebrate. We did not know then how much we were losing: a month later we heard the news of his death.

I would like here to express my gratitude to the funding institutions which made possible the conference, and hence this collection: to the University of Alberta, the Canada Council, the British Council and the United States Embassy. I also want to thank Ian Jack, for coming at short notice to deliver a delightful paper (unfortunately not available for this collection); my colleagues, David Jackel, Noel Parker-Jervis, Norman Page and John Lauber, for their help in the organisation of the conference; and Brahma Chaudhuri, for edi­torial assistance.

Juliet McMaster

Contributors

LLOYD W. BRoWN has taught in both Canada and the United States, and is now Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His publications include Bits of Ivory: Narrative Techniques in Jane Austen's Fiction, The Black Writer in Africa and the Americas, and a forthcoming study of West Indian poetry.

BARBARA IfARny is Chairman of the Department of English at Birk­beck College, University of London, and present occupant of its Chair of Literature. She is the author of The Novels of George Eliot, The Appropriate Form, The Moral Art of Dickens, The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination, A Reading of Jane Austen, and the editor of Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel and Critical Essays on George Eliot. A. WALTON LITz is Professor of English and Chairman of the English Department at Princeton University. He is the author of The Art of ]ames Joyce, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development, ]ames Joyce and Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens. He has also edited texts by Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, and collections of essays on T. S. Eliot and modem American fiction. His most recent volume is an edition of Major American Short Stories.

JULIET McMAsTER took her first degree at St Anne's College, Oxford, and her graduate degrees at the University of Alberta, where she is now a Professor of English. She is the author of Thackeray: The Major Novels, and of a number of articles on Sterne, Jane Austen, Trollope, James, and others. She is currently working on a study of Trollope's Palliser novels, with the support of a Guggenheim fellow­ship.

NoRMAN PAGE was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and

X Contributors

Leeds University. He is a Professor of English at the University of Alberta, and is the author of The Language of Jane Austen, Speech in the Novel and many articles on the novel, and editor of Wilkie Collins: the Critical Heritage. He has in preparation a book on Hardy and an edition of Jude the Obscure.

B. C. SoUTHAM, formerly a lecturer at Westfield College of the Uni­versity of London, has more recently been Editorial Director at Routledge & Kegan Paul, and is now with Basil Blackwell Publisher. He is the author of books on Jane Austen, Tennyson and T. S. Eliot. His particular interest is in the relation between the writer and his times; and, in the case of Jane Austen, in understanding the con­temporary Regency meanings of her words and references, and the novels' social and intellectual terms of reference.

GEORGE WHALLEY, Professor of English in Queen's University, was elected Rhodes Scholar in 1936, served with the Royal Navy during the war, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Author of Poetic Process, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson, The Legend of John Hornby, and of a number of poems, essays, articles, and broadcasts, he is at present editing Coleridge's Marginalia for the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

E Letters MP NA p P&P s S&S VI

Abbreviations

Emma Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others Mansfield Park N orthanger Abbey Persuasion Pride and Prejudice Sanditon Sense and Sensibility Minor Works

References to Jane Austen's works are toR. W. Chapman's editions: The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932-4) Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1954) Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952)

There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slight­ing the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

(Northanger Abbey, p. 37)

Today Jane Austen's playful complaint about the low critical status of her chosen medium has become superfluous, at least so far as her own novels are concerned. The following essays, written to celebrate the bicentenary of her birth, do full justice to her as a writer of keen intellect, significant vision, and impeccable artistry. Her genius, wit, and taste - as well as her irony that prompted the insertion of that 'only' - are here acknowledged.

Introduction

In a letter of 1974 to the Times Literary Supplement, Frank Brad­brook humorously objected to the incongruity of the celebrations planned for the bicentenary of Jane Austen's birth, which were dotted all over the calendar, instead of concurring on the properly accurate date of 16 December, her birthday.1 She herself took pains to get such things right, and so perhaps should her critics and admirers. In his recent book Stuart Tave too enlarges on Jane Austen's enjoyment and ability, in the novel as in the dance, 'in moving with significant grace in good time in a restricted space'.z It is the silly and dangerous characters in her fiction, he shows, like the Thorpes and the Crawfords, who misrepresent and manipulate time and space.

To celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen's birth in October, in Western Canada, is no doubt to be guilty of a comic incongruity. But as though to compensate for the misdemeanour, the papers delivered at the conference have a common and exact focus on period and locale.

Though they are discrete studies and written independently, these essays touch and expand on each other at many points. Local habitations recurrently become centres of interest, and the descrip­tion of Pemberley, which is so important a co-relative of Darcy's identity, is echoed, quite unpremeditatedly, from one paper to another: for Barbara Hardy Pemberley is the defining space which provides Elizabeth with an accurate image of Darcy; Walton Litz examines it as a manifestation of permanence, an example of Jane Austen's early sense of the stability of self that was to give way to a vision of a more fluid identity, as suggested by Anne Elliot's even­tual commitment to a homeless sailor. And B. C. Southam finds in it the achieved harmony between man and nature that needs no 'improvement', a space that time need no further modify.

'Improvement', a resonant term in Jane Austen criticism since Alistair Duckworth's book, The Improvement of the Estate,• is

xvi Introduction

another concept that recurs from one paper to another, and it is investigated most fully by B. C. Southam in his wide-ranging examination of Sanditon. I have chosen to place his paper first in this collection, despite the apparent inappropriateness of beginning with a treatment of the last novel, because in fact it beautifully connects Sanditon with Northanger Abbey, the end of Jane Austen's career with the beginning; and because it firmly and vividly locates her in her own time. He shows her to be a novelist of ideas, writing, in her last novel especially, a work that is as topically pointed and as intellectually structured as Swiffs Tale of a Tub or Peacock's Headlong Hall.

Lloyd Brown too looks at Jane Austen in her own time, but on a more personal level, drawing on her private pronouncements in her letters as evidence for the interpretation of her public statements in the novels. Like George Whalley, he takes issue with the standard view of Jane Austen as a comic writer; for he finds in her view of marriage and motherhood a bleak moral outlook, and a poignant statement about the plight of woman.

Norman Page's paper advances our attention to the Victorian and modern periods, where Jane Austen remains immanent as an influence, the founder of the 'great tradition' of Lea vis's phrase. He introduces too another presiding genius of the conference, Henry James, who makes his gracious appearance in several of the papers. Walton Litz identifies 'the twentieth century's penchant for com­paring [Jane Austen's] art to Henry James's'; and perhaps it is fitting that James too, after his benign condescension about 'our dear, everybody's dear, Jane', should be invoked, with all his critical pres­tige, to do belated justice to the wool-gathering spinster of his description. 4

Walton Litz's paper, like Barbara Hardys, utilises a quotation from James - the splendid discussion between Madame Merle and Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady on the nature of personal identity and its relation to surrounding objects - to throw light on a change in Jane Austen's view of the self as it developed through her career. 'What shall we call our "self"?' asks Madame Merle. Jane Austen's answer, Litz suggests, would have been different at the end of her career from what it was at the beginning. Madame Merle's answer is suggestive for Jane Austen too: 'It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again.'

Barbara Hardy's focus is on that 'everything that belongs to us', the 'properties and possessions' in the novels that are such important

Introduction xvii

extensions of their owners, the characters. Her emphasis is spatial, on the being in space rather than the becoming in time, so that her paper and Litz's interestingly complement each other. Her exact and exacting scrutiny of the significant things in the novels - the objects treasured or neglected, the gifts generous or niggardly, the enclosing rooms and spaces that are the shells which organically express their inmates - is testimony that Jane Austen possessed and marvellously refined on that great virtue which James required of the novelist, specificity.

With the engaging modesty of a Coleridgean among J aneites, George Whalley nevertheless advances criticism of Jane Austen by a large stride. As Litz comments, Jane Austen had already been aligned with Aristotle and the Poetics by some of her nineteenth­century critics; but no one has so lucidly pursued that question of her 'poetry' that was so hotly in dispute between Charlotte Bronte and Lewes. If, as he fears, George Whalley is indeea sickening for a book on Jane Austen, his malady may be cheerfully anticipated by Austen scholars.

'Jane Austen, poet?' is one's initial doubtful reaction; but then, somehow, the proposition becomes acceptable and even familiar. Mter all, we always knew it. The fact that she wrote in prose is of course neither here nor there - Sidney dealt with that objection long ago when he announced 'there have been many most excellent Poets that never versified, and now swarme many versifiers that neede never aunswere to the name of Poets.' Pride and Prejudice manages to be 'light, and bright, and sparkling' because of qualities of timing and rhythm that belong to poetry. Walton Litz uses lines from Wallace Stevens to describe Jane Austen: 'there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.' Stuart Tave's image of her as dancer, and his demonstration of the concentrated significance that is resident in her very words, are further testimony to our movement towards the appreciation not only of Jane Austen, novelist, but of Jane Austen, poet.

NOTES 118 Oct 1974, p. 1164. 2 Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago and London, 1973) p. 1. 3 (Baltimore and London, 1971). 4 'The Lesson of Balzac', The Atlantic Monthly, XCVI (Aug 1905) pp. 167-8.