From The Sunday Times
March 22, 2009
Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire HarmanThe Sunday Times review by John Carey
Jane Austen is not just a novelist but a cultural ideal. Her books teach us what it means to be civilised. These truths seem so obvious nowadays that it is hard to imagine they were ever questioned. But in fact they are comparatively recent discoveries, or inventions. As Claire Harman's rich, incisive interrogation of the Austen cult shows, Jane's fame was no more than a feeble glimmer for most of the hundred years following her death in 1817, and there has never been any lack of otherwise intelligent readers unable to see the point of her novels at all. “What is all this about Jane Austen?” demanded Joseph Conrad, writing to HG Wells. “What is there in her?”
The first readers to underrate her were her own siblings. Though they enjoyed her high-spirited teenage skits and send-ups, they regarded her brother James, a rather glum poet, as the real writer in the family. So did James. A family friend remembered Jane as simply “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly”. Even when she had become a published novelist, no one dreamed they had a world-class author in their midst, whose every scratch on paper would one day be treasured. After her death most of her letters were lost or thrown away, and the early editions of her books were pulped or remaindered.
Conventional readers did not take to her, Harman suggests, because she was so experimental. No one had written such naturalistic dialogue before, or cut down so drastically on incident, or focused so sharply on character. Her monsters and vulgarians, such as Mrs Norris or Mrs Elton or the Steele sisters, were an innovation too, showing with unpleasant accuracy how awful women can be, and she replaced clichés about true love with a realistic reading of the female mind. Elizabeth Bennet, asked by her sister how long she has loved Darcy, replies, “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Though Austen wrote during Romanticism's heyday, she was committed to exposing its falsehoods, and this naturally upset the Romantics. Wordsworth deplored her lack of “attractions”; Madame de Staël deemed her “vulgaire”.
She gained a few fans among the great Victorians. Macaulay compared her to Shakespeare; Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice 17 times; Tennyson, on a visit to Lyme Regis, demanded to be shown “the place where Louisa Musgrove fell”. George Eliot's lover GH Lewes tried to persuade Charlotte Bronte that Austen was a great artist (“Can there be a great artist without poetry?” huffed Bronte), and the Queen enjoyed reading Northanger Abbey to “dear Albert”. But compared to the mass-market success of Dickens or Wilkie Collins, Austen's following remained tiny, and her intellectual stature was negligible. Carlyle pronounced her novels “dismal trash”. In the 1860s the verger of Winchester Cathedral, puzzled when some literary pilgrims asked where Jane Austen's gravestone was, inquired, “Pray, Sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady?”
The turning point in her reputation, Harman thinks, was a memoir by her nephew James, published in 1869. It was feeble and misleading, presenting Aunt Jane as a quiet, modest person who wrote only for her own amusement, whereas in fact she had been a determined professional author. After selling the copyright of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to her brother Frank that she had now earned £250 by her writing, “which only makes me long for more”. But by making her sound nice and ordinary James's memoir seemingly endeared her to readers who felt they were nice and ordinary too. The sentimental cult of Austen quickly took root. She became “Divine Jane”, a winsome paragon with a special place in gentlemanly English hearts. In 1894 the literary critic George Saintsbury coined the term “Janeites” for her votaries, and Rudyard Kipling's 1924 short story The Janeites linked her mystique to British gallantry on the western front. The trenches, it seems, had been full of Janeites. For Kipling, Winchester was “the holiest place in England” after Stratford.
The belief that a liking for Austen is an infallible “test” of your taste, intellect and general fitness for decent company was already well established in the 1880s, and is still potent today. According to arch-Janeite Lord David Cecil in 1931, those who did not like her were a “despised minority”, made up of the sort of people who “do not like sunshine or unselfishness”. Understandably, the more this kind of thing went on the more furious her detractors became. Austen was “entirely impossible”, expostulated Mark Twain. “It seems a great pity to me that they allowed her to die a natural death.”
In her devotees, Austen inspires feelings of personal possession. She is their Jane. Professor Kathryn Sutherland's reported complaint last week that Harman repeats some of her ideas about Austen perhaps illustrates this. Another curious aspect of Austenmania is that her admirers reserve their most contemptuous barbs not for her critics but for other admirers, who happen to enjoy aspects of her work that they prefer to ignore. Like other great religions, Janeism split into mutually antagonistic sects quite early in its history. Writing a brisk outline of her life for the Dictionary of National Biography in 1885, Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, was careful to distance himself from the “fanaticism” of her “innumerable readers”, and Henry James drew a firm line between his own discriminating appreciation and the “pleasant twaddle” about “everybody's dear Jane” that the less refined indulged in. In the later 20th century the two camps divided, roughly speaking, into academics on one side and everyone else on the other. In the universities Austen studies multiplied, encouraged by the fact that her habitual irony made her meanings endlessly elusive. Was she a Marxist before Marx, exposing “the economic basis of society” as WH Auden maintained? Was she a proto-feminist? Or a reactionary? Is it true, as one critic alleged, that those who now read and enjoy her books are precisely the kind of people she despised?
Meanwhile the popularisation of Austen proceeded happily, untouched by these solemn concerns, and focusing solely on the love stories. Period romances à la Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland are essentially, as Harman sees it, Austen offshoots. Asked to name the ingredients of an ideal romance, women readers stipulate that the heroine must be “young and virginal”, the hero “strong and assertive”, the plot predictable and the ending happy. No doubt Stephen and Henry James would avert their eyes, but these are, Harman insists, Austen's components, too.
More people now know about her novels (or anyway get a rough idea of their plots) from film and television than from print, and Harman rightly insists that this is an irreparable loss. All the same, it has boosted Austen's reputation. The 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice began an unparalleled surge of interest, not least because of the scene where Colin Firth, as Darcy, dives into a lake and emerges in a wet shirt. Although this was the invention of the scriptwriter Andrew Davies, not Austen, it was true to her indirect and repressed eroticism; films of Austen novels, Harman finds, have generally observed a similar restraint. They always climax with a kiss, which is made as passionate as possible, but there is only ever one. It is understood that more than that would be “like demanding a second communion wafer”.
Jane's Fame by Claire Harman
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