austen critical insights

7/27/2019 Austen Critical Insights

1/16

Jane Austen:The Critical Reception

Bonnie Blackwell

Although Austen was little known in her own lifetime, shortly af-

ter her death her critical ascent began: in 1830 the Edinburgh Review

acknowledged that Miss Austen has never been so popular as she

deserved to be, and each succeeding generation has worked to com-

pensate for that early oversight. Today an entire critical industry is

devoted to explicating Austens small canon. A typical year now sees

the publication of more than 150 articles and fifteen critical books on

Austens life and works, and every critic who discusses the English

novel as a genre has to account for her achievement. She has there-

fore played a part in virtually every wave of literary criticism. She has

been subjected to New Critical investigations of irony; she has been

put on the couch by Freudians; she has been critiqued for her class

consciousness by Marxists; she has been interrogated by disciples offeminism, queer studies, and gender studies. In this essay, Bonnie

Blackwell offers an overview of that long critical tradition, beginning

with the readings Austen got from her family and close friends and

continuing to the present. J.L.

During his 1868 term as Englands prime minister, Benjamin Dis-

raeli (1804-1881) was asked if he found time to read novels. In Dis-raelis surprising replyAll six of them, every yearthe PM, him-

self a novelist since the age of twenty-two, obliterates the whole genre

of novels from competition for his attention while asserting the utter

centrality ofPride and Prejudice (1813), Sense and Sensibility (1811),

Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818), and North-

anger Abbey (1818) to British heritage, so well known that they and

their author need not be named. Disraeli invites us to imagine whatabout reading Austen has prepared him to be prime minister or con-

soled him when the job was fatiguing. We need not puzzle too long on

Critical Reception 37


2/16

what aspect of Austens prose enabled him to give this precisely

crafted answer, for her heroinesreading habits are often subject to im-

pertinent queries. Catherine Morland fares poorly when Henry Tilney

disparages her taste for nice books, by which he supposes she means

well-bound ones (Northanger Abbey 121). Caroline Bingley attempts

to lower Lizzy Bennet in Darcys estimation by sardonically accusing

her of being a great reader who has no pleasure in anything else

(Pride and Prejudice 74). Her reply, that I deserve neither such praise

nor such censure, is a model for Disraeli in how to sidestep the intel-

lectual trap of being judged socially for ones private reading; to her

creator he gives all the credit.

In this anecdote, a testimony both to Austens ability to predict hu-

man nature and to her lessons in style, we find the dual nature of

Austens reception throughout the nearly two hundred years since the

publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811. Critics ad-

dress a variety of concerns, from the status of women and the disen-

franchised to the price of sugar or barouches, but most critical treat-ments of Austen fall into two broad camps: those that judge her by a

standard of realism, thereby comparing the books to lived experience,

either of the Regency or the present; and those that address some aspect

of her style, especially her use of irony. Some generations of realist-

bound criticism find her books reprehensibly silent on such historical

events as the Atlantic slave trade and the Napoleonic Wars. Other crit-

ical schools invoke a different strain of realism, the psychologicalrealism of recognizable and nuanced human personalities, and find

much to admire in Austens psychological portraits. Her foolish vicars,

more concerned with brokering their own advantageous marriages

than with caring for the spiritual lives of their brethren, and her selfish

mothers blind to their childrens faults continue to resonate with this

school.

38 Critical Insights


3/16

Biography and Early ReceptionJane Austen has been the subject of numerous biographies, includ-

ing several written by family members and recent standouts by John

Halperin and Claire Tomalin.1 All note the centrality of her family to

the formation of her character. She was the seventh of eight children

born to the rector of Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775.

Her family was neither rich nor well connected, but the Austens were

literary: her fathers library included some five hundred volumes that

were sold at his retirement for about 200 (Halperin 127), or approxi-

mately $40,000 in todays terms. This was a shocking indulgence on

the income of a clergyman who had eight children and who frequently

appealed to relatives to cover his debts, but the library was a wonderful

resource for a fledgling novelist. By her teens, Austen was an ener-

getic, productive author of arch, knowing prose; reading it, one won-

ders how she achieved so much worldliness at fifteen. Her pleasure in

recording the worlds folly continued until her distressingly early death

at age forty-one, of symptoms many have interpreted as Addisons dis-ease.2

Austens precocious start in the literary life ripened into a highly fer-

tile period in her early twenties. At twenty-one, she wrote First Im-

pressions in 1796-97; she later revised it in 1810 and 1813 into Pride

and Prejudice. In 1797, Austen began converting a two-year-old manu-

script, Elinor and Marianne, into Sense and Sensibility, and in 1798-

99, she composed works published posthumously as Lady Susan andNorthanger Abbey. She sold Northanger Abbey (then called Susan,

though unrelated to the novella Lady Susan) in 1802 for 10 to a pub-

lisher, Crosby, who advertised it but never printed it; she was finally

able to purchase the work back for the same price in 1816 (Halperin

101). Despite early signs of brilliance, Austen did not see her work in

print until age thirty-five, and she enjoyed only six years of moderate

financial gain from her works. Her earnings from those six years670, or about $130,000were offset by losses onMansfield Parkand

family debts, but even in gross they are equivalent only to what Maria



4/16

Edgeworth, the most successful woman writer of her day, earned

yearly in her career, which spanned several decades. Austen was not,

then, the best-paid or the most-celebrated woman writer of her day and,

indeed, took some years in accommodating her distinctive ironic voice

and her plots to the demands of the Regency publishing world. Edward

Copeland regards Austens own lack of wealth as the reason money . .

. especially spendable income, is the love-tipped arrow aimed at the

hearts of both her heroines and her readers (132). Certainly it is unde-

niable that she pays enormous attention to the incomes and potential

earnings of her marriageable characters and that while her heroines

loudly disdain the vulgar bargain of marrying for money, nonetheless

they have the very good luck to marry rich men for love.

Jane Austens family members and small social circle were her ear-

liest critics; their objections and accolades are still raised to this day, so

this reception history of her work allows them their say. Her siblings

read, and often starred in, her juvenilia, including The Beautiful Cas-

sandra, a spoof in which her sister indulges in a passion for bonnetsand ices, and Henry and Eliza, a romance named for her brother and

first cousin, who later married. Her mothers relations, the Leigh

Perrots, were the first to remark that Darcy and Elizabeth had spoilt

them for anything else, a sentiment that sums up a still-burgeoning

cottage industry in adapting, updating, and admiring Pride and Preju-

dice (Halperin 289).3 Her mother was the first of many to dislike

Mansfield Parks heroine Fanny Price, whom she found insipid. Hersister Cassandra offered an ingenious solution to give this excessively

moral character some needed nuance and spark: marry her off to her

antithesis, Henry Crawford, a suggestion Austen scaled back to an ex-

tended pursuit and rejected marriage proposal (Tomalin 225). Other

friends and relatives admitted to shameful pleasure whenever the ur-

bane and irreligious Mary Crawford triumphs over Fanny. Janes

brother Henry claimed to like his namesake Crawford, properly, as aclever, pleasant man, as well as he liked Fanny, a dual allegiance that

may not have been repeated since (Halperin 251). Her friend Miss



5/16

Sharp, a governess, faulted the psychological dimensions of another

considering the trade, Emmas Jane Fairfax. She felt that the would-be

governesss secret engagement to Frank Churchill rang false; Frank was

selfish and rash enough to carry on a secret engagement and correspon-

dence, but the discreet Miss Fairfax was decidedly not (Tomalin 250).

Austens familys compliments and objections reveal a high priority

for realism, including psychological realism, as the goal of fiction.

Austens brothers scrupulously policed her verisimilitude, sometimes

at her requestwhen she asked them to time journeys she did not have

the opportunity to make to ensure that her characters move about En-

gland in a reasonably timely fashionand sometimes quite contrary to

her liking. In one instance, her brother Edward Knight remarked after

reading Emma, Jane, I wish you would tell me where you get those

apple-trees of yours that come into bloom in July, a fairly deflating as-

sessment of four hundred pages undone by one misunderstood sub-

clause.4 Yet, an exacting critic herself, Austen satirized the hard-to-

believe in other novels. In a letter critiquing Mary Bruntons Self-Control,she joked that her own books might make more of a splash in the world

if she imitated the heroines solitary journey on a tiny boat down an

American river, though in her version, she smirked, the young lady

would cross the Atlantic and land in Gravesend in her hand-built canoe

(Halperin 267). Her realism has, for many readers, been the chief qual-

ity to praise in Austen: her subtle portraits of human folly resonate with

many. Given the major themes and developments in Austen criticism,however, we may ask whether the realism question has limited our crit-

icism unduly, preventing us from asking other questions.

Contemporary reviewers of Austens novels did praise her realism,

which they typically called probability or believability, and at

times her moral lessons. The first review she ever received, on Sense

and Sensibility in Critical Review (1812), calls the novel both well-

written and probable. Three months later, The British Critic de-clared Sense and Sensibility to be fortified with sober and salutary

maxims for the conduct of life, chiefly in the chastening of the emo-



6/16

tional sister who falls in love with a male coquet, Willoughby

(quoted in Halperin 205).Pride and Prejudice was more extravagantly

praised by the same publication a year later, when it was declared far

superior to almost all the publications of its kind to come before us

and the first edition sold out within six months (quoted in Halperin

210). Mansfield Park, her next novel, was not reviewed at all and lost

its publisher money. With the publication of Emma, Austen received

somewhat tepid reviews: the four major reviewsin Literary Pan-

orama, British Critic, Monthly Review, and Gentlemens Magazine

all found it light and trifling in comparison to the weightierSense and

Sensibility and more vivacious Pride and Prejudice.

Just when, in 1816, it looked as though Austen would not receive se-

rious critical attention from her peers, her publisher John Murray con-

vinced the powerful Sir Walter Scott to pay the very high compliment

of a comprehensive assessment of her work in Quarterly Review. In

Austens own favorite review, Scott praised her whole oeuvre, except-

ing Mansfield Park, which he failed to mention. It was some compen-sation that he rescued the underrated Emma from other critical dimin-

ishments by extolling what he called its insight into the human heart.

Austen, he writes, has the art of copying from nature as she really ex-

ists in the common walks of life, and of presenting to the reader . . . a

correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place

around him (quoted in Halperin 291). Clearly, this tribute to Austens

palpable skill intentionally diminishes her originality and novelty, andpreserves those qualities for Scotts own reputation.

The Rise of the NovelIn his monumental study The Rise of the Novel(1957), Ian Watt con-

cedes that the majority of eighteenth-century novels were written by

women, though he limits his books scope to Defoe, Richardson, andFielding because, he claims, womens control over the novel was a

purely quantitative dominance (298). Watt elides female writers from



7/16

his study and blames the predominantly female readership of the novel

for the shortfalls of realism in eighteenth-century fiction (301). De-

spite the frank misogyny of his critical study, Watt reserves a special,

though very limited, place in his pantheon of realist novelists for Jane

Austen, who he claims solved most of the obvious technical weak-

nesses troubling the novels of the three male authors who consume his

works study (301). The irony of his compliment to Austen is twofold:

the scale of his inquiryone-tenth the space given to Fielding and one-

twentieth that for Richardsoncontradicts his ranking of her contribu-

tion, and, more troubling still, it neutralizes her own spirited defense of

the female-dominated novel form in Northanger Abbey, where she

asks that female heroines, authors, and readers all openly avow their

mutual respect: Let us not desert one another; we are an injured

body! (59).

Austens exceptionalismthe careful construction of her as the one

female author from three centuries of novel writing worth defending

was a time-honored tradition long before Ian Watts study. HenryJames noted that many found our dear, everybodys dear, Jane so infi-

nitely to their material purpose, whatever that critical purpose might

be (quoted in Johnson, Austen 211). Many critics of the novel have

posited a clean break between Austen and her female predecessors,

one that contradicts her own admiration for Fanny Burney, Maria

Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe. Yet other critics have put Austen in a

context and a genealogy of female influence, and not all are correctionsantedating Watt. B. G. MacCarthy published an ambitious study of fe-

male writers just after World War II that implicitly sides with Watt in

seeing a flood of mediocrity in womens writing since 1621 yet also

finds not one but more than fifty cogent influences, as she calls them,

among females writing prose. MacCarthy manages to praise the dis-

tinctive style of Austen while placing her within the context of her fe-

male influences and predecessors, and she does so within Watts keycritical term, realism, which she finds women novelists particularly

qualified to create (29).



8/16

By the date of publication for Marilyn Butlers Jane Austen and the

War of Ideas (1975), Austens ascension to the great pantheon of Brit-

ish writers, once contentious, was no longer controversial. Perhaps it is

not surprising, then, that Butler sees Austen as part of the old conserva-

tive establishment that Butlers generation of Oxford students sought

to critique. Butler places Austen squarely within a repudiated Tory tra-

dition and makes a spirited argument that readers should consider what

her values are before idolizing her: Before Austen could be trusted to

assist ones choices in the modern world, we needed to know what hers

had been (xxxiii). MacCarthy admires Austens moral individualism,

writing that not even the literary patronage of the Prince Regent could

persuade her from the right of keeping her own literary conscience

(29), whereas Butler finds Austens domestic, home-bound, village

bound novels . . . programmatically conservative, a disappointment

because she had wanted and expected Austen to be a non-partisan lib-

eral moralist (xiv).

Butlers reading of a politically retrograde Austen has been widelycritiqued, especially by Julia Prewitt Brown, Elaine Showalter, and

Sandra Gilbert, all of whom have disputed her positioning of Austen as

regressive. Butler was nonetheless influential in creating an Austen

generally assumed to be the most resistant to feminist, Marxist, and

other progressive readings (Evans 1). Nancy Armstrongs Desire and

Domestic Fiction (1987), which offers many important feminist revi-

sions to Ian Watts story of male contributions to the novel, nonethelessinherits the icon of a conservative, Tory Austen. For example, Arm-

strong contrasts Northanger Abbey with what she believes is the more

progressive Jane Eyre. Quoting a scene in which Henry Tilney shames

Catherine Morland for expecting remnants of a murder in his family

homeRemember that we are English, that we are Christians. Con-

sult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable

Armstrong claims that Austen teaches the heroine of her first novel tounderstand the excesses of patriarchal culture as a feature of women

and the undisciplined imaginations of women, not as a social reality



9/16

(206). Claudia L. Johnson, in contrast, maintains that Austen is not on

the side of Sir Thomas Bertram and General Tilney, repressive patri-

archs at home and colonizers abroad: Austen may dismiss alarms

concerning the gothic machinery . . . , but alarms concerning the central

gothic figure, the tyrannical father, are commensurate to the threat they

pose (Jane Austen 35). Postcolonial critics have come to argue that

Fanny Price stands in for the absent figure of the slave in Mansfield

Park, since the naming of the novel is an homage to a landmark aboli-

tionist decision, Lord Mansfields ruling in the Somerset case in 1772,

widely understood to outlaw slavery in Britain. Gary Kelly notes that

such names would have been familiar to Austens contemporary read-

ers, who would not have regarded her as apolitical, given the obvious

references to the Napoleonic Wars and other social upheavals in her

novels (158-59).

Raymond Williams frames a Marxist challenge to the common mis-

conception that Jane Austen ignored or effaced the social realities of

her day, obliterating everything from Napoleon to the Atlantic slavetrade with the fiction of purely personal relationships (113). Wil-

liams rejects the false dichotomy between the personal world of Aus-

tens courtship novels and the real-life concerns of Regency England,

drawing our attention to her preoccupation with the gentrys struggles

to reproduce itself as an acquisitive high-bourgeois society at the

point of its most evident interlocking with an agrarian capitalism that is

itself mediated by inherited titles and family names (115). Williamswas one of the first to notice the critical edge to Austens preoccupation

with wealth and status, and his tradition is continued in criticism by

Edward Copelands illuminating work on money in Austen and in

Austen adaptations by filmmakers Roger Michell (Persuasion, 1995)

and Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, 2005), who resist heritage cin-

emas aestheticdetached capital, detached income, detached con-

sumption . . . in incidentally surviving and converted houses that noones labor seems to support and maintain. Michell and Wright rein-

sert livestock and laborers intrusively, not picturesquely, back into the



10/16

Austen landscape and insist on a grubby realism in the makeup, cos-

tumes, and lighting of their films mise-en-scnes. In another, more

dominant school of adaptation referred to as heritage cinema, Aus-

tens limited descriptions of fashion, person, and placeher habit of

simply describing Pemberley as a large modern house on rising

groundsis corrected or supplemented to create visual banquets

for audiences seeking a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and so-

cial critiques of the source novels (Higson 109-29).

Cinematic interpretations of Austen deserve special mention here:

not only is each film a critical reading of a novel, but also many enfold

postcolonial criticism of Austen into their scripts. For example, Patri-

cia Rozemas Mansfield Park (1999) seeks to bring the books quiet

subtext on slavery to the forefront of the film. As Troost and Green-

fields edited collection Jane Austen in Hollywood observes, Austen

adaptations noticeably influence popular perceptions of the original

source texts, particularly among students, for whom the films have a

demonstrable didactic function. Following a series of E. M. Forsternovel adaptations in the 1980s on the part of the filmmaking team of

James Ivory and Ishmail Merchant, Jane Austen soon surpassed For-

ster as the most adapted of English authors in a cluster of adaptations in

the mid-1990s, and adaptations continue to be made. Pride and Preju-

dice, first brought to the screen in 1940 by MGM, was remade in 1995

by the BBCs Andrew Davies and in 2005 by Joe Wright. Except for

Northanger Abbey andLady Susan, all of Austens novels have had ad-aptations that have gone into wide release, either in period pieces or in

contemporary analogies, such asBride and Prejudice (2004) and Clue-

less (1995). These adaptations have brought new generations of read-

ers to the Janeite cult, and the latest development is in biographical

studies of the author, including Julian Jarrolds Becoming Jane (2007)

and the BBC film Miss Austen Regrets (2008), which offer competing

explanations of Austens mysterious spinsterhood, given the primacyof courtship and marriage in her novels.

Austens spinsterhood has provoked questions about her views on



11/16

the satisfactions of male-female love, as have the portrayals of married

couples throughout her books, whose troubled relationships call into

question the very notion of a happily ever after. Mrs. Croft may be the

only happily married woman in all of Austen who is likable on her own

terms, or who has not made a bargain the heroine rejected herself, like

Charlotte Collins (ne Lucas).5 One interpretation of Austens spin-

sterhood frames it as her strongest testimony to the belief that one

should marry only for love; the fact that Austen never married, then,

supports the primacy of the romance plot rather than undermining it for

biographer Claire Tomalin and filmmaker Julian Jarrold. Both treat

Austens brief flirtation with Tom Lefroy in 1796 (mentioned exactly

thrice in her letters) as the love of her life, a strict analogy to Cassan-

dras own permanent eschewal of marriage in tribute to the death of her

fianc Tom Fowle. The popularity of Jarrolds Becoming Jane, which

extends these three brief epistolary references into two thrilling hours

of highly convincing chemistry between the leads Anne Hathaway and

James McAvoy, will assure that this explanation is influential for sometime. A more intricate elucidation of Austens spinsterhood comes

from biographer John Halperin and from the BBC biographical film

Miss Austen Regrets, both of which construct from Austens novels,

family recollections, and letters not a pining, dejected monogamist but

an accomplished flirt who was never able to choose among half a

dozen attractive offers of marriage throughout her twenties and thir-

ties, none of which came from Tom Lefroy.A third cause for Austens spinsterhood has also been suggested in

the last twenty years: when Terry Castle reviewed the Deirdre Le Faye

edition of Austens letters in the London Review of Books, the LRB

chose to run the review under the incendiary banner Was Jane Austen

Gay? The initial response was shockingly negative; many readers as-

sumed that the author took a prurient view of innocent habits, such as

sisters sharing beds and writing emotional letters, that were commonand unquestioned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Castles

inquiry is, in fact, far less inflammatory and definitive than the review



12/16

title suggests, or than most respondents assumed; she writes ellipti-

cally that were one wanting to make a vulgar case for Austens

homoeroticism, the letters to her niece Fanny would be the place to

look (82). Castle purposely refuses sweeping claims about Austens

sexual orientation, providing instead a close reading of the correspon-

dence between Cassandra and Jane Austen, which she finds suffused

with a primitive adhesivenessand underlying Erosof the sister-

sister bond.6 Castle, like Halperin, asks us to reconsider the conserva-

tive promoter of marriage we have inherited in the light of some signif-

icant tendencies to mock marriage and child rearing in her letters.

Jane Austens six courtship novels and one novella marry off a total

of twenty couples, parceling even those without reciprocal attractions

to their intended mates (such as Reginald de Courcy and Frederica

Vernon, or Marianne and Colonel Brandon) into tidy marriages. Given

the prevalence of the heterosexual courtship plot as the form of closure

in all her novels, Austen may seem, at first blush, like one of the least

amenable authors for queer readings. Queer theorya critical rubricfashioned from a former insultdescribes any gendered identity rep-

resenting a challenge to the monolith of two opposite sexes that can ex-

press their desires only through compulsory heterosexuality (Sedg-

wick 8). Closer inspection, however, reveals troubled portraits of

marriage in Austens books as well as very strong same-sex (or homo-

social) bonds, particularly among women. In many Austen novels, a

female friend labors to attach another female to her brother: MaryCrawford, Isabella Thorpe, and Georgiana Darcy insist on Fanny,

Catherine, and Lizzy being their sisters in powerful scenes that

eclipse the role of their brothers in completing the courtships; Sophie

Croft reassures Anne Elliot about being a naval wife without seeming

particularly aware that her words will promote the marriage of Anne

and Sophies brother, Frederick Wentworth.

While Castles essay may have been an infelicitous calling card forushering in a new school of Austen studies, queer Austen nonetheless

developed into a vibrant academic subspecialty over the past twenty



13/16

years. Critics working in this tradition generally leave the authors own

libidinal investments out of the question and focus on one of two main

approaches: examining the rich emotional connections of female homo-

social structures in Austens novels7 or adopting Oscar Wildes view

that pure style, evacuated of morality, including sexual morality and te-

dious questions of who sleeps with whom, is the proper sphere of the

queer critic. Of this latter group, D. A. Miller leads the pack: over the

past twenty-five years, he has authored three of the finest books in Jane

Austen studies, The Novel and the Police,Narrative and Its Discontents,

and Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, as well as a charming Raritan

article, The Late Jane Austen. Joseph Litvaks Strange Gourmets

gives a special place to the light, pleasing, and aphoristic style ofPride

and Prejudice, so similar to the dandys taste in well-turned phrases,

while Miller points out that Austens portrait of Robert Ferrars picking

out a toothpick case amounts to a merciless parody of a gay man, one

that sticks in the readerly subconscious to make the surprise marriage

of Robert to Lucy Steele all the more shocking (Jane Austen 15).Critical responses to Austens style need not fall exclusively under

the aegis of queer theory; many things motivate critics to investigate

what is distinctive and fascinating in her prose. As Virginia Woolf

wrote, Of all authors she is the most difficult to catch in the act of

greatness (quoted in Stoval 231). Wayne C. Booths A Rhetoric of

Irony gives special place to Austens use of the traditional tropes of

irony, providing an invigorating close reading of the famous openingline ofPride and Prejudice: a single woman of no fortune is the one

in want of a husband, he points out; a single man with money wants

nothing at all to complete his happiness. This aphoristic substitution

informs the style of all Pride and Prejudice, while books such as Per-

suasion and Emma rely on free indirect discourse, a subtle incorpora-

tion of a particular characters voice into the omniscient narrators

prose that allows the author to satirize without preaching (Finch andBowen). John F. Burrows examines the distinctive voices of particular

characters in a quantitative analysis that posits Mr. Darcys letter as the



14/16

most formal, elaborate prose in Austen; Burrows writes that style is

not a belletristic fancy but a real presence, one that is now respon-

sive to straightforward computational procedures (186). For many of

us, however, the pleasures of reading Austen are not quantifiable in

mathematical terms, and we will continue to debate the standards for

measuring her imposing talents for many more generations.

Notes1. The earliest was by her elder, and favorite, brother Henry, A Biographical No-

tice of the Author, included in the 1818 edition ofNorthanger Abbey andPersuasion.

Later biographies include Caroline Austens My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir, James

Edward Austen-Leighs A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary-Augusta Austen-Leighs

Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, and William and Richard Austen-Leighs Jane

Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record.

2. Sir Zachary Cope was the earliest to make this diagnosis, in his 1964 article

Jane Austens Last Illness.

3. Pride and Prejudice was the first of her novels to be adapted for the screen, in

1940, and has spawned more updates than any other, including a Bollywood musical

(Bride and Prejudice). Perhaps the best-known adaptations are those in Helen Field-ings Bridget Joness Diary franchise.

4. In the Box Hill picnic scene in Emma, the title character pauses in the midst of

midsummer strawberry picking to survey a view that includes Abbey-Mill Farm, with

all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard

in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending. Austens brother Edward Knight

pointed out that if ripe strawberries were in the fields, the apple orchard would hardly

be in blossom. Critic John Sutherland defends this description from charges of failed

realism by supposing that it is meant to cover all four seasons, from flocks in pasture

(spring) to cooler fall temperatures (necessitating the smoking chimney, which would

hardly be a feature of a day described by Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax as beastly

hot). He supposes that Austen intended this survey and therefore did not change the

text at the printer despite her brothers criticism (17-18).

5. For an excellent discussion of Mrs. Croft as a naval wife, see Mary Ann

OFarrells Telling Complexions (45-50).

6. The original essay appeared August 3, 1995; the argument and accompanying

letters are reprinted in Castles The Austen Papers.

7. See Lisa L. Moores Desire and Diminution: Emma and George E. Haggertys

Sisterly Love in Sense and Sensibility.



15/16

Works CitedArmstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Austen, Caroline. My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir. London: Spottiswoode,Ballantyne, 1952.

Austen, Jane.Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002.

____________. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Robert P. Irvine. Toronto: Broadview

Press, 2002.

Austen-Leigh, James Edward.A Memoir of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Lon-

don: Oxford UP, 1926.

Austen-Leigh, Mary-Augusta. Personal Aspects of Jane Austen. London: Murray,

1920.

Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Austen-Leigh.Jane Austen: Her Life and Let-

ters: A Family Record. London: Smith, Elder, 1913.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.

Burrows, John F. Style. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward

Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford, England: Clarendon

Press, 1975.

Castle, Terry. The Austen Papers. Lingua Franca (Sept./Oct. 1995): 77-82.

Cope, Zachary, Jane Austens Last Illness. British Medical Journal (18 July

1964): 182-83.

Copeland, Edward. Money. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Ed-ward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane

Austen. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Evans, Mary Ann. Jane Austen and the State. London: Tavistock, 1987.

Finch, Casey, and Peter Bowen. The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury: Style in Emma.

Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 1-18.

Haggerty, George E. Sisterly Love in Sense and Sensibility. Unnatural Affec-

tions: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century. Bloomington: Indi-

ana UP, 1998. 73-87.

Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.Higson, Andrew. Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the

Heritage Film. Fires Were Started: Cinema and Thatcherism. Ed. Lester

Friedman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Johnson, Claudia L. Austen Cults and Cultures. The Cambridge Companion to

Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cam-

bridge UP, 1997.

____________. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: U of Chi-

cago P, 1988.

Kelly, Gary. Religion and Politics. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.

Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Dur-

ham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.



16/16

austen critical insights

Documents