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Book review
Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees

edited by Deirdre Lynch

Princeton University Press, 2001

• Reviewed by Maggie Lane
• Reviewed by Robin Williams

[Kipling’s term ‘Janeites’ for Austen ‘disciples’ (see his original article reproduced in the June 2002 Sensibilities) is more in use now than ever.] 

Maggie Lane’s perceptive and acerbic review, first published in the Newsletter of the Jane Austen Society of the UKis reproduced here with permission.  

There can be no progressive development in a book by many authors, just a unifying theme and good sense of order on the part of the editor. Janeites, edited by Deirdre Lynch, has both these virtues, but does not escape the vice of bad writing. Like John Wiltshire’s Recreating Jane Austen the book is concerned with reception theory: ‘the divergent uses to which alternative Austens have been put in the literary system and the culture at large,’ to quote from Lynch’s Introduction. But while Wiltshire focuses on the present, Janeites ranges over two centuries of reading and responding to Jane Austen. So we have chapters on Regency popular fiction, on the earliest Janeites, and on Jane Austen in America – in which we discover that our author is not as English as we perhaps thought. ‘A dominant pattern among these American admirers of Jane Austen neglects Chawton Cottage, Steventon Parsonage, the Royal Navy, rooms at Bath, the Anglican Church and the English countryside; Jane Austen, for these readers, is about something else. And that something else might be named, loosely, as freedom and the pursuit of happiness.’ You don’t get that in England! A final chapter partially refutes Edward Said’s famous – or infamous – charge of imperialism in Mansfield Park, arguing that no writer can be oblivious to the iniquities of slavery who can so clearly see the parallel slavery of women.

Much the two best chapters, because free of jargon and elegantly written, are Katie Trumpener on ‘The Virago Jane Austen’ and Roger Sales on ‘In Face of all the Servants: Spectators and Spies in Austen’. Trumpener has read widely in the Virago Modern Classics series and quotes references to Jane Austen from mainly early twentieth-century novels, and from their late twentieth-century introductions, showing how many female writers have been nourished by their literary foremother. In compelling detail she shows how two novels, The Optimist by E M Delafield and The Rector’s Daughter by F M Mayor, are conscious re-workings of Mansfield Park and Persuasion. 

Although you would not know it from the title, ‘In Face of all the Servants’ is largely about Jane Austen films of recent years. Servants in these films, Sales points out, ‘are just there to remind us, as is the almost obligatory crunch of posh carriage wheels on immaculate gravel drives, that we are being invited to make a pleasurable return to a more leisured world that has been lost’. Yet they also have a more unsettling tendency. Their very servitude may alienate a modern audience especially as, to remain true to the text, they can rarely be allowed to speak. We ourselves, as viewers, are often given the viewpoint of servants, circling the dinner table, for example, overhearing conversations and looking over the protagonists’ shoulders. Sales is particularly amusing on the different attitude to filming meals between Hollywood and British TV. The former, he points out ... produce adaptations that are less interested in the spectacle, if that is what it is, of the gentry at table. Emma may contain many characters who are almost totally obsessed with food, and yet the 1996 Hollywood version of it offers only short, sharp dinner-table scenes. In contrast, the 1996 ITV version ... gives more space to both servants and the food they cultivate, prepare and serve ... Hollywood adaptations of Austen, going back to the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, have always privileged romance and character (shading into caricature) over loving attempts to reproduce what passes for historical, heritage detail. Sales also points out how in film after film, the anti-heroes or men whom the heroines eventually reject in the novels, are too easily ‘read’ by viewers as wrong from the start, thus lessening the suspense. ‘The charm has to be there in the first place for it to be broken.’ The rival suitor in the novels is often characterised by the seductive power of his voice, but only Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon has this charming voice according to Sales, and I agree with him – I can hear it now. In the 1995 Persuasion, excellent in so many ways, it is difficult to imagine Anne feeling even a flicker of interest in Benwick, who is cast as ‘a single and singularly unattractive man in want of a bath and a life. He is a very low-rent Lord Byron indeed.’ Sales is the only English contributor to Janeites, as I found out by reading the list of contributors only after having written this piece. It is no pleasure to me to say – and doesn’t it show!

Maggie Lane

Robyn Williams' review appeared in JASA's  December 2002 Newsletter.

Having made my way through the first part of Janeites, I felt some nostalgia for George Orwell's essays, which should be mandatory reading for anyone attempting to write about Jane Austen or, for that matter, any other author on any other topic deemed worthy of academic attention. After all, it was Orwell who advised us never to use a long word when a short one would do, to avoid foreign words when there were perfectly good English equivalents and to omit any words we didn't really need for clear communication. To these we might add, please don't patronise your readers, don't elevate linguistic 'cleverness' over clarity, don't overuse parentheses and please, don't invent any more hybrids beginning with 'homo'.

Of the ten pieces of writing in this collection, at least three are guilty of language and expression which are both precious and overly laced with jargon, which this reader found to be extremely irritating. However the remainder, which do pay attention to the precepts of clear meaning, invite us to share their thoughts and reflect upon the ideas that have been raised.

Apart from those verbal and intellectual gymnastics, obviously designed to be impressive, this Janeite was not amused by a rather arrogant attitude expressed by a minority of contributors, directed towards the Austen enthusiasts who were not 'serious' enough in their approach to the writer seen by Leavis as ' the inaugurator of the great tradition of the English novel' (p 148). For example, in the first of the essays, 'The Divine Miss Jane', Claudia Johnson refers to those 'Janeite practices which flourish today in the Jane Austen societies, where fans convene to stage teas, balls, games, readings and dramatic presentations, to take quizzes, ... and to imagine together how a character in one novel might behave towards a character in another, all of which practices render Austen's novels one loose, baggy middle' (p36-37). Do we detect a little of de Bourghian condescension here? 

Despite the less-than-flattering references to those Janeite reading practices perceived as being weak, escapist, frivolous, morally pernicious and, worst of all, amateur, as against those of academia, which are disciplined, professional and therefore of intrinsic weight and value, Johnson's deliberately provocative essay raises some interesting points regarding the history of Austen's reception by her readers, fellow novelists and inheritors. Kipling's short story which we can read and evaluate for ourselves is used as a point of reference not only for an analysis of what a Janeite is or is not, but of the discipline of novel studies within universities, of the distinctions and bridges between 'high' and 'low' culture and of the complexities and subtleties of sexual behaviours and identity within the Austen works of formally constrained and civilised manners compared with those of our own. 

As far as contemporary mores are concerned, the 'gay' reception of Austen is also pursued, not only in this, but also in other essays in the collection. The reader is given fair warning with Johnson choosing 'interesting' quotes from Roger Rosenblatt and Leo Bersani as a forward to her essay. Terry Castle's 1995 essay 'Was Jane Austen Gay?' and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's paper 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl' (1991), receive further mention in essays apart from these. We can be sufficiently intrigued to chase up these references, dismiss them as more examples of academic extremism or simply cry along with Scrooge 'Bah. Humbug' and let it go at that.

But, central to the intent of the Janeites, 'Austen's disciples and devotees', is examination of the ways in which Austen's novels have been read and received from the time of their first publication until now, in part a cultural and literary history and in part an adjudication of Austen's enduring popularity, her 'canonisation' and her present status in contemporary academic evaluation and where, we are told by the author, 'contention' and 'fray' are the order of the day. So, what we have here is a number of literary professionals, a few of whom are writing for each other, reading each other and referring to each other's work, often with a kind of gleeful maliciousness. Now, Who's Afraid of Intertextuality? But just as these professionals are on the hunt for historic and cultural influences on Austen's work as well as those attributed to her, it seems clear that they themselves are products of their own historic and cultural contexts, collective and individual. So this collection offers a wide variety of Janes to consider, the tiresome Jane, the domestic Jane, the consoling Jane and even, according to Edward Said, the culpable Jane. These divergences of opinion reveal something of the attitudes and traits of those who read and those who offer judgement. My Jane would enjoy the irony. 

Following Johnson we turn with some relief to O'Farrell's more user-friendly 'Jane and Friendship', Benedict's informative essay on Regency circulating libraries and reading practices and Galperin's paper on Austen's Earliest Readers. But, alas, with Tuite's 'Decadent Austen Entails' we are back again not only with the language of literary obscurantism but with a rather odd thesis on the 'anxiety of influence' suffered by E.M.Forster whom I envisaged, while reading, as a sort of cartoon character, trembling in his country house closet lest he meet his literary mama, Miss Austen, waiting outside his door with a large pair of scissors. Perhaps this essay should have been more aptly entitled 'The Homosexual Butterfly meets the Elegant Lesbian Vampire'. Why? Read and discover.

It does seem that, for some, the sexuality of Austen and her characters, whether normal, abnormal, Oedipally scary or simply non-existent, is a recurring topic of fascination which at least offers some explanation for Mary Crawford's sapphic appreciation of Fanny Price's rain-drenched form in Rozema's film of Mansfield Park.

Trumpener's satisfying essay, 'The Virago Jane Austen', offers us not the comfortable, domestic, provincial Jane, but a down-to-earth realist, innovator and modernist, concerned with those issues of economic and social power from which women were traditionally excluded. This Jane, an artist who wrote without even a room of her own, serves as the inspiration and focus for the Virago Press which aims to reprint and thus raise the awareness of the value of classic women's writing. Again, the history of response, particularly that of Virginia Woolfe, is traced within this tradition, together with Austen's influence not only as a writer of consummate artistry but as one with the courage to pursue a freedom and independence of thought despite the constraints of her situation in life. Recommended.

Recommended also is 'Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America' where Favret lucidly summarises points already raised and discusses Austen's American popularity within the context of the American historical and social experience - the War of Independence, the Civil War, slavery and its abolition. Against this background Austen's 'marriage plot' fits in well with notions of freedom and the pursuit of happiness while finding the 'right mating of individuals' accords with the fears of miscegenation and the ideal of social coherence and racial homogeneity. Power and slavery are also explored in 'In Face of all the Servants' where Sales deals mostly with Persuasion as interpreted in the latest television production. The camera, it is argued, takes the point-of-view of the numerous servants whose presence makes privacy impossible for the gentry whom they maintain. Anne Elliot's powerlessness is emphasised by her treatment as a servant to others in the family and as necessarily subservient because of her age and unmarried state. Again and again we return to this disempowerment of women in a society were economic, social and sexual freedom were enjoyed by men, by landowners and patriarchs who faced little, if any, accountability.

The last essay of the collection suggests the culprit responsible for the over-the-top treatment of slavery in the movie of Mansfield Park. Edward Said, whose reading of the novel and whose scholarship of Austen in general is regarded as flawed and incomplete. Fraiman, the author of this essay, published in 1993 an influential work Culture and Imperialism, asserting that European colonisation and its attendant injustices were and are supported by European culture and European literature, with Mansfield Park providing as prime suspect. Fraiman does not go so far as to exonerate Austen - although surely the readers, as well as the writers of Imperialist literature must share some responsibility for the dissemination of colonial 'legitimacy' and of complicity in repressive colonial rule - but she does redress the balance. Rather than unquestioning acceptance of slavery as a basis for the wealth enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mansfield Park - a dysfunctional family of the first order - Fraiman points out that slavery is used a s a metaphor for the unenviable position of dependent women such as Fanny Price, Jane Fairfax, Anne Elliot, a well as others of Austen's creations. Said has not only subordinated Austen to his political ideology but confused/conflated Austen with her characters. This essay is recommended for the light it throws on such controversial contemporary positions regarding Austen studies and the politics of gender.

On the whole, then, returning to the points made at the beginning of this review, this not-very-serious but devoted Janeite was challenged, intrigued, charmed, informed, delighted by clear, well-organised, accessible writing, exasperated by the pompous and downright silly, and generally had great fun .

Robyn Williams

03 February 2004

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