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Book Reviews: Volume 1

The Mathematics Of Jane Austen, and Other Stories
by Elizabeth Smither
Reviewed by Ruth Williamson

Jane Austen's Family Through Five Generations
by Maggie Lane
Reviewed by Yvette Field

The World of Jane Austen
by Nigel Nicolson
Reviewed by Meghan Hayward

Jane Austen, Feminism & Fiction
by Margaret Kirkham
Reviewed by Amanda Jones

Jane Austen: A Life
by David Nokes
Reviewed by Christine Alexander

Jane Austen: A Life
by David Nokes
Reviewed by Penny Gay

Obstinate Heart: Jane Austen, A Biography
by Valerie Grosvenor Myer
Reviewed by Susannah Fullerton

Jane Austen The Woman: Some Biographical Insights
by George Holbert Tucker
Reviewed by Pamela Whalan

Jane Austen’s World
by Maggie Lane
Reviewed by Marjorie Jones

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen
edited by Juliet McMaster and Edward Copeland
Reviewed by Yvette Field

The Mathematics Of Jane Austen,
and Other Stories

Elizabeth Smither
Published by Godwit, 1997

Jane Austen must have been very fond of the number 2. Have you never noticed it? Two proposals by Darcy; two good sisters (and three foolish ones); two ill-mannered matriarchs, Mrs Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh; two unsuitable suitors, Mr Collins and George Wickham.

So begins a recently published short story. Readers outside New Zealand may not yet be aware of this book by Elizabeth Smither, an established writer from Palmerston North.

While the other stories in this collection do not share an Austen theme, they contain many other literary allusions which add much to the reader’s enjoyment and reflect Ms Smither’s background as a librarian.

The title story might well have the most appeal for JASA members. It concerns a university student of the 1990s named Irene who is trying to prepare an outline proposal for her thesis on the subject of Austen. Her story brims with touches of irony and references to the practicalities of Jane Austen’s life as well as her own. Thus a school boy, when shopping, ‘carries a pocket calculator and hesitates between two sizes of Coke’ while his mother ‘swears she’s not trying to make him feel guilty, like Elinor Dashwood over meat.’

Irene is a writer who finds herself constantly having to deal with the realities of everyday life, just as we all do and as Jane Austen herself must have done. Irene copes with meal preparation and supermarket shopping while grappling with ideas and images for her supervising professor’s consideration: even the ‘ketchup glows like a military uniform at Meryton’. So Elizabeth Smither reveals both personal knowledge of Jane Austen’s novels and affection for them; Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Persuasion as well as Pride and Prejudice are all mentioned with images and instances illuminating the theme as it relates to the number 2.

The primacy of 2 in this story is developed on several levels. There are more examples provided from Pride and Prejudice; an awareness of the presence of pairs which we might see culminating in the double wedding at the novel’s end, and on another level in Jane Austen’s own life in terms of her pairing with Cassandra. The predominance of the second chance (two again) is also highlighted with two proposals in Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. On the next level of Irene’s own story she has a good friend in her old schoolmate and landlady Sue, making another pair; they both provide positive mothering role models for Sue’s son Ben (he of the calculator), and so the pattern is developed.

There is much to delight Jane Austen enthusiasts in this short story. With the echoes of other writers of classic fiction in many of the remaining pieces, this collection is well worth reading. It has indeed served to whet this reader’s appetite for more of this type of material with an Austen flavour. Let us hope that having tantalised us with this tempting morsel Elizabeth Smither will offer a main course without delay!

Ruth Williamson

Jane Austen's Family Through Five Generations

by Maggie Lane

Published in hard cover in 1984 and in paperback in 1992 by Robert Hale Ltd London.

I had not known of the existence of this book until I found it on the Willoughby library shelves, and as it has been available for thirteen years there will be many members who have read it. If not, do find a copy. Our September 1998 weekend conference is on Jane Austen's families (both real and imagined) and this book provides some delightful background reading.

It differs from biographies of Jane Austen, although there is much familiar ground, because of its longer perspective. Maggie Lane focuses on the Austen family over 170 years and not on the seventh of George and Cassandra Austen's children. This gives us a valuable insight into the kind of family the writer came from. The Austen family history with details of personalities is traced from 1700 until 1870. The family became removed from ties with the wool cloth trade from the late 17th century and then encountered the pressures that come with gentrification. Sources of information are records, letters and memoirs from many branches of the family.

Early household account records and business letters of Jane's great grandmother, Elizabeth, tell a particularly poignant story. Elizabeth Austen was the wife of John Austen, who was heir to his cantankerous old father. Like some of the sons and heirs in Austen's novels, such as Tom Bertram or Frederick Tilney, John Austen was always in debt. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was widowed in 1704, before her husband could inherit. She got little help from her father-in-law, either in paying her husband's debts or in providing financial support for her six sons, the fourth of which was Jane's grandfather, William. The father-in-law lived long and left all his estate to her eldest son, John, who them removed himself to live the easy life of the established gentry, leaving his mother, one sister and five brothers to fend for themselves. The story of how she managed to educate them and find money to begin them on a career path makes fascinating reading. She died without ever knowing ease with money herself but her redoubtable efforts are worthy of a novel, perhaps more of the Trollope type than Jane Austen's courtship novels.

In this work, Jane's brothers, her aunts, uncles and cousins who must receive only passing mention in a biography of the writer, come alive. We read of the two brothers, James and Henry, both courting their cousin Eliza, and of Eliza's fascinating and slightly scandalous mother, George Austen's sister, Philadelphia. We get to know Francis, Jane's older sea-faring brother, who always refers to himself in his memoirs in the third person and who comes over as the essence of respectable and competent manliness. There is a lovely vignette of Mrs Leigh Perrot, long after the court case has been resolved, as the wealthy old lady who kept her relatives dancing on a string not knowing to whom she would leave her estate.

The book is very readable, despite so much detail about so many characters in this middle class English family. There are struggles, but always there is education, and somewhere, family connections, which link different branches of the family. These may bring the prospect of inheritance, preferment in the church, or privilege. One such privilege for James and Henry Austen was a fellowship at St John's, Oxford, where the Leigh family had 'founder rights' for their descendants up to the mid 19th century. These offered free education to descendants of the original founders or benefactors of the College. There seems to have been much affection and unity among the Austen relatives and there is much charm in reading about them in Maggie Lane's book. At times the numbers of marriages, children and activities by people who have the same name as in the previous generation can be a little confusing. Luckily there are three sets of family trees in the appendix and some maps which are very helpful.

Jane Austen's Family Through Five Generations adds to the understanding of the sources for the novels in many ways, because these were the people Jane Austen knew and their domestic activities and concerns were part of her observations.

Yvette Field

The World of Jane Austen

by Nigel Nicolson

Phoenix Illustrated. First published 1991. Paperback edition 1997 (unrevised text).

The World of Jane Austen is not a biography, but a discussion of the houses Jane lived in or visited, and her love of the English countryside. Nicolson does not attempt to identify the fictional houses, and indeed Jane never made her characters or houses recognisable from real life. Her artistry is in amalgamating many layers of experience into fictional but believable characters and places.

The book encourages a re-evaluation of many familiar scenes and gives a fresh appreciation of Jane’s genius for detail. It makes one think again how rooms divide or unite characters or action. It gives food for thought about the subtle difference between the drawing room and the salon and how Jane placed her characters and servants, in what rooms and at what time of day.

The descriptions of the places that she knew and their transformation into imagination is flavoured by Nicolson’s own love of the countryside and his lament about unnecessary change. To quote:

People packed into the ‘Assembly Rooms’, a large hall above the stables and coach-house ... demolished when Basingstoke became so pleased with its present it forgot its past.

or

Great Bookham contains no mystery except how its past residents can have so ill-treated it.

He gives fascinating insights into her world which we rarely hear from other biographers — for instance, the ungentlemanly behaviour of a neighbour recorded in a letter to Cassandra. Jane did not trust William Portal of Ashe Park, so when he visited

nothing could prevail on me to move two steps from the door, on the lock of which I kept one hand constantly fixed.

The public perception of Jane is often as a member of a privileged class, but the truth of her genteel poverty was very different. Sometimes being a guest at a grand house had its disadvantages.

Nicolson relates the details of a ball at Goodnestone where most of the people present were related by blood or marriage, and provided their own music. Jane had the honour of being asked to open the ball, but she did have to walk a mile in the dark and the rain back to Edward’s home afterwards.

Included in the book are several photographs or drawings of houses she knew, many of which were new to this writer, despite the current proliferation of biographies and ‘Austen Country’ coffee table books. Nicolson reminds us to see Jane’s world as ‘new’, not bathed in the soft light of history. English country and town houses were being transformed by a mania for building and improvement, under the influence of Repton and Capability Brown. Bath, for instance, despite its Roman origins, was a relatively new town when the Austens lived there.

Nicolson rejects Nikolaus Persner’s comment that Jane was ‘without exception vague, when it comes to describing buildings’ — she was, after all, a novelist, not an architect. What she does do extremely well however, is provide a realistic ambience for her characters, to which Nicolson’s marvelous book adds background and colour.

Meghan Hayward

Jane Austen, Feminism & Fiction

by Margaret Kirkham

First published 1939, Athlone Press 1995 (now in the JASA library).

The Jane Austen so fondly remembered by her brother and nephew is, if not a figment of their imagination, only one of the Jane Austens whom we can know as Margaret Kirkham reveals, opening the door to a whole new way of reading and enjoying Jane Austen.

The title is intriguing: the book offers a new and very different way of looking at Austen,

lifting her from a rare female presence in a male dominated literary canon to one of a line of feminist moralists ... called feminist since (she) was concerned with establishing the moral equality of men and women and the proper status of individual women as accountable beings’ (3).

Austen has been seen as a writer of great prose and stories but limited subject matter, writing only what she experienced, which, since she was a sheltered spinster of the upper middle class, could obviously not be much. Kirkham refers to this ‘problem’ early, but considers that:

the enduring problem of Jane Austen criticism: scale versus stature; the slightness of the matter and the authority of the manner can be resolved if we change our historical perspective on the Austen novels and consider them in the context of 18th century feminist ideas. (56 & xi)

The book is divided into four parts: Part One — Feminism and Fiction: 1694 - 1798 perhaps the most difficult. It is concerned with laying the foundations of the argument for Jane Austen as a feminist rather than discussing the actual works themselves. The section expores the history and understanding of Enlightenment Feminism and demonstrates how, in the light of this understanding, Austen can be (retrospectively) considered as a feminist.

Kirkham also considers the history and continuity of feminist development through the 17th century and the development of the novel in the 18th century. From the behaviour of heroines in Austen’s novels, women could claim the ability to make their own rational and moral decisions:

In her own novels Austen criticises the belief that women’s problems are to be solved by benevolent patriarchs ... her heroines, especially the later ones, solve their own problems before making marriages with men who see themselves in a fraternal, rather that a patriarchal, relationship as husbands. (32).

Part Two, entitled The Publication and Reception of Jane Austen’s Novels, 1797-1818, challenges two commonly held notions: one that Jane Austen disliked Bath; and two, that the long gap between the writing of the lost originals of the three early novels and the writing of the three later novels was ‘a result of disappointment in love or this same presumed dislike of Bath’ (66). It also looks at the correspondence of Austen and Crosby, the publisher who had suppressed Susan (later to become Northanger Abbey) and who wrote stating he had no intention of publishing it. Kirkham writes:

In so far as (Northanger Abbey) attempts a more penetrating criticism of literature and life ... from a feminist point of view, it had less chance of being read with understanding in 1816 than in the late 1790’s when it was begun, or in 1803, when it was ready for publication. It is but one of the many ironies in the history of her eventual success that when (it) at last appeared it was prefaced by an account of her life and character which effectively inhibited readers from seeing how strongly and overtly it displayed that ‘sparkle of confident intelligence’ which had once made it a work worth suppressing (72).

The remainder of the book is given over to consideration of the novels: Part Three: Allusion, Irony and Feminism and the Austen Novels; and Part Four: Feminist Criticism of Society and Literature in the Later Novels. In the chapter on Mansfield Park, Kirkham presents a case for Fanny’s attractions. She says of Fanny:

her apparent innocence and religiosity is an aspect of her sexiness, a veneer of the angelic which makes her sexually exciting to men like Crawford’ (102)

Fanny! Sexy!

A 1983 postscript looks at Jane Austen and the Critical Condition, giving an all-too-brief overview of Jane Austen criticism, including the context of the time in which her novels were published. For our own century she looks at a classic critical essay of feminist criticism, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the conservative criticism of the 1940s and 50s when Austen was elevated to the status of a major novelist, and a consideration of Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, published in 1975. The 1995 edition includes a Preface which enlarges the scope of this postscript, some 14 years later. Feminist criticism had become respectable, and many new studies of Austen and her work were published. The time has not yet come when there is nothing new to challenge or stimulate us as we engage with the author and her texts — although the variety and originality of ideas for research does continue to amaze!

Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction develops a clearly set out and logical argument which is accessible to the general reader. It will add in many ways to your pleasure and knowledge of the Austen novels. Read it!

Amanda Jones

Jane Austen: A Life

by David Nokes

This is abstracted from a review published in the Weekend Australian of 22 November 1997.

During the past six years or so, the carefully orchestrated family portrait of Austen as a perfectly restrained and proper lady novelist has been gradually disintegrating, and we are now aware of her innuendoes (the conflation of governessing with slavery) and silences (the source of Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth in Antigua). The recent surge of popularity for Austen’s novels, with recent films of Sense & Sensibility, Emma and Persuasion however, has done little to dispel the general lingering image of picturesque and inconsequential domesticity. There is still room for another biography — one such as David Nokes’ that challenges our preconceptions and re-examines the evidence from a new perspective.

Nokes’ new biography is a fascinating patchwork of family affairs, village and county records, money dealings of the East India company, power-broking in the navy, the scandal and luxury of Regency London and, above all, Austen’s own comments from letters, intertwined with a racy narrative. Austen afficionados, however, may have trouble with his imagined access to a character’s thoughts — there is considerable invention rising from hints in the letters.

The biography is to some extent revisionist: we meet a less happy, more calculating and more vehemently sardonic Austen than the one we know as he explores the enigmatic silences in the family record and the blank years for which no letters exist. Primary sources of Austen are thin, so it is all the more refreshing when scrutiny of the available evidence turns up some convincing reversals of previous assumptions. Nokes shows, for example, that, contrary to tradition, Austen had fun in Bath and sought out social activity. He plausibly suggests that Austen’s silence in the decade between the drafts of her first three and her later novels may be due to happiness rather than depression. And it follows that the subsequent isolation at Chawton would provide the opportunity for writing.

This is not the first biography to challenge the familiar image of Austen as a literary maiden aunt, but it is the first to rejoice so unreservedly in an Austen who is ‘rebellious, satirical and wild’. Nokes injects new life into an old mould, and the result is both provoking and entertaining.

Christine Alexander

Jane Austen: A Life

by David Nokes

This book should come with a warning. The innocuous and scholarly-sounding title takes on quite other connotations before one is very far into it. The opening, for example:

It is the rainy season in the Sunderbunds. Inside his lonely makeshift hut the Surgeon-Extraordinary sits writing a letter home to his wife in England. The livid orange sun is sinking over this dismal region of fetid salt-flats, swamp and jungle …

This is not, as you might momentarily imagine, an extract from a hitherto undiscovered piece of parody-Gothic juvenilia from Jane Austen, but David Nokes’s evocation of ‘Bengal, 1773’, where (the as yet unborn) Jane’s uncle-by-marriage, Tysoe Saul Hancock, is glooming over a portrait of his wife, who in fact (according to Nokes) has been having an affair with Warren Hastings for years; he is the real father of Tysoe’s supposed daughter. Nokes harps upon this piece of exotic family scandal — as he does the trial of Mrs Leigh Perrott for shop-lifting and the fostering out of Jane’s retarded brother George — because they provide a context for his revisionist portrait of Jane Austen: not the quietly domestic country spinster of her nephew’s memoir, but ‘a wild beast’, sharp-tongued and beady-eyed, intolerant of the stupidities of her country neighbours and fascinated by the gaudy delights of the cities of Bath and London.

Nokes’s attempts to claim Jane for the dark side sound faintly familiar, at least to those of us who started reading Austen criticism in the 60s. Remember Marvin Mudrick, the first to claim that Emma’s interest in Harriet was a substitute for real sexual experience? psychologist D.W.Harding, who called his famous essay ‘Regulated Hatred’? John Halperin’s more recent biography evinces the same need to overturn the traditional picture of a brilliant but modest woman, much-loved by her family, in favour of a figure whose principal drive is malice. There are, of course, things to be learnt from this warts-and-not-much-else approach: it is good, for example, to be reminded of Austen’s taste for lurid and shocking novels, as against her brother’s pious claim that ‘she recoiled from everything gross’. But what none of these (male) writers has taken much account of is what it was really like to be an intelligent and highly gifted woman of the gentry class at the end of the eighteenth century. Their judgements of Austen are disturbingly skewed by this fatal weakness of imagination, this lack of awareness of subtle pressures which almost any well-trained female biographer would put her finger on (I look forward to Claire Tomalin’s biography — particularly as she has already proved herself in this precise field with her excellent life of the actress Dora Jordan, JA’s contemporary).

Demonstrably, Nokes does not lack imagination; he has already displayed his unique talents to the public in his travesty of Clarissa and his sensationalising of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for British television. Ultimately, it is his rampant instinct for Gothic fictionalising which characterises this book, more properly titled, ‘JA: a Sensational Life’. It’s a well-enough told tale, racing over familiar and less-familiar ground in technicolor prose. But Nokes also claims knowledge of Jane’s thoughts (and Cassandra’s, and various other lesser characters’) via a critically irresponsible assignation to them of lines from the novels, regardless of character. He also uses material from the letters completely out of context. For example, he disingenuously reinforces the furphy that the principal subject of Mansfield Park was to be ‘ordination’ because it suits his biographical fantasisings. It’s clear that he doesn’t like the novel or its heroine, and he puts his disapproval into Jane Austen’s invented thoughts:

There was perhaps, she privately conceded, too much of the vanity of humility in Fanny Price’s demeanour; and rather more saintliness about her than was entirely consistent with vitality. (433)

Austen’s own doubts about the reception of the book, which were minor (to do with its being ‘less entertaining’ than Pride and Prejudice) have no tinge of this secular snobbery. Nokes admits in his Introduction, with some pride, that

This is a biography written forwards. In formal terms, it does not adopt the ‘objective’ view of a modern biographer but, like a novel, presents events through the perceptions of its principal characters … in the disposition of a character’s thoughts, as in the interpretation of his or her actions, there is some degree of invention. (5-6)

The trouble with this approach is that keen readers of Jane Austen have already ‘written’ their version of this biography-based-on-fiction in their own minds, larded with their favourite quotations. Readers coming fresh to Austen, probably after seeing some of the film and television adaptations, will be wildly misled, though no doubt titillated, by the work of this latter-day ‘imaginist’.

Penny Gay

Obstinate Heart: Jane Austen, A Biography

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

Published by Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 1997, price $29.95 for hardback edition. Available from all good book shops, or from the Regency Fair for $24.50, and also available from the JASA Library.

When Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were first published in 1818, Jane Austen’s brother Henry attached a short ‘biographical notice’ of his sister. This was the start of the family’s whitewash operation on Jane’s life and character which was continued in the memoir written by Jane’s nephew J.E.Austen-Leigh in 1870. Anything which did not accord with the image of devoted daughter / sister / aunt or with the picture of a sweet-natured, demure spinster whose life was one of constant duty cheerfully performed, was omitted from the edition of her letters published by her great-nephew Lord Brabourne in 1884. The woman who could make a joke about a miscarriage, who could criticise the bad breath of some women she met at a party, and who frankly discussed adultery, contraception and pregnancy, was not the woman Jane’s family wished to present to the world.

Valerie Grosvenor Myer’s biography of Jane Austen, Obstinate Heart, first published this year, does a great deal to remove the layers of whitewash. In it we find an intelligent, sharp and highly critical Jane Austen who was often far from happy with the world she lived in. As explained in the preface,

Jane Austen was never secure financially and was less secure socially than many readers of her novels have assumed. She belonged not to the squire-archy but to the upper end of the professional middle class and spent her entire life as a poor relation. Although socialising with richer neighbours and visits to landed relatives gave her an insight into the way wealthy people lived, it was very different from her own life of genteel poverty, especially after her father’s retirement. She lived on the outside looking in.

Through frequent quotations from Jane Austen’s candid and gossipy letters, Valerie Grosvenor Myer reveals much of Jane Austen’s discontent and shows her struggles with the many difficulties she had to face. For example, we see Jane’s frustration at not being able to afford fashionable clothes, her hatred of being dependent on other people for lifts in carriages to get where she wanted to go, and her irritation at not being better paid for work that she knew was good! This biography gives a clear portrait of a woman who was keenly aware of and resented her low status as a poor, unmarried female.

Like George Holbert Tucker’s excellent biography Jane Austen The Woman, (reviewed on this site), this book does not present the events of Jane’s life in strict chronological order, but rather breaks her life and interests into separate chapters on topics such as ‘Siblings and Society’, ‘Flirtations and Scandal’, ‘Dancing and Shopping’ and ‘Exile’. The material is presented clearly and is easy and enjoyable to read in such a format. There is a wealth of detail in this biography (even those who have read many biographies of Jane Austen will find details that are new to them), and any references to Georgian objects and customs, which would not be clear to a modern reader, are well explained. Both Jane’s everyday routine and her personality are really brought alive for the reader.

The title of the book does, however, let it down! The phrase ‘obstinate heart’ smacks of Mills and Boon and could easily be off-putting to readers. It refers to the proposal of marriage which Jane Austen received from Harris Bigg-Wither, a wealthy man and brother of two of her closest friends. As this book points out strongly, this was an excellent opportunity for a woman who was already ‘on the shelf’ by the standards of her day. Jane Austen saw its advantages and accepted Mr Bigg-Wither. However, the woman who would soon create Mr Darcy and describe the tender feelings of Anne Elliot, could not sink to the level of marrying a man she did not love. Her ‘obstinate heart’ made her turn him down the next morning. While this is an important incident in any biography of Jane Austen, I do not feel it warrants the prominence of being used for a title of a scholarly biography.

Valerie Grosvenor Myer graduated from Cambridge University, taught English literature, worked as a literary editor and has written critical works on Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontė and Margaret Drabble. Obstinate Heart is an excellent introduction for those who have never read a life of Jane Austen, and those who have read several will also find it interesting and enjoyable.

Susannah Fullerton

Jane Austen The Woman: Some Biographical Insights

by George Holbert Tucker

St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1994

This book sets out ‘not to tell us more about Austen’s writing but to tell her personal history – her environment, her friendships, her romantic attachments.’ Through ten chapters, each concentrating on a different aspect of Austen’s life, George Holbert Tucker proceeds to do just that.

Tucker’s journalistic background is evident in his very thorough investigation of available source material. Indeed his bibliography is most impressive in its scope, which goes far beyond the traditional literary texts to look at church registers, contemporary newspapers, published and unpublished family journals, works long out of print and very recent contributions to Austen scholarship. Because of his wide-ranging research there is rarely a statement which cannot be supported by several references and so the notes on each chapter are extensive.

This thorough investigation into the background material has largely achieved the writer’s purpose of dispelling the sentimental picture that had been built up during Victorian times of Miss Austen as a quiet and sheltered village spinster. Unfortunately, the presentation of the minutiae of supporting evidence often makes for tedious reading. As examples Chapter 3 ‘Beaux and a Blighted Romance’ and Chapter 8 ‘Jane Austen and Scandal’, whose titles suggest that the contents will provide entertaining, even racy, reading. Both chapters are particularly ponderous in their examination of supporting evidence.

Another problem associated with ease of reading is found in the exposition of family links over several generations and several degrees of removal. For these links to be made clear we need more than the brief family tree provided as a frontispiece.

Despite these quibbles the book is a very useful one for those who want to know more about Jane Austen and her role in the society of her time. It does not sentimentalise her and does not shy away from providing us with less than favourable accounts of her appearance and behaviour, for example the account provided in a letter from Mary Russell Mitford dated April 3, 1815 in which she wrote:

I have discovered that our great favorite [sic], Miss Austen, is my countrywoman; ... with whom mamma before her marriage was well acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers... (p.14)

It is refreshing to have the myths about her romantic attachments put aside in favour of the facts that are known and the allegations which can be supported or dismissed because of corroborating evidence or lack thereof.

Tucker gives a clear presentation of historical events and then, through examination of correspondence, diaries and family connections is able to give a good idea of Miss Austen’s knowledge and understanding of important military and political happenings without resorting to conjecture.

The book is not presented as a chronological biography but as an examination of different aspects of Jane Austen’s life. The Chapter headings give a good idea of the scope of the book: Presenting Miss Austen; Homes, Environments, and Friends; Beaux and a Blighted Romance; Jane Austen and the Events of Her Time; The Elegant Amenities; Jane Austen and the Prince Regent; Jane Austen’s Reading; Jane Austen and Scandal; Jane Austen’s Journeyings; Jane Austen and Religion.

Each of the chapters stands as a separate essay and there is a useful index so the scholar can easily find specific information.

For those who are prepared to cope with the sometimes tedious detail of supportive evidence Jane Austen the Woman provides an unsentimental appraisal of aspects of the life of this most interesting human being.

Pamela Whalan

Jane Austen’s World

by Maggie Lane

The dedication of this book reads:

To Peter Troy, who found out more about Jane Austen than he ever thought he wanted to know.

Such a dedication would never do for a true Janeite! And although many of you will be familiar with much of the material in this work it is unusual in that it gives us, in one volume, information which we might have to go to many sources to access. We get not only a comprehensive picture of the domestic life which Jane Austen and her circle would have led, but also of the wider world of history and politics both at home and abroad. As Brian Southey writes in his introduction,

The great value of Maggie Lane’s approach is in its placing of Jane Austen clearly and firmly in an historical setting.

The book opens with a chronological account of Jane Austen’s life and a portrait of the writer both as an individual and a member of a large and close-knit family. Various themes are explored under the headings of ‘Daily Life in Jane Austen’s England’, ‘Society and the Spirit of the Age’ and ‘The Visual World’. The topics covered are many and diverse, ranging from ‘Meals and Manners’, ‘Needlework and Dancing’ to ‘Revolution and War’, ‘The British Empire’ and ‘The Rights of Women’.

There is a brief study of each of the six published novels, an account of the dramatisations of these, and a look at ‘Sequels & Completions’. Memoirs and biographies are discussed and the final chapters are devoted to the Museum at Chawton, the growth of what Maggie Lane calls ‘The Jane Austen Industry’ and the birth of the societies bearing her name. Throughout the text there are constant references to the author and her work, and a link made either to some aspect of Jane Austen’s life or to events and characters in her novels.

Without these links this book could be described simply as a successful and entertaining attempt to educate the reader in aspects of life in Regency England. With them however, an extra dimension has been added by the skilful way in which Maggie Lane ensures that the ultimate focus is on Jane and her place in the contemporary scene.

This would be the ideal introduction to Jane Austen for the new reader but can also be appreciated by her long-time fans. It is a large book, handsomely presented and generously illustrated with good quality reproductions of sketches and paintings and with some photographs. As one would expect from a writer of Maggie Lane’s calibre, the style is clear and concise and it all adds up to a book which should give a good deal of instruction and pleasure.

Marjorie Jones

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

edited by Juliet McMaster and Edward Copeland
Published in Cambridge at the University Press in 1997. Paperback. ppxiii +251

The Companion to Jane Austen has been published this year in a period of unprecedented general interest in Jane Austen’s work. The preface speaks of ‘the burgeoning Jane Austen boom’(p.xii) which has led to the press turning to literary critics for ready commentary on Jane Austen’s culture. This book does not aim to provide a tour of Jane Austen’s world at media pace, but to address her readers needs in a time when, as the editors say, even people who read and re-read Jane Austen, may feel that her culture is ‘receding from them at an unsettling speed’ (p.xii).

The editors ask the question, Who are Austen readers? and come up with three categories. The first mentioned, recognises the impact of our kind of Society. We are the ‘new Janeites’, with ‘eager feelings’ for Jane Austen, but with ‘limited tolerance of bookish harangues’. Academics make up the second category, people who are ‘bookish enough about Jane Austen but have few feelings of the Janeite kind’, according to the editors, and the third category are the readers who come to read Austen for motives which could vary from study to curiosity(pxi). The Companion’s stated aim is ‘to recover and illuminate elements of her culture so that her novels may speak the more lucidly to ours’(pxii). In this way the book could appeal to all kinds of Austen readers.

One of the strengths of the Companion is the variety of cultural elements it includes. There are thirteen contributions, of which only four are direct commentaries on her published writings. The six major novels are grouped in threes; the first three on the basis that they were all drafted in the 1790s and the others because they belong to the Chawton years. There is also an article on the minor works and another on her letters. Four more articles focus on the author, with a chronology of her life, a history of her publications, a commentary on her style and a review of her literary sources and influences. A further three contributions cover some of the contexts of her novels which have excited much commentary over the years: one is on money, another on class consciousness, and one covers that blend of religion and politics which underlies the moral values in the novels. Many of the writers of these articles will be familiar to members of the society because of their publications or because they have spoken at our meetings or at conferences. Most contributors including the editors are from The United States but there are two from Australia, two from Britain and two from Alberta, Canada.

The book begins with a chronology provided by Deirde Le Faye, the editor of the latest edition of Jane Austen’s letters. This starts with the marriage of Jane Austen’s parents and ends in December 1817 with the posthumous publication, with a note by Henry Austen, of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. This chronology of the author’s life gives a useful quick reference to births, deaths, family movements and incidents which are context, particularly, for the letters and for the timing of publications. A family tree would have been a useful addition here as an aid to quick reference, but the chronology does provide background for the papers that follow. For example, Jan Fergus opens the first paper by contesting Henry Austen’s (1817) image of his sister as a ladylike, retiring amateur writer who was grateful to receive any money for her work. She demonstrates that Jane Austen was very much a professional writer, and discusses the obstacles to publishing for a Georgian woman writer, the ways this could be done, as well as the publishing history of the novels.

This paper on Jane Austen as The Professional Woman Writer, like the chronology, provides factual reference but also establishes a theme which is taken up in Rachel Brownstein’s discussion of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice and again by Margaret Anne Doody in her discussion of the short fiction. This theme is that Jane Austen transformed her writing from a satirical tone which was her preferred artistic view towards something more publishable in Regency England. She began by satirising courtship novels of the virtuous heroine and moved toward establishing her own version of the romantic novel. Rachel Brownstein shows how the first novels undercut romance with social satire and in the development of romantic love how ‘irony thwarts readers in search of straight answers to big questions’ (p34). She shows Austen’s complex progression towards happy and romantic endings through the first three novels. Margaret Anne Doody makes the interesting claim that Jane Austen’s early fiction was not an apprenticeship for the six novels, but that strong social satire and parody was what she wanted to write. The wit of the 18th century had to give way to a less ebullient, more restrained domestic sort of novel to fit Regency tastes, which were far less Rabelaisian than the antics of the Prince Regent would suggest. There is an interesting comparison between the writer of the first Regency romance and Georgette Heyer, the 20th century creator of the retrospect version.

The two other articles directly on Jane Austen’s writing are the analysis of the Chawton novels by John Wiltshire and of the letters by Carol Houlihan Flynn. Both are highly readable. John Wiltshire concentrates on the different physical and social settings which make separate worlds of each novel, and on the use of narrative voice. There is an illuminating discussion of Mansfield Park in which he describes the reader’s viewpoint as being that of a resident in that stately house, studying the assumptions and manners of the very rich. An interesting discussion ensues of the ‘almost equal narrative stature’ (p61) of Mary and Fanny, and an explanation of Mary’s worldliness and wit as a coping strategy for the disillusionment of her upbringing. There are gems in the discussion of the other two novels as well. Carol Houlihan Flynn analyses the letters and notes a detachment which she considers, is a pretence to ‘undercut desire’ stemming from a social position where Jane Austen was virtually powerless. Shades of Mary here, one might think, in strategy; and in position, the powerlessness of Miss Bates. It is the latter connection that Carol Houlihan Flynn uses to great effect.. She likens the style of Jane Austen’s letters to that of the ‘great talker on little matters’, Miss Bates. She then uses Emma’s phrase on that lady’s style; that she could ‘fly off through half a sentence to her mother’s old petticoat’ to apply to Austen’s letters. In this article which quoted from many letters, it would have been useful to have the date, as well as the traditional number, for each. This would have linked in well with the chronology.

Articles on the context of the novels provide much information that aims to bridge the widening cultural gap between our time and Jane Austen’s time. Juliet McMaster concentrates on Emma in her discussion of class but also ranges though the other novels to suggest that although Austen recognises the relevance of social status, she is more interested in ‘who’ than ‘what’ people are. Edward Copeland. in an amusing article on ‘money’, documents the style of life that would be possible with so many hundreds or thousands of pounds per year. Gary Kelly has written an erudite account of religion and politics, showing how Jane Austen in her novels, ‘sought to repair dangerous divisions’ in these matters, as they affected the strata of society that she depicted.

The articles on style, and aspects of the critical tradition and Austen’s sources add further depth to the Companion as does the final contribution by Bruce Stovel which is a comment on further reading with a wide range of material. John Burrows on style concentrates on its ‘disjunctive quality’ and also documents a statistical analysis comparing Jane Austen’s style in letters, fictional versions of letters and longer narratives in the novels with other writers over about 100 years. The computer results suggest that there is a distinctive quality that can be measured. Isobel Grundy and Claudia Johnson at times overlap in their discussions, respectively on Literary Traditions and Cults and Cultures, but both articles are interesting and comprehensive.

The Companion is indeed a book that would be useful to have on the shelves so that it can be exactly that.

Yvette Field

Lackington Allen & Co, booksellers, Finsbury Square, was 'one of the curiosities of the metropolis ... on account of the vast extent of its premises, and of the immense stock of books'.

From Ackermann, R: The Repository of arts. literature, commerce, manufactures, fashion and politics (1809 - 28).

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18 December 1998

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