Genre and style
Main articles: Styles and themes of Jane Austen and Marriage in the works of
Jane Austen
Austen's works implicitly critique the sentimental novels of the second half
of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary
realism.[131][o] The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding,
and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and
romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe,
and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen repudiated, returning
the novel on a "slender thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding
for a "realistic study of manners".[132] In the mid-20th century the literary
critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and
Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and
satire to form an author superior to both".[133]
Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of
much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the
regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'".[134] Yet her
relationship with these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger
Abbey and Emma.[134] Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the
modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen
distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she
demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is
artistically more."[134] She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror
in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or
abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their
title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine,
Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale
rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with
descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's
"novel-fueled" desires.[135] Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic
fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine
is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated
manners and the strict rules of the ballroom.[136] In Sense and Sensibility
Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple
sentimental fiction, according to the critic Tom Keymer, who notes that
although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, "Marianne in her
sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite
justifiable scream of female distress."[137]
The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think
and be miserable. It was a wretched business, indeed! Such an overthrow of
everything she had been wishing for! Such a development of every thing
most unwelcome!
— example of free indirect speech, Jane Austen, Emma[138]
Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic
love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to
have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social
conventions.[139] Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found
the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which
each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The
narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English
novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a
character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative
control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's
voice and values and those of the characters.[140]
Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to the scholar
Mary Lascelles: "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as
to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters."[141] Techniques such as
fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and
phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants.[142]
Dialogue reveals a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each
treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence
structures. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the
convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:[143]
From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my
acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief
of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of
others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on
which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not
known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world
whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.[144]
Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to
secure social standing and economic security.[145] As an art form, the 18th-
century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th
century, when novels were treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and
ventilation of what mattered in life".[146] Rather than delving too deeply
into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them
with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring
of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of
life".[147] Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary
significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels.
Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write
"a representation of life as may excite mirth".[148]
Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her
most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the
trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in.
[147] Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and
gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in
life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic
Robert Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of
Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence
and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and
the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her
satirical bias with her sense of the good."[148]
Reception
Main articles: Reception history of Jane Austen, Janeite, and Jane Austen in
popular culture
Contemporaneous responses
In 1816 the editors of The New Monthly Magazine noted Emma's publication,
but chose not to review it.[K]
As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little
personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were
rarely reviewed.[104] Most of the reviews were short and on balance
favourable, although superficial and cautious,[149][150] most often focused
on the moral lessons of the novels.[151]
Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, anonymously wrote a review of
Emma in 1815, using it to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel
and praising Austen's realism, "the art of copying from nature as she really
exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of
the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking
representation of that which is daily taking place around him".[152] The
other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821.
However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew
favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as
Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative.
Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century
Austen criticism.[153]
19th century
One of the first two published illustrations of Pride and Prejudice, from the
Richard Bentley edition.[154] Caption reads: "She then told him [Mr
Bennett] what Mr Darcy had voluntarily done for Lydia. He heard her with
astonishment."
Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian
expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious
display of sound and colour in the writing",[155] some 19th-century critics
preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.[156]
Notwithstanding Walter Scott's positivity, Austen's work did not win over
those who preferred the prevailing aesthetic values of the elite Romantic
zeitgeist.[157] Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and
sold steadily.[158] Austen's six books were included in the canon-making
Standard Novels series by publisher Richard Bentley, which increased their
stature. That series referred to her as "the founder of a school of novelists"
and called her a genius.[159]
The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an
1842 essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer
with no substance.[160] Austen was not widely appreciated in France until
1878,[160] when the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le
Roman Classique en Angleterre, in which he called Austen a "genius", the
first French author to do so.[161] The first accurate translation of Austen
into French occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger
Abbey as Catherine Morland.[161]
In Britain and North America, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of
both the public and the literati. In the United States, Austen was being
recommended as reading in schools as early as 1838, according to Professor
Devoney Looser.[162] The philosopher and literary critic George Henry
Lewes published a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s.
[163] Later in the century, the novelist Henry James referred to Austen
several times with approval, and on one occasion ranked her with
Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as amongst "the fine painters of
life".[164]
The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in
1869 introduced Austen's life story to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the
respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred another reissue
of Austen's novels. Editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated
editions and collectors' sets quickly followed.[165] The author and critic
Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for
Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". Around the start of the 20th century,
an intellectual clique of Janeites reacted against the popularisation of
Austen, distinguishing their deeper appreciation from the vulgar enthusiasm
of the masses.
In response, Henry James decried "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a
rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and
interest".[166] The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the
"anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprised a formidable literary
squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence, and
Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the
special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen
relatively untouched".[167]
Modern
Depiction of Austen from A Memoir of Jane Austen (1871) written by her
nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, and based on the sketch by Cassandra.
All subsequent portraits of Austen are generally based on this, including on
the reverse of the Bank of England £10 note introduced in September 2017.
Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on
Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard
University.[168] Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay
by the Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley,[169] who grouped
Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by
scholars today.[170] The first academic book devoted to Austen in France
was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why
French critics and readers should take Austen seriously.[161] The same year,
Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her
PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France.[161] In
1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's
collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English
novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent
published editions of Austen's works.[171]
With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, the
academic study of Austen took hold.[172] Lascelles analysed the books
Austen read and their influence on her work, and closely examined Austen's
style and "narrative art". Concern arose that academics were obscuring the
appreciation of Austen with increasingly esoteric theories, a debate that has
continued since.[173]
The period since the Second World War has seen a diversity of critical
approaches to Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most
controversially, postcolonial theory.[174] The divide has widened between
the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and
academic judgements.[175] In 1994 the literary critic Harold Bloom placed
Austen among the greatest Western writers of all time.[176]
In the People's Republic of China after 1949, writings of Austen were
regarded as too frivolous,[177] and thus during the Chinese Cultural
Revolution of 1966–76, Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois
imperialist".[178] In the late 1970s, when Austen's works were re-published
in China, her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had
trouble understanding that people generally read books for enjoyment, not
political edification.[179]
The conservative American professor Gene Koppel claimed that Austen and
her family were "Tories of the deepest dye", i.e. Conservatives in opposition
to the liberal Whigs. Although several feminist authors such as Claudia
Johnson and Mollie Sandock claimed Austen for their own cause, Koppel
argued that different people react to a work of literature in different
subjective ways, as explained by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Thus competing interpretations of Austen's work can be equally valid,
provided they are grounded in textual and historical analysis: it is equally
possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency-era society and as a
conservative upholding its values.[180]
