Jane's Fame , livre ebook

For Paul

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface


Chapter 1 ‘Authors too ourselves’
Chapter 2 Praise and Pewter
Chapter 3 Mouldering in the Grave
Chapter 4 A Vexed Question
Chapter 5 Divine Jane
Chapter 6 Canon and Canonisation
Chapter 7 Jane Austen™


Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Manuscript Sources
Select Bibliography
Notes
Index

List of Illustrations

1. Manuscript of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ by Jane Austen (kind permission of Chawton House Library, Hampshire www.chawtonhouse.org).
2. The Revd George Austen (1731–1805).
3. Letter from Revd George Austen to Thomas Cadell, 1 November 1797 (by kind permission of the President and Scholars of Saint John Baptist College in the University of Oxford).
4. John Murray II, mezzotint after unknown artist, early 1800s (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
5. Royalty cheque from the firm of John Murray to Jane Austen, 1816 (John Murray Archive © Trustees of the National Library of Scotland).
6. Portrait of a man said to be the Revd James Stanier Clarke, LLD, FRS (1765–1834) by John Russell (1745–1806), c. 1790 (© V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum).
7. Silhouette of Cassandra Austen (1773–1845), undated (Jane Austen Memorial Trust).
8. Henry Austen (1771–1850), miniature c. 1820 (in family possession).
9. Jane Austen’s gravestone in Winchester Cathedral (© The Dean and Chapter of Winchester).
10. Richard Bentley, lithograph by Charles Baugniet, 1844 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
11. Title page of Sense and Sensibility , published by Richard Bentley & Co. in 1833.
12. James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798–1874), artist unknown (Jane Austen Memorial Trust).
13. Robert William Chapman, bromide print by Walter Stoneman, 1949 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
14. Chawton Cottage, photographed for The Bookman , January 1902 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Per 25805 c.2).
15. Dorothy Darnell and T. E. Carpenter at Chawton Cottage, late 1940s (Jane Austen Memorial Trust).
16. Jane Austen, pencil and watercolour drawing by Cassandra Austen, c.1810 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
17. Watercolour painting by James Andrews after Cassandra Austen, 1869 (private family collection).
18. Engraving after Cassandra Austen; the frontispiece to James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen , 1870 (© Bettman/Corbis).
19. Steel engraving from Evert A. Duyckinck’s Portrait Gallery of Eminent Men and Women , 1873, artist unknown.
20. Silhouette, said to be of Jane Austen, artist unknown (Patrick O’Connor Collection).
21. ‘Mr and Mrs Bennet’ from Pride and Prejudice , Allen and Macmillan, 1894; illustration by Hugh Thomson.
22. Jane Austen, woodcut by Félix Vallotton, from La Revue Blanche , January-April, 1898.
23. Lithograph portrait of Félix Fénéon by Maximilien Luce, from Mazas , 1894 (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009).
24. Cover of The Storyteller , May 1924 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Per 2561 d.46).
25. Cartoon from ‘Real Life Stories: Jane Austen’, Girl 20 October 1954, drawn by Eric Dadswell (© IPC Magazines).
26. Royal Mail commemorative stamps, 1975, designed by Barbara Brown.
27. Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in Robert Z. Leonard’s Pride and Prejudice , 1940 (© Turner Entertainment Co. A Warner Bros Entertainment Company. All rights reserved).
28. James McAvoy and Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane ,2007 (Source: BFI).
29. ‘Jane Austen’, 1995 (© Theo Westenberger/Corbis).
Preface

‘What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her?
What is it all about?’


Joseph Conrad to H. G. Wells, 1901
When Jane Austen’s brother Henry wrote the first ‘Biographical Notice’ about the author for the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, he clearly thought his would be the last words on the subject. ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer,’ he wrote. ‘A life of usefulness, literature and religion was not by any means a life of event.’ As far as Henry and his siblings were concerned, the story of their sister’s authorship was over. A few of her remaining letters were bequeathed as keepsakes to nephews and nieces, others were destroyed or forgotten, the books went out of print, and Jane’s generation of Austens aged and died secure in the belief that the public’s curiosity about their sister – such as it was – had been satisfied.
But almost two hundred years and tens of thousands of books on Austen later, her fame and readership worldwide continue to grow. Her six completed novels are among the best-known, best-loved, most-read works in the English language. Practically over-looked for thirty or forty years after her death, the ‘tide of her fame’ that Henry James imagined had already ‘passed the high-water’ at the end of the nineteenth century has swollen and burst its banks. She is now a truly global phenomenon, known as much through film and television adaptations of her stories as through the books themselves, revered by non-readers and scholars alike. Her influence reaches from the decoration of tea-towels to a defence of extreme pornography, and her fans have included Queen Victoria, E. M. Forster, B. B. King (‘Jane Austen! I love Jane Austen!’) 1 and the editor of the lad-mag Nuts . As the title of one Austen blog has it, ‘Jane Austen – She’s Everywhere!’, endlessly referenced and name-dropped and part of today’s multinational, multilingual, multicultural single currency.
The use of Austen’s name knows no generic boundaries. Who else is cited with equal approval by feminists and misogynists, can be linked to nineteenth-century anarchism, twenty-first-century terrorism and the National Trust, forms part of the inspiration behind works as diverse as Eugene Onegin and Bridget Jones’s Diary ? During the 2006 World Cup Final, some viewers may have been momentarily distracted from the foot-and head-work of Zinedine Zidane by the Phillips advert behind the French goal announcing ‘Sense and Simplicity’, while a recent article about possible infiltration of US educational programmes by terrorists was titled ‘Osama Bin Laden a Huge Jane Austen Fan’. The phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice’ itself, sonorous, moralistic and nicely alliterative, has provided headline-writers with one of their readiest formulae, though, of course, Austen’s novel is rarely the subject of whatever follows; Test Match coverage, the stalemate in a steel strike, the fallout from an anti-Islamic newspaper article, or the description of Bob Woodward’s latest book about the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy: ‘A Heady Mix of Pride and Prejudice Led to War’. There is a long tradition of linking the phrase with public affairs; in 1900 the New York Times ran a letter about the conduct of the British in the Boer War under that title, as the writer had claimed, ‘Pride has made them believe themselves perfect; prejudice against things foreign has so isolated their army that it is now actually antiquated and worthy of the days of George III.’ 2 In the spring of 2007, it turned up in a headline about the birth of a child to the American Vice-President’s lesbian daughter, Mary: ‘Pride and Prejudice: Dick Cheney’s family values’. 3
If Pride and Prejudice is the representative Austen title, its opening sentence is one of the most frequently abused quotes in the language, second only to ‘to be or not to be’. Marjorie Garber has called it a ‘cultural bromide’ and cited its forced use in articles on subjects as diverse as grape allergies, opera stars and restaurant services, as well as pieces about Austen and her books, of course. 4 The mathematical neatness of the sentence lends itself to appropriation: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a [blank] in possession of a [blank] must be in want of a [blank].’ Almost every day of the week, you’ll find it in a paper or on a website somewhere: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that an unemployed believer in possession of a missile-launcher must be in want of a Jehad’ or ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the acquisition and enhancement of literacy skills is a fundamental educational goal.’ 5
Austen’s success as an infinitely exploitable global brand, or conceptual product, is everything to do with recognition and little to do with reading. The Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant understood this at the very dawn of Janeism: ‘"The best judges" have here, for once, done the office of an Academy,’ she wrote in September 1870, suspicious of the fuss around the first biography, ‘[they have] laureated a writer whom the populace would not have been likely to laureate, but whom it has learned to recognise.’ The ‘universality of applause’ which Austen had already excited seemed to Oliphant ‘half-real half-fictitious’, 6 the result of wishful thinking on the part of readers and exploitation by what Henry James later identified as ‘bookselling spirits’ and ‘the stiff breeze of the commercial’. If this was true in 1872, how much more so today, when Austen’s name bears such a weight of signification as to mean almost nothing at all. To many people, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, even ‘Jane Austen’, simply evokes the actor Colin Firth in a wet shirt, and for all her consistent topping of ‘Nation’s Favourite’ listings (in 2007 Pride and Prejudice was voted ‘the book the nation can’t do without’; the Bible came sixth), Austen’s texts remain unfamiliar to many readers. In 2007, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, an unpublished novelist, tested the alertness of eighteen contemporary British publishers by sending round the first chapters of Pride and Prejudice , with proper nouns slightly adjusted, under the title ‘First Impressions, by Alison Laydee’. It was rejected by all of them, but more surprisingly, only one editor seems to have recognised the manuscript’s origins and the presence of a hoax. 7
But unlike many candidates for global celebrity, Austen is a genuinely great a