sign in sign up
<<
Home , Love and Freindship, The Beautifull Cassandra

JANE AUSTEN THE NOVELIST Also by luliet McMaster

DICKENS THE DESIGNER 'S ACHIEVEMENT (editor) JANE AUSTEN ON LOVE THE FROM STERNE TO JAMES (co-author with Rowlalld McMaster) THACKERAY: THE MAJOR TROLLOPE'S P ALLISER NOVELS Jane Austen the Novelist

Essays Past and Present

Juliet McMaster ISBN 978-1-349-24682-3 ISBN 978-1-349-24680-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24680-9

First published in Great Britain 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-59926-6

------~--_._---

first published in the United States of Ameriea 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-12753-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-I'ublication Data McMaster, luliet. lane Austen the novelist : essays past and present /luliet McMaster. p. cm. Includes bibliographieal references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12753-4 1. Austen, lane, 1775-1817-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature-England-History-19th century. I. Title. I'R4037.M35 1996 823'.7-dc20 95--14700 CI I'

© luliet McMaster 1996

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made witlwut wrilten permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence perrllitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Lieensing Ageney, 90 Tottenh,lI11 Court Road, London WlP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised aet in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for dam'lges. 10 9 8 7 6 5 OS 04 03 02 01 To Valentine and Hugh, kind sister and brother-in-Iaw, with lasting affection, and thanks for your years of toleration and support of my Jane Austen doings Contents

List of Illustrations viii Texts and Abbreviations ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xiv Part I 1 Jane Austen as a Cultural Phenomenon 3 2 Teaching "" 18 3 "" Illustrated 36 4 Hospitality 47 5 "God Gave Us Our Relations": The Watson Family 59

6 11Acting by Design" in 76 7 The Secret Languages of 90 Part 11 Love in fane Austen's Novels - APreface to Chapters 8-11 109 8 The Symptoms of Love 111 9 Surface and Subsurface 133 10 Love and Pedagogy 150 11 Women in Love 173 Index 199

vii List of Illustrations

Genealogies in "Love and Freindship" 31 "Cassandra was the Daughter and the only Daughter of a celebrated Millener in Bond 5treet" 37 "5he placed it on her gentle Head & walked from her Mother's shop to make her Fortune" 40 "5he next ascended a Hackney Coach and ordered it to Hampstead" 42

viii Texts and Abbreviations

References to Jane Austen's works are to R. W. Chapman's editions: The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols, 3rd edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1932-4), 5th impression. Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), reprinted with revisions 1963. Jane Austen's Letters to !zer Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). E Emma Letters Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others MP MW Minor Works NA Nort!zanger Abbey P PP Pride and Prejudice SS

ix Preface

To begin with an anecdote: On the day I draft this preface, Jane Austen has claimed attention in no less than four book projects - all of wh ich are either in process, like the one I am writing at this very minute, or projected for the future. And if a single critic is involved in four at a time, how many books on her must there be out there, growing week byweek? Here's how the day has gone. With my colleague and co-editor, Bruce Stove 1, I have been contacting contributors about last-minute changes to the volume of essays we call Jane Austen's Business, a col­ lection resulting from the large-scale conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America wh ich he and I convened in the autumn of 1993 at Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies. The contributors inc1ude such people as Margaret Drabble and Elaine Showalter, and the con­ ference, in spite or because of its remote setting, drew six hundred delegates. That's one book project. Also on this day arrived readers' reports on a projected Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, very positive. (How could a reader not be positive about such a Companion?). That volume Ed Copeland of California and I are co-editing, and we have the go-ahead on it from Cambridge University Press. Also on this day ca me a phone call from a colleague in Texas, sound­ ing me out as a co-editor of a volume of essays that may result from the next Society conference, to be held in New Orleans on the theme of revolution in Jane Austen's writings. A prominent Austen scholar in England is interested in such a volume for a British press he is con­ nected with. And then of course there's the present volume, of my own essays past and present, with an opening essay on "Jane Austen as a Cultural Phenomenon," wh ich engages these very issues of how many people are reading Jane Austen, and how many books there are on her. Why do I feel as though I am riding a wave? - indeed thundering in to shore with the surf breaking all around me. It may be a phenomenon peculiar to the circ1es I move in that Jane Austen is receiving unprecedented attention; but if so, those circ1es are certainly getting bigger and bigger. Jane Austen is news. Jane Austen is business. In academe her status has never been higher, and

xi xii Preface has had an extra impulse with feminist approaches. And the popular following is even greater than in the heyday of the , early in the century. I'd ratherjoin the stampede (a fairly decorous one, let me admit) than disapprove of it. The essays that follow have been writ­ ten as part of an academic career; but I hope they speak also to those who read Jane Austen simply for recreation. They are about what we all care for: the development of her art; her characters and their lan­ guage; her sense of community; and love. Jane Austen's habit of mind is to move easily from the particular example to the general proposition, and back again, with a due enrich­ ment of both. In writing and rearranging the essays thatfollow, I have tried to do something similar, alternating the long-distance look with close-up examination. Some of these essays are overviews of an over­ arching theme, so me individual studies. The first essay, on Jane Austen's growing place in our culture, is the one written most recent­ ly, and I draw on my long association with the Jane Austen Societies on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as on my experience in teaching and criticism, to examine the extraordinary popular following that she still attracts, as weIl as her high status among academics. Whyall the fuss about Jane Austen? - ask the ones who are not making the fuss. That is a large and general question, and part of the answer is a documentation of the fuss. Theessayon "Hospitality" as a recurringconcern in Austen's works was written for a particular occasion, as is still apparent. It engages large issues of the social ties that bind the characters of the novels together (or divide them), and define her society. The same can be said of the final group of essays on love in her novels. Here I chal­ lenge CharIotte Bronte's contention that Austen as a novelist lacks passion. Not so, I claim. Three of these essays first appeared in a lit­ tle book called Jane Austen on Love; the last, on the "Women in Love," is new to this volume, and will be detected as being of more recent date in showing the influence of feminist criticism, which has so changed and enlarged our way of reading the novels. Within these general essays, however, I still tend to move in to close examination of individual texts - my principle being that if you're dealing with a stylist of Jane Austen's calibre it's a waste not to quote her amply. In between come several close-up studies. I rejoice in Jane Austen's juvenilia, and have probably paid more sustained attention to "Love and Freindship" and "The Beautifull Cassandra" than anyone else in print. The tantalising fragment , too, coming as it does between Jane Austen's two creative periods of the 1790s and the 1810s, Preface xiii

invites more attention than it has received, and I'm not one to turn down an invitation. I have no such excuse for writing ab out Pride and Prejudice and Emma, as they have been, and continue to be, very thor­ oughly worked over. But I claim a right to have my say too. These essays have been written over two decades, and I don't pre­ tend to a unity of approach. In preparing them for this volume, I have sometimes added a new reference (where it seems indispensable) from the large body of criticism which has emerged since they were writ­ ten. But it would be anachronistic to attempt a full-scale updating. These essays haven't a single thesis; rather they are the separate prod­ ucts of years of reading Austen's novels with attention and admira­ tion, and teaching them with joy. Though I have written in the meanwhile on several other authors - Burney, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot - Jane Austen is the one I return to with most delight in "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" Since I have ventured to be personal and confidential in these essays, I should explain that it seems to me that Jane Austen is a writer who does almost magically engage her readers' whole personalities. As generations of her readers have found, she breaks down the barriers between the orders of reaIity, and makes us like or dislike her char­ acters as if we actually knew them. One finds it difficult to maintain a proper professional distance in talking of her novels. I confess this in advance, lest the less-than-critically-distanced material in, say, the chapters on "The Beautifull Cassandra" and "Hospitality" should seem unseemly. It has been my good fortune to have addressed the members of the Jane Austen Society of England (once) and the Jane Austen Society of North America (many times). By the time this book emerges, I shall have tried my luck with the Jane Austen Society of AustraIia too. These are such audiences as almost to spoil one for any other. If there is a tone of levity in some of the following essays, many of which were first delivered to these Societies, blame the audiences, not me. They were the ones who encouraged me. Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the University of Alberta for its generous and ongo­ ing support of my research, inc1uding grants to enable me to go places to give these papers. For helping me to develop and define these ideas, and for kindly listening to them, I thank my students, both under­ graduate and graduate, as weil as the Jane Austen Societies, and many individuals within them. Among the many students, colleagues and friends whose help and advice I would particularly like to acknowl­ edge are Joan Austen-Leigh, Gamet Bass, Diana BirchaIl, Astrid Blodgett, PatClements, Ed Copeland, Martin Friedrich, Isobel Grundy, Susan Hillabold, Heidi Janz, Gary Kelly, Michael Londry, Peter Mitham, Shirley Neuman, Ilona Ryder, Elaine Showalter, Christina Sommerfeldt, Bruce Stovel, Eileen Sutherland, Karys Van de Pitte, and Mary Beth Wolicky; also the late Jack Grey, who was so gener­ ous in his encouragement to so many of us who work on Jane Austen. My husband, Rowland, has as always stimulated my ideas as weIl as listened to them; and he has even put up with being turned into a bit of a himself. Many of these essays have been published before, and I am grate­ ful to the editors and presses listed below for permission to publish them here. "Teaching 'Love and Freindship'" was first published in Jane Austen' s Beginnings: The Juveniliaand , edited by J. David Grey (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 135-51. "Pride and Prejudice: 'Acting by Design'" was first published in The Novel from Sterne to James: Essays on the Relation 0/ Literature to Li/e, by Juliet and Rowland MeMaster (London: Maemillan, 1987), 19-36. "Jane Austen on the Symptoms of Love" was an address to the Jane Austen Society at Chawton in 1977, and printed in the Society's annualreportfor that year. "Surfaee and Subsurfaee in Jane Austen's Novels" appeared first in Ariel, 5:2 (April 1974), 5-24. "Love and Pedagogy" was invited for Jane Austen Today, edited by Joel Weinsheimer (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 64-91. The last three, as I have explained, were also published in my Jane Austen on Love (Victoria: English Literary Studies Monograph series, 1978). Published in Persuasions, the annual journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, were "'The Beautifull Cassandra' Illustrated," (10, 1988, 99-103); "'God Gave UsOur Relations': The WatsonFamily," (8, 1986, 60-72); and "The Seeret Languages of Emma," (13, 1991, 119-31). xiv