'The Novelist of Home': Silence and the Theorisation of Domesticity in Jane Austen's Fiction

Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Stanley, Kerry (2018) 'THE NOVELIST OF HOME': SILENCE AND THE THEORISATION OF DOMESTICITY IN JANE AUSTEN'S FICTION. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR http://kar.kent.ac.uk/66697/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html ‘THE NOVELIST OF HOME’: SILENCE AND THE THEORISATION OF DOMESTICITY IN JANE AUSTEN’S FICTION Kerry Stanley A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English University of Kent April 2018 Word count: 98,775 Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Introduction: ‘the novelist of home’ 1 Chapter 1 – ‘Activity run mad!’: Accomplishments and the inconspicuous 27 labour of female leisure Chapter 2 – ‘[N]ot quite of the human flesh’: The domestication of the 82 female body Chapter 3 – Silence, distance and absence: The politics of female exclusion 134 Chapter 4 – ‘I hate describing such things’: Austen and the fabric of the home 181 Chapter 5 – ‘[W]oman’s destiny’: Marriage, endings and the inappropriateness 233 of the domestic ideal Conclusion 270 Bibliography 276 i Abstract This thesis offers a re-examination of the nearly two-centuries-old idea that Jane Austen is ‘the novelist of home’. How, it asks, can we reconcile the seemingly opposing notions of Austen’s famed insular focus on domestic life, with its corresponding restraints upon women, and her clearly non-conservative gender politics? In depicting the lives of young women, Austen by and large excludes matters which were deemed ‘unfeminine’ or belonging to the public and ‘masculine’ world from her fiction. Topics such as sexuality and politics might then be considered silences in her novels. This apparent refusal to discuss these subjects was not, however, a sign of Austen’s endorsement of the ideal of withdrawn and private female life set out within conservative conduct literature. Instead, I argue, in her isolated focus on domesticity Austen provides forensic studies of the conditions of home life for middle-class women and their psychological impact. Her silences, therefore, are tools used to recreate the state of disconnection in which women exist under the influence of contemporary domestic ideology. In each of her novels, Austen criticises that confinement to, and an education that prepares women for, a life solely in the domestic realm harmfully limits the scope of their knowledge, development and ultimately selfhood. Offering a theorisation of domesticity that develops over the course of her career, Austen set herself apart from her forerunners and contemporaries in domestic fiction. In adapting the novel according to this enterprise of reconceiving domesticity, Austen moreover reimagines the novel itself. ii Acknowledgements I would first of all like to thank the AHRC for funding this research. In addition, I am grateful to Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah and all of the interview panel for thinking my ideas were worthy of this award. Receiving the news about this scholarship will undoubtedly always be one of my proudest moments. I am also grateful to the staff at the Templeman Library and British Library. These libraries provided valuable materials for research and peaceful places to work. My thanks go out more widely to all of the staff in the School of English who I have had the pleasure to meet or be taught by since I first joined the University of Kent in 2007. The friendliness, enthusiasm for teaching and wide range of expertise at the School made this a stimulating place to learn as an undergraduate, Masters and PhD student. I am grateful to the School for providing me with the opportunity to teach in recent years, an experience which greatly enhanced my research. While I have had many excellent teachers in my time at Kent I would like to give special acknowledgment to Professor Donna Landry, who guided me through writing my MA dissertation. Without her initial kind words of encouragement and advice I would never have thought I had the potential to do a PhD. Becoming part of the postgraduate community at Kent and beyond has been one of the most rewarding aspects of being a research student. Discussing thesis-writing and teaching with fellow students helped me in facing these otherwise daunting challenges. I am especially thankful to anyone at conferences who offered their thoughts on my work and spurred me on in my research. Most of all I am grateful to my two supervisors, Professor Jennie Batchelor and Dr Declan Gilmore-Kavanagh. Declan I thank for sharing his expertise and for providing iii insights throughout the PhD writing process. He helped me to look at my work in a different light and see what I had missed. I am particularly grateful for his care in offering feedback in the final few weeks before submission. To Jennie I am hugely indebted for reasons too numerous to mention in their entirety. Jennie first taught me as an undergraduate and MA student and it was her teaching and passion for her subject that helped ignite my interest in the long eighteenth century. As my principle supervisor for the past four years she has shown unwavering confidence in me and enthusiasm for this project. Jennie’s vast knowledge of her field has helped shape and develop my ideas at every stage of the PhD and she has offered painstaking and detailed feedback throughout the writing process. But I am perhaps most of all grateful to her for always believing firmly that there was still more to say about Jane Austen. Lastly (but not least) I would like to acknowledge all of my friends and family. I am especially grateful to John Stanley for keeping a roof over my head and for putting up with the late nights and piles of books and to Cleo for all the much-needed walks. I am grateful to Clare O’Shaughnessy for always being unconditionally proud and for her love and friendship. To Jodie Stanley I am also thankful for her friendship and for always being there to listen. I also wish particularly to acknowledge Paul Hartgen, Sue Stanley, along with the rest of my family, and June and Barry Hughes for all of their continued support. Finally, I would like to thank Alex Hughes for all of his years of patience and for saying he believed I could do this when I needed to hear it most. 1 Introduction: ‘the novelist of home’ Miss Austen […] with combined boldness and modesty, struck into a path of her own, of which she remains, to this day, the undisputed mistress. The truth, spirit, ease, and refined humour of her conversations have rarely been equalled. She is, emphatically, the novelist of home. The Editor of ‘The Standard Novels’, ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833)1 If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)2 At the end of Henry Austen’s biographical preface to an 1833 edition of Sense and Sensibility (1811), its editor famously makes a case for Jane Austen’s originality that is rooted in her domesticity. Summarising the sentiments expressed in her brother’s biography, the editor declares that Austen is set apart from her contemporaries in being ‘the novelist of home’. But what exactly does it mean to be ‘the novelist of home’? The question is not an easy one to answer on the basis of this commentary alone. In the short paragraph in which it appears, the appellation is preceded by praise for Austen’s dialogue and the editor’s marvelling at the novels’ ‘truth of portraiture’. Admiration for Austen’s ‘exquisite delineation of common life’ similarly dominates Henry Austen’s account.3 It would seem, then, that to be ‘the novelist of home’ is to convey accurately the behaviour of the people within it. The editor’s subsequent 1 The Editor of ‘The Standard Novels’, ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833), in A Memoir of Jane Austen and other Family Recollections, ed. by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 145-54 (p. 154). This quotation comes from, as Sutherland notes, ‘[a]n editorial paragraph issued from Bentley’s office and [is] not strictly part of Henry Austen’s ‘Memoir’’, p. 154. 2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.

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