Jane Austen & Lord Byron: Regency Relations
By Christine Kenyon Jones (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)
Hbk £58.50; pbk £17.99
That Jane Austen and Lord George Byron probably never met face to face is extraordinary, given the number of times their paths crossed. In nine fascinating chapters, Christine Kenyon Jones explores how these two writers shared interests, acquaintances, literary concerns, family connections and a sharp sense of humour. Kenyon Jones seeks to overturn the accepted view of Austen and Byron – that they were opposites in all respects. Drawing on new research and unfamiliar sources, she discovers many similarities between them, while also recognising their differences. Her approach is scholarly and engaging, clear and balanced. Each chapter is divided into sections with helpful sub-headings and illustrated with small black and white images.
The Introduction begins by explaining the distant link by marriage between the Musgrave, Milbanke, Austen and Byron families and goes on to investigate the agenda that presents Austen and Byron as opposites, in terms of their family lives, their writing, education, social position and character. Against this blanket assessment, Kenyon Jones puts forward the argument that both writers were shaped by the historical changes through which they lived – the French Revolution and the widespread economic, social and cultural transformations created by the early stirrings of the industrial revolution. Byron courted celebrity, Austen sought anonymity, but recent adaptations of Austen’s novels have brought them together in the public imagination by portraying the leading men, Darcy in particular, as Byronic.
Both writers were great novel readers, with a partiality for Scott, Richardson, Edgeworth and Burney, and Kenyon Jones makes a convincing case in her first chapter for Byron having read Austen. We know that she read The Corsair and referenced two of Byron’s ‘Oriental Tales’ in Persuasion. While writing her final novel she would have been aware of Byron’s widely publicised departure from England following the separation from his wife. By the time she married him, Annabella Milbanke was a keen admirer of Austen’s plots and characters and Byron himself owned first editions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the latter a present from John Murray. There is no record of Byron’s response to the gift, although Kenyon Jones suggests that poet and publisher discussed the novel in person. In 1817, Murray certainly took the trouble to apprise Byron, then living in Italy, of Austen’s death. Cogent evidence follows, supporting the argument that Byron was also familiar with Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
The second and third chapters, ‘London’ and ‘Theatre and Other Entertainments’ explore Byron’s and Austen’s experiences in the capital. Byron lived at several addresses in London, sometimes in the same area as Henry Austen, at whose houses his sister often stayed. A knowledge of these London locations allowed her to place characters in her novels according to their status and income and Kenyon Jones considers them with reference to Byron’s movements in the city. Both writers’ love of plays leads to the intriguing speculation that they might have attended the same performances at the Pantheon in 1808 and at the Lyceum in 1813. They both wrote admiringly of Edmund Kean and the handsome young actor James Wallack, the latter appearing to great acclaim as Don Juan at the Lyceum. An earlier opportunity for a crossing of paths occurred in May 1813, when Austen and Byron visited three exhibitions of Joshua Reynolds’ paintings. This section of the book is packed with compelling material on Regency London – ‘the paintings, the plays, pantomimes, exhibitions, shows, performances and other entertainment which had brought the two authors into such a close and rewarding area of shared experience’.
The extraordinary marriage of Lord Portsmouth to Mary Ann Hanson occupies the next chapter. Byron was heavily implicated in the event, having given away the bride; the groom was known to the Austens. Apart from John Murray, John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth, was the only other person whose close connection with Byron and Jane Austen is recorded. The Earl’s mental health problems, already evident when he was a young pupil at Steventon Rectory, leads Kenyon Jones to investigate various mental states in the Austen and Byron families. The former will be familiar to those who read Austen biographies, the latter probably less so. Austen’s sexual knowingness – given Mary Crawford’s pun in Mansfield Park and various double entendres in The History of England – is also considered in this chapter.
‘Publishing With John Murray’ considers the publisher’s dealings with Austen and Byron. Despite viewing them as ‘highly contrasting clients’ his relationship with both was, for the most part, cordial and helpful. He took commercial risks in promoting their writing – Austen being, in 1815, his first female novelist and Byron’s political leanings very much at odds with Murray’s conservative readership. Byron received almost £20,000 from his ten-year association with Murray, but it was not enough to prevent him terminating their business relationship. He, like Austen, had experienced printing delays and what he considered to be, in 1822, ‘repeatedly rude neglect’. Murray had also in the past made cuts and alterations to some of the poet’s more controversial lines without his consent, a practice that might make us speculate on the amendments made to Austen’s work. Kenyon Jones provides some persuasive suggestions here.
The final two chapters cover ‘Fiction, Finances and Entail’ and ‘Prose, Poetry, Private and Public’. This last chapter before the Conclusion considers the methods employed by those who survived Austen and Byron to protect their literary and social reputations. Their private writings invariably caused problems for their respective reputational guardians – what to do with Austen’s Lady Susan, or her juvenile writings; whether to sink Byron’s character to greater depths by publishing his journals. In the end, with the exception of several letters, Austen’s ‘private’ writings escaped the flames to be published later, while a significant number of Byron’s did not.
The Regency era is the context in which Christine Kenyon Jones brings Jane Austen and Lord Byron within convincing touching distance and given that 2024 marked the 200th anniversary of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, while 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, there could not be a more fitting time to bring these two writers together at last.
Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in “a Style Entirely New”
By Collins Hemingway, McFarland & Company Inc (2024)
£35.99
The quotation comes from the pen of Jane’s proud father, and forms the theme of Collins Hemingway’s critique (a wonderfully literary name). His aims are as follows: to explain Austen’s creative process, to complement and inform traditional approaches, and to map her creative growth in mastering the art of fiction and changing it forever. He examines her as a working novelist, developing her craft through the six major novels, and concentrates on the fictional techniques she uses to affect her readers and how she achieved what she did. His approach is satisfactorily clear and insightful, deliberately eschewing any particular schools of current literary theory.
The book is in three sections. The first looks at the context in which Austen wrote and how she transformed the traditions of the eighteenth century novel into something new. The second takes a holistic view of her craft by examining her powers of description. The third traces her development through the first three novels and the increasingly sophisticated techniques she uses in the later novels to explore the interior lives of her heroines, with particular reference to FIS, free indirect style.
How does Austen affect readers and how does she create remarkably real people in remarkably realistic situations? How does she make social and moral points through character development and by creating a stage where they are free to act? What is she trying to achieve in a scene and how does she do it? What fictional trade-offs and compromises does she have to make? Painstakingly, Hemingway dissects the novels to find answers to these questions by building what he calls their literary architecture. He states that contrary to many other critics, he is reading Austen on her own terms rather than boxing her into traditional norms or ‘transgressive’ readings.
He takes an overview of her literary influences and the context in which she wrote, showing how she took from the best of her contemporaries’ fiction (the humour and the heroines of Burney, the psychological insight of Richardson) but discarded their stiff scenarios and their ponderous language, replacing elaborate sentence structure with pithy one-liners and lengthy descriptions with an attention to fine detail and minutiae that enlightens and clarifies. She sought to avoid the coincidences so beloved of the eighteenth century novel, finding freedom to allow her characters to direct the action, so that cause and effect drive the plot. Every behaviour has a consequence. She learnt to show not say, to demonstrate through the mouths of her characters rather then tell. Each character large or small has an individual voice.
In all of this Hemingway sees her oeuvre as a work in progress. She is constantly learning, revising and fine tuning. With many examples from the novels, he shows how she progresses in descriptions of a scene so that it is best expressed when it reveals the psychological state of the doer and the observer. Her physical descriptions can, he says, be generalized, and he makes the comment that her ‘pocket descriptions’ of minor characters are often more telling than the more generalized ones of the genteel major characters. We see Mr Collins clearly, but have no idea of what Bingley or Jane look like. Her male heroes are usually described as ‘handsome’, an undifferentiated adjective. It is our imagination that forms pictures of the characters.
He divides the novels into two categories, the Steventon Novels and the Chawton Novels. In Northanger Abbeyhe sees a novelist in training. Jane’s Juvenilia had already taught her what not to write, and now her parody of the gothic novel only succeeds when it is abandoned for the deeper and truer relationship story. Sense and Sensibilitysuffers from its transition from an epistolary novel, with some letter-like monologues that would work better as dramatic confrontations, such as the scene between Willoughby and Elinor after Marianne’s illness. In Pride and Prejudice Austen is much more successful in her use of the narrative voice and of her own unique, wry authorial voice. She writes with more economy, and dialogue is crisper and more natural. She is steadily developing her power to see the world through her flawed characters’ eyes.
Moving on to the Chawton Novels, Hemingway queries why Mansfield Park is the least favourite of Austen readers, despite its ‘marvellous complexity’ and its successful blocking of every scene. He blames the novel for its long-windedness and for having too many authorial comments. (Lovers of the novel may disagree with this criticism.) Long descriptions reduce the impact, as at the end of the novel when Edmund’s proposal to Fanny, like Henry Tilney’s to Catherine, is described rather than shown, so not fully realized by the reader. Only in the Portsmouth chapters, with their density of specifics, does her description of a scene really come alive. In five observant chapters, he moves on to discussing Emma and Persuasion, the peak of Austen’s development as a great writer. Emma combines the best of the preceding novels with its sharp word-play, its subtlety in presenting characters as they present themselves, and its brightness and charm, while ending with a searching moral appraisal. He praises Austen’s use of free indirect style to process Emma’s thoughts and imagination as masterly. Persuasion is a wonderful exploration of consciousness and the mind, but according to Hemingway needs a thorough review. He notes in particular the unsatisfactory character of Mrs Smith, Lady Russell’s disappearance from much of the novel and the undeveloped sub-plot concerning Mrs Clay and Walter Elliot. The revised chapter shows how Jane could have changed structural details for the better, and he ascribes this to her increasing ill health (Henry described “deep symptoms of decay” in 1816) as well as to financial worries about the failure of Henry’s bank and its effect on her family.
After a short scamper through Sanditon, which he sees as a first draft, Hemingway summarises what he has been trying to prove, that only a close examination of Jane Austen’s development as a craftsman can truly demonstrate how she managed to write the first realist fiction. She composed what previous writers had not, behaviour-based stories built upon recognizable people in believable settings. Her hard work, her innovations and her professionalism laid the foundations for all realist novels. She invented the modern English novel (I could have wished for some later novels as comparisons here). I would recommend Hemingway’s book as an excellent and instructive addition to our Austen library shelves.
Rather mad about cricket: Jane Austen and her cricket connections
By John Goulstone & Roger Packham. Available from the publisher J W McKenzie Ltd
£20
Given that there are only two glancing mentions of cricket (both in Northanger Abbey) in the novels and one in Jane’s surviving correspondence, almost all connection to cricket comes from her nephews and great-nephews. Of her brothers only Francis appears to have had any real interest in the game and the book reproduces the charming pencil sketch by his daughter Catherine of a ball being bowled round-arm to a batsman defending a wicket in front of a large net in the grounds of Francis’s Portsdown house. Though Chawton was in the orbit of the home of cricket at Hambledon, it was not brother Edward but the next generation of Knights who started playing in earnest, particularly at Godmersham. His daughter Fanny, herself a cricket fan, makes clear how much it meant, writing in 1815: ‘My brothers are … rather mad about cricket & we are frequently having meetings in the neighbourhood. As the gentlemen play, the ladies look on and altogether it is very pleasant’. What a shame social convention allowed her only a spectator role.
Unfortunately, the authors give little social background to explain the popularity of cricket, with all the gambling and partying that came with it, especially in the Regency period when big prize-money was attracting a wider social base with many more ‘Players’ to compete with the ‘Gentlemen’. The various scorecards given are interesting according to how they relate to the wider Austen network, followed by many short biographical snippets, of varying degrees of relevance. As background, there is a short summary of early references to cricket in literature, before a lengthy quote from Northanger Abbey giving Catherine Moreland’s preference for ‘cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country … to books’. Not much to go on, though the authors do make the interesting observation that the OED entry for ‘baseball’ gives this as the earliest citation.
There is an impressive amount of (mainly biographical) research in this book, pointing up many networks of family connections. It works roughly chronologically through the generations starting with Jane Austen’s great-uncle Frank who as solicitor and agent for the (Sackville) Duke of Dorset at Knole played a key role in establishing a thriving cricket club at Sevenoaks. He was still alive in 1788 when Jane and Cassandra were taken by their father to meet him at a cricket match in Sevenoaks (Hampshire v All-England) as recorded in a letter from their cousin Philadelphia who was there. Hampshire won by 53 runs – those were the days! The Kentish Austens remained closely involved in cricket and in 1827 Frank’s grandson, Thomas Austen organised A GRAND MATCH OF CRICKET at Sevenoaks ‘between Ten Gentleman of the County of Kent with the choice of One Man from All England against Nine Players of the County, with Lord Strathavon and George Claridge Esq … for 500 Guineas’. The Gentlemen included no fewer than five of Thomas’s extended family: Fanny’s brothers Edward and George, two Deedes cousins and a relative by marriage, Henry Knatchbull. It was a good day for the family – they won by 83 runs. One wonders why the Players had to call on two gents to make up a team.
Short chapters follow on the Portsdown Austens and on the Austen Leighs, notably Spencer, a ‘cricketer of great note’ who played for Berkshire and later for the Gentlemen of Sussex for whom he scored 60 out of 151 against a visiting Australian Aboriginal team in 1868. That must have been interesting! Much of the rest of the book is devoted to the Knights, particularly at Godmersham, with intermingled pieces on cricket played by various local families connected by marriage to Edward – Bridges, Deedes, Cages, Rices and Knatchbulls. Though Edward appears never to have caught the cricket bug, his sons and numerous grandsons did, and in this respect the most significant was Edward’s son George who played a leading – and controversial – part in persuading the cricket authorities in 1828 to legalise round-arm bowling, which till then had been characterised as ‘throwing’.
It could have done with more editing, perhaps using footnotes more consistently, to allow a more flowing narrative. However, so much of the early development of cricket came from Hampshire and Kent that the particular role of the Austen family network is of real interest for lovers of cricket
Jane Austen’s Men
By Helen Amy, Amberley Publishing (2024)
£22.99
‘How did Jane Austen portray her male characters? How much inspiration did she draw from real men?’ Helen Amy asks these questions in her latest book.
The chapters in the first part of the book are dedicated to Jane’s father George Austen, her brothers, an uncle and two of her nephews, one of whom wrote the first biography of her life. A later chapter discusses Jane’s suitors including one who proposed marriage. Each chapter provides the background to their lives from the dates of their baptisms (both private and public) through their childhood, education, careers, homes, marriages, and children. The chapters also look at their relationship with Jane using primary sources such as letters, memoirs, poems, and parodies and sometimes through these showing off their own creative writing ability. Jane’s father George Austen wrote a letter to the London Publisher Thomas Cadell when he sent them the manuscript of Pride and Prejudice. Her brother James published a weekly magazine while at Oxford University and sent a poem to Jane following the publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811. Henry Austen was Jane’s literary Executor and helped to prepare her two unpublished novels for publication and wrote the Biographical notice which identified Jane as the author of the novels.
There is a chapter on her brother George Austen who was ill from childhood and was cared for outside the family home and there is also a chapter on Frances Austen whose memoir has recently been transcribed by volunteers from around the world following an appeal by Jane Austen’s House. Jane’s brothers had different occupations which included the clergy, militia, and the Law amongst others. Reading about each relation I could see certain traits that Jane used in her male characters.
In the chapter on potential suitors entitled ‘Could Jane have married?’ four possible men are considered including a mystery man and another who proposed marriage, with Jane initially accepting the proposal but then changing her mind and making a hasty retreat.
The second part of the book discusses each of Jane’s six novels, with a summary of the novel at the beginning of each chapter and descriptions of the main male characters, and some more minor ones, their characters’ roles in the story and whether they live up to what is expected of them based on their background and occupation in the hierarchy of society at that time, e.g. aristocracy, gentry, the newly rich and the professional. Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice was born a Gentleman, but does he always behave like one? Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility is described as a true hero who has always behaved as a gentleman and is rewarded by winning Marianne Dashwood’s hand in marriage. Mr Perry and Mr Cole in Emma who are referred to as ‘half gentlemen’ -educated men who mixed with the gentry but lack the breeding and connections to be gentlemen but whose conduct is better that some characters with a higher social standing. Frank Churchill looks like a hero but the only heroic thing he does is rescue Harriet Smith. Mr Knightley has all the attributes of a gentleman including being able to dance well however, Frederick Tilney in Northanger Abbey is not a true gentleman and cannot dance well!
The book includes Jane’s immediate family tree, portraits, paintings, and photographs of places that were significant to her life, depictions of historical naval battles that took place during her lifetime, and illustrations from her novels. There is also a section on Places to Visit. Overall, I thought it was a really engaging read and as a newcomer to the study of Jane Austen, the book provided me with a foundation to her life and the lives of her male relatives along with summaries of each of her main novels and a look at to how she wrote the male characters in to her novels. Helen Amy has written a number of books about Jane Austen including The Jane Austen Files and The Jane Austen Girls about the relationship between Jane and her sister Cassandra. Having enjoyed this book, I am hoping to continue my interest by reading these books too.
Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness
By Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey, Johns Hopkins University Press
£23
Just when you think that all possible approaches to Jane Austen’s work have been exhausted, leaving only either the foolishly lightweight or the stodgily academic – a book comes along that is original in its ideas, enjoyable to read and enlightening to ponder.
Inger Brodey, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, wears her learning lightly. She is as well-equipped to cast an analytical eye over film adaptations and spinoffs as she is to dig deeply into the text of Austen’s novels, though certainly the skill of Austen’s narrative art is what this book is all about. In the course of a lifetime’s reading and teaching the novels, Brodey has noted an intriguing paradox between the happy endings Austen leads us to expect – ‘all hastening together towards perfect felicity’ as she puts it in Northanger Abbey – and the literary devices with which she thwarts, or undercuts, or qualifies our expectations. If Austen is associated in the public mind with wedding bells and happy-ever-after, Brodey here sets out to demonstrate that the novels’ conclusions, which sometimes seem to disappoint, or to give short measure, in fact have considerably more satisfying fare to offer.
The desire for more romance is not only a modern phenomenon but goes back to Austen’s earliest readers. Her niece Fanny Knight, reading Mansfield Park on first publication, made it known to her aunt that though she was delighted with her namesake heroine, she was ‘not satisfied with the end – wanted more Love between her & Edmund’. Mansfield Park is not the only Austen novel that declines to indulge readers with a specific proposal scene between hero and heroine. The fact that Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion, do contain heartfelt declarations of love, accounts for their being the first and second most popular of Austen’s novels, Brodey contends. The hero has truly to believe himself unsure of the response he desires. Mr Knightley, too, in a moment of high emotion, speaks his heart; but then either Emma or her author lets us down by reportedly saying ‘just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’ This is a tricky narrative point for the author to handle, and results in a slight jarring on every reading, which we must learn to skip over or justify. (Or perhaps some readers don’t mind.) The proposals of the other heroes – Ferrars, Brandon, Tilney – are not verbalised, nor are the responses of their wives-to-be.
There is of course no embrace described in an Austen text – no first kiss between the lovers, not even a long look into each other’s eyes. The deficiency has been well compensated for in filmed versions, when probability and decorum are thrown to the wind, especially unlikely and unseemly in filming set on the public streets of Bath. In the texts, Austen has made sure that we know the heroines well enough to have no doubts of their depth of feeling, and no doubts of their being emotionally equipped to build strong partnerships in which they will play their full part. Most are provided with comfortable marital homes and – eventually – sufficient incomes for their wants, and a ready-made role in their communities. But had the heroines chanced not to marry – had their fiancés died, as did Cassandra Austen’s, or had their destiny been to sit unregarded like a poker in company, as Jane Austen herself was described by a neighbour as doing – the novelist knew from the women around her that a fulfilled life replete with interest and usefulness was no less achievable, and one without the perils of childbirth. Austen may not have provided her heroines with such an alternative, perhaps because she was conscious of writing for a market that favoured the conventions of a love story. In any case, it is true that the heroines themselves, with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland, in their different ways positively resolve on living good and useful lives if hopes of marrying the man of their choice are thwarted. Not one of them, not even Anne Elliot, gives up on life.
It is Brodey’s contention that the methods Austen uses to bring her narratives to a close demonstrate her mastery over her material. What some, particularly male critics, have characterised as the embittered reticence of an old maid in her curtailed endings, is nothing of the sort. Brodey shows how Austen deploys a variety of literary devices to assert her authority, challenge readers’ expectations, and elevate her fiction from mere story-telling to enduring work of art. These literary devices, which Austen deploys with supreme confidence across her various novels, will be familiar to members of our Society. They are why we return to her work again and again. They include breaking the fourth wall to address the reader directly, over the heads of her characters, in first-person phrases such as ‘My Fanny, I have the satisfaction of knowing …’ and ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery’ (Mansfield Park); making it clear who is directing the action by drawing attention to ‘the tell-tale compression of the pages’ and ‘the rules of composition’ forbidding the introduction at a late stage of a new character ((Northanger Abbey); the device known as apophasis, in which the narrator pre-emptively tells the reader what will not be told, a good example of which, from Sense and Sensibility, Brodey quotes: ‘in what manner [Edward] expressed himself, and how he was received, need not be particularly told’. Often the timescale is left deliberately imprecise. Austen further subverts romantic expectations with her choice of everyday items such as washing-bills and turkeys (Northanger Abbey and Emma respectively) as the absurdly mundane aspects of daily living which accompany the resolution of the heroines’ difficulties, and enable the key marriages at last to take place. Money often comes into it. Austen is a realist just as much as she is, like her own Emma, an imaginist.
Brodey’s erudition and her openness to modern life have enabled her to draw on a triple strand of literary comparison: on contemporary (i.e. 18th century) fiction; on Shakespeare (all of whose comedies, she contends, lead to reestablishing a proper order among the young couples, providing templates for Austen’s comedies) and on late 20thand 21st century Austen-inspired films and fan fiction, with their varying interpretations, emphases and updatings for our time. All of this gives breadth to her argument, as do the responses of her young, predominantly female students. Non-judgemental but keen to open our eyes to pattern and significance we may have overlooked, Brodey has written one of the most stimulating commentaries on Austen’s narrative methods that I’ve read for a long time. Her text is not free from odd errors and inconsistencies of spelling characters’ names, but she provides a good range of black and white images from both film and book publication to illustrate the absurdities to which the interpretation of Austen is these days prone. Brodey has given us a lively introduction, a chapter devoted to each of the six novels, and a conclusion full of subtle insights, altogether amounting to an excellent read.
A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist
By Juliette Wells, Bloomsbury Academic
£17.99
Juliette Wells likes to tease and admits as much. ‘Who’ she asks, ‘created the earliest critical edition of Jane Austen’s novels?’ If we answered ‘R.W. Chapman’, we’d be wrong. ‘Hold onto your astonishment’ advises Wells, as she reveals the answer and poses a second question, ‘Who was Austen’s first critical biographer?’ The clue is in the word ‘critical’, so no, not Henry Austen, nor Lord Brabourne, and no one by the name of Austen-Leigh. The solution to both questions lies, as one would expect from the title of Wells’s book, on the other side of the Atlantic.
Americans have a well-documented history of appreciating and promoting Jane Austen, a history Wells has investigated and reinforced in her two previous books, Everybody’s Jane Austen In The Popular Imagination (2011) and Reading Austen In America (2017), both reviewed in past JAS News Letters. In all three texts the valuable contributions made by amateurs and literary collectors is recognised and the understanding of what constitutes an Austen readership expanded, but A New Jane Austen takes Wells one step further. Asking questions of archivists and librarians that no one had asked before and accessing unexplored scrapbooks, letters, journals and jottings leads her to the conviction that ‘Austen studies originated in America . . . a provocative idea’ she admits, which ‘surprised me as much as it may surprise you’. This review will not pre-empt that surprise by naming names. You must read the book yourself to discover the identities of Wells’s chosen subjects, who appear in chronological order.
Wells begins with a writer who inspired his readers to adopt a fresh approach to Austen’s life and writings. He was, she concludes, the earliest critical editor to introduce, interpret and annotate Austen’s works for the general, perhaps resistant, American reader. Later dismissed in academic circles as a mere collection of extracts and personal responses, Wells’s reappraisal establishes the critical significance of his idiosyncratic approach. His later Austen biography included contemporary photographs of Austen-related sites. Ten years before Constance and Ellen Hill undertook their tour of Austen locations, this man had been there, yet the Hills’ publication is generally accepted as the first Austen travelogue. He is the first of four ‘visionary Americans’ to feature in Wells’s study.
The second chapter covers a self-educated novelist’s interpretation and promotion of Austen’s novels. His twelve articles, the first written when he began reading Austen at the age of fifty, were published over the following thirty years in prestigious American magazines, such as Harper’s Bazar (so spelled at the time). Wells points out that his late interest in the novels made him a particularly authentic advocate where reluctant readers were concerned.
A generation later, the third subject of Wells’s study meticulously recorded his responses to Austen’s novels over the course of twenty years as well as collecting Austen artefacts – most notably the Austen sisters’ topaz crosses – with a passion.
The final chapter features ‘an Austen omnivore’ and her English artist friend. The correspondence between these two women, discovered among a collection of hitherto unavailable letters, illuminates the extent to which they collaborated in enriching existing responses to Austen’s life and writing.
Wells’s stated ambition is ‘not merely to reorient but to revolutionise our conception of how Austen came to be viewed as the world’s greatest novelist’. To this end, her research focuses on the years between the 1880s and the 1980s, a time span inhabited by her American enthusiasts – not academics, but essayists, editors, teachers, novelists and collectors, whose contributions to Austen studies, comprising private, archived scholarship as well as published works, have been neglected, superseded or ignored. She directs readers to consider the complex questions regarding the authority, legitimacy and influence of critical writers from widely differing backgrounds to those in academic circles, arguing that as ‘outsiders’ they were able to make unconventional contributions to Austen studies, both biographical and literary.
The four key chapters, divided into a series of brief essays, are in effect illustrated case studies, through which Wells encourages readers to ‘choose your own adventure . . . skip and skim as your interest directs’, while drawing attention to the ‘rewarding’ endnotes (yes, many are fascinating) and the Afterword. This final section of the text, titled ‘Jane Austen Anew’, suggests ways in which general readers and academics alike can add to the work of these groundbreaking Americans. As Wells convincingly demonstrates, there are unexplored letters, notes and journals in archives and libraries across the world, waiting to be interpreted and transformed into illuminating texts such as hers.
Jane Austen in 41 Objects
By Kathryn Sutherland, Bodleian Library Publishing
£25
No mere keepsake (though well worth keeping), its chunky format and high production values are at the service of a thoughtful, original and deeply satisfying text. Members of the Jane Austen Society will not be surprised at this, for Kathryn Sutherland is well known to us as a speaker, presenter and editor of Jane Austen manuscripts. She brings to her work on Austen the dual qualifications of academic rigour, as Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and familiarity with the material world of the novelist, having served as Patron of Jane Austen’s House (where several, though by no means all her chosen objects are kept) for many years. But her selection and her commentary, while thoroughly grounded in research, go well beyond museum- style guidebook description. Her aim is to provide ‘shifting entry points into and varying ways of inspecting Austen’s lives and literary afterlives’.
‘The objects chosen here,’ Sutherland tells us, ‘are to some extent arbitrary, as is the discipline of describing each in around 600 words.’ Although the number 41 has significance as corresponding to the years of her life, not all the objects would have been known to Austen herself and many post-date her: for example, the Pride and Prejudice costume designs by Rex Whistler, and the decorative vase by Grayson Perry have been chosen to reflect on the powerful afterlife of her imagination. The most famous artefact of our own era, of course, has to be the ‘wet shirt,’ (I need hardly specify), though notleast of the revelations in Sutherland’s text is the number, and degree of wetness, of the BBC-generated shirts concerned.
The book begins with a Chronology, useful in providing a framework to what follows. Sutherland’s Introduction is extensive and thought-provoking. It makes one realise what a blow it must have been for Austen to lose, at a stroke, virtually all the familiar objects, books, pictures, piano and furnishings amongst which she had grown up when the family left Steventon for Bath. People matter, landscape matters, but so do things. Sutherland invites us to compare
Fanny Price’s ‘nest of comforts’ in Mansfield Park, modest enough in its components, but vital to her emotional wellbeing. Familiar things shape the mind and give rise to our sense of identity and security in the world.
In her fiction, Austen is by no means unaware of the dangers of taking attachment to material goods too far, of straying into shameless consumerist display. Sutherland follows critic Marilyn Butler in considering Northanger Abbey the novel that most questions the consumerism of the age, with Mrs Allen besotted with clothes and General Tilney fixated on the latest household goods, to the detriment of human relationships and duties. The Thorpes, brother and sister, are likewise boorishly limited in their imaginations. But we know that every Austen novel has its characters who quest after things inordinately, especially those novels with passages set in London or Bath, where shopping was a temptation – a temptation that Austen herself did not scorn to enjoy, in the small way within her means.
Well-supported with footnotes and generous in its references to other texts, Sutherland’s commentary is, as one would expect, intelligent, thought- provoking and wide-ranging across the culture of the age. It is also delightfully unstuffy. Her turns of phrase often make one smile. She demonstrates how male-oriented were Austen’s interpreters for very many years after her death. I have to confess that, familiar with the Winchester Cathedral black marble slab that eulogises Austen’s Christian virtues ‘and the extraordinary endowments of her mind,’ without mentioning her novels, and the subsequent brass wall plaque of 1872, I have never bothered to study the iconography of the Victorian stained glass windows paid for by public subscription as late as 1900. But Sutherland describes them in detail, as her object 34: ‘Masculine and religious iconography aplenty,’ namely St Augustine of Canterbury, King David, Saint John and ‘the sons of Korah’ but no depiction of Jane, though her name and date of death arerecorded in small writing.
Sutherland quotes Virginia Woolf: ‘Often nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day’. A patchwork quilt, a hand-written collection of recipes, a fire grate, a tiny writing table: these exemplify the quiet domestic existence we associate with the Austen household. In a pleasing interconnection, the object chosen for the cover illustration of this book is a ceramic dinner plate, one of the fifty ‘famous women’ set hand-decorated by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1932-4. It is a perennial problem in Austen publishing to come up with a cover design that is fresh yet appropriate. This charming blue and white interpretation of Austen’s image is the perfect choice – unmistakeably signalling Jane Austen, and at the same time, an artefact with an interesting history of its own.
A Truth Universally Acknowledged : 40 Days with Jane Austen
By Rachel Mann, Canterbury Press (2023)
£12.99
This is a delightful book for anyone who enjoys dipping into a page or a few paragraphs of a lengthy novel as a way of capturing something of the character, flavour and plot of the writing. Mann offers a total of forty such opportunities drawn from all six of Austen’s novels. Each passage receives perceptive comments on its relationship to the overall plot of the novel, or to the creation of the characters involved. With such insights Mann consistently pays great tribute to the novelist’s skill and reveals how Austen presents human nature in both its honourable dimensions, as well as its less palatable. Mann shows how that is done, not just through Austen’s deep understanding of humanity, but also by employing immense wit and irony in her writing.
What leads Mann to select forty passages is dictated by her desire to provide a daily reading and reflection for use during the forty days of the Christian season of Lent. Lent, traditionally, is a time for Christians to recall the forty days Jesus Christ spent in a wilderness prior to his ministry. In that wilderness experience various temptations prompted by the devil came his way but enabled him to determine that his life and work would be founded on sound and worthy values. So, for Christians in any age, Lent can be observed as a period for reflection and maybe transformation of one’s personal style of living and the moral values which undergird our lives. With such endeavours in mind, Austen’s novels and characters are richly rewarding for Mann for the ways in which they promote worthy moral values, or challenge error and mistake.
However, the chosen passages are not just for Lent. They can be used at any time and need not follow one day after another. Nor is it the writer’s intention to draw her readers into some commitment to Christian faith and practice. This is made totally clear at several points in the book. Nevertheless, after presenting each passage and commenting on it, there is a paragraph which has a strong religious and spiritual component followed by a short prayer. There are also occasions when lines from some of Austen’s own prayers are inserted which relate to the commentary Mann has offered. In no way should any of these elements deter anyone from appreciating the careful and wise approach Mann adopts towards the novels. As she declares in her Introduction to the book, her wish is to provide space for those with faith, as well as for those without faith, and ‘to offer an appreciation of the absurdities as well as the glories of being human’.
That wish is certainly brought to fruition! As each passage receives commentary some of Austen’s characters are applauded for their sound moral principles. Others, though, are shown to be overtaken with selfishness, pride and greed, or marred by sheer vanity, lack of compassion, or failure to discern matters with care and attention. In this way all that is of true value for living a fulfilled human life is presented by the writer as she draws out the many moral lessons Austen promotes in her novels.
Yet the passages and commentaries Mann presents have even greater value to them. For the writer shows how the life-styles and approaches adopted by the characters in the novels can have lessons for today’s world and for the future well-being of society. The wisdom of avoiding judging others harshly and unfairly may surface in Pride & Prejudice, but it is just as necessary now when class, race, gender, sexuality and other issues are attacked, and when individuals and groups are treated with disdain and vilified particularly through social media networks. Sir Walter Elliot may be self-obsessed and vain, but such characteristics are just as visible today in the proliferation of selfies, the pursuit for personal beauty and the constant self-promotion paraded on social media. These are just some of the ways in which Mann shows that despite their age Austen’s novels are relevant and meaningful for today. The chosen passages certainly offer significant evidence of the wisdom embedded in Austen’s novels and a full and close reading of all the selected passages provide valuable lessons for everyone.
Love and Marriage in The Age of Jane Austen
By Rory Muir, Yale University Press
£25
Whereas Rory Muir’s earlier Austen book (Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune – reviewed in JAS News Letter autumn 2019) had a specific focus, namely the experiences and difficulties encountered by younger sons in what he then termed ‘Jane Austen’s England’, he now turns to a broader field of investigation encompassing the personal lives of both sexes. He has also, it’s interesting to note, stepped back from the designation ‘Jane Austen’s England’ and chosen instead as part of his title ‘the Age of Jane Austen’. This is more accurate for his purpose because he is writing about a period of history rather than of place or literary interpretation. His work does not illuminate the novels in the way a literary critic would seek to do, but neither is it anywhere near as twee as the first three words of his title (to the cynical book-buyer) might suggest. This is a serious and worthwhile study.
Muir defines ‘the Age of Jane Austen’ as the two decades at the end of the eighteenth century, and the two or three first decades of the nineteenth. His subject is the personal relationships of men and women who came to adulthood in this era, when companionate marriage was regarded by most as the thing to be desired and sought. In pursuit of this ideal, almost every aspect of personal life, happy or sad, successful or disappointing, ever-changing and subject to a variety of health and economic pressures, is covered. The people Muir writes of were increasingly free to choose their own destinies; but with such freedom came greater responsibility, to the self and to the wider family.
The author arranges his material in logical fashion, beginning with ‘Meeting – how did people of that era meet a selection of suitable marriage partners?’ – proceeding through ‘Attraction’ (which could not always be acted upon) and ‘Courtship’, ‘Hesitation and Heartbreak’, ‘Proposals, Engagements and Marriage Settlements’, ‘Weddings and Honeymoons’. Having reached this point – having got his people to the church, in effect – he then takes a dive into what might go wrong: ‘Abductions, Mistresses and Mésalliances’ and to alternatives to marriage, whether by choice or circumstance, in ‘Spinsters and Bachelors’. Back then to the more regular sequence of ‘Early Married Life’, ‘Getting Along’, ‘Careers’ and ‘Children’ before contemplating ‘Unhappy Marriages’ and the even worse ‘Domestic Violence, Adultery, Divorce and Separation’. The marriage journey ends, with life, in ‘Widows and Widowers’ and ‘Growing Old Together’.
Muir draws on a large number of sources, most of them printed; his bibliography cites few manuscript sources. He acknowledges a large debt to Hazel Jones, whose Jane Austen and Marriage, published in 2009 (paperback 2017), covers the fictional and familial ramifications with a thoroughness which Muir does not claim to rival. He does, however, cite a limited number of examples from Austen’s life and novels: sufficient to warrant the subtitle and to make the book a pleasure to read for those of us who love to encounter her characters in any discussion. Probably because his background is as an historian of the Napoleonic wars, Muir takes many of his examples from the letters and diaries of military and naval officers and their wives and sweethearts, from whom in the course of duty they might often be separated for long periods. Many of his subjects are titled or come from a higher social level than the characters of Austen’s fiction: the political classes are well represented, for example the Palmerstons, Castlereaghs and Cannings; some are famous for their marital indiscretions, like the Spencers and Pagets; many we have possibly never encountered before. To aid us, as these real and often less well-known people dip in and out of his chapters, marrying one another and of course changing their surnames, Muir provides a Dramatis Personae along with his Notes and Index. Quite a few are second wives, or men seeking such, after the death in childbirth of the first. There is more to consider when embarking on this step for both potential partners. He has plenty of examples of the agonising that might go on first.
Muir laments, in his Preface, the dearth of available writings in what we these days term diversity:
‘This is primarily a study of heterosexual relationships and of love as it was felt between courting couples and husbands and wives. Homosexual relationships and heterosexual relationships outside marriage are touched upon but they are not the main focus, and our sources are too limited for me to discuss them in the depth that I would like’.
Other limits to his range that are more striking now than they would have been even a few years ago concern people from other ethnicities and cultures, or even anyone other than the British upper class, of whom almost all who appear in his book are white Protestants, though a few profess the Catholic faith. Moreover, as he candidly admits, there are other types of love, besides that for a spouse, which he cannot find space for here, but which could be equally important in people’s lives, including love of parents and of children, love of God, love of nature, love of a favourite house or estate; to include them would have made this already substantial book too diffuse. Perhaps a third Age of Austen book by Muir is in the offing?
Meanwhile, in assembling and interpreting the material at his disposal, he has surely achieved his stated aim ‘to give a richly textured account of what courtship and marriage felt like for people of this class and time in all its variety, with the emphasis on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary’. One of his strengths is his ability to empathise wholeheartedly with the female point of view, and to give women their full due. I came away from reading this book feeling that there was more happiness in the married state among Jane Austen’s contemporaries than you might think. And not only because people will seek happiness where they can, as Austen tells us drily about Mrs Collins and Mrs Grant; but because companionable, respectful and mutually supportive marriage as experienced by the Crofts and the Westons, and in real life by her own parents, was what people of both sexes yearned for and worked to achieve. I am glad that, as Muir’s examples show, so many succeeded.
Jane Austen – Daddy’s Girl: The Life & Influence of The Revd George Austen
By Zöe Wheddon, Pen and Sword Books (2024)
£22
Through fourteen chapters George’s life is surveyed in considerable detail. His humble and inauspicious early life as an orphan is shown to be relieved through the attention and kindness given to him by his uncle Francis; he also paid fees for George to be educated at Tonbridge School. Thanks to his schooling, George’s intellectual powers grew immensely enabling him to move on to Oxford University where he was able to rise in academic stature as a tutor and eventually to be acclaimed as the ‘handsome Proctor’. Several chapters deal with George’s life and ministry as Rector at Steventon. These cover not just his clerical duties, but also his roles as schoolmaster and farmer; they also provide details about the house and the importance its library and barn had for Jane and the family. George’s careful handling of finance is noted, and a chapter entitled ‘Jane’s Effusions’ underlines his huge support for her literary ability and the attempts he made to gain publication of her work. His decision to retire to Bath is covered along with the difficulties faced there as the family found themselves moving from one dwelling to another over a short period of time. The book certainly doesn’t end with George’s death but goes on to disclose the many ways in which the example and values that underpinned his life were deeply embedded in the lives of all his children. It was George’s example and teaching which enabled them to grow in maturity and to take on significant and varied roles in different fields of work.
Wheddon certainly expresses huge admiration and affection for George Austen. There are moments, though, when speculation intrudes in her writing and leads her to raise what seem to be flights of fancy. One example arises in the account of George’s early years in London when another uncle, Stephen, lived close to St. Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Might Stephen have taken George up into the dome of St. Paul’s’, the writer poses, and then adds ‘and did they both scratch their initials into the lead roofing as many were in the habit of doing?’ There are also occasions when mistakes surface – ‘Captain Hardwick’ for ‘Harville’ on one page, and whilst ‘Mary Crawford’ is named quite frequently, on at least four different pages she is referred to as ‘Caroline Crawford’! Any careful proof-reader should have spotted these, together with a number of typos and one or two footnotes that are unrelated to the textual sentences.
Despite these slips, though, this is a very informative and detailed book which, in addition to paying huge tribute to George Austen, draws out references in Jane’s novels which connect with his life experiences and character. Throughout the book this thread is constantly employed to show how influential George’s life and values were for Jane and for her literary work. A further thread draws on the nature of fatherhood as presented in Jane’s novels. Most of the fictional fathers utterly fail to scale the moral stature and heights of George Austen. Instead, their selfishness, indifference and vanity are shown to contrast sharply with the generous care, affection and intellectual powers Jane received in full measure from her father. This book not only shows how fortunate Jane was to have George as her father; it reveals the immense blessings she received from him enabling her to create the wise and entertaining novels we enjoy.
