Jane and the Janeites
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing JANE AND THE JANEITES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL JANE AUSTEN'S novels dwell on the minutiae of daily life with such fidelity that appreciative readers find the events chronicled as...
...Her England is still primarily rural...
...Andrew Wright traces all the plays and movies based on Pride and Prejudice: A musical called First Impressions tried to be a Regency My Fair Lady, while in A. A. Milne's Miss Elizabeth Bennet" It is impossible not to detect the sort of dialogue that would have gone better between Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward than between the characters in Jane Austen's novel.' George Holbert Tucker reveals that the Austen family indulged in sophisticated "amateur theatricals...
...However much alive [her characters] may be or become, she is not seriously involved with them in the sense in which Tolstoy or George Eliot were...
...Her conservatism, and her reputation for limiting herself to subjects suitable to a woman of her day and eschewing explicit commentary on political events, have displeased many feminists...
...Elizabeth Barrett Browning thought her heroines lacked "souls...
...or a Catherine Morland, gullible and kindhearted, rather too ready to confuse fiction with life (North-anger Abbey...
...they did not provide solace to the distressed, emotional stimulus to the jaded, or information to the inquisitive...
...Jane took revenge by using Eliza as a model for several wicked sirens in her novels...
...One imagines that the frustrations of her not very happy life would have soured her had she held any other creed...
...Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree...
...her work looks back to an earlier era when novels were supposed to display the morals and manners of the culture...
...These heroines lead quiet lives in circumscribed environments...
...Anne Thackeray hailed her as "a dear household name," gushing, "Dear books...
...Two pieces in the Companion nevertheless claim Austen as at least a moderate proponent of the rights of women...
...or an Emma Woodhouse, whose intelligence and capacity for management only fail her when she tries to matchmake for her friends (Emma...
...In his 1894 introduction to Pride and Prejudice, George Saintsbu-ry announced that he wanted to marry Elizabeth Bennet...
...The prize Anti-Janeite was D.H...
...Her last three books illustrate the "national mood of...
...Some notable " Anti- Janeites" did have their say in the interim...
...David Lodge discusses her borrowings from women's romances, noting how she made use not only of conventional plots but also of stock devices—such as contrived misunderstandings that keep hero from marrying heroine in Chapter Two, rather than the last page...
...Robert M. Polhem-us convincingly demonstrates t hat there is nothing sentimental about the fact that her novels end with weddings...
...her heroines are not starved for sensation to relieve the tedium of useless lives...
...Charlotte Bronte scoffed that "the Passions are perfectly unknown to" Austen...
...Lewes (whose common-law wife wrote as George Eliot) called Austen a "prose Shakespeare" and "the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end...
...their adventures consist of the most humdrum occurrences...
...The subjects are not elegant...
...like them, she was modest enough to prefer subtle irony to didactic preaching...
...John Bayley explains that it is easy to be misled if one's expectations are based on 19th century fiction...
...Writers & Writing JANE AND THE JANEITES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL JANE AUSTEN'S novels dwell on the minutiae of daily life with such fidelity that appreciative readers find the events chronicled as familiar as their own experiences...
...but they are finished...
...Who has not known an Elizabeth Bennet, with her " lively, playful disposition which delighted in anything ridiculous" (Pride and Prejudice...
...Other admiring critics, aware that "vulgar" readers might find her dull, started boasting that a taste for Jane Austen marked the person of refinement and discrimination...
...Lawrence, who claimed that "this old maid" represented everything "Englishinthebad, mean, snobbish sense of the word...
...Two articles on "Completions" and "Sequels" relate attempts of other writers to finish Austen's fragments—The Watsons and Sanditon—and to chronicle the further adventures of her heroines and heroes...
...She offers us a wholesome simplicity...
...The element of snob appeal spawned the notorious " Janeites," who sentimentalized the portrait of the artist...
...One participant was Jane's scandalous cousin, Eliza de Feuillide...
...The Jane Austen Companion makes us appreciate' the civilized craft behind her idyllic vision...
...the pen has been in their hands...
...But "lovable Jane" was too firmly entrenched in the Victorian heart...
...In context, though, this outburst is concerned merely to defend women from a literary tradition that makes them seem fickle in love...
...regeneration" that England experienced after the Napoleonic wars, and show attendant social shifts through the fates of her characters...
...True, she makes Persuasion's Anne Elliot complain that "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story...
...It is a measure of Austen's genius that she was able to make these farfetched turns plausible...
...We might have difficulty imagining an encounter with Jane Eyre, Heathcliff or Dorothea Brooke on the way to the supermarket—not because they strike us as less than real, but because each is part of a landscape and an era not our own...
...A good deal of the material in the Companion expatiates on particular aspects of Austen's talents...
...As Joseph Duffy puts it, her novels "were not in harmony with bourgeois fiction...
...Both admirers and detractors have at times misconstrued the point of Austen's art...
...Yet her critical reputation shone brighter than ever in that age...
...she was even invited to dedicate a novel to the Prince Regent...
...Jane Austen's world charms us with its self-sufficiency...
...in the way that Dickens was...
...Her charity toward the people of her books stems from the knowledge that humanity inclines more naturally to the ridiculous than to the noble...
...Instead , she values her creations for their "humorous potential...
...Other items in The Jane A usten Companion touch on lighter matters...
...The homey quality of Austen's world is timeless...
...During her lifetime, when her books were published anonymously, Jane Austen saw her work celebrated...
...As A. Walton Litz observes, it was not until the 1940s that the popular rose-colored image of Austen gave way to "the archetypal modern figure, isolated and self-protected, using her verbal and dramatic ironies to preserve her personal integrity...
...This kind of adulation upset those who sensed a more ambivalent and tart-tongued author...
...Ludicrous behavior represents for her "the saving grace of life, the comfort of it, the irradiation of the sympathetic and the human...
...Bright, sparkling with...
...Virginia Woolf warned Edwardi-ans who had the "temerity" to write about Austen that "there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight on her as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts...
...Mark Twain spoke for many Americans repelled by things too British when he confessed himself filled with "animal repugnance" for her work, and sneered at her bigoted "Presbyterian" world (a cultural misunderstanding—she came from a long line of tolerant Anglican clergymen...
...Though no radical, Butler says, "she succeeds in rendering the plight of women [within the domestic sphere] more tellingly than anyone else...
...she might be "shrewd and observant," but she is also "very incomplete, and rather insensible...
...this is simply comic technique, for "Marriage, promising generation and new life, has been to comedy what death is to tragedy.' Jane Austen was a Tory, like every member of her family— whose men either became priests or admirals...
...The Companion also includes "A Dictionary of Jane Austen's Life and Works," a fascinating compendium by H. Abigail Bok that provides much insight into how Austen's seeming lack of artifice conceals unmatched technique...
...animation, in which homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting...
...Her first husband, a French aristocrat, having been guillotined during the Revolution, Eliza vamped Jane's favorite brother, who gave up a church career to marry her...
...The cult reached its peak in the period between the Wars: Kipling suggested in his 1924 story, "The Janeites," that honest British Tommys had read Austen in the trenches, and fought the Great War to preserve the English values she stood for...
...In a related essay, Margaret Kirkham discusses how Austen joined early feminists in attacking Rousseau's degrading theories of female education, and concludes that she should be deemed a "feminist moralist" by the lights of her own era since she insisted on representing her heroines' natures as "human" and not simply "feminine...
...John Bayley points out that "Jane Austen's finest achievement is to make us in love in art with what might appear most wearisome, tedious, and petty in living, with what we have to do every day and prefer to forget.'" His observation—and a great deal more—can be found in The Jane A us-ten Companion (Macmillan, 511 pp., $17.50), edited by J. Daniel Grey, with consulting editors A. Walton Litz and Brian Southam...
...Sir Walter Scott, the best-selling novelist of the day, thought well of Emma, writing that "The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting...
...Well-born men and women do not yet rely on servants the way their Victorian counterparts would...
...One might have supposed she would have found less favor with Victorian audiences...
...Oliphant tried to alterthe Janeite image in 1871 by portraying a woman who had possessed "a fine vein of feminine cynicism" and a "stinging yet soft-voiced contempt," who wrote books "so calm and cold and keen...
...In a thoughtful, scholarly reassessment, Marylin Butler maintains that "this most retired and reticent of novelists both observes movements of history and participates in them...
...Her characters seem almost flawlessly natural...
...Unlike most of her heroines, Jane Austen was well-educated...
...with a precision that delights the reader...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 16
