Bloom, Harold (Ed) - Jane Austen (Bloom's Classic Critical Views)

Bloom’s Classic Critical Views
ja n e
au st e n
Jane Austen
Geoffrey Chaucer
Charles Dickens
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe
Walt Whitman
ja n e
au st e n
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: Jane Austen
Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jane Austen / [edited by] Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s classic critical views)
A selection of important older literary criticism on Jane Austen.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9560-7
ISBN-10: 0-7910-9560-6
1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.
II. Title: Bloom’s classic critical views : Jane Austen.
PR4037.J285 2007
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Contents
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Series Introduction ix
Introduction by Harold Bloom xi
Biography xiii
Personal 3
Mary Russell Mitford (1815) 5
Henry Austen “Biographical Notice of the Author” (1818) 5
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1834) 11
James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870) 11
William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
(1913) 14
General 19
Archbishop Whately “Modern Novels” (1821) 21
Sir Walter Scott (1822) 25
Unsigned “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are—or
The Manners of the Day” (1830) 25
Frances Ann Kemble (1831) 27
Maria Jane Jewsbury “Literary Women, no. II:
Jane Austen” (1831) 27
Sara Coleridge “Letter to Emily Trevenen” (1834) 32
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1839) 32
George Henry Lewes “Recent Novels:
French and English” (1847) 33
Charlotte Brontë (1848) 33
George Eliot “The Progress of Fiction As an Art” (1853) 34
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1855) 35
George Henry Lewes “The Novels of Jane Austen” (1859) 35
David Masson (1859) 45
vi Contents
Thomas Babington Macaulay “Madame D’Arblay” (1860) 46

G.F. Chorley “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford” (1870) 47
T.E. Kebbel “Jane Austen” (1870) 50
Edward FitzGerald (1870) 53
John W. Hales (1873) 54
George William Curtis “Editor’s Easy Chair” (1881) 54
Henry Morley (1881) 55
George Barnett Smith “More Views of Jane Austen” (1885) 55
Andrew Lang “Letter to Jane Austen” (1886) 57
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1887) 60
James Ashcroft Noble (1889) 62
Goldwin Smith (1890) 62
W.B. Shubrick Clymer “A Note on Jane Austen” (1891) 66
William Dean Howells (1891) 79
Walter Raleigh “Jane Austen” (1894) 79
George Saintsbury (1896) 83
Edmund Gosse (1897) 85
Vida D. Scudder (1898) 86
Janet Harper “The Renascence of Jane Austen” (1900) 87
Earl of Iddesleigh “A Chat about Jane Austen’s Novels”
(1900) 87
William Dean Howells “Jane Austen’s
Elizabeth Bennet” (1901) 94
Works 101
Pride and Prejudice 103
Unsigned (1813) 103
Mary Russell Mitford (1814) 104
Henry Crabb Robinson (1819) 104
Sir Walter Scott (1826) 105
W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860) 106
James Oliphant “Scott and Jane Austen” (1899) 108
Francis Hovey Stoddard “Growth of Personality in Fiction”
(1900) 111
William Dean Howells “Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet”
(1901) 114
“Pride and Prejudice” (1913) 118
Contents vii
Sense and Sensibility 119

Julia Kavanagh “Miss Austen’s Six Novels” (1863) 124
William Dean Howells “Three of Jane Austen’s Heroines”
(1901) 125
Emma 128
Sir Walter Scott “Emma” (1815) 128
William C. Macready (1834) 134
Anthony Trollope “Emma” (1865) 137
Margaret Oliphant (1882) 139
(1901) 141
“Emma” (1913) 144
“Opinions of Emma” (1913) 145
Mansfield Park 148

William C. Macready (1836) 148
Adolphus Alfred Jack “Miss Austen” (1897) 149
Hiram M. Stanley “Mansfield Park” (1897) 151
(1901) 155
“Mansfield Park” (1913) 157
“Opinions of Mansfield Park” (1913) 159
Northanger Abbey 159

Anonymous “Northanger Abbey and Persuasion” (1818) 159
Thomas Babington Macaulay “Journal” (1876) 165
Margaret Oliphant (1882) 166
William Dean Howells “Anne Eliot and
Catherine Morland” (1901) 167
viii Contents
Persuasion 170
Maria Edgeworth (1818) 170
Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1886) 171
William Dean Howells “Anne Eliot and
Catherine Morland” (1901) 174
“Persuasion” (1913) 179
Chronology 181
Index 183
Series Introduction
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Bloom’s Classic Critical Views is a new series presenting a selection of the most
important older literary criticism on the greatest authors commonly read in high
school and college classes today. Unlike the Bloom’s Modern Critical Views series,
which for more than twenty years has provided the best contemporary criticism
on great authors, Bloom’s Classic Critical Views attempts to present the authors in
the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to
be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections range from contemporary
reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in
its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and
American tradition, including Henry James, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold, and
many more.
Some of the critical essays and extracts presented here have appeared previously
in other titles edited by Harold Bloom, such as the New Moulton’s Library of Literary
Criticism. Other selections appear here for the first time in any book by this publisher.
All were selected under Harold Bloom’s guidance.
In addition, each volume in this series contains a series of essays by a contemporary
expert, who comments on the most important critical selections, putting them in
context and suggesting how they might be used by a student writer to influence his
or her own writing. This series is intended above all for students, to help them think
more deeply and write more powerfully about great writers and their works.
ix
Introduction by Harold Bloom
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Jane Austen’s principal precursors were Shakespeare and the major eighteenth-
century English novelist Samuel Richardson. The influence of the heroines of
Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, Rosalind of As You Like It in particular,
is palpable upon Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice and Emma
Woodhouse of the equally superb novel she entitles. Richardson is now out
of fashion yet always returns. In my judgment, no other novel in the language
rivals Clarissa, a work as long and complex as Marcel Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time. In our age of the digest and the screen, when deep reading wanes,
most students, if they encounter Clarissa at all, employ a severely cut version,
which is as maimed as a truncated Proust would be. Dr. Samuel Johnson set
Clarissa above all other novels, while gloomily observing that reading it for
the plot might lead to self-hanging. You read Shakespeare for his thinking,
his wisdom, his uncanny mastery of language, and his ability to construct
alternative worlds that seem wholly natural. Most of all, I return to William
Hazlitt and to A.C. Bradley and meditate endlessly upon Shakespeare’s
characters: Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Cleopatra, and a hundred more.
I return frequently to Richardson for his two great persons: Clarissa Harlowe
and her abductor and despoiler, Lovelace.
Clarissa, after Shakespeare’s greatest characters, is the largest instance in
the language of a heroine of the Protestant Will. By this I mean that in his
extraordinary novel (1747–48), Richardson gave us an utterly convincing
secular saint, who incarnates the English Protestant sensibility. The peculiar,
dominant mark of such a sensibility is its exaltation of the right of private
judgment. Clarissa and her descendants—Austen’s Elizabeth and Emma,
Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, Henry James’s
Isabel Archer and Millie Theale, Virginia Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway—live by
xi
xii Harold Bloom
the Inner Light. I omit D.H. Lawrence’s Ursula Brangwen, who incarnates
her creator’s Nonconformist heritage, because her struggle with Lawrence’s
surrogate, Rupert Birkin, is an even wilder version of the Protestant Will run
rampant than his paramour Ursula can summon up.
In Austen, the secularization of Protestantism and its drives follows the
model of Richardson, who brilliantly moved Shakespearean inwardness into
the unitary plot of a single action: courtship between the sexes. Elizabeth
and Darcy resolve their agon by an ultimate exchange of spiritual estimates
that works to confirm their mutual self-esteem. Subtle as Austen’s ironies are,
they remain visible because they are so controlled, whereas the Chaucerian-
Shakespearean ironies of courtship frequently are too huge to be readily
discerned. This hardly is a disadvantage to Austen, since her comic genius
surpasses that of anyone in the language since Shakespeare himself.
t
Biography
t
Jane Austen
(1775–1817)
Jane Austen was born in Steventon in Hampshire, England, on December 16, 1775,
the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh
Austen. Jane was educated at home by her father, then in 1783 she was sent with
her sister Cassandra to attend a school run by a Mrs. Cawley—first at Oxford, then at
Southhampton—where Jane almost died of putrid fever. During 1784–85 Jane and
Cassandra went to the Abbey School in Reading
Austen started writing around 1787, perhaps inspired by the plays put on
by her family in the neighboring barn or in the parsonage where her father was
rector. Among her juvenilia are Love and Freindship (as the author spelled it in her
manuscript), a burlesque of love stories and romances written about 1790; History of
England completed in 1791 by, as Austen labeled herself, “a partial, prejudiced, and
ignorant historian”; Catharine, an unfinished novel about an orphan girl; and several
other works. She included many of these writings in a three-volume manuscript
collection, which she completed copying in 1793.
During 1794–96 Austen wrote a novel entitled Elinor and Marianne, followed in
1796 by First Impressions. The latter was offered in 1797 to a publisher named Cadell
but was rejected by him without a reading. In that year, Austen began rewriting
Elinor and Marianne, retitling the work Sense and Sensibility. In 1798 she wrote a
novel entitled Susan. This parody of gothic novels was sold to a publisher for £10 in
1803 but never appeared, and was published only posthumously in a revised version
under the title Northanger Abbey. Around 1799 Austen wrote another novel entitled
Lady Susan. An unfinished novel entitled The Watsons probably dates from between
1800 and 1805.
In 1801 Austen’s family moved to Bath. Around this time, Jane apparently had a
love affair with a clergyman. The next year she received a marriage proposal from
Harris Bigg-Wither, a friend of one of her brothers, but she turned him down because
she did not love him.

Biography
A year after her father’s death in 1805, the family moved again to Southampton
and then, in 1809, to the village of Chawton, near Alton in Hampshire. Each move
represented a downward step on the socioeconomic scale. During this time, however,
Austen’s writing finally began to see print. Sense and Sensibility was published
in 1811, although only as “by a Lady.” Austen then revised First Impressions, and it
appeared as Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Mansfield Park, begun in 1811, was published
in 1814, followed by Emma the next year. Some scholars believe that this novel is an
extensive reworking of The Watsons. Persuasion, her last novel, was written in 1817. In
May of that year, the family went to Winchester to seek medical attention for Jane,
who had developed Addison’s disease. She died two months later, on July 18, 1817.
Much of Austen’s work appeared posthumously, beginning with the joint
publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818. In the 1920s her juvenilia
began to appear, as well as a fragment of a novel, later known as Sanditon, written
in early 1817.
t
personal
t
Personal
Mary Russell Mitford (1815)

Mary Russell Mitford is best known for her novel Our Village, based on her
own observations. Students investigating literary history and issues of
gender might look at Mitford’s friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
as well as her admiration for Austen, in terms of a growing and mutually
supportive community of women writers.
QQQ
Apropos to novels, I have discovered that our great favorite, Miss Austen, is
my countrywoman; that mamma knew all her family very intimately; and
that she herself is an old maid (I beg her pardon—I mean a young lady)
with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that
she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly
she ever remembers; and a friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she
has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of “single
blessedness” that ever existed, and that, till Pride and Prejudice showed what
a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded
in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin, upright piece of
wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very
different now; she is still a poker, but a poker of whom every one is afraid.
It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is
rather formidable. Most writers are good-humored chatterers—neither very
wise nor very witty; but, nine times out of ten (at least in the few that I have
known), unaffected and pleasant, and quite removing by their conversation
any awe that may have been excited by their works. But a wit, a delineator of
character, who does not talk, is terrific indeed!
After all, I do not know that I can quite vouch for this account, though the
friend from whom I received it is truth itself; but her family connections must
render her disagreeable to Miss Austen, since she is the sister-in-law of a gentleman
who is at law with Miss A.’s brother for the greater part of his fortune.
—Mary Russell Mitford, Letter to Sir William Elford (April 3, 1815)
Henry Austen
“Biographical Notice of the Author” (1818)
Five months after Jane Austen’s death, her older brother Henry published
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion together, since neither work had been
released during the writer’s lifetime. In the “Biographical Notice” that
Henry attached to this publication, he reveals her identity as the author
Jane Austen
for the first time. During her life, Austen had published anonymously.
Students looking at Austen as a feminist (or antifeminist) or researching
private versus public spheres in pre-Victorian England will find this crucial.
Henry compares Austen to Frances D’Arblay (or Fanny Burney) and Maria
Edgeworth, both well-known and mostly well-respected writers who also
published their first works anonymously. Although their writings were
often quite popular, women authors were sometimes criticized by those
who believed that a woman’s place was in the home or private sphere.
Some even compared women writers to prostitutes, selling themselves for
public approbation. The possibility of public scorn might have influenced
Austen’s decision to publish anonymously. She may also have done so
out of modesty, as Henry writes, “no accumulation of fame would have
induced her . . . to affix her name to any productions of her pen.” If this is
true, we must ask why her favorite brother revealed her identity.
Students studying Austen’s life story should pay close attention to
personal ties her early biographers may have had to her family. The first
writings about Austen were composed by family members: nephew James
Edward Austen-Leigh, grandnephew Lord Brabourne, and grandnephew
and nephew William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh.
Henry focuses on Austen’s disposition more than on her writing abilities,
using words such as “faultless” and “perfect,” which indicate that he might
be exaggerating his sister’s good character. Since Henry chooses to reveal
Jane’s identity in his piece, he likely wants to emphasize her outstanding
moral qualities in order to avoid possible scandal. There is perhaps no other
writer whose biography has been so exclusively maintained by her family.
This control was initiated both to strengthen the family’s ties to such an
important writer and to protect Austen’s (and thus the family’s) reputation.
Austen’s sister, Cassandra, burned or edited letters written around times of
family crisis, creating gaps in the sequence of the author’s correspondence.
Because of the protectiveness the family exercised regarding its esteemed
daughter’s life, there are limits to what is known about Jane Austen.
Students may want to compare writings about Austen in order to
determine historical context or to disentangle, if possible, Austen’s life
from her work. Henry focuses on the purity of Austen’s life, while William
Dean Howells, Edmund Gosse, and George William Curtis separate her
life from her work by claiming that Austen “writes wholly as an artist,” as
Curtis states. It is perhaps more popular, as can be noted in the writings
of James Oliphant and Charlotte Brontë, to weave Austen’s life and work
together until they become indistinguishable. The lives of women writers
often became a part of reviews of their writing, the logic being that if a
Personal
woman’s real life was somehow scandalous, her writing must be equally
so. As a result, many readers give Austen only partial or qualified credit for
her work, claiming that she was only writing down what occurred right in
front of her.
QQQ
The following pages are the production of a pen which has already
contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public. And
when the public, which has not been insensible to the merits of Sense and
Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, shall be informed
that the hand which guided that pen is now mouldering in the grave, perhaps
a brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than
simple curiosity.
Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness,
literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event. To those who
lament their irreparable loss, it is consolatory to think that, as she never
deserved disapprobation, so, in the circle of her family and friends, she never
met reproof; that her wishes were not only reasonable, but gratified; and that
to the little disappointments incidental to human life was never added, even
for a moment, an abatement of goodwill from any who knew her.
Jane Austen was born on the 16th of December, 1775, at Steventon, in
the county of Hants. Her father was Rector of that parish upwards of forty
years. There he resided, in the conscientious and unassisted discharge of his
ministerial duties, until he was turned of seventy years. Then he retired with
his wife, our authoress, and her sister, to Bath, for the remainder of his life, a
period of about four years. Being not only a profound scholar, but possessing
a most exquisite taste in every species of literature, it is not wonderful that his
daughter Jane should, at a very early age, have become sensible to the charms
of style, and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language. On the death
of her father she removed, with her mother and sister, for a short time, to
Southampton, and finally, in 1809, to the pleasant village of Chawton, in the
same county. From this place she sent into the world those novels, which by
many have been placed on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an
Edgeworth. Some of these novels had been the gradual performances of her
previous life. For though in composition she was equally rapid and correct,
yet an invincible distrust of her own judgement induced her to withhold her
works from the public, till time and many perusals had satisfied her that the
charm of recent composition was dissolved. The natural constitution, the
regular habits, the quiet and happy occupations of our authoress, seemed to
Jane Austen
promise a long succession of amusement to the public, and a gradual increase

of reputation to herself. But the symptoms of a decay, deep and incurable,
began to shew themselves in the commencement of 1816. Her decline was
at first deceitfully slow; and until the spring of this present year, those who
knew their happiness to be involved in her existence could not endure to
despair. But in the month of May, 1817, it was found advisable that she
should be removed to Winchester for the benefit of constant medical aid,
which none even then dared to hope would be permanently beneficial. She
supported, during two months, all the varying pain, irksomeness, and tedium,
attendant on decaying nature, with more than resignation, with a truly elastic
cheerfulness. She retained her faculties, her memory, her fancy, her temper,
and her affections, warm, clear, and unimpaired, to the last. Neither her love
of God, nor of her fellow creatures flagged for a moment. She made a point
of receiving the sacrament before excessive bodily weakness might have
rendered her perception unequal to her wishes. She wrote whilst she could
hold a pen, and with a pencil when a pen was become too laborious. The
day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and
vigour. Her last voluntary speech conveyed thanks to her medical attendant;
and to the final question asked of her, purporting to know her wants, she
replied, ‘I want nothing but death.’
She expired shortly after, on Friday the 18th of July, 1817, in the arms of
her sister, who, as well as the relator of these events, feels too surely that they
shall never look upon her like again.
Jane Austen was buried on the 24th of July, 1817, in the cathedral church
of Winchester, which, in the whole catalogue of its mighty dead, does not
contain the ashes of a brighter genius or a sincerer Christian.
Of personal attractions she possessed a considerable share. Her stature
was that of true elegance. It could not have been increased without exceeding
the middle height. Her carriage and deportment were quiet, yet graceful.
Her features were separately good. Their assemblage produced an unrivalled
expression of that cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence, which were
her real characteristics. Her complexion was of the finest texture. It might
with truth be said, that her eloquent blood spoke through her modest
cheek. Her voice was extremely sweet. She delivered herself with fluency and
precision. Indeed she was formed for elegant and rational society, excelling
in conversation as much as in composition. In the present age it is hazardous
to mention accomplishments. Our authoress would, probably, have been
inferior to few in such acquirements, had she not been so superior to most
in higher things. She had not only an excellent taste for drawing, but, in her
Personal
earlier days, evinced great power of hand in the management of the pencil.
Her own musical attainments she held very cheap. Twenty years ago they
would have been thought more of, and twenty years hence many a parent will
expect their daughters to be applauded for meaner performances. She was
fond of dancing, and excelled in it. It remains now to add a few observations
on that which her friends deemed more important, on those endowments
which sweetened every hour of their lives.
If there be an opinion current in the world, that perfect placidity of
temper is not reconcileable to the most lively imagination, and the keenest
relish for wit, such an opinion will be rejected for ever by those who have
had the happiness of knowing the authoress of the following works. Though
the frailties, foibles, and follies of others could not escape her immediate
detection, yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with
unkindness. The affectation of candour is not uncommon; but she had no
affectation. Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always
sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget.
Where extenuation was impossible, she had a sure refuge in silence. She never
uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression. In short, her temper was as
polished as her wit. Nor were her manners inferior to her temper. They were
of the happiest kind. No one could be often in her company without feeling
a strong desire of obtaining her friendship, and cherishing a hope of having
obtained it. She was tranquil without reserve or stiffness; and communicative
without intrusion or self-sufficiency. She became an authoress entirely from
taste and inclination. Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her
early motives. Most of her works, as before observed, were composed many
years previous to their publication. It was with extreme difficulty that her
friends, whose partiality she suspected whilst she honoured their judgement,
could prevail on her to publish her first work. Nay, so persuaded was she that
its sale would not repay the expense of publication, that she actually made a
reserve from her very moderate income to meet the expected loss. She could
scarcely believe what she termed her great good fortune when Sense and
Sensibility produced a clear profit of about £150. Few so gifted were so truly
unpretending. She regarded the above sum as a prodigious recompense for
that which had cost her nothing. Her readers, perhaps, will wonder that such
a work produced so little at a time when some authors have received more
guineas than they have written lines. The works of our authoress, however,
may live as long as those which have burst on the world with more eclat. But
the public has not been unjust; and our authoress was far from thinking it
so. Most gratifying to her was the applause which from time to time reached
10 Jane Austen
her ears from those who were competent to discriminate. Still, in spite of
such applause, so much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation
of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any
productions of her pen. In the bosom of her own family she talked of them
freely, thankful for praise, open to remark, and submissive to criticism. But in
public she turned away from any allusion to the character of an authoress. She
read aloud with very great taste and effect. Her own works, probably, were
never heard to so much advantage as from her own mouth; for she partook
largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse. She was a warm and judicious
admirer of landscape, both in nature and on canvass. At a very early age she
was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her
opinions either on books or men.
Her reading was very extensive in history and belles lettres; and her
memory extremely tenacious. Her favourite moral writers were Johnson
in prose, and Cowper in verse. It is difficult to say at what age she was not
intimately acquainted with the merits and defects of the best essays and novels
in the English language. Richardson’s power of creating, and preserving the
consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in Sir Charles
Grandison, gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste
secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did
not rank any work of Fielding quite so high. Without the slightest affectation
she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could
make her amends for so very low a scale of morals.
Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and
almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been
surmised to the contrary, never from individuals.
The style of her familiar correspondence was in all respects the same as that
of her novels. Every thing came finished from her pen; for on all subjects she had
ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen. It is not hazarding too much
to say that she never dispatched a note or letter unworthy of publication.
One trait only remains to be touched on. It makes all others unimportant.
She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God,
and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature. On serious subjects
she was well-instructed,
both by reading and meditation, and her opinions accorded strictly with
those of our Established Church.
—Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,”
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 1818
Personal 11
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1834)

I remember Jane Austen, the novelist, a little child: she was very intimate with
Mrs. Lefroy, and much encouraged by her. Her mother was a Miss Leigh,
whose paternal grandmother was a sister of the first Duke of Chandos. Mr.
Austen was of a Kentish family, of which several branches have been settled
in the Weald, and some are still remaining there. When I knew Jane Austen I
never suspected that she was an authoress; but my eyes told me that she was
fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full. The
last time I think that I saw her was at Ramsgate in 1803: perhaps she was then
about twenty-seven years old. Even then I did not know that she was addicted
to literary composition.
—Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, Autobiography, 1834, Vol. 2, p. 41
James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870)

James Edward Austen-Leigh was the son of Austen’s oldest brother, James.
He was nineteen years old when Austen died. Most of the material for his
book came from letters and the reminiscences of other family members.
The Austen family generally disapproved of “outsiders” writing about their
famous relative, and therefore many Austen biographies written in the
first century after her death are by family members.
Students exploring topics involving historical context or gender
issues will note that when James writes of Austen’s accomplishments he
does not mention formal education or training. Upper-class women in
Austen’s time were expected to play music and sing, learn languages,
and perhaps dabble in reading. James mentions that Austen “was not
highly accomplished according to the present [1870] standard,” because
upper-class women of the mid- to late Victorian era were expected to
possess even more domestic attributes. There were strides made toward
gender equality in the nineteenth century, but Victorians also saw a
backlash. Women were purported to be “angels in the house,” making
the home an ideal domain for a man to inhabit. For many, being cast
in this role was a step backward, though some women, despite their
domestic encapsulation, assumed and enjoyed unique positions of
power. Throughout the era, several women, including George Eliot, the
Brontës, and Elizabeth Gaskell, were following in Austen’s footsteps by
producing works of their own.
Students examining historical context should look at James’s references
to historians. James also acknowledges changing perceptions of history
12 Jane Austen
in the early nineteenth century when he writes that critical enquiry into
the usually received statements of the old historians was scarcely begun
in Austen’s time. The Romantic period saw a transformation from the
unquestioned reception of historical “fact” to the use of history as a
means of answering contemporary questions as well as a method open
to critique. Historians were no longer viewed as objective regurgitators of
information; they were beginning to be seen as real people with their own
biases, individuals who may have left some questions unanswered but still
might hold useful information for the current world.
James’s mention of Austen’s acquaintance with periodicals is no small
thing, as throughout the nineteenth century periodicals were a primary
source of information and literature. Writers such as Charles Dickens
realized great success printing their novels in serial form, one chapter
included in each subsequent issue of a particular periodical for a given
duration. James notes that Austen was familiar with Samuel Richardson,
Samuel Johnson, George Crabbe, William Cowper, and to a lesser extent,
Sir Walter Scott. All of these writers were well known and respected
in their time, and, of course, all were men. These writers’ influence on
Austen’s work could be explored by students researching intertextuality,
examining one work in light of another, and the evolution of literary forms
such as the novel. Students discussing biographical representation may
recognize that, according to James, Austen paid attention to the style
and content of the writing, rather than spending much time on the lives
and personalities of the writers themselves.
QQQ
In person she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender,
her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and
animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she
had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright
hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If
not so regularly handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar
charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders. At the time of which I am
now writing, she never was seen, either morning or evening, without a cap;
I believe that she and her sister were generally thought to have taken to the
garb of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required; and that,
though remarkably neat in their dress as in all their ways, they were scarcely,
sufficiently regardful of the fashionable, or the becoming.
She was not highly accomplished according to the present standard. Her
sister drew well, and it is from a drawing of hers that the likeness prefixed
Personal 13
to this volume has been taken. Jane herself was fond of music, and had
a sweet voice, both in singing and in conversation; in her youth she had
received some instruction on the pianoforte; and at Chawton she practised
daily, chiefly before breakfast. I believe she did so partly that she might not
disturb the rest of the party who were less fond of music. In the evening she
would sometimes sing, to her own accompaniment, some simple old songs,
the words and airs of which, now never heard, still linger in my memory.
She read French with facility, and knew something of Italian. In those days
German was no more thought of than Hindostanee, as part of a lady’s
education. In history she followed the old guides—Goldsmith, Hume, and
Robertson. Critical enquiry into the usually received statements of the old
historians was scarcely begun. The history of the early kings of Rome had not
yet been dissolved into legend. Historic characters lay before the reader’s eyes
in broad light or shade, not much broken up by details. The virtues of King
Henry VIII. were yet undiscovered, nor had much light been thrown on the
inconsistencies of Queen Elizabeth; the one was held to be an unmitigated
tyrant, and an embodied Blue Beard; the other a perfect model of wisdom
and policy. Jane, when a girl, had strong political opinions, especially about
the affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement
defender of Charles I. and his grandmother Mary; but I think it was rather
from an impulse of feeling than from any enquiry into the evidences by which
they must be condemned or acquitted. As she grew up, the politics of the day
occupied very little of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of
moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family. She was well acquainted
with the old periodicals from the Spectator downwards. Her knowledge of
Richardson’s works was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the
multitude and the merits of our light literature have called off the attention
of readers from that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles
Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to
her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered
as if they had been living friends.
Amongst her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and
Cowper in both, stood high. It is well that the native good taste of herself
and of those with whom she lived, saved her from the snare into which a
sister novelist had fallen, of imitating the grandiloquent style of Johnson. She
thoroughly enjoyed Crabbe; perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to
herself in minute and highly finished detail; and would sometimes say, in jest,
that, if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe; looking on
the author quite as an abstract idea, and ignorant and regardless what manner
14 Jane Austen
of man he might be. Scott’s poetry gave her great pleasure; she did not live to
make much acquaintance with his novels.
—James Edward Austen-Leigh,
A Memoir of ]ane Austen, 1870, Ch. 5
William Austen-Leigh and

Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (1913)
Although early biographical material on Austen should be approached
with a critical sensibility, given that most of it was written by biased family
members, this intimate sketch of Austen provides an outline of her person-
ality (the authors even note the qualities and traits of Austen that come
through in her books) and a glimpse of her literary influences.
QQQ
Jane Austen was now between thirty-three and thirty-four years old. She was
absolutely free from any artistic self-consciousness, from any eccentricity of
either temper or manner. “Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good
sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles;
so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible
women only by that peculiar genius which shines out clearly . . . in her
works.” Her tastes were as normal as her nature. She read English literature
with eagerness, attracted by the eighteenth-century perfection of style—and
still more by the return to nature in Cowper and the introduction of romance
in Scott—but repelled by coarseness, which she found even in the Spectator
and the presence of which in Fielding made her rank him below Richardson.
As for the latter, “Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all
that was ever said or done in the ‘Cedar Parlour,’ was familiar to her; and the
wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had
been living friends.” Her “dear Dr. Johnson” was a constant companion; and
a younger friend was found in Crabbe, whom—as she used to pretend—she
was quite prepared to marry: not knowing at the time whether he had a wife
living or not. As to her other tastes, she greatly delighted in the beauties
of nature, and no doubt would have enjoyed foreign travel, had not that
pleasure been quite out of her reach. Her attitude to music, as an art, is more
doubtful. She learnt to play the piano in her youth, and after spending many
years without an instrument, took it up again on settling at Chawton; but
she says herself that she did this in order to be able to play country-dances
for her nephews and nieces; and when she goes to a concert she sometimes
Personal 15
remarks on her inability to enjoy it. A concert in Sydney Gardens, however,

was not perhaps likely to offer to the hearer many examples of high art; and
we have no means of knowing whether, if she had had a chance of being
introduced to classical music, it would have appealed to her, as it sometimes
does to intellectual people who have been previously quite ignorant that
they possessed any musical faculty. We are told that she had a sweet voice,
and sang with feeling. “The Soldier’s Adieu” and “The Yellow-haired laddie”
survive as the names of two of her songs.
She was extraordinarily neat-handed in anything which she attempted.
Her hand-writing was both strong and pretty; her hemming and stitching,
over which she spent much time, “might have put a sewing machine to
shame”; and at games, like spillikins or cup-and-ball, she was invincible.
If this description does not seem to imply so wide a mental outlook as we
wish to see in a distinguished author, we must remember that Jane Austen (as
her nephew tells us) “lived in entire seclusion from the literary world,” and
probably “never was in company with any person whose talents or whose
celebrity equalled her own.” She was in the middle of a small family circle,
the members of which were well-educated according to the fashion of the
times, intelligent, and refined; but not especially remarkable for learning or
original thought. They accepted the standards and views of their generation,
interpreting them in a reasonable and healthy manner. She had therefore no
inducement, such as might come from the influence of superior intellects,
to dive into difficult problems. Her mental efforts were purely her own, and
they led her in another direction; but she saw what she did see so very clearly,
that she would probably have been capable of looking more deeply into the
heart of things, had any impulse from outside induced her to try. Her vision,
however, might not have remained so admirably adapted for the delicate
operations nearer to the surface which were her real work in life.
Jane’s person is thus described for us by her niece Anna, now becoming a
grown-up girl and a keen observer: “The figure tall and slight, but not drooping;
well balanced, as was proved by her quick firm step. Her complexion of that
rare sort which seems the particular property of light brunettes; a mottled
skin, not fair, but perfectly clear and healthy; the fine naturally curling hair,
neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, and the rather small,
but well-shaped, nose.” This is a delightful description; but she adds that in
spite of all this, her aunt was not regularly handsome, though most attractive.
As to her charm and lovableness there is absolute unanimity among all those
who were near enough to her to know what she really was. Jane had by this
time seen a good deal of society, and enjoyed it, though with a certain critical
16 Jane Austen
aloofness which belonged to her family, and which was hardly to be avoided
by so clever a person as herself. This critical spirit was evidently a quality
of which she endeavoured to rid herself as of a fault; and one of her nieces,
who was too young to know her aunt intimately, until almost the end of her
life, was able then to say: “She was in fact one of the last people in society to
be afraid of. I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing. She was
naturally shy and not given to talk much in company, and people fancied,
knowing that she was clever, that she was on the watch for good material for
books from their conversation. Her intimate friends knew how groundless
was the apprehension and that it wronged her.” She was not only shy: she was
also at times very grave. Her niece Anna is inclined to think that Cassandra
was the more equably cheerful of the two sisters. There was, undoubtedly, a
quiet intensity of nature in Jane for which some critics have not given her
credit. Yet at other times she and this same niece could joke so heartily over
their needlework and talk such nonsense together that Cassandra would beg
them to stop out of mercy to her, and not keep her in such fits of laughing.
Sometimes the laughter would be provoked by the composition of extempore
verses, such as those given in the Memoir celebrating the charm of the “lovely
Anna”; sometimes the niece would skim over new novels at the Alton Library,
and reproduce them with wilful exaggeration. On one occasion she threw
down a novel on the counter with contempt, saying she knew it must be
rubbish from its name. The name was Sense and Sensibility—the secret of
which had been strictly kept, even from her.
The niece who shared these hearty laughs with her aunts—James’ eldest
daughter, Anna—differed widely from her cousin, Edward’s daughter,
Fanny. She was more brilliant both in looks and in intelligence, but also
more mercurial and excitable. Both occupied a good deal of Jane’s thoughts
and affections; but Anna must have been the one who caused her the most
amusement and also the most anxiety. The interest in her was heightened
when she became engaged to the son of Jane’s old friend, Mrs. Lefroy. Anna’s
giddiness was merely that of youth; she settled down into a steady married life
as the careful mother of a large family. She cherished an ardent affection for
her Aunt Jane, who evidently exercised a great influence on her character.
Jane Austen’s literary work was done mainly in the general sitting-room:
liable at any moment to be interrupted by servants, children, or visitors—to
none of whom had been entrusted the secret of her authorship. Her small
sheets of paper could easily be put away or covered with blotting-paper,
whenever the creaking swing-door (which she valued for that reason) gave
notice that anyone was coming.
Personal 17
Her needlework was nearly always a garment for the poor, though she
had also by her some satin stitch ready to take up in case of the appearance
of company. The nature of the work will help to contradict an extraordinary
misconception—namely, that she was indifferent to the needs and claims
of the poor: an idea probably based on the fact that she never used them
as “copy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. She was of course quite
ignorant of the conditions of life in the great towns, and she had but little
money to give, but work, teaching, and sympathy were freely bestowed on
rustic neighbours. A very good criterion of her attitude towards her own
characters is often furnished by their relations with the poor around them.
Instances of this may be found in Darcy’s care of his tenants and servants, in
Anne Elliot’s farewell visits to nearly all the inhabitants of Kellynch, and in
Emma’s benevolence and good sense when assisting her poorer neighbours.
—William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh,
“Sense and Sensibility,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters,
1913, pp. 189–192
t
general
t
General 21
Archbishop Whately “Modern Novels” (1821)

Whately first mentions Austen as a Christian writer, but his discussion of
her “practical utility” is even more thought provoking. Many reviewers and
scholars believe that nondidactic works hold no value. Students reading
Austen might ask whether her works teach specific lessons, and whether
the books have value beyond the lessons they impart.
QQQ
Miss Austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being
evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the
score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all
obtrusive. She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels,
(as Coelebs was designated, we will not say altogether without reason,) a
‘dramatic sermon.’ The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than
studiously brought forward and dwelt upon. In fact she is more sparing of it
than would be thought desirable by some persons; perhaps even by herself,
had she consulted merely her own sentiments; but she probably introduced
it as far as she thought would be generally acceptable and profitable: for
when the purpose of inculcating a religious principle is made too palpably
prominent, many readers, if they do not throw aside the book with digust, are
apt to fortify themselves with that respectful kind of apathy with which they
undergo a regular sermon, and prepare themselves as they do to swallow a
dose of medicine, endeavouring to get it down in large gulps, without tasting
it more than is necessary.
The moral lessons also of this lady’s novels, though clearly and impressively
conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from
the circumstances of the story; they are not forced upon the reader, but he
is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: her’s is
that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and
certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in
the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions. Her fables appear to us to
be, in their own way, nearly faultless; they do not consist (like those of some
of the writers who have attempted this kind of common-life novel writing)
of a string of unconnected events which have little or no bearing on one
main plot, and are introduced evidently for the sole purpose of bringing in
characters and conversations; but have all that compactness of plan and unity
of action which is generally produced by a sacrifice of probability: yet they
have little or nothing that is not probable; the story proceeds without the aid
of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or
22 Jane Austen
natural consequences of what has preceded; and yet (which is a very rare
merit indeed) the final catastrophe is scarcely ever clearly foreseen from the
beginning, and very often comes, upon the generality of readers at least,
quite unexpected. We know not whether Miss Austin ever had access to the
precepts of Aristotle; but there are few, if any, writers of fiction who have
illustrated them more successfully.
The vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and
air of unstudied ease in the scenes represented, which are no less necessary
than probability of incident, to carry the reader’s imagination along with the
story, and give fiction the perfect appearance of reality, she possesses in a high
degree; and the object is accomplished without resorting to those deviations
from the ordinary plan of narrative in the third person, which have been
patronized by some eminent masters. We allude to the two other methods of
conducting a fictitious story, viz. either by narrative in the first person, when
the hero is made to tell his own tale, or by a series of letters; both of which
we conceive have been adopted with a view of heightening the resemblance
of the fiction to reality. At first sight, indeed, there might appear no reason
why a story told in the first person should have more the air of a real history
than in the third; especially as the majority of real histories actually are in the
third person; nevertheless, experience seems to show that such is the case:
provided there be no want of skill in the writer, the resemblance to real life, of
a fiction thus conducted, will approach much the nearest (other points being
equal) to a deception, and the interest felt in it, to that which we feel in real
transactions. We need only instance Defoe’s Novels, which, in spite of much
improbability, we believe have been oftener mistaken for true narratives,
than any fictions that ever were composed. Colonel Newport is well known
to have been cited as an historical authority; and we have ourselves found
great difficulty in convincing many of our friends that Defoe was not himself
the citizen, who relates the plague of London. The reason probably is, that in
the ordinary form of narrative, the writer is not content to exhibit, like a real
historian, a bare detail of such circumstances as might actually have come
under his knowledge; but presents us with a description of what is passing in
the minds of the parties, and gives an account of their feelings and motives,
as well as their most private conversations in various places at once. All this
is very amusing, but perfectly unnatural: the merest simpleton could hardly
mistake a fiction of this kind for a true history, unless he believed the writer
to be endued with omniscience and omnipresence, or to be aided by familiar
spirits, doing the office of Homer’s Muses, whom he invokes to tell him all
that could not otherwise be known. . .
General 23
Let the events, therefore, which are detailed, and the characters described,
be ever so natural, the way in which they are presented to us is of a kind of
supernatural cast, perfectly unlike any real history that ever was or can be
written, and thus requiring a greater stretch of imagination in the reader. On
the other hand, the supposed narrator of his own history never pretends to
dive into the thoughts and feelings of the other parties; he merely describes
his own, and gives his conjectures as to those of the rest, just as a real
autobiographer might do; and thus an author is enabled to assimilate his
fiction to reality, without withholding that delineation of the inward workings
of the human heart, which is so much coveted. Nevertheless novels in the first
person have not succeeded so well as to make that mode of writing become
very general. It is objected to them, not without reason, that they want a
hero: the person intended to occupy that post being the narrator himself,
who of course cannot so describe his own conduct and character as to make
the reader thoroughly acquainted with him; though the attempt frequently
produces an offensive appearance of egotism.
The plan of a fictitious correspondence seems calculated in some
measure to combine the advantages of the other two; since, by allowing each
personage to be the speaker in turn, the feelings of each may be described by
himself, and his character and conduct by another. But these novels are apt to
become excessively tedious; since, to give the letters the appearance of reality,
(without which the main object proposed would be defeated,) they must
contain a very large proportion of matter which has no bearing at all upon
the story. There is also generally a sort of awkward disjointed appearance in
a novel which proceeds entirely in letters, and holds together, as it were, by
continual splicing.
Miss Austin, though she has in a few places introduced letters with
great effect, has on the whole conducted her novels on the ordinary plan,
describing, without scruple, private conversations and uncommunicated
feelings: but she has not been forgetful of the important maxim, so long ago
illustrated by Homer, and afterwards enforced by Aristotle, of saying as little
as possible in her own person, and giving a dramatic air to the narrative, by
introducing frequent conversations; which she conducts with a regard to
character hardly exceeded even by Shakspeare himself. Like him, she shows
as admirable a discrimination in the characters of fools as of people of sense;
a merit which is far from common. To invent, indeed, a conversation full of
wisdom or of wit, requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but
the converse does not hold good: it is no fool that can describe fools well; and
many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior characters, have
24 Jane Austen
failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones, which it is necessary to

introduce in order to give a faithful representation of real life: they exhibit to
us mere folly in the abstract, forgetting that to the eye of a skilful naturalist
the insects on a leaf present as wide differences as exist between the elephant
and the lion. Slender, and Shallow, and Aguecheek, as Shakspeare has painted
them, though equally fools, resemble one another no more than Richard, and
Macbeth, and Julius Caesar; and Miss Austin’s Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Rushworth,
and Miss Bates, are no more alike than her Darcy, Knightley, and Edmund
Bertram. Some have complained, indeed, of finding her fools too much like
nature, and consequently tiresome; there is no disputing about tastes; all we
can say is, that such critics must (whatever deference they may outwardly pay
to received opinions) find the Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night very
tiresome; and that those who look with pleasure at Wilkie’s pictures, or those
of the Dutch school, must admit that excellence of imitation may confer
attraction on that which would be insipid or disagreeable in the reality.
Her minuteness of detail has also been found fault with; but even where
it produces, at the time, a degree of tediousness, we know not whether that
can justly be reckoned a blemish, which is absolutely essential to a very
high excellence. Now, it is absolutely impossible, without this, to produce
that thorough acquaintance with the characters, which is necessary to make
the reader heartily interested in them. Let any one cut out from the Iliad or
from Shakspeare’s plays every thing (we are far from saying that either might
not lose some parts with advantage, but let him reject every thing) which is
absolutely devoid of importance and of interest in itself; and he will find that
what is left will have lost more than half its charms. We are convinced that
some writers have diminished the effect of their works by being scrupulous
to admit nothing into them which had not some absolute, intrinsic, and
independent merit. They have acted like those who strip off the leaves of a
fruit tree, as being of themselves good for nothing, with the view of securing
more nourishment to the fruit, which in fact cannot attain its full maturity
and flavour without them. . . .
On the whole, Miss Austin’s works may safely be recommended, not
only as among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining,
in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the
direct effort at the former, of which we have complained, as sometimes
defeating its object. For those who cannot, or will not, learn any thing from
productions of this kind, she has provided entertainment which entitles
her to thanks; for mere innocent amusement is in itself a good, when it
interferes with no greater; especially as it may occupy the place of some
General 25
other that may not be innocent. The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a
reward to him who should discover a new pleasure, would have deserved
well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless. Those, again,
who delight in the study of human nature, may improve in the knowledge
of it, and in the profitable application of that knowledge, by the perusal of
such fictions as those before us.
—Archbishop Whately, “Modern Novels’’
Quarterly Review, January 1821, pp. 359–63, 375–76
Sir Walter Scott (1822)

By the way did you know Miss Austen Authoress of some novels which have
a great deal of nature in them—nature in ordinary and middle life to be sure
but valuable from its strong resemblance and correct drawing.
—Sir Walter Scott, Letter to Joanna Baillie (February 10, 1822)
Unsigned “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are—

or the Manners of the Day” (1830)
Miss Austen has never been so popular as she deserved to be. Intent on
fidelity of delineation, and averse to the commonplace tricks of her art,
she has not, in this age of literary quackery, received her reward. Ordinary
readers have been apt to judge of her as Partridge, in Fielding’s novel,
judged of Garrick’s acting. He could not see the merit of a man who merely
behaved on the stage as any body might be expected to behave under
similar circumstances in real life. He infinitely preferred the ‘robustious
periwig-pated fellow,’ who flourished his arms like a windmill, and ranted
with the voice of three. It was even so with many of the readers of Miss
Austen. She was too natural for them. It seemed to them as if there could
be very little merit in making characters act and talk so exactly like the
people whom they saw around them every day. They did not consider that
the highest triumph of art consists in its concealment; and here the art was
so little perceptible, that they believed there was none. Her works, like well-
proportioned rooms, are rendered less apparently grand and imposing by
the very excellence of their adjustment. It must perhaps be confessed, that
she availed herself too little of the ordinary means of attracting attention and
exciting interest. Her plots are very simple, formed upon the most rigid view
of probabilities, excluding every thing romantic or surprising, or calculated
26 Jane Austen
to produce a very powerful emotion, and including only such events as

occur in every-day life. Her characters are, for the most part, commonplace
people, little distinguished by their mental qualities from the mass of their
fellow-creatures, of secondary station, and hardly ever exhibited through
that halo of rank and wealth which makes many an ill-drawn sketch pass
current with a credulous public. ‘Materiam superabat opus,’ may be said of
her works. No novelist perhaps ever employed more unpromising materials,
and by none have those materials been more admirably treated. Her forte
lay not so much in describing events, as in drawing characters; and in this
she stands almost alone. She possessed the rare and difficult art of making
her readers intimately acquainted with the characters of all whom she
describes. We feel as if we had lived among them; and yet she employs no
elaborate description—no metaphysical analysis—no antithetical balance
of their good and bad qualities. She scarcely does more than make them act
and talk, and we know them directly.
In the ridicule of human foibles, she showed great delicacy and address.
She never railed in set terms, and seldom launched the shafts of direct satire;
but she made us equally sensible of the absurdity or unreasonableness
which she wished to expose,—perhaps without even having recourse to
one single condemnatory expression. A nicely-regulated vein of humour
runs through her writings, never breaking out into broad mirth, but ever
ready to communicate a pleasing vivacity to the current of her story. To
the above merits may be added those of the purest morality, and most
undeviating good sense. Few, if any, fictitious writings have a more decided
tendency to improve the hearts of those who read them; and this end is
gained without any thing that could be called sermonizing even by the
most impatient.
In dialogue she also excelled. Her conversations are never bookish—they
are just what might have been said; and they are eminently characteristic.
We have seen a good deal of spirited dialogue, in which the parts might be
transposed and given to other interlocutors, with very little injury to the effect
of the whole. This is never the case in the conversations introduced by Miss
Austen. Every thing that is said, however short and simple, belongs peculiarly
to the person by whom it is uttered, and is indicative of their situation, or turn
of mind: And yet they do not seem to talk for effect; they merely say just what
it seems most natural that they should have said.
—Unsigned, “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are—or The Manners
of the Day,” Edinburgh Review, July 1830, pp. 449–50
General 27
Frances Ann Kemble (1831)

Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of
Miss Austen’s novels. What wonderful books those are! She must have written
down the very conversations she heard verbatim, to have made them so like,
which is Irish.
—Frances Ann Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, July 31, 1831
Maria Jane Jewsbury “Literary Women,

no. II: Jane Austen” (1831)
A writer who was left (with her father) to care for several younger broth-
ers and sisters after her mother died in 1819, Jewsbury understood only
too well what it meant for a woman to combine domestic duty with the
compulsion to write. While Jewsbury died young, of cholera at the age of
33, the following piece remains one of the best-known articles on Austen
written by a woman.
It is clear that Jewsbury took inspiration from Austen, writing, “For
those who may doubt the possibility of engrafting literary habits on
those peculiarly set apart for the female sex, and for those who may
doubt how far literary reputation is attainable, without a greater sacrifice
to notoriety than they may deem compatible with female happiness and
delicacy, it is pleasant to have so triumphant a reference as Miss Austen.”
It seems that Jewsbury is speaking directly to those who have objected
to her own penchant for writing, and it would be interesting for students
to study letters and diaries to learn how many women directly referenced
Austen as a role model. This is notable in terms of gender studies as well
as the evolution of the novel, as students might look at the number of
women who wrote novels before and after Austen, including the number
of women who appear to have influenced Austen herself. Was there a
particular female writing style that would have required women to be
influenced more by other female writers? In terms of biographical study,
was there a particular class of women who wrote, or a particular class that
read and was influenced by Austen?
Jewsbury seems determined to defend Austen’s reputation (inasmuch
as such a defense was even necessary) by remarking that Austen did not
seek fame through writing, a practice that would most certainly have been
deemed improper for a woman of the time. Jewsbury would be surprised
and perhaps dismayed to hear twentieth- and twenty-first-century
28 Jane Austen
readers calling Austen a feminist with particular agendas embedded

in her writing. Jewsbury emphasizes the morals she finds inherent to
Austen’s novels, again a quality popularly expected or required more of
women’s writing than of men’s. These opinions give rise to a fascinating
opportunity for comparisons and contrasts between centuries. Students
might look into early reception of Austen’s works and ask themselves
if people then were much more inclined to take Austen at face value,
characterizing her as a harmless woman writer who never neglected other
womanly duties. Then students can look at recent readings of Austen and
ask themselves whether readers and scholars today, who label Austen a
feminist and find new meaning and commentary in her novels, are seeing
only what they want to see—what modern readers and critics require of
novelists considered worth studying. Was Austen a feminist, or do we call
her so today because we cannot bear the idea that she might have been
content with the life she led, and the unbalanced and unequal gender
roles that characterized the times in which she lived?
QQQ
In the slight sketches which will from time to time occupy a page of the
Athenaeum, we shall alternate between the dead and the living, the past time
and the present, and thus tincture criticism with biography. Would that the
interesting and gifted woman whose name is prefixed to this paper, could
be numbered among the living! Would that, instead of closing her works
with the saddened feeling, that the source whence so much pure amusement
emanated is sealed for ever, we could glance over the list of books “nearly
ready for publication,” and find another announced by the same author. Miss
Austen, however, has been dead fourteen years; and from what has been laid
before the public of a biographical nature, (slight as that is,) there seldom
appears to have been a more beautiful accordance between an author’s life and
writings; in fact, in the life and education of Miss Austen, may be discerned
many of the causes of the excellencies that mark her works. Her father was
a clergyman, a scholar, a man of fine general taste, and for forty years he
resided on his living, (Steventon, in Hants,) conscientiously discharging its
ministerial duties in his own person. Miss Austen was thus placed from
infancy under two influences, calculated to mature female intellect in the
happiest manner—rural life, and domestic intercourse at once polished,
intellectual, and affectionate. The four years prior to his death were spent
at Bath; and after that event, she resided with her mother and sister in the
pleasant village of Shawton [sic], Hants; from thence she sent her novels into
the world, and there, in May 1817, she died, after a slow insidious decline of
General 29
many months. She was only forty-two when this event occurred, and though
some of her works had been the gradual composition of her previous life, she
was upwards of thirty before the first (“Sense and Sensibility”) was published.
For those who may doubt the possibility of engrafting literary habits on those
peculiarly set apart for the female sex, and for those who may doubt how
far literary reputation is attainable, without a greater sacrifice to notoriety
than they may deem compatible with female happiness and delicacy, it is
pleasant to have so triumphant a reference as Miss Austen. Being dead,
she may be quoted without impropriety. Placed by Providence in easy and
elegant circumstances—endowed preeminently with good sense, and a
placid unobtrusive temperament, she passed unscathed through the ordeal
of authorship, and, in addition to exciting enthusiastic affection in immediate
friends, received the general good-will of all who knew her. This alone is a
high tribute to the benevolence of her temper, and the polish of her manners
in daily life; for in print, her peculiar forte is delineating folly, selfishness, and
absurdity—especially in her own sex. In society, she had too much wit to lay
herself open to the charge of being too witty; and discriminated too well to
attract notice to her discrimination. She was, we suspect, like one of her own
heroines, “incurably gentle,” and acted on the principle of another, that “if a
woman have the misfortune of knowing anything, she should conceal it as
well as she can.”26 Besides this, whilst literature was a delightful occupation, it
was not a profession to Miss Austen; she was not irrational enough to despise
reputation and profit when they sought her, but she became an authoress
entirely from taste and inclination;27 and in her judgment made her severely
critical because she published her works, her unambitious temper was amply
satisfied with the attention bestowed upon them by the public.
Unlike that of many writers, Miss Austen’s fame has grown fastest since
she died; there was no éclat about her first, or second, or third appearance; the
public took time to make up its mind; and she, not having staked her hopes
of happiness on success or failure, and not being obliged by circumstances
to stake something more tangible on these results, could afford to wait for
the decision of her claims. Those claims have long been established beyond
a question; but the merit of first recognizing them, belongs less to reviewers
than to general readers.
The able article in the Quarterly Review for 1821, was founded on a
posthumous work, when the praise or blame of ten thousand critics were
equally unimportant to the author. So retired, so unmarked by literary
notoriety, was the life Miss Austen led, that if any likeness was ever taken
of her, (and the contrary supposition would seem strange,) none has ever
30 Jane Austen
been engraved; and of no woman, whose writings are as numerous and

distinguished, is there perhaps so little public beyond the circle of those who
knew her when alive—
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye.28
With regard to her genius, we must adventure a few remarks. She herself
compares her productions to a little bit of ivory two inches wide,29 worked
upon with a brush so fine that little effect is produced after much labour. It
is so; her portraits are perfect likenesses, admirably finished, many of there
gems, but it is all miniature-painting; and, satisfied with being inimitable
in one line, she never essayed canvas and oils—never tried her hand at a
majestic daub. Her “two inches of ivory” just describes her preparations for
a tale of three volumes. A village—two families connected together—three
or four interlopers, out of whom are to spring a little tracasserie30—a village
or a country town, and by means of village and country town visiting and
gossiping, a real plot shall thicken, and its “rear of darkness” never be
scattered till six pages off Finis. The plots are simple in construction, and yet
intricate in development; the main characters, those that the reader feels sure
are to love, marry, and make mischief, are introduced in the first or second
chapter; the work is all done by half a dozen people; no person, scene, or
sentence, is ever introduced needless to the matter in hand—no catastrophes,
or discoveries, or surprises of a grand nature are allowed—neither children
nor fortunes are lost or found by accident—the mind is never taken off the
level surface of life—the reader breakfasts, dines, walks, and gossips, with the
various worthies, till a process of transmutation takes place in him, and he
absolutely fancies himself one of the company. Yet the winding up of the plot
involves a surprise; a few incidents are entangled at the beginning in the most
simple and natural manner, and till the close one never feels quite sure how
they are to be disentangled. Disentangled, however, they are, and that in a
most satisfactory manner. The secret is, Miss Austen was a thorough mistress
in the knowledge of human character; how it is acted upon by education
and circumstance; and how, when once formed, it shows itself through every
hour of every day, and in every speech to every person. Her conversations
would be tiresome but for this; and her personages, the fellows to whom may
be met in the streets or drank tea with at half an hour’s notice, would excite
no interest. But in Miss Austen’s hands we see into their hearts and hopes,
their motives, their struggles within themselves; and a sympathy is induced,
which, if extended to daily life and the world at large, would make the reader
General 31
a more amiable person. We think some of Miss Austen’s works deficient in

delineations of a high cast of character, in an exalted tone of thought and
feeling, a religions bias that can he seen as well as understood; Miss Austen
seemed afraid of imparting imagination to her favourites, and conceived
good sense the ultima Thule of moral possessions.31 . . .
Characters of another grade, those very troublesome persons to draw,
heroes and heroines, have in Miss Austen’s pages spirit and reality. The hero is
not a suit of fashionable clothes, and a set of fashionable phrases; the heroine
is not a ball-dress, a fainting fit, and a volume of poetry; they too are taken
from life, and are distinguished one from another. . . .
We sometimes feel that Miss Austen’s works deal rather too largely with
the commonplace, petty, and disagreeable side of human nature—that we
should enjoy more frequent sketches of the wise and high-hearted—that
some of the books are too completely pages out of the world. . . .
Miss Austen was sparing in her introduction of nobler characters, for
they are scattered sparingly in life, but the books in which she describes
them most we like most; they may not amuse so much at the moment, but
they interest more deeply and more happily. . . . Her death has made a chasm
in our light literature, the domestic novel with its home-born incidents, its
“familiar matter of today,”32 its slight array of names and great cognizance
of people and things, its confinement to country life, and total oblivion of
costume, manners, the great world, and “the mirror of fashion.”33 Every
species of composition, is, when good, to be admired in its way; but the
revival of the domestic novel would make a pleasant interlude to the showy,
sketchy, novels of high life.
Notes
26. In Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine Catherine Morland feels “heartily
ashamed of her ignorance” about a particular topic of discussion. Austen’s
narrator intervenes: “A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach,
they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is
to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which
a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she
have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she
can” (chapter XIV).
27. A direct quotation from Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author,”
in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (London: John Murray, 1818).
28. Wordsworth, “Song” (She dwelt among th’untrodden ways), first published
in Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
32 Jane Austen
29. See her letter to her nephew, J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816,
p. 343. This was quoted by Henry Austen in a “Postscript” to his
“Biographical Notice.”
30. French: turmoil, bother, fuss.
31. The ancient Greek and Latin name for the most northerly lauds (above
Britain), hence, the highest degree attainable.
32. Quoting the poet’s conjecture about the Erse song he hears, in Wordsworth’s
poem, The Solitary Reaper (1807).
33. The subtitle of such publications for ladies, read by Austen and others, as
La Belle Assemblée and Ladies Monthly Museum, and mentioned in novels
of Scott and Edgeworth.
—Maria Jane Jewsbury, “Literary Women, no. II: Jane Austen,”
The Athenaeum 200 (August 27, 1831), pp. 553–54
Sara Coleridge
“Letter to Emily Trevenen” (1834)
Sara Coleridge was a poet and the daughter of one of the famous Lake Poets,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This excerpt provides insight into what three of the
best-known Romantic poets (Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge) thought of Austen. Students may want to compare
Austen with these Romantics in terms of writing style and content.
QQQ
. . . the delicate mirth, the gently-hinted satire, the feminine decorous humour
of Jane Austen, who, if not the greatest, is surely the most faultless of female
novelists. My Uncle Southey and my father had an equally high opinion of
her merits, but Mr. Wordsworth used to say that though he admitted that
her novels were an admirable copy of life, he could not be interested in
productions of that kind; unless the truth of nature were presented to him
clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination, it had scarce any
attractions in his eyes.
—Sara Coleridge, Letter to Emily Trevenen (August 1834), Memoirs
and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. Edith Coleridge, 1874, Vol. 1, p. 75
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1839)

I am amusing myself with Miss Austen’s novels. She has great power and
discrimination in delineating common-place people; and her writings are a
General 33
capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare
like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much. Those who have
not power to fill up gaps and bridge over chasms as they read, must therefore
take particular delight in such minuteness of detail. It is a kind of Bowditch’s
Laplace in the romantic astronomy. But readers of lively imagination naturally
prefer the original with its unexplained steps, which they so readily supply.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Journal, May 23, 1839
George Henry Lewes “Recent Novels:

French and English” (1847)
What we most heartily enjoy and applaud, is truth in the delineation of life
and character: incidents however wonderful, adventures however perilous,
are almost as naught when compared with the deep and lasting interest
excited by any thing like a correct representation of life. That, indeed, seems
to us to be Art, and the only Art we care to applaud. To make our meaning
precise, we should say that Fielding and Miss Austen are the greatest novelists
in our language. . . . Now Miss Austen has been called a prose Shakspeare;
and, among others, by Macaulay. In spite of the sense of incongruity which
besets us in the words prose Shakspeare, we confess the greatness of Miss
Austen, her marvellous dramatic power, seems more than any thing in Scott
akin to the greatest quality in Shakspeare.
—George Henry Lewes, “Recent Novels: French and
English,” Fraser’s Magazine, December 1847, p. 687
Charlotte Brontë (1848)

You say I must familiarise my mind with the fact that ‘Miss Austen is not a
poetess, has no “sentiment” ’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted
commas), ‘no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’; and
then you add, I must ‘learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of
the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest
sense of means to an end that ever lived.’
The last point only will I ever acknowledge.
Can there be a great artist without poetry?
—Charlotte Brontë, Letter to George Henry Lewes

(January 18, 1848)
34 Jane Austen
George Eliot “The Progress of Fiction

As an Art” (1853)
George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), a novelist
who, at the time this review was written, was the assistant editor of the
Westminster Review. Eliot, who assumed the male pseudonym in the hope
that her work would be taken seriously, is known as a novelist who was
unafraid to take on controversial issues of her time. Her novels, of which
Middlemarch is perhaps the best known, are sweeping in scope and
crowded with fully delineated characters from various social classes. It is
not unusual to find Austen and Eliot discussed together, exemplified here
in the pieces by Andrew Lang and George Barnett Smith. Eliot’s novels are
often favorably compared to Austen’s in terms of both women’s sense of
social consciousness.
Students interested in gender or comparative studies might also note
that many works about Austen discuss her style and content as inherently
female, while Eliot’s is often regarded as masculine, making the two writers
a fascinating study in comparisons and contrasts. Finally, in the 42-year
gap between Austen’s last novel and Eliot’s first, England had moved from
the Romantic age to the Victorian, and the Industrial Revolution was well
under way. Queen Victoria’s empire was expanding, making it much more
possible for writers, male and female, to move and look outside England for
inspiration and exposure. Students interested in historical or biographical
studies may note that historical context is a crucial part of understanding
not only a writer’s work, but a writer’s evaluation of other works as well.
QQQ
Without brilliancy of any kind—without imagination, depth of thought,
or wide experience, Miss Austin, by simply describing what she knew and
had seen, and making accurate portraits of very tiresome and uninteresting
people, is recognised as a true artist, and will continue to be admired,
when many authors more ambitious, and believing themselves filled with
a much higher inspiration, will be neglected and forgotten. There is an
instinct in every unwarped mind which prefers truth to extravagance, and a
photographic picture, if it be only of a kitten or a hay-stack, is a pleasanter
subject in the eyes of most persons (were they brave enough to admit it), than
many a glaring piece of mythology, which those who profess to worship High
Art find themselves called upon to pronounce divine. People will persist in
admiring what they can appreciate and understand, and Wilkie will keep his
place among national favourites when poor Haydon’s Dentatus is turned to
General 35
the wall. But Miss Austin’s accurate scenes from dull life, and Miss Burney’s
long histories of amiable and persecuted heroines, though belonging to the
modern and reformed school of novels, must still be classed in the lower
division. As pictures of manners, they are interesting and amusing, but they
want the broader foundation, the firm granite substratum, which the great
masters who have followed them have taught us to expect. They show us
too much of the littlenesses and trivialities of life, and limit themselves so
scrupulously to the sayings and doings of dull, ignorant, and disagreeable
people, that their very truthfulness makes us yawn.
—George Eliot, “The Progress of Fiction As an Art,”
Westminster Review, October 1853, p. 358
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1855)

Students of the political elements that inform literature may want to com-
pare Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s political poetry with Austen’s novels that
“don’t go far” in that arena. Barrett Browning was outspoken about events
in England and Italy, her home after she married. Several scholars claim to
have found political statements in Austen’s novels as well.
QQQ
She (Mary Russell Mitford) never taught me anything but a very limited
admiration of Miss Austen, whose people struck me as wanting souls, even
more than is necessary for men and women of the world. The novels are
perfect as far as they go—that’s certain. Only they don’t go far, I think. It may
be my fault.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Letter to John Ruskin (November 5, 1855)
George Henry Lewes

“The Novels of Jane Austen” (1859)
George Henry Lewes was a philosopher and literary critic who dabbled in
writing novels but eventually focused on studying science and reviewing
the work of others. He is perhaps best known for his 24-year affair with
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), for whom he left his wife and with whom
he lived until his death in 1878.
Lewes mentions several other Austen reviewers in this piece: Sir Walter
Scott, Currer Bell (the pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë), and Thomas
36 Jane Austen
Babington Macaulay. Students will find it valuable to read each of these

cited reviewer’s thoughts on Austen and compare them, perhaps noting
how Lewes interprets each writer’s review of Austen and considering
whether he treats them fairly. Students of comparative literature might
also note that several Austen reviewers recommend a particular work
of hers and will want to read these Austen works and determine why a
particular reviewer likes one work better than another.
Acknowledging that Austen is a low-ranking member of the group of
great artists, Lewes states that her works have little or no mass appeal. In
the paragraph beginning, “We are touching here on one of her defects,”
Lewes demonstrates his disregard for popular writing because it is often
well received only by a non-discriminating readership: “Emotion is in its
nature sympathetic and uncritical: a spark will ignite it.” Many readers
look for the extreme passion and picturesque elements and miss the
genius of Austen’s detail and dramatic presentation. This is a point of view
that generally holds true today; if a writer is widely popular, he or she is
not considered sufficiently literary. Stephen King and Jennifer Crusie are
two twenty-first-century authors who are particularly outspoken about
the literary community’s unwillingness to embrace their work, due in
large part, they claim, to their mass popularity. Students of comparative
literature and literary theory might study not only the definition of
popularity but the effects that it can have on an author’s chances of
entering the literary canon.
On a related topic, readers might look at how “art” is and can be
defined and how and why such definitions change over time. Students
of popular culture could investigate writers who do not appear to be
attempting to produce “art,” and how their works are at times disdained
by literary communities. Students might also look at which works
sustain popularity over time, which are made into popular films (as
opposed to “art” films), and which are most often taught in schools and
universities.
QQQ
But the real secret of Miss Austen’s success lies in her having the exquisite and
rare gift of dramatic creation of character. Scott says of her, “She had a talent
for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary
life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow
strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which
renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the
truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied me. What a pity such
General 37
a gifted creature died so early!”1 Generously said; but high as the praise is,
it is as much below the real excellence of Miss Austen, as the “big bow-wow
strain” is below the incomparable power of the Waverley Novels. Scott felt,
but did not define, the excellence of Miss Austen. The very word “describing”
is altogether misplaced and misleading. She seldom describes anything, and
is not felicitous when she attempts it. But instead of description, the common
and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic
presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel,
she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never
perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself. If ever living beings
can be said to have moved across the page of fiction, as they lived, speaking
as they spoke, and feeling as they felt, they do so in Pride and Prejudice,
Emma, and Mansfield Park. What incomparable noodles she exhibits for our
astonishment and laughter! What silly, good-natured women! What softly-
selfish men! What lively, amiable, honest men and women, whom one would
rejoice to have known!
But all her power is dramatic power; she loses her hold on us directly she
ceases to speak through the personal; she is then like a great actor off the stage.
When she is making men and women her mouthpieces, she is exquisitely and
inexhaustibly humorous; but when she speaks in her own person, she is apt
to be commonplace, and even prosing. Her dramatic ventriloquism is such
that, amid our tears of laughter and sympathetic exasperation at folly, we feel
it almost impossible that she did not hear those very people utter those very
words. In many cases this was doubtless the fact. The best invention does
not consist in finding new language for characters, but in finding the true
language for them. It is easy to invent a language never spoken by any one
out of books; but it is so far from easy to invent—that is, to find out—the
language which certain characters would speak and did speak, that in all the
thousands of volumes written since Richardson and Fielding, every difficulty
is more frequently overcome than that. If the reader fails to perceive the
extraordinary merit of Miss Austen’s representation of character, let him try
himself to paint a portrait which shall be at once many-sided and interesting,
without employing any but the commonest colours, without calling in the aid
of eccentricity, exaggeration, or literary “effects;” or let him carefully compare
the writings of Miss Austen with those of any other novelist, from Fielding
to Thackeray.
It is probably this same dramatic instinct which makes the construction
of her stories so admirable. And by construction, we mean the art which,
selecting what is useful and rejecting what is superfluous, renders our
38 Jane Austen
interest unflagging, because one chapter evolves the next, one character is
necessary to the elucidation of another. In what is commonly called “plot”
she does not excel. Her invention is wholly in character and motive, not
in situation. Her materials are of the commonest every-day occurrence.
Neither the emotions of tragedy, nor the exaggerations of farce, seem to
have the slightest attraction for her. The reader’s pulse never throbs, his
curiosity is never intense; but his interest never wanes for a moment. The
action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt,
or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot;
and we are almost made actors as well as spectators of the little drama. One
of the most difficult things in dramatic writing is so to construct the story
that every scene shall advance the denouement by easy evolution, yet at the
same time give scope to the full exhibition of the characters. In dramas,
as in novels, we almost always see that the action stands still while the
characters are being exhibited, and the characters are in abeyance while the
action is being unfolded. For perfect specimens of this higher construction
demanded by art, we would refer to the jealousy-scenes of Othello, and
the great scene between Celimene and Arsinoe in The Misanthrope; there
is not in these two marvels of art a verse which does not exhibit some
nuance of character, and thereby, at the same time, tends towards the full
development of the action.
So entirely dramatic, and so little descriptive, is the genius of Miss Austen,
that she seems to rely upon what her people say and do for the whole effect
they are to produce on our imaginations. She no more thinks of describing
the physical appearance of her people than the dramatist does who knows
that his persons are to be represented by living actors. This is a defect and
a mistake in art: a defect, because, although every reader must necessarily
conjure up to himself a vivid image of people whose characters are so vividly
presented; yet each reader has to do this for himself without aid from the
author, thereby missing many of the subtle connections between physical and
mental organisation. It is not enough to be told that a young gentleman had
a fine countenance and an air of fashion; or that a young gentlewoman was
handsome and elegant. As far as any direct information can be derived from
the authoress, we might imagine that this was a purblind world, wherein
nobody ever saw anybody, except in a dim vagueness which obscured all
peculiarities. It is impossible that Mr Collins should not have been endowed
by nature with an appearance in some way heralding the delicious folly of the
inward man. Yet all we hear of this fatuous curate is, that “he was a tall heavy-
looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his
General 39
manners were very formal.” Balzac or Dickens would not have been content
without making the reader see this Mr Collins. Miss Austen is content to
make us know him, even to the very intricacies of his inward man. It is
not stated whether she was shortsighted, but the absence of all sense of the
outward world—either scenery or personal appearance—is more remarkable
in her than in any writer we remember.
We are touching here on one of her defects which help to an explanation
of her limited popularity, especially when coupled with her deficiencies in
poetry and passion. She has little or no sympathy with what is picturesque
and passionate. This prevents her from painting what the popular eye can see,
and the popular heart can feel. The struggles, the ambitions, the errors, and
the sins of energetic life are left untouched by her; and these form the subjects
most stirring to the general sympathy. Other writers have wanted this
element of popularity, but they have compensated for it by a keen sympathy
with, and power of representing, the adventurous, the romantic, and the
picturesque. Passion and adventure are the sources of certain success with
the mass of mankind. The passion may be coarsely felt, the romance may be
ridiculous, but there will always be found a large majority whose sympathies
will be awakened by even the coarsest daubs. Emotion is in its nature
sympathetic and uncritical: a spark will ignite it. Types of villany never seen
or heard of out of books, or off the stage, types of heroism and virtue not less
hyperbolical, are eagerly welcomed and believed in by a public which would
pass over without notice the subtlest creations of genius, and which would
even resent the more truthful painting as disturbing its emotional enjoyment
of hating the bad, and loving the good. The nicer art which mingles goodness
with villany, and weakness with virtue, as in life they are always mingled,
causes positive distress to young and uncultivated minds. The mass of men
never ask whether a character is true, or the events probable; it is enough for
them that they are moved; and to move them strongly, black must be very
black, and white without a shade. Hence it is that caricature and exaggeration
of all kinds—inflated diction and daubing delineation—are, and always will
be, popular: a certain breadth and massiveness of effect being necessary to
produce a strong impression on all but a refined audience. In the works of
the highest genius we sometimes find a breadth and massiveness of effect
which make even these works popular, although the qualities most highly
prized by the cultivated reader are little appreciated by the public. The Iliad,
Shakespeare and Moliere, Don Quixote and Faust, affect the mass powerfully;
but how many admirers of Homer would prefer the naivete of the original to
the epigrammatic splendour of Pope?
40 Jane Austen
The novelist who has no power of broad and massive effect can never
expect to be successful with the great public. He may gain the suffrages of the
highest minds, and in course of time become a classic; but we all know what
the popularity of a classic means. Miss Austen is such a novelist. Her subjects
have little intrinsic interest; it is only in their treatment that they become
attractive; but treatment and art are not likely to captivate any except critical
and refined tastes. Every reader will be amused by her pictures, because their
very truth carries them home to ordinary experience and sympathy; but this
amusement is of a tepid nature, and the effect is quickly forgotten. Partridge
expressed the general sentiment of the public when he spoke slightingly of
Garrick’s “Hamlet,” because Garrick did just what he, Partridge, would have
done in presence of a ghost; whereas the actor who performed the king
powerfully impressed him by sonorous elocution and emphatic gesticulation:
that was acting, and required art; the other was natural, and not worth
alluding to.
The absence of breadth, picturesqueness, and passion, will also limit the
appreciating audience of Miss Austen to the small circle of cultivated minds;
and even these minds are not always capable of greatly relishing her works.
We have known very remarkable people who cared little for her pictures of
every-day life; and indeed it may be anticipated that those who have little
sense of humour, or whose passionate and insurgent activities demand in art
a reflection of their own emotions and struggles, will find little pleasure in
such homely comedies. Currer Bell may be taken as a type of these. She was
utterly without a sense of humour, and was by nature fervid and impetuous.
In a letter published in her memoirs she writes,—“Why do you like Miss
Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. . . . I had not read Pride
and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And
what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face;
a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate
flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no
fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her
elegant ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”2 The
critical reader will not fail to remark the almost contemptuous indifference
to the art of truthful portrait-painting which this passage indicates; and
he will understand, perhaps, how the writer of such a passage was herself
incapable of drawing more than characteristics, even in her most successful
efforts. Jane Eyre, Rochester, and Paul Emmanuel, are very vigorous sketches,
but the reader observes them from the outside, he does not penetrate their
souls, he does not know them. What is said respecting the want of open
General 41
country, blue hill, and bonny beck, is perfectly true; but the same point has
been more felicitously touched by Scott, in his review of Emma: “Upon the
whole,” he says, “the turn of this author’s novels bears the same relation to
that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and
meadows bear to the highly-adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the
rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. It is neither so captivating as
the one, nor so grand as the other; but it affords those who frequent it a
pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social habits.” Scott
would also have loudly repudiated the notion of Miss Austen’s characters
being “mere daguerreotypes.” Having himself drawn both ideal and real
characters, he knew the difficulties of both; and he well says, “He who paints
from le beau ideal, if his scenes and sentiments are striking and interesting,
is in a great measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling them
with the ordinary probabilities of life; but he who paints a scene of common
occurrence, places his composition within that extensive range of criticism
which general experience offers to every reader. . . . Something more than a
mere sign-post likeness is also demanded. The portrait must have spirit and
character as well as resemblance; and being deprived of all that, according to
Bayes, goes to ‘elevate and surprise,’ it must make amends by displaying depth
of knowledge and dexterity of execution.”
While defending our favourite, and giving critical reasons for our liking,
we are far from wishing to impose that preference on others. If any one
frankly says, “I do not care about these pictures of ordinary life: I want
something poetical or romantic, something to stimulate my imagination,
and to carry me beyond the circle of my daily thoughts,”—there is nothing
to be answered. Many persons do not admire Wordsworth, and cannot feel
their poetical sympathies aroused by waggoners and potters. There are many
who find no enjoyment in the Flemish pictures, but are rapturous over the
frescoes at Munich and Berlin. Individual tastes do not admit of dispute.
The imagination is an imperious faculty, and demands gratification; and if a
man be content to have this faculty stimulated, to the exclusion of all other
faculties, or if only peculiar works are capable of stimulating it, we have
no right to object. Only when a question of Art comes to be discussed, it
must not be confounded with a matter of individual feeling; and it requires
a distinct reference to absolute standards. The art of novel-writing, like the
art of painting, is founded on general principles, which, because they have
their psychological justification, because they are derived from tendencies
of the human mind, and not, as absurdly supposed, derived from “models
of composition,” are of universal application. The law of colour, for
42 Jane Austen
instance, is derived from the observed relation between certain colours and
the sensitive retina. The laws of construction, likewise, are derived from
the invariable relation between a certain order and succession of events,
and the amount of interest excited by that order. In novel-writing, as in
mechanics, every obstruction is a loss of power; every superfluous page
diminishes the artistic pleasure of the whole. Individual tastes will always
differ; but the laws of the human mind are universal. One man will prefer
the humorous, another the pathetic; one will delight in the adventurous,
another in the simple and homely; but the principles of Art remain the
same for each. To tell a story well, is quite another thing from having a
good story to tell. The construction of a good drama is the same in principle
whether the subject be Antigone, the Misanthrope, or Othello; and the
real critic detects this principle at work under these various forms. It is the
same with the delineation of character: however various the types, whether
a Jonathan Oldbuck, a Dr Primrose, a Blifil, or a Falstaff—ideal, or real, the
principles of composition are the same.
Miss Austen has generally but an indifferent story to tell, but her art of
telling it is incomparable. Her characters, never ideal, are not of an eminently
attractive order; but her dramatic ventriloquism and power of presentation is
little less than marvellous. Macaulay declares his opinion that in this respect
she is second only to Shakespeare. “Among the writers,” he says, “who, in
the point we have noticed, have approached nearest the manner of the great
master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom
England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a
certain sense, commonplace—all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all
as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric
of human beings . . . And all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude
analysis, that they defy powers of description, and that we only know them to
exist by the general effect to which they have contributed.”3
The art of the novelist consists in telling the story and representing the
characters; but besides these, there are other powerful though extraneous
sources of attraction often possessed by novels, which are due to the
literary talent and culture of the writer. There is, for example, the power of
description, both of scenery and of character. Many novels depend almost
entirely on this for their effect. It is a lower kind of power, and consequently
much more frequent than what we have styled the art of the novelist; yet it
may be very puissant in the hands of a fine writer, gifted with a real sense of
the picturesque. Being very easy, it has of late become the resource of weak
writers; and the prominent position it has usurped has tended in two ways
General 43
to produce weariness—first, by encouraging incompetent writers to do what

is easily done; and, secondly, by seducing writers from the higher and better
method of dramatic exposition.
Another source of attraction is the general vigour of mind exhibited by the
author, in his comments on the incidents and characters of his story: these
comments, when proceeding from a fine insight or a large experience, give
additional charm to the story, and make the delightful novel a delightful book.
It is almost superfluous to add, that this also has its obverse: the comments
too often painfully exhibit a general weakness of mind. Dr Johnson refused to
take tea with some one because, as he said, “Sir, there is no vigour in his talk.”
This is the complaint which must be urged against the majority of novelists:
they put too much water in their ink. And even when the talk is good, we
must remember that it is, after all, only one of the side-dishes of the feast. All
the literary and philosophic culture which an author can bring to bear upon
his work will tend to give that work a higher value, but it will not really make
it a better novel. To suppose that culture can replace invention, or literature
do instead of character, is as erroneous as to suppose that archaeological
learning and scenical splendour can raise poor acting to the level of fine
acting. Yet this is the common mistake of literary men. They are apt to
believe that mere writing will weigh in the scale against artistic presentation;
that comment will do duty for dramatic revelation; that analysing motives
with philosophic skill will answer all the purpose of creation. But whoever
looks closely into this matter will see that literature—that is, the writing of
thinking and accomplished men—is excessively cheap, compared with the
smallest amount of invention or creation; and it is cheap because more easy
of production, and less potent in effect. This is apparently by no means the
opinion of some recent critics, who evidently consider their own writing of
more merit than humour and invention, and who are annoyed at the notion
of “mere serialists,” without “solid acquirements,” being regarded all over
Europe as our most distinguished authors. Yet it may be suggested that
writing such as that of the critics in question can be purchased in abundance,
whereas humour and invention are among the rarest of products. If it is a
painful reflection that genius should be esteemed more highly than solid
acquirements, it should be remembered that learning is only the diffused
form of what was once invention. “Solid acquirement” is the genius of wits,
which has become the wisdom of reviewers.
Be this as it may, we acknowledge the great attractions which a novel may
receive from the general vigour and culture of the author; and acknowledge
that such attractions form but a very small element in Miss Austen’s success.
44 Jane Austen
Her pages have no sudden illuminations. There are neither epigrams nor
aphorisms, neither subtle analyses nor eloquent descriptions. She is without
grace or felicity of expression; she has neither fervid nor philosophic
comment. Her charm lies solely in the art of representing life and character,
and that is exquisite.
We have thus endeavoured to characterise, in general terms, the qualities
which her works display. It is less easy to speak with sufficient distinctness of
the particular works, since, unless our readers have these vividly present to
memory (in which case our remarks would be superfluous), we cannot hope
to be perfectly intelligible; no adequate idea of them can be given by a review
of one, because the “specimen brick” which the noodle in Hierocles thought
sufficient, and which really does suffice in the case of many a modern novel,
would prove no specimen at all. Her characters are so gradually unfolded,
their individuality reveals itself so naturally and easily in the course of what
they say and do, that we learn to know them as if we had lived with them, but
cannot by any single speech or act make them known to others. . . .
The reader who has yet to make acquaintance with these novels is
advised to begin with Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park; and if these
do not captivate him, he may fairly leave the others unread. In Pride and
Prejudice there is the best story, and the greatest variety of character: the
whole Bennet family is inimitable: Mr Bennet, caustic, quietly, indolently
selfish, but honourable, and in some respects amiable; his wife, the perfect
type of a gossiping, weak-headed, fussy mother; Jane a sweet creature;
Elizabeth a sprightly and fascinating flesh-and-blood heroine; Lydia a pretty,
but vain and giddy girl; and Mary, plain and pedantic, studying “thorough
bass and human nature.” Then there is Mr Collins, and Sir William Lucas,
and the proud foolish old lady Catherine de Bough, and Darcy, Bingley,
and Wickham, all admirable. From the first chapter to the last there is a
succession of scenes of high comedy, and the interest is unflagging. Mansfield
Park is also singularly fascinating, though the heroine is less of a favourite
with us than Miss Austen’s heroines usually are; but aunt Norris and Lady
Bertram are perfect; and the scenes at Portsmouth, when Fanny Price visits
her home after some years’ residence at the Park, are wonderfully truthful
and vivid. The private theatricals, too, are very amusing; and the day spent
at the Rushworths’ is a masterpiece of art. If the reader has really tasted the
flavour of these works, he will need no other recommendation to read and
re-read the others. Even Persuasion, which we cannot help regarding as the
weakest, contains exquisite touches, and some characters no one else could
have surpassed.
General 45
We have endeavoured to express the delight which Miss Austen’s works

have always given us, and to explain the sources of her success by indicating
the qualities which make her a model worthy of the study of all who desire
to understand the art of the novelist. But we have also indicated what seem
to be the limitations of her genius, and to explain why it is that this genius,
moving only amid the quiet scenes of every-day life, with no power over the
more stormy and energetic activities which find vent even in every-day life,
can never give her a high rank among great artists. Her place is among great
artists, but it is not high among them. She sits in the House of Peers, but it
is as a simple Baron. The delight derived from her pictures arises from our
sympathy with ordinary characters, our relish of humour, and our intellectual
pleasure in art for art’s sake. But when it is admitted that she never stirs the
deeper emotions, that she never fills the soul with a noble aspiration, or
brightens it with a fine idea, but, at the utmost, only teaches us charity for
the ordinary failings of ordinary people, and sympathy with their goodness,
we have admitted an objection which lowers her claims to rank among the
great benefactors of the race; and this sufficiently explains why, with all her
excellence, her name has not become a household word. Her fame, we think,
must endure. Such art as hers can never grow old, never be superseded. But,
after all, miniatures are not frescoes, and her works are miniatures. Her place
is among the Immortals; but the pedestal is erected in a quiet niche of the
great temple.
Notes
1. Lockhart, Life of Scott, viii. 292. Compare also vol. x. p. 143.
2. Life of Charlotte Bronte, ii. 54.
3. Art. on “Madame D’Arblay,” Edin. Rev., vol. lxxvii. p. 561.
—George Henry Lewes, “The Novels of Jane Austen,”
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1859, pp. 104–13
David Masson (1859)

Masson’s characterization of Austen as thoroughly feminine is common,
and begs the question: Is there any difference between “masculine” and
“feminine” writing? Students examining gender, feminist, or psychological
issues might investigate such divisions and strict categorizations. Masson
claims to know men “in ecstasies” with Austen’s books, while women com-
plain that Austen reveals “too many of their secrets.”
QQQ
46 Jane Austen
Among these lady-novelists, Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen were,

undoubtedly, the first in talent. So far as they remind us of previous novelists
of the other sex, it is most, as might be expected, of Richardson; but, while
resembling him in minuteness of observation, in good sense, and in clear
moral aim, they present many differences. All in all, as far as my information
goes, the best judges unanimously prefer Miss Austen to any of her
contemporaries of the same order. They reckon her Sense and Sensibility, her
Pride and Prejudice, her Mansfield Park and her Emma (which novels were
published in her life-time), and also her Northanger Abbey and her Persuasion
(which were published posthumously) as not only better than anything else
of the kind written in her day, but also among the most perfect and charming
fictions in the language. I have known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies
with them; and the only objection I have heard of as brought against them by
ladies is, that they reveal too many of their secrets.
—David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles,
1859, pp. 188–89
Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Madame D’Arblay” (1860)
Thomas Babington Macaulay was a historian, poet, and politician. He was
one of the first to argue for copyright laws protecting authors, and read-
ers will note the number of times that this review of Austen is quoted or
mentioned by other writers.
The significance of Macaulay’s comparison of Austen to Shakespeare
cannot be overemphasized, and students of literary history might choose
to research this connection further. Macaulay does not claim that Austen
purposefully imitates Shakespeare. Instead he simply notes a similarity in
the ways the two writers created their characters, stating that Austen has
“approached nearest to the manner of the great master.”
Students can compare Austen’s various clergymen to decide
whether Macaulay’s determination of Austen’s gift for nuance is
accurate. Students can do further study by comparing and contrasting
other similarly situated Austen characters: sisters, fathers, daughters, or
young single women.
Macaulay mentions characters from well-known European plays:
Harpagon and Jourdain from two seventeenth-century plays by Molière
and Joseph Surface and Sir Lucius O’Trigger from two eighteenth-century
plays by Richard Sheridan. This comparison offers an opportunity for
General 47
students exploring the history and evolution of literature to study

changes and similarities in writing over several centuries.
QQQ
It is the constant manner of Shakspeare to represent the human mind as
lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but
under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other.
Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this,
that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other
dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.
Shakspeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who,
in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner
of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of
whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all,
in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all
as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric
of human beings. There are, for instance, four clergymen, none of whom, we
should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward
Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all
specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally
educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They
are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use
the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope.
Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No
such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more
unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to
all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that
they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know
them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Madame D’Arblay” (1843),
Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays,
1860, Vol. 5, pp. 307–08
G.F. Chorley
“Miss Austen and Miss Mitford” (1870)
Chorley compares Austen only to other women writers (Radcliffe,
Burney, Smith, Bennet, and Opie), at a time when it was generally more
conventional to compare Austen to male writers and then claim that
48 Jane Austen
she fell short of their talent. Students might take this opportunity to ask
themselves if there is in fact a community of women writers that excludes
men, and vice versa. Should male and female writers be compared to one
another, or should male writers only be held to the standards of other male
writers, and female writers to females? This question has been debated
for centuries, and today is at the forefront of literary and gender studies
due to the proliferation of “chick lit,” which seems to inherently lay claim
to only the female domain. Some scholars would call Austen the “chick
lit” writer of her time, stating that there is something unquestionably
female about her style and content. Students may want to read Austen’s
works and a selection of other women’s writing from the time period to
determine whether this statement is defensible.
Chorley mentions one male writer, Horace Walpole, as he discusses
the prevalence of “supernatural fiction” in Austen’s time. Walpole and
Ann Radcliffe wrote in a genre termed gothic fiction, which Austen
pokes fun at in her novel Northanger Abbey. The real supernatural fiction
appeared in 1818, just after Austen’s death. Widely considered the first
science-fiction novel ever written, Frankenstein was published by a young
woman named Mary Shelley and stands in stark contrast to the “quiet,”
“real” novels of Austen. Students may want to look at Austen and Mary
Shelley together, as a study in comparisons and contrasts. Both were
young women writers, both concerned with women’s lives and issues,
and both exceedingly popular in their time and consistently afterward.
Students might ask themselves why Chorley uses terms such as
“courageous self-knowledge” and “boldness” to describe a woman who
wrote “quiet novels [that] have become classics.” Chorley seems astonished
that such a young woman could write so clearly about the world
immediately around her. He also seems to be assuming (by his use of the
phrase “self-knowledge”) that Austen was writing about herself. Students
could study the effects of a writer’s age on her style, content, and public
reception. (Keep in mind that what might be considered “old” in one time
period is not in another, so ground the comparisons in historical context.)
The “boldness” in Austen that Chorley refers to might also be rooted
in her statements about society, which he claims are “as clear as if she had
braved society.” Read Austen’s books and search for the ways in which
she upholds or condemns societal norms, behaviors, and attitudes.
One method would be to compare the heroines Elizabeth Bennet,
Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot to figure out what they have in
common. From this, one can safely assume that Austen respected these
characteristics and behaviors. Students might also use this opportunity
General 49
to examine conduct and etiquette books of Austen’s time to determine

what was considered generally acceptable and popular.
QQQ
Pride and Prejudice, the first of Miss Austen’s half-dozen novels, which will be
read so long as any one cares for English domestic fiction, was begun when
its writer was twenty-one years of age, in October, 1796,—and completed
in about ten months. Sense and Sensibility was commenced immediately
after the completion of Pride and Prejudice (1797), and Northanger Abbey
was composed in the following year (1798). The courageous self-knowledge
which could prompt and carry through such undertakings, under such
circumstances, is a noticeable fact. These stories were written in the time of
supernatural fiction, made popular by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and by the
writings of Anne Radcliffe—a time, it might have been predicated, when the
appeal of so delicate a voice and so delicate a touch as Miss Austen’s would
entirely fail of effect. But we are proud to believe, that, in England at least,
everything which is real makes a way, not to be closed up, but to be widened
as years go on, and as with them the powers of comparison are developed.
These quiet novels have become classics. So much can hardly be said of
many of the works by the other female novelists. By the side of Emma and
Persuasion, Evelina—ushered into fame by a patron no less authoritative
and powerful than Dr. Johnson—as a work of art, is coarse and farcical. The
Austen novels have outlasted the tales of Mrs. Bennet and Charlotte Smith,
and that kind-hearted, illicit Quakeress, Amelia Opie; though each of these as
it came was the delight of novel readers, and all appealed to emotions more
serious and to passions more high-flown than can be excited by the cares and
concernments of everyday people in country villages, passing lives sparingly
marked by sin or sorrow. . . .
By those who have studied character distinct from its outward
manifestations, as expressed in conformity to uses and customs, there will
be found in Miss Austen’s novels an expression of firm and original courage
as clear as if she had braved society, whether theoretically or practically. The
boldness which will vindicate for persons of mediocre intellect souls to be
saved and feelings to be tortured, and which by such vindication can interest
and compel a jaded, hurrying public, eager for changing excitements, to
pause and to listen—is surely no common quality; but it has within itself a
promise and an assurance of enduring reputation.
—G.F. Chorley, “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford,”
Quarterly Review, January 1870, pp. 200–03
50 Jane Austen
T.E. Kebbel “Jane Austen” (1870)

The believability of Austen’s characters is a recurring theme in many
reviews of her work, and T.E. Kebbel’s assessment proves to be no excep-
tion. He compares Austen to Samuel Richardson, whose popular novels
Pamela and Clarissa center on female characters, of which, according to
Kebbel, Richardson “was in total ignorance.” Austen, on the other hand,
writes of what she knows, and perhaps the fusion of her life and her work
is an advantage in making her characters that much more believable.
Students might investigate dialogue and style in Austen and Richardson
to determine, according to the norms and standards of the times in which
they wrote, which seems more natural.
Kebbel notes that readers of his time cannot fully relate to Austen’s
characters because she writes so exclusively of the time in which she
lived, the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. One could
argue that this is true of any sixty-year span, but it is particularly true of
nineteenth-century England. The first steam engine appeared in 1829,
Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837, and the Industrial Revolution and
imperialist expansion that ensued brought about significant and often
overwhelming changes. Students can study the historical contexts of
writers such as Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde to learn just
how impossible it may have been for each of these authors to write their
works at any other time or place.
According to Kebbel, “Miss Austen belongs essentially to the
eighteenth-century school of literature” because her work contains little or
no romance, by which he means the passion and emotion often aroused by
and related to nature. Austen is not regarded as a Romantic, even though
she wrote during the time now termed the Romantic age, which produced
writers such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Lord Byron. Austen
is also not included as an eighteenth-century (or Enlightenment) writer,
sometimes merely because most of her work was written in the early
nineteenth century. Austen cannot be wholly included in the Victorian
writing tradition, partly because she died before the advent of the
Industrial Revolution and the coronation of Victoria, and partly because her
work does not contain the grit and social consciousness that characterizes
much of the writing in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Students might
research works from all three time periods (the Enlightenment, Victorian,
and Romantic eras) and determine for themselves which, if any, of these
categories Austen most naturally fits into.
Kebbel alludes to sensation fiction, popular in the Victorian age,
when he writes of books that contain “a mystery, an explosion, and a
General 51
reconciliation.” The most popular sensation writers of the nineteenth

century were Wilkie Collins and M.E. Braddon. By contrast, Kebbel claims
that Austen’s marriage-centered plots and emphasis on characters rather
than action make her writing “the purest of treats.” Certainly there was far
less scandal in Austen’s work than in Collins’s or Braddon’s, but students
should feel free to question whether Kebbel’s assessment of Austen’s
work as having “no bad hearts” and no “crime, calamity, and anguish” is
altogether accurate.
QQQ
We have yet to mention two of Miss Austen’s most characteristic
excellencies—her dialogue and her style. In regard to the former we must of
course remember what a vast change in this respect has passed over society
since she wrote. For all that, the dialogues in Miss Austen’s novels strike us as
much more natural than the dialogues in Richardson’s, upon whom she had
apparently endeavored to form her own. But her genius was too strong for
her. She wrote, moreover, only upon those scenes of life with which she was
perfectly familiar; whereas Richardson was in total ignorance of the habits
and conversation of that society which it was his ambition to describe. There
is something very quaint about the conversations in Miss Austen’s novels, but
we cannot help feeling certain that it was exactly what people of that class in
those days would have said. When Anne Elliott, a young lady of the period,
advises Captain Bennick, a young officer in the navy, who is given to quoting
Byron, to go through a course of our best English moralists, she does so in
perfect good faith, and without a suspicion of wrong. But how charming is the
art that can make us accept this as the perfectly natural thing for her to have
said on the occasion. The conversation between Henry Tilney and Catherine
Morland, on the first night of their meeting in the Bath ball-rooms, is another
instance of the same kind, though not so striking perhaps at the first. There
is, of course, always a difficulty in placing one’s self entirely en rapport with
any writer who describes the living manners of his or her own age, which
is at a long distance from his own. Do what we can, we feel solitary in their
company. When we read a writer of our own day who describes the manner
of a hundred years ago, we feel that we have a companion in our enjoyment.
That cannot be felt by any one who reads Miss Austen.
Her style deserves the highest commendation. It has all the form and
finish of the eighteenth century, without being in the least degree stilted or
unnatural. It has all the tone of good society without being in the least degree
insipid. For a specimen of crisp, rich English, combining all the vigour of the
52 Jane Austen
masculine with all the delicacy of the feminine style, we suggest the opening
chapter of Northanger Abbey as a model for any young lady writer of the
present age.
No doubt Miss Austen belongs essentially to the eighteenth-century
school of literature. There is little we should now call romance in any one of
her five novels. They are good genteel-comedies. They play over the surface
of life, and represent its phenomena with the most finished elegance. But
they do not stir the deeper passions, or more tumultuous emotions of our
nature. We should question if a single page that Miss Austen has written has
ever moistened the eyelid of the most impressionable man, woman, or child
who has lived since she first began to write. On the other hand, the quiet
fun, the inexhaustible sly humour, the cheerful healthy tone, the exquisite
purity, and the genuine goodness which are reflected in every line she wrote,
carry us down the sluggish stream of her stories without either weariness
or excitement, and with a constant sense of being amused, refreshed, and
benefited. In these respects she has been compared to Addison. And we think
the comparison a just one. . . .
It was a necessity of Miss Austen’s method that her plots should be less
interesting than her persons. In fact, of the plot regular, with a mystery, an
explosion, and a reconciliation, she presents no specimen; and our curiosity,
we must own, is but faintly stimulated by the doubts and fears which beset
her heroes and heroines en route for the altar. And it is a most remarkable
circumstance that there is no other interest in her novels but what arises out
of a passion to which she was herself a stranger. So many young men and
so many young ladies stand up in couples as if they were going to dance a
quadrille, and the various entanglements which await them form the whole
action of the piece. Now one goes wrong, and now another, sometimes
with serious, but oftener with comic, consequences. A few dresses are torn,
and once a lady has a fall. But there are no bad hearts, and all winds up
comfortably with the usual refreshments. Crime, calamity, and anguish enter
not this placid sphere. Tragedy is not allowed to show even the tip of her
buskin. Poverty and disgrace are hinted at, but, like murder, are excluded
from the stage. In three words, the story is redolent always of the quiet
respectability, the prosperous dulness, and the ignorance of passion which
encircled Miss Austen’s existence, and narrowed the range of her experience.
But as soon as her personages begin to talk and unfold their own characters
to our gaze, we cease to care how they act, how they are situated, or what is in
store for them. The exhibition of human nature, unadulterated by sensational
incidents, is the purest of treats. And that is what she gives to perfection.
General 53
To those critics who would ask us what moral purpose Miss Austen
proposed to herself in these delineations of common-place society, it is
perhaps enough to reply that every picture of human life, however trite or
conventional, must have a moral of its own if we have only eyes to see it.
Without plunging into any such profound question as the ethics of art in
general, we may affirm that nearly all Miss Austen’s novels have a very plain
moral, and one that admits of easy application. All of them have a family
likeness, and a general tendency to bring out into prominent relief the peril
of being guided by appearances. The danger to which a young lady is exposed
by imagining too readily that a polite gentleman is in love with her; and the
danger to which a young gentleman is exposed by imagining too readily that
a good-natured girl is in love with him; the misunderstandings that arise from
careless conversation, from exaggerated reserve, from overrated pretensions,
from all the little mistakes which create the common embarrassments of
ordinary society; these are the minor mischiefs which her pen is devoted to
setting in their proper light, and no man or woman turned forty will deny
that such work may be of great utility, or that anybody who chooses to read
her novels with a view to practical instruction may learn a great deal from
them. Our space will not allow us to illustrate these remarks by examples.
But we refer our readers more particularly to Emma and Persuasion in
confirmation of the truth of them.
—T.E. Kebbel, “Jane Austen,” Fortnightly Review,
February 1870, pp. 190–93
Edward FitzGerald (1870)

As to which is the best of all I can’t say: that Richardson (with all his
twaddle) is better than Fielding, I am quite certain. There is nothing at all
comparable to Lovelace in all Fielding, whose Characters are common and
vulgar types—of Squires, Ostlers, Ladies’ maids, etc., very easily drawn. I
am equally sure that Miss Austen cannot be third, any more than first or
second: I think you were rather drawn away by a fashion when you put her
there: and really old Spedding seems to me to have been the Stag whom
so many followed in that fashion. She is capital as far as she goes: but she
never goes out of the Parlour; if but Magnus Troil, or Jack Bunce, or even
one of Fielding’s Brutes, would but dash in upon the Gentility and swear
a round Oath or two! I must think the Woman in White, with her Count
Fosco, far beyond all that. Cowell constantly reads Miss Austen at night
54 Jane Austen
after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it composes him—like Gruel: or like

Paisiello’s Music, which Napoleon liked above all other, because he said it
didn’t interrupt his Thoughts.
—Edward FitzGerald, Letter to W.F. Pollock
(December 24, 1870)
John W. Hales (1873)

Miss Austen is without a rival in the field she occupied. In any of the highest
creative ages Scott would assuredly have taken an eminent place. But in
comprehensiveness of power can either of these immortal artists be ranked
above Chaucer? What we wish to emphasize is not only the depth but the
breadth of Chaucer’s genius. It was a mere fragment of human life that Miss
Austen saw with a clearness and an intelligence and a reproductive power
that defy panegyric.
—John W. Hales, Notes and Essays on Shakespeare, 1873, p. 72
George William Curtis

“Editor’s Easy Chair” (1881)
They (her novels) are perfectly simple and intelligible. The course of the tale
is not clogged with description or moralizing. They deal with the great theme
of the novelist, match-making, and no writer ever attended more strictly than
Miss Austen to the business in hand. Her novels are marvels of clearness,
and they have a delightfully shrewd humor. The Austen stories have all the
misunderstandings and embarrassments and doubts and delays which become
the course of true love. There are no extravagances in them, no sublimated
raptures and dark despairs. It is good, honest, every-day match-making
among every-day people, and the unintelligent reader does not find himself
in the least degree bewildered by the style or the characters. The very finish,
the cabinet and microscopic completeness, facilitate the comprehension and
the enjoyment of them by unintelligence, while the shrewd humor, and the
neat touches of characterization, and the portraiture of certain aspects of
English country life and society, commend them to the most intelligent. A
distinguished English scholar said to a lecturer who had extolled the tales
of Charlotte Bronte, “I am afraid you do not know that Miss Austen is the
better novelist.” If the scholar had explained, doubtless he would have said, in
comparing Miss Bronte or George Eliot with Miss Austen—and the three are
the chief of their sex in this form of English literature—that her distinction
General 55
and superiority lie in her more absolute artistic instinct. She writes wholly as
an artist, while George Eliot advocates views, and Miss Bronte’s fiery page is
often a personal protest. In Miss Austen, on the other hand, there is in kind,
but infinitely less in degree, the same clear atmosphere of pure art which we
perceive in Shakespeare and Goethe. It is a thread of exceeding fineness with
which she draws us, but it is spun of pure gold. There are no great characters,
no sweep of passion, no quickening of soul and exaltation of purpose and
sympathy, upon her page, but there is the pure pleasure of a Wattean.
—George William Curtis, “Editor’s Easy Chair,”

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1881, pp. 308–09
Henry Morley (1881)

Henry Morley compares Austen with novelist Henry Fielding, which offers
a marked contrast to William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-
Leigh’s contention that their relative disliked Fielding’s style. Reading
Fielding and Austen together will offer students an opportunity to find
similarities and differences, and to speculate whether Austen purposefully
imitated Fielding or attempted to set herself apart from him.
QQQ
She painted such pictures of real life as she had seen as a girl in a quiet
country parsonage. Like Wordsworth, she sought to show the charm that lies
under the common things about us, and with a fine feminine humour, under
sentences clear, simple, and exactly fitted to expression of a shrewd good
sense, she came nearer to Fielding than any novelist who wrote before the
reign of Queen Victoria.
—Henry Morley, Of English Literature
in the Reign of Victoria, 1881, pp. 111–12
George Barnett Smith

“More Views of Jane Austen” (1885)
George Barnett Smith writes that “novels are supposed to give a false
picture of life and manners.” A relatively new genre in Austen’s time, the
novel was difficult to define, and usually not respected as highly as poetry.
Students can look at origins and theories of the novel to discuss notable
changes in the genre’s development and reception.
QQQ
56 Jane Austen
The principal reasons . . . for Miss Austen’s hold upon the reading public—a
hold which we may reasonably believe will be constant and enduring—are not
far to seek. Adopting a totally different course from Mrs. Radcliffe and her
school, she substituted reality for excitement. The change was agreeable and
refreshing. It has been observed that, although novels are supposed to give a
false picture of life and manners, this is not necessarily so. As regards many
novelists, unquestionably the accusation is true, but no one can really feel its
applicability to the works of Jane Austen. Her characters are not unnatural,
neither are her incidents in the least degree improbable. She too thoroughly
understands human nature to exaggerate its sentiments beyond recognition.
Miss Austen is also a moral writer in the highest sense—that is, there is a high
tone pervading all her works; this is no more than the natural outcome of
her own life and character. But she has also great literary claims. Besides her
capacity for minute detail as affecting her dramatis personae, already insisted
upon, she has vivid powers of description, all the more effective, perhaps,
because they are held in check by a sound judgment and a well-balanced
imagination. She never exhausts a scene by what is called word-painting.
She indicates its main features, and describes the general effect it produces
upon the spectator, rather than recapitulates the size, weight, and colour of
its various component elements. To say that she has a strong insight into
female character is almost superfluous. George Eliot does not enter more
deeply into the workings of the female mind and heart than she does. Add to
all these claims that our author’s novels are perfectly unexceptionable from
every point of view, and that they combine rational amusement with no small
degree of instruction, and we have advanced tolerably sufficient grounds for
the continuous favour with which they have been and are still regarded.
The critic who said that these novels added a new pleasure to existence
was not wide of the mark. In Miss Austen’s later books, the most exacting may
discover a maturity of thought and a felicity of expression seldom attained
by members of her craft; and these augured still greater achievements in the
future had her life been spared. In no instance is it possible to sum up the
claims and characteristics of a writer of the first rank in a single phrase; but if
it were demanded that we should attempt this in the case of Jane Austen, we
should aver that her writings have not become obsolete, and never will become
obsolete, because they are just and faithful transcripts of human nature. It is in
this all-important respect that she is able to touch the hand of Shakespeare.
—George Barnett Smith, “More Views of Jane Austen,”
Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1885, pp. 44–45
General 57
Andrew Lang “Letter to Jane Austen” (1886)

Madam,—If to the enjoyments of your present state be lacking a view of the
minor infirmities or foibles of men, I cannot but think (were the thought
permitted) that your pleasures are yet incomplete. Moreover, it is certain that
a woman of parts who has once meddled with literature will never wholly
lose her love for the discussion of that delicious topic, nor cease to relish
what (in the cant of our new age) is styled ‘literary shop.’ For these reasons I
attempt to convey to you some inkling of the present state of that agreeable
art which you, madam, raised to its highest pitch of perfection.
As to your own works (immortal, as I believe), I have but little that is
wholly cheering to tell one who, among women of letters, was almost alone
in her freedom from a lettered vanity. You are not a very popular author: your
volumes are not found in gaudy covers on every bookstall; or, if found, are
not perused with avidity by the Emmas and Catherines of our generation. ‘Tis
not long since a blow was dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at your
character as an author by the publication of your familiar letters. The editor
of these epistles, unfortunately, did not always take your witticisms, and he
added others which were too unmistakably his own. While the injudicious
were disappointed by the absence of your exquisite style and humour, the
wiser sort were the more convinced of your wisdom. In your letters (knowing
your correspondents) you gave but the small personal talk of the hour, for
them sufficient; for your books you reserved matter and expression which
are imperishable. Your admirers, if not very numerous, include all persons of
taste, who, in your favour, are apt somewhat to abate the rule, or shake off the
habit, which commonly confines them to but temperate laudation.
’Tis the fault of all art to seem antiquated and faded in the eyes of the
succeeding generation. The manners of your age were not the manners of
to-day, and young gentlemen and ladies who think Scott ‘slow,’ think Miss
Austen ‘prim’ and ‘dreary.’ Yet, even could you return among us, I scarcely
believe that, speaking the language of the hour, as you might, and versed in
its habits, you would win the general admiration. For how tame, madam,
are your characters, especially your favourite heroines! how limited the life
which you knew and described! how narrow the range of your incidents! how
correct your grammar!
As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth,
and Catherine: women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for the
degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and the parish’s
concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings
58 Jane Austen
and interesting doubts. Who can engage his fancy with their match-makings
and the conduct of their affections, when so many daring and dazzling
heroines approach and solicit his regard?
Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden fleurs-
de-lys—ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their roubles by
the million, their lovers by the score, and even their husbands, very often,
in figures of some arithmetical importance. With these are the immaculate
daughters of itinerant Italian musicians—maids whose souls are unsoiled
amidst the contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the
art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more admirable,
because entirely derived from loving study of the inexpensive collections
vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the corner. When such heroines
are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where are your Emmas and Elizabeths?
Your volumes neither excite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by that
modern and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United
States, as well as in France and at home.
You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open. Knowing Lydia and
Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost insignificant
characters? With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone far; and, had you
devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to the passions of Kitty,
you might have held your own, even now, in the circulating library. How
Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her
challenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed,
swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally
eloped: all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say
Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites
of our time. Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and
lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary’s legs and the softness of Kitty’s
cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham’s whiskers, you would have left
a romance still dear to young ladies.
Or, again, you might entrance fair students still, had you concentrated
your attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henry Crawford. These
should have been the chief figures of Mansfield Park. But you timidly decline
to tackle Passion. ‘Let other pens,’ you write, ‘dwell on guilt and misery. I quit
such odious subjects as soon as I can.’ Ah, there is the secret of your failure!
Need I add that the vulgarity and narrowness of the social circles you describe
impair your popularity? I scarce remember more than one lady of title, and
but very few lords (and these unessential) in all your tales. Now, when we all
wish to be in society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and
General 59
we get lords (and very queer lords) even from Republican authors, born in a
country which in your time was not renowned for its literature. I have heard
a critic remark, with a decided air of fashion, on the brevity of the notice
which your characters give each other when they offer invitations to dinner.
‘An invitation to dinner next day was despatched,’ and this demonstrates that
your acquaintance ‘went out’ very little, and had but few engagements. How
vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy ‘keep his breath to
cool his porridge.’ I blush for Elizabeth! It were superfluous to add that your
characters are debased by being invariably mere members of the Church of
England as by law established. The Dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that
glides from Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher
Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look for in vain among your studies
of character. Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown sound to you; so
how can you help us in the stress of the soul’s travailings?
You may say that the soul’s travailings are no affair of yours; proving
thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty of the
novelist. I only remember one reference, in all your works, to that controversy
which occupies the chief of our attention—the great controversy on Creation
or Evolution. Your Jane Bennet cries: ‘I have no idea of there being so much
Design in the world as some persons imagine.’ Nor do you touch on our
mighty social question, the Land Laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as
a Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty ‘of settling an estate
away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody
cared anything about.’ There, madam, in that cruelly unjust performance,
what a text you had for a tendenz-romanz. Nay, you can allow Kitty to report
that a Private had been flogged, without introducing a chapter on Flogging
in the Army. But you formally declined to stretch your matter out, here
and there, ‘with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected
with the story.’ No ‘padding’ for Miss Austen! In fact, madam, as you were
born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or
Physiology, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival
your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation. Your heroines are
not passionate, we do not see their red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in
the manner of our frank young Maenads. What says your best successor, a
lady who adds fresh lustre to a name that in fiction equals yours? She says of
Miss Austen: ‘Her heroines have a stamp of their own. They have a certain
gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart. . . . Love with them
does not mean a passion as much as an interest, deep and silent.’ I think one
prefers them so, and that Englishwomen should be more like Anne Elliot
60 Jane Austen
than Maggie Tulliver. ‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving
longest when existence or when hope is gone,’ said Anne; perhaps she insisted
on a monopoly that neither sex has all to itself. Ah, madam, what a relief it is
to come back to your witty volumes, and forget the follies of to-day in those
of Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet! How fine, nay, how noble is your art in
its delicate reserve, never insisting, never forcing the note, never pushing the
sketch into the caricature! You worked, without thinking of it, in the spirit of
Greece, on a labour happily limited, and exquisitely organised. ‘Dear books,’
we say, with Miss Thackeray—’dear books, bright, sparkling with wit and
animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the
very bores are enchanting.’
—Andrew Lang, “Letter to Jane Austen,”
Letters to Dead Authors,1886
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1887)

Like David Masson and G.F. Chorley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson dis-
tinguishes male writing from female writing, noting that Austen initiated
the female tradition of “the minute delineation of character and manners,
leaving to men the bolder school of narrative romance.” Higginson men-
tions some of Austen’s female predecessors, but claims that Austen’s talent
surpasses them all. His terms are defined fairly clearly, letting readers know
what he considers specifically female and particularly male in writing style
and content, but it might be fascinating for students to research other
terms that are not often clearly defined, such as “popular.” What really
makes a work popular? Longevity? Its earnings? In many literary circles,
popularity bears a negative connotation, so it might be useful to consider
when and why popularity is positive, and when and how it is considered
a drawback.
Higginson mentions very few writers possessing the same
characteristics of Austen, and seems surprised to note that these
protégés are men, a response that likely stems from the proliferation of
adventure writing by men during the mid- to late nineteenth century. As
the British empire expanded to cover about one-quarter of the earth’s
landmasses, men were traveling and writing about their experiences. H.
Rider Haggard, for example, wrote King Solomon’s Mines and other novels
about Africa in the Victorian age. Women were comparatively restricted
to their homes, and thus did far less writing about harrowing adventures.
General 61
Students focusing on politics and travel can research the ways in which
the British empire’s geographical expansion contributed to writings of
the time.
QQQ
It is a curious fact that Paris, to which the works of Jane Austen were lately as
unknown as if she were an English painter, has just discovered her existence.
Moreover, it has announced that she, and she only, is the founder of that
realistic school which is construed to include authors so remote from each
other as the French Zola and the American Howells. The most decorous of
maiden ladies is thus made to originate the extreme of indecorum; and the
good loyal Englishwoman, devoted to Church and King, is made sponsor for
the most democratic recognition of persons whom she would have loathed as
vulgar. There is something extremely grotesque in the situation; and yet there
is much truth in the theory. It certainly looked at one time as if Miss Austen
had thoroughly established the claim of her sex to the minute delineation of
character and manners, leaving to men the bolder school of narrative romance.
She herself spoke of her exquisitely wrought novels as her “little bit of ivory, two
inches wide, on which,” she said, “I work with a brush so fine as to produce little
effect after much labor.” Yet in the opinion of Sir Walter Scott and all succeeding
critics, the result was quite worth the effort, Scott saying that he himself did the
“big bow-wow style as well as anybody,” but that all the minuter excellences
were peculiarly her province. As a result, she has far surpassed in fame her
immediate contemporaries of her own sex. Madame D’Arblay (Fanny Burney),
Miss Porter, Mrs. Opie, and even Miss Edgeworth, are now little read, while
Miss Austen’s novels seem as if they were written yesterday.
But the curious thing is that of the leading novelists in the English tongue
to-day it is the men, not the women, who have taken up Miss Austen’s work,
while the women show more inclination, if not to the “big bow-wow style”
of Scott, at least to the novel of plot and narrative. Anthony Trollope among
the lately dead, James and Howells among the living, are the lineal successors
of Miss Austen. Perhaps it is an old-fashioned taste which leads me to think
that neither of these does his work quite so well as she; but they all belong to
the same photographic school; each sets up his apparatus and takes what my
little nephew called a “flannelly group” of a household, or a few households,
leaving the great world of adventure untouched.
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Women and Men, 1887, pp. 156–57
62 Jane Austen
James Ashcroft Noble (1889)

James Ashcroft Noble’s opinions of Austen are similar to those of Edward
Fitzgerald, among others. She did what she did very well, they contend,
though she did not somehow do enough. Noble complains of “her steady
avoidance of the heights and depths of human nature.” He and several
other critics compare Austen to particular writers. In this case, Austen is
compared to George Sand, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë—all women
who wrote during the mid- to late nineteenth century. Students can
attempt to determine whether these writers were influenced by Austen
and, if so, to what extent. Those concerned with the evolution of the novel
might find it fascinating to make educated guesses as to whether these
three women imitated Austen in some way, or whether they purposefully
developed their own distinctive and different writing styles and content.
QQQ
Her work displays creative imagination, wonderful power of observing, fine
feeling for dramatic situation, and perfect command of her literary vehicle;
but we cannot help feeling conscious of a certain lack of weight which comes
of her steady avoidance of the heights and the depths of human nature. We
are charmed always, but seldom, if ever, deeply moved. Though in various
respects Jane Austen may be compared favourably with George Sand, George
Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte, we feel that these writers have spells of which
she knew not the secret. It is in virtue of their combination of veracious and
uncompromising realism with unfailing vivacity and ever-present grace that
the novels of Jane Austen are unique in literature.
—James Ashcroft Noble, Academy, August 11, 1889, pp. 96–97
Goldwin Smith (1890)

Criticism is becoming an art of saying fine things, and there are really no
fine things to be said about Jane Austen. There is no hidden meaning in
her; no philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to bring to
light; nothing calling in any way for elaborate interpretation. We read in
a recent critique of a work of fiction by Balzac, “Serephita, the marvellous
creature whose passage from Matter to Spirit, from the Specialist to the
Divine conditions, is the theme of Balzac’s genius, in this case is intended
to typify the final function of a long course of steadfast upward working by
a soul which has, by many reincarnations, won its way past the Instinctive
and Abstractive spheres of existence, and has at length attained that delicate
General 63
balance of the material and spiritual which is the last possible manifestation
on the earthly plane.” Jane Austen’s characters typify nothing, for their doings
and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making
the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing. Perfect in
her finish and full of delicate strokes of art, her works require to be read with
attention, not skimmed as one skims many a novel, that they may be fully
enjoyed. But whoever reads them attentively will fully enjoy them without
the help of a commentator.
Some think that they see a difference between the early and the later
novels. It is natural to look for such a difference, but for ourselves we must
confess that we see it not. In the first set and in the last set the style appears
to us to be the same; in both equally clear, easy, and free from mannerism or
peculiarity of any kind. In both there is the same freedom from anything like
a straining after point and epigram, while point and epigram are not wanting
when there is natural occasion for them. There are the same archness and
the same quiet irony. The view of life, society, and character is essentially the
same: at least, we should be surprised if any great contradiction or variation
could be produced. It has been said that Northanger Abbey shows above all
the rest of the novels the freshness and briskness of youth, and this has been
ascribed to its having been out of the hands of the writer, so that it could not,
like its fellows of the same epoch, undergo revision. It is, as we have shown,
a comic travesty of the romantic school: to its satirical character its special
friskiness is due. An autumnal mellowness of tone and sentiment has been
discovered in Persuasion. For this it has been already said there seems to
be some foundation: it would be wonderful indeed if there were none. The
sound of the vesper bell is sometimes heard. Perhaps there is something in
the tender and suffering character of Anne Elliot congenial to the melancholy
of the parting hour. Yet there are things fully as sharp and as nearly verging
on cynicism in the later novels as in the earlier. There is nothing more closely
verging on cynicism in the whole series than the passage in Persuasion
mocking the “large fat sighs” of Mrs. Musgrove over the early death of her
worthless son.
There are novelists who seem to think that we can do without a plot,
provided they give us elaborate delineations of character or even picturesque
descriptions of scenery. But it is difficult, as we have already said, to create
an interest in character apart from action; while picturesque descriptions of
scenery, except as the merest accessories, become tedious, word-painting
being, in fact, not painting at all, but a draft on the imagination of the reader,
who has to put together a landscape in his mind’s eye, out of the verbal
64 Jane Austen
materials furnished him, and soon grows weary of the effort. Walter Scott
always gives us a good plot, a plot at least which carries us on and excites
our interest in the actors. We have endeavoured to show by analysis that in
this respect Jane Austen is not wanting, though in some of her plots there are
weaknesses which we have had occasion to mark. It is true, we say once more,
that her plots are very unlike those of a sensation novel. Where the sensation
novel gives us murder, and perhaps carnage on a still larger scale, adulteries,
bigamies, desperate adventures and hairbreadth escapes, she manages to
amuse and almost to excite us with the scrape into which Emma gets by her
attempt to make a match between Harriet and Mr. Elton, or the catastrophe
produced by the sudden return of Sir Thomas Bertram in the midst of the
theatricals at Mansfield Park.
Lord Brabourne has justly observed that the heroines of Jane Austen’s
novels are better than the heroes. It could hardly fail to be so. It could hardly
be given to men or women to understand the character of the other sex as
thoroughly as that of their own. Shakespeare’s women are inferior in interest
to his men with the single exception of Lady Macbeth, who is more man
than woman, though she betrays her womanhood by breaking down at
last under the moral strain of conscious guilt, while nothing can pierce her
consort’s heart but the sword of Macduff. The phrase “heroes and heroines”
is objectionable in the case of novels in which there is nothing heroic. But the
principal figure, to use a more suitable phrase, in each of Jane Austen’s novels is
not a man, but a woman or a pair of women; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth,
in Sense and Sensibility the sisters Elinor and Marianne, in Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland, in Emma Miss Woodhouse, in Mansfield Park Fanny
Price, in Persuasion Anne Elliot. Each of them has a very distinct character,
with a charm of its own, and is, we have no doubt, a true woman. Of the
principal male figures hardly one can be said to have a very distinct character
except Darcy, and Darcy, as we have seen, is made to do and say things
which no man of his supposed character and sense would do or say. Edward
Ferrars hardly has a character at all. There is nothing very marked in those of
Henry Tilney or Edmund Bertram; nor does either of them, or any one of the
whole set, play any part which specially calls for the male forces, qualities, or
passions. Female critics greatly admire Knightley, but the interest which we
feel in Knightley is derived not so much from anything striking in himself
or in the part which he plays, as from his being the natural supplement
of Emma, the corrective of her little faults and the support to which her
charming weakness clings. After all, the manufacture of heroes is difficult.
Perfection does not interest. Of all Scott’s heroes not one is interesting except
General 65
the Master of Ravenswood, and in his case the interest is not so much that
of character as that of circumstance. It is in the secondary characters of Jane
Austen, the imperfect, the comic, and even the bad that we delight. That the
comic characters are sometimes overdrawn has been already admitted, and
the apology has been given. There never was a Tartuffe or a M. Jourdain any
more than there was a Mr. Collins or a Mr. Woodhouse, a General Tilney
or a Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and there is a basis in human nature for
the comic characters of Jane Austen as well as for the comic characters of
Moliere. It is marvellous that Jane Austen’s range being so narrow she should
have been able to produce such variety. But narrow we must remember her
range was, and recurrences or partial recurrences of the same characters and
incidents are the consequence. We cannot help seeing the likeness between
Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, while Edward Ferrars is a feeble germ
of both. We have several pairs of sisters, and sisterly affection is a constant
theme. There is a close resemblance between Wickham and Willoughby, and
a considerable resemblance between both of them and Henry Crawford. To
say this may seem to be flying in the face of Macaulay, who has said, “She
[Jane Austen] has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense,
commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly
discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human
beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be
surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom—Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr.
Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of
the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They
all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young.
They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase
of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who
would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such
thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more
unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines
to all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate,
that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we
know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.”
But this eulogy, with all deference be it said, however eloquent, will not bear
comparison with the facts. Henry Tilney shines more in small talk than
Edmund Bertram, and his figure catches some of the special liveliness which
pervades the travesty; but otherwise the two characters might be transposed
without injury to either novel. Mr. Elton, on the other hand, the clerical idol
of school-girls, essentially low and mean, with his vulgar and flashy wife, is
66 Jane Austen
distinguished from Henry and Edmund by the broadest difference of colour

which Jane Austen’s palette could supply. It may be added that neither Henry
Tilney nor Edmund Bertram belongs to the middle class; both of them
belong to the aristocracy, though each is a younger son.
In doing justice to Jane Austen and recommending her in preference to
the unwholesome products of sensationalism and the careless manufactures
of literary hacks, we do not mean to take a leaf from the crown of those who
have dealt with nobler and more entrancing themes. The subjects which
presented themselves to her were of the kind with which, and with which
alone, she was singularly qualified by her peculiar temperament as well as by
her special gifts and her social circumstances to deal. But the lives of these
genteel idlers after all were necessarily somewhat vapid, and void of anything
heroic in action or feeling as well as of violent passion or tragic crime. Few sets
of people, perhaps, ever did less for humanity or exercised less influence on
its progress than the denizens of Mansfield Park and Pemberley, Longbourn
and Hartfield, in Jane Austen’s day. As they all come before us at the fall of
the curtain, we feel that they, their lives and loves, their little intrigues, their
petty quarrels, and their drawing-room adventures, are the lightest of bubbles
on the great stream of existence, though it is a bubble which has been made
bright for ever by the genius of Jane Austen.
—Goldwin Smith, Life of Jane Austen, 1890, pp. 185–91
W.B. Shubrick Clymer

“A Note on Jane Austen” (1891)
The first thing to notice about this excerpt is the number of references
to other reviewers, many of whom appear in this volume. Clymer men-
tions Andrew Lang, Archbishop Whately, Goldwin Smith, and Margaret
Oliphant, and alludes to Thomas Babington Macaulay in places as well.
For the most part, Clymer agrees with the other reviewers. He thinks,
for example, as Macaulay does, that Austen’s work contains a percep-
tible element that “eludes analysis.” Students may want to compare
and contrast several of these reviews. Clymer most specifically counters
Whately’s argument that Austen is a didactic writer by claiming, “It is not
easy to fancy Jane Austen writing for the edification of her readers, or
trying to teach anybody.” In comparing reviewers such as Clymer and
Whately, students might ask why Whately would respond so strongly to
what he saw as Austen’s didacticism and, conversely, why Clymer claims
that her works contain no instructive dimension. Such comparisons and
General 67
contrasts not only lend insight to Austen’s novels, but offer a critical lens
through which students can see that reviewers often pursue their own
critical agendas.
Clymer also mentions several novel writers, including Austen’s
contemporaries and many others who came before and after her.
Comparing Austen to any one of the writers he mentions would make
for an enlightening study. George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth
Gaskell, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, William
Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony
Trollope are cited, to name a few. Clymer’s comparison of Austen and Guy
de Maupassant offers a fascinating (albeit brief) example of how such
literary comparison can be used to reach conclusions about both authors.
Clymer refers to such a long list of novelists in his piece in order to
establish Austen as the link between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
writers, “Her work is the thread by which it is traceable the continuance,
through a romantic age, of the strain of realism that marks Thackeray and
Trollope as descendants of Fielding and Richardson.” Late-nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century literary studies delineated and identified
time periods such as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the early-
nineteenth-century Romantic period, and the mid- to late-nineteenth-
century Victorian age. Such categorizations often lead readers and
scholars to believe that all writers from one period are alike and that they
are always distinct from writers of other periods. Austen is perhaps the
clearest exception to such generalizations, as she has never fully belonged
to any period of literature. Students examining historical context should
look for the threads in Austen of which Clymer speaks and attempt to
determine if he is correct in surmising that Austen is the link between
centuries, then examining whether she is the only one. This investigation
may lead to a study of the periods themselves and will allow students to
contribute to ongoing academic conversations regarding the three time
periods’ differences and similarities. How did an Enlightenment event
such as the French Revolution contribute to habits, laws, and sensibilities
in the Victorian age, for example?
QQQ
The scrutinizing criticism to which Jane Austen has for some time past
been subjected omits explicit statement of a fundamental fact, which it yet
fully establishes by implication, namely, that she is provincial. The word
provinciality, as commonly used to suggest rudeness or lack of polish,
is naturally avoided by a eulogist. Yet the connotation of disparagement
68 Jane Austen
attaching to it is perhaps as accidental as that attaching to the word curiosity,

which, Arnold insists, indicates, except in English, the “disinterested love
of a free play of the mind” requisite to real criticism. May not the term
provinciality, used by Arnold in a sense anything but complimentary, serve,
for lack of a better, to sum up qualities as different from those it suggests to
him, as the two sets of qualities suggested by the term curiosity are different
from each other? As another instance, where can a more striking difference
be found than that between philology as commonly understood to mean
linguistic study, and philology of which the purpose is, according to recent
authority, “the comprehension of human life as recorded in the monuments
of language”? The difference in each case is an intrinsic difference in spirit.
A passage from Mr. Pater’s appraisal of Lamb may help, more than pages of
hair-splitting, to define the spirit in which Jane Austen may properly be called
provincial: “And, working ever close to the concrete, to the details, great or
small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to
his vision by the intervention of mere abstract theories, he has reached an
enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as
he might seem with great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is
real, especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much
of the whole woful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a
perfect understanding of it.” This, and more to the like effect, points clearly to
the spirit which is not provincial, which inhabits the metropolis, the centre, as
distinguished, on the one hand, from the suburban spirit of such a writer as
Leigh Hunt, who, dealing often with much the same sort of subject as Lamb,
scarcely ever, try as he may to be impressive, conveys a sense of any wider
world than is lighted from his hearth; and as distinguished, on the other
hand, from the spirit which, content to enjoy “human nature’s daily food”
without counting the pulsations of the “whole woful heart of things, “charms
us in such a book as Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. Call them what you will, Jane
Austen’s simple pictures of the life she saw differ from Balzac’s Scenes de la vie
de province, or George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life, or from Middlemarch,
which is a study of provincial life, or from The House of the Seven Gables, not
so essentially in scene or incident as in spirit. Balzac and George Eliot and
Hawthorne all attempt to let the reader into a larger world of ideas than Jane
Austen ever dreamed of. In so far as they succeed, they set astir “that vague
hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man” which
should, it has been said, be felt to pervade a great work of fiction. In so far
as Jane Austen is incapable of attempting anything of the kind, she is in one
sense provincial. That is her limitation. In the recognition of that limitation
General 69
lies much of her strength and of her charm—just as, conversely, Hunt’s
irritating weakness may be traced to his mistaking the limits of his powers.
Concentration of interest in one place and within a narrow social range,
steadiness of observation, sureness of touch, firmness of handling, accurate
adjustment of parts always with a view to total effect, nice discrimination of
individual members of the same class, exquisite precision and high finish,
permeating humor—these are among the obvious characteristics which,
combining with an essentially feminine treatment—shown by her noticing,
from the woman’s point of view, things no man would ever think of noticing,
by her women being better than her men, and by the absence of scenes
between men—identify her among novelists many of whom share with her
some, though perhaps none all, of these means to an artistic end. On the
present inartistic generation of Americans, overrun with novels, and not
keenly relishing the local flavor in provincial life, of which in this country
the “march of improvement” is rapidly effacing what vestiges remain, such
qualities as those just enumerated can be expected to make no very deep
impression. The Deserted Village fails—if it fail—to bore us through a certain
grace of the verse and of the pictures, rather than from any real interest we
take in the subject. The Vicar of Wakefield doubtless bores more of us than
would willingly admit the fact. Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines naturally
bore a great many of us. Yet their fortunes are, at least as treated by her,
intrinsically quite as interesting as those of the Primrose family, about whom
we are presumed to be enthusiastic. One who should follow Rogers’s example
in reading an old book whenever a new book is published, might do worse
than begin, if not, as Mr. Austin Dobson suggests, with the Vicar, then with
the serene Persuasion, or the match-contriving Emma.
Jane Austen was, in Mr. Andrew Lang’s words, “born before Analysis
came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or Religious
Open-mindedness;” she was not borne down with the sense of an all-
important mission; she had no reform to preach, no faith to promulgate, no
system to expound; she wrote merely because she delighted in doing what
she must have felt she did well, for every page shows that she tried always to
do her best. Yet, coming at about the middle of the period of a century and a
half which separates us from Richardson, publishing at the precise moment
when Scott was rising to his highest fame as a novelist, she is, surprised as she
would have been to be told so, a significant landmark in the course of British
fiction. An article attributed to Scott and an excellent article by Whately1 tell
the story of the appearance of a new star and do full justice to its brilliance.
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, the first novelists in England (for Defoe’s
70 Jane Austen
stories of adventure are not precisely novels as the term is now understood),
had been followed by a romantic and by a sentimental school, the former
growing from Horace Walpole, through Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe, to
Scott; and the latter including men so dissimilar as Sterne, Mackenzie, and
Goldsmith. The sentimentalists were virtually a thing of the past, and the
romanticists were in full career when Jane Austen, cutting loose from both
influences, set again on a firm basis the realistic study of manners taught her
by Richardson and Fielding. Small and slender though it be, her work is the
thread by which is traceable the continuance, through a romantic age, of the
strain of realism that marks Thackeray and Trollope as descendants of Fielding
and Richardson. She belongs to a small group of women who excelled in what
has been well called “fictitious biography;” of that group—comprising Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, and herself, who “have all,” Scott says in his journal,
“given portraits of real society far superior to anything man, vain man, has
produced of the like nature”—she is incontestably the finest artist. Of recent
British novelists, Trollope is most obviously her inheritor, for, though he lacks
her acute tact, his work is of essentially the same class as hers—high comedy
of manners, and nothing else.
Unconsciously, too, she was a forerunner of another group of novelists,
represented at present perhaps most completely by M. Guy de Maupassant.
Could she have foreseen what was coming, there is no reason to suppose
she would have shrunk from the association as perturbing to maidenly
susceptibilities; her minute acquaintance with Richardson, the outspoken
habit of her time, a hint or two in her letters, show the likelihood that her
objection to the form taken for the moment by French fiction would, like
ours, be to some extent offset, could she read it, by admiration of the skill
of some of the writers, all the more that she knew French. She and M. Guy
de Maupassant are, indeed, in odd contrast, and yet closely alike. His range
is perhaps as narrow as hers: he avowedly goes out of his way in search of
the unhackneyed, whereas she obviously makes her arrows of the wood that
happens to lie in her path. Her characters are apt to be ladies and gentlemen;
his are usually, as Mr. Henry James points out, the reverse. Her plots turn on
domestic “involvements;” by no stretch of language could his atmosphere be
termed domestic. Finally, his view of life is morbidly gloomy and depressing;
hers is wholesomely cheerful and enlivening. In subject, character, situation,
and total effect they differ widely; in delicacy, not in manner, of treatment,
there is a strong resemblance between them—though always with a marked
difference. The aim of each is to isolate on a small stage a small group
of characters intimately known to the author, and to let the interaction
General 71
of the characters tell the story. Her story is always simple and coherent,
usually rapid—though, to be sure, “celerity” is, in Sir Thomas Browne’s
words, occasionally “contempered with cunctation,” and uniformly ends in
marriage; his is generally simple, not always rapid, supremely indifferent to so
conventional an institution as marriage. On laying down the book you know,
in either case, everything the author means you to know; and in either case you
have learned it by observing the picture of what the author had first observed,
not from comments. The Frenchman would have you draw from his picture
specific inferences about life as he has shown it; the Englishwoman asks you
to draw no inference whatever. He is, as is common with Frenchmen, nearly
destitute of humor; her “delicate subsatirical humor” is a motive power,
quickening what might otherwise be inert, keeping the reader at the writer’s
point of view, distinguishing the story from a transcript, the miniature from
a photograph. His French, though more contemporary, is not more highly
finished nor more idiomatic than her English. Each accomplishes the prime
object, dramatic presentation—a faculty which she had, it has beeen said, “by
birthright,” and which he acquired after years of sedulous study under the
great artist who wrote Madame Bovary. Pierre et ]ean has by Mr. Henry James
been reckoned perfect, and to Fortcomme la mort, an especially well-named
book, praise as unstinted has been given by M. Jules Lemaitre; enthusiasts
might perhaps be found to speak as unqualifiedly of Emma. All three I admit
that I find, in parts, hard reading. The marvellous craftsmanship shown in
the French books leaves on me an impression—which the more recent Notre
Coeur only confirms—of amazingly subtile study of a kind of thing I am
not especially fond of studying; the equally admirable skill expended on the
English book rather makes me regret my inability to sympathize fully with
a state of affairs really significant two or three generations ago. Emma has,
however, over the others the inalienable superiority of humor to misplaced
seriousness; it professes to be no more than the record of the pre-matrimonial
career of an attractive girl—a subject of “enduring freshness,” whereas they
profess further dramatically to represent psychological problems which they
certainly do not satisfactorily dispose of. Jane Austen, in brief, attempts only
what lies within her restricted scope; M. Guy de Maupassant probably tries
to transcend his limits.
The novel of greatest interest to the present generation, I suppose,
would be the one which should deal with the complex life of to-day as
simply and directly as the three novels I have mentioned deal with small
bits of life, which should apply to George Eliot’s subjects Jane Austen’s or
M. Guy de Maupassant’s treatment. That may be an unattainable ideal, for
72 Jane Austen
even Tourgueneff, who in some of his books approaches it, does not quite
reach it any more than Landor in Pericles and Aspasia or George Eliot in
Middlemarch overcomes all the difficulties, though in one of these cases the
objective method, and in the other the analytic, reaches a high degree of
excellence. Yet, that a treatment as objective as Jane Austen’s or Landor’s would
necessarily be inadequate to unravel the tangled web of life in which we of the
last decade of the nineteenth century are inextricably caught, is, at best, not
proved. The problem is not the same as that presented to Shakespeare, or to
Fielding; but has it yet been shown to be more difficult of solution than theirs
were? or less amenable to genius as strong as theirs? M. Guy de Maupassant
holds that a man, being shut out by his individuality from entering into the
recesses of another man’s nature, and explaining his motives for acts any one
of which may, given the circumstances and antecedents and temperament, be
with some certainty predicted, cannot, by analysis, do more than substitute
himself for a character in a book. If that is true, can the analytic method in
fiction lead anywhere except back again to the objective, by which most of the
famous novels of the world have, until recently, been produced?2 However
vain such speculation may be, George Eliot, with her analytic processes, and
Jane Austen, with her synthetic results, at any rate mark pretty well each
other’s limitations. An incarnation of the admirable qualities of both would
be, if not a monster, a literary Messiah.
The notion of some such doubly endowed creature as I have fancied
occurred to me soon after the publication of Middlemarch, which I happened
to read the same week that I first read Mansfield Park, with a view to
contrasting Miss Crawford and Rosamund Vincy. Both books pleased me so
much that I forthwith set about eagerly reading almost everything of each of
the authors, of neither of whom had I previously read a line. Ever since then
they have stood to me for the genius not quite artist enough for her task, and
the artist with not quite an interesting enough subject for her powers. Of
the two, George Eliot does the larger, not necessarily the better, thing; Jane
Austen does with greater perfection what she undertakes. Her workmanship,
at its best, is, indeed, flawless.
Though extracts from a novel are sure to be unsatisfactory samples by
which to judge of it as a whole, yet something of Jane Austen’s way of doing
things may be shown by comparison of passages in the much-despised letters
published by Lord Brabourne, with passages in the novels. The letters, which
are invariably spoken of by critics as in every way beneath notice—Mr.
Goldwin Smith going so far as to say that “the editor’s sauce, in fact, is
better than the meat”—are, of course, not literature, like some of Gray’s and
General 73
Cowper’s and Lamb’s and Shelley’s, but they are divertingly natural, trivial,
sisterly prattle; and, though not carefully written, nor wholly suitable for
publication, they are no less really of the same stuff as her novels than Lamb’s
are of the same stuff as his essays. The matter and the manner of the artistic
product are in each case discernible in the casual and more diluted work.
Not to press the analogy, this bit from a letter to her sister Cassandra: “Only
think of Mrs. Holder’s being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing
in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her”—may, for
illustration of the point, so far as Jane Austen is concerned, be set beside the
following passage in Emma, written not more than a year or two later:
“The great Mrs. Churchill was no more.
“It was felt as such things must be felt. Everybody had a degree of gravity
and sorrow; tenderness toward the departed, solicitude for the surviving
friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be
buried. Goldsmith tells us that when lovely woman stoops to folly she has
nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally
to be recommended as a clearer of ill fame. Mrs. Churchill, after being
disliked at least twenty-five years, was now spoken of with compassionate
allowances. In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted
before to be seriously ill. The event acquitted her of all the fancifulness and
all the selfishness of imaginary complaints.
“ ‘Poor Mrs. Churchill! No doubt she had been suffering a great deal—
more than anybody had ever supposed—and continual pain would try the
temper. It was a sad event a great shock—with all her faults what would Mr.
Churchill do without her? Mr. Churchill’s loss would be dreadful indeed.
Mr. Churchill would never get over it.’ Even Mr. Weston shook his head and
looked solemn, and said, ‘Ah, poor woman, who would have thought it!’ and
resolved that his mourning should be as handsome as possible; and his wife
sat sighing and moralizing over her broad hems with a commiseration and
good sense true and steady.” The suggestion of the fictitious by the actual,
of which more instances might be found, is here obvious enough. The
elaboration of detail, though of course partly for fun, is not wasted; for Mrs.
Churchill, heretofore a very minor personage, in dying starts a new set of
relations among the characters, which leads finally to the train of incidents
with which the story closes; the first hint of those new relations immediately
follows the passage quoted, which in a way serves to group the characters
afresh in characteristic attitudes about the incident which has suddenly
become for a moment central. The passage is illustrative not so especially of
humor as of the use, constantly made in these novels, of trivial incident in
74 Jane Austen
forwarding the plot. The links are sometimes as much hidden in unemphatic
dialogue as they usually are in Landor’s Conversations. Hence the close
attention demanded of a reader by both those writers. Some of Jane Austen’s
scenes are as denuded of superfluity as his, so that the meaning is to be got
only on condition of mentally supplying stage-directions which are left out.
The scene of Louisa Musgrove’s unlucky jump is a case in point. All is hurry
and agitation and movement, but for the most part merely implied in the
words of the several characters. Read hastily, it is tame; read attentively, it is
as rapid and close in construction, and as fully provides for every character at
every moment as if it were Scribe’s. The development of plot and of character
by means of dialogue is as distinguishing a trait of Jane Austen as of any
novelist, and is better understood by none than by her. Charles Reade and
Trollope, each in his way, use dialogue very largely and very well. Reade’s is
dramatic in the histrionic sense that it may be put, with scarcely the change
of a word, into the mouths of actors; Trollope’s is the verbatim report of the
voluminous talk of his personages; Jane Austen’s differs from both in being
not so literal a transcript, and in being more essentially a tissue of character
manifested in speech. The whole character is shown chiefly by the dialogue
in her books; the other authors need more supplementary comment to
complete the character. Her way may or may not be the best; she, at any rate,
is unsurpassed in that special thing; for, though perhaps nothing of hers is
so concentrated and penetrating as Mr. Crawley’s, “Peace, woman,” to Mrs.
Proudie, that is an almost unique stroke in Trollope, who habitually is as
diffuse as she is concise.
On all these points, and on several others, it would be possible to expatiate
to an indefinite extent. The difficulty of finding short specific illustrations of
an essence which disappears under analysis, is, however, great; and a list of
abstract qualities unaccompanied by concrete instances of their occurrence,
is as dull and useless as the balance-sheet of a railway company in which you
own no stock. The final result produced by the fusion of qualities in her novels
is that the characters remain very distinct in the recollection. The total effect
of many novels of great interest is that, through lack of this special faculty
of characterization, the subject overpowers the individual characters, which
become perhaps types, but more probably puppets only slightly different
from a hundred other inhabitants of the land of fiction. Such personages
are, of course, lost in the crowd; hers are safe from that fate, for, though they
may not move us deeply, they can scarcely be forgotten. It remains to speak
separately of the novels, which together constitute a little corner of creation
to be mistaken for no other. In Northanger Abbey the point of departure
General 75
from the Radcliffe school is marked; novels of highly wrought mystery are
parodied. Not to go into a consideration of the amusing ridicule that saves
this rather immature book from being dull—for that has been done again and
again—it may suffice here to mention the last paragraph as a witty take-off
on the elaborate conclusion of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The book may be
regarded as associating its author in the field of burlesque with Fielding and
Thackeray, each of whom early indulged his sportive propensities in that sort
of attack on the school of fiction from which he departed, and each of whom,
it may be whispered, did it better than she.
Mansfield Park and Emma are said to show the influence of Miss Edgeworth’s
didacticism, though neither was ever called, like Cozlebs, a “dramatic sermon.”
It is not easy to fancy Jane Austen writing for the edification of her readers, or
trying to teach anybody but the children who were so fond of her and of the
“long, circumstantial stories” she used to invent for their amusement; even
them she would, in all probability, have taught rather through her personal
charm than by appending moral tags to the fairy tales she told them, or by
imparting categorical information. If any of her novels are didactic, it is, I am
inclined to believe, incidentally, not intrinsically. No charge so grave has been
brought against Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; they may owe
their escape to the chronological accident that Miss Edgeworth did not begin
to publish until after they were written. For my own part, I do not see that
Emma is a whit more didactic than Pride and Prejudice.
As to the relative power to amuse—the thing she wrote for: primarily, to
amuse herself—of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, opinions
will differ. The number is small of those who do not regard them all somewhat
as the passengers on board the Indiaman in the story regarded that monument
of tediousness, The Memories of Clegg the Clergyman, which not even the offer
of the “two volumes in duodecimo, handsomely bound,” could prevail with
anyone but the boatswain, “a man of strong and solid parts, to hazard the
attempt” of reading straight through. Of the small number who read them,
there are probably few who find no dull places. Pride and Prejudice—rated
by Trollope second only to Henry Esmond—though a less mature piece of
work than Mansfield Park, is more continuously amusing. It opens brilliantly;
Mansfield Park rather tamely. The most concise and accurate summary of
Pride and Prejudice is Mr. Goldwin Smith’s: “Philip Darcy is Pride; Elizabeth
Bennet is Prejudice; and the plot is the struggle of their mutual attraction
against their mutual repulsion, ending in love and marriage.” The plot of
Mansfield Park is the more varied; the types in Pride and Prejudice are the
more sharply contrasted. A competent judge of several literatures has called
76 Jane Austen
Mansfield Park a “great book;” Mrs. Oliphant rates it low. Fanny Price and
Miss Crawford are interesting, especially in their effect on each other; the
latter is unlike any other of Jane Austen’s characters, and is certainly a striking
figure. Without attempting nice discrimination among the three books, it
is safe to say that, whereas Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, though
surely characteristic, contain incidents that would, off-hand, not suggest
her, Emma shows to perfection throughout the qualities that distinguish its
author among novelists. In all three there is some caricature, but very little in
consideration of the opportunity. Think what Dickens would have made, for
instance, of Mr. Woodhouse’s nervous solicitude lest the horses should wet
their feet in a quarter of an inch of snow. Instead of yielding to the temptation
to caricature, she is usually content with quietly showing peculiarities in
action, and in contrast to other peculiarities, which she contrives to introduce
repeatedly without harping on them. Her heroines’ peculiarities are treated
with shrewd cunning. She does not, as some novelists do, make you feel that
a subordinate character is better drawn than a principal. This is one test of
her craft, for of course it is easier to sketch a subordinate distinctly enough
to give the reader no sense of blurred individuality, than it is to round out,
by strokes differing but slightly from one another and constantly repeated, a
personage that is kept continually in the foreground—to leave an impression
of Miss Bates or of Mrs. Elton, for instance, being better done than Emma. It
is not so, however; Emma is as peculiarly herself as Desdemona.
The earliest article on Jane Austen in the Quarterly, already mentioned,
after a lively synopsis of the dexterously twined ins and outs of Emma’s
maiden life, which is animated by the very spirit of the book, goes on to say
that “there are cross-purposes enough (were the novel of a more romantic
cast) for cutting half the men’s throats and breaking all the women’s hearts.
But at Highbury Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing
his torch under a lanthorn, instead of flourishing it around to set the house
on fire. All these entanglements bring on only a train of mistakes and
embarrassing situations, and dialogues at balls and parties of pleasure, in
which the author displays her peculiar powers of humor and knowledge
of human life. The plot is extricated with great simplicity.” It has even been
said, with some plausibility, that there is too much plot for the interest,
which consequently falls flat. Those persons, however, who think Emma and
the other heroines insipid dolls, may be reminded of the end of one of the
cleverest chapters in Daniel Deronda. When Gwendolen and Grandcourt have
met, and had the conversation in which the pauses are as interesting at least
as the speeches, and, after a few more incidents, Gwendolen is left pondering
General 77
whether or not she shall accept him, George Eliot, in one of the essays that
contain so much of what is best in the books whose symmetry they mar, thus
touches, with words fitting Emma almost as closely as Gwendolen, on the
province of the young girl:
“Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history
than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way
in which she could make her life pleasant?—in a time, too, when ideas were
with fresh vigor making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was
declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other side of the world would
not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause,
and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss
and were patient: a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which
had for centuries been beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new
life of terror or of joy.
“What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind
visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring
and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the
treasure of human affections.”
Anne Elliot has been spoken of as a nineteenth-century Viola. Though
there may be a point or two of similarity, it is not easy to fancy her writing
“loyal cantons of contemned love,” or singing “them loud even in the dead
of night,” or making “the babbling gossip of the air cry out Olivia!” Sir
Walter, the consequential, pompous, and vain, is a not altogether unworthy
descendant of Malvolio. But any such fanciful notion of Persuasion in tow
astern of Twelfth Night seems less to the purpose than Whately’s unaffected
avowal that “on the whole, it is one of the most elegant fictions of common
life we ever remember to have met with.” Anne Elliot differs from Jane
Austen’s other heroines: patient and submissive, tender and winning, full of
a womanly sensibility not incompatible with sense, she is a heroine of a kind,
in a situation of a kind, new, it is said, to British fiction in the early years
of this century. However that may be, the book shows broader sympathies,
deeper observation, and perhaps more perfect symmetry, balance, poise,
than the others. The always flexible, unobtrusive style, in which reduction of
emphasis is carried sometimes to the verge of equivocation, concealing the
author, yet instinct with her presence, in none of her books approximates
more nearly to Cardinal Newman’s definition—“a thinking out into language.”
In general, the qualities that appear in the others are in Persuasion perhaps
more successfully fused than before. Through it runs a strain of pathos
unheard in its predecessors, which in the chapter before the last combines
78 Jane Austen
in harmony with the other motives in a way not suggested in the previous
novels. That chapter is as well composed as Thackeray’s chapters about
Waterloo. As Shelley, toward the end of his life, with more complete control
of his material, gave promise of more satisfying work than any he had done,
so Jane Austen, always master of her material, gave evidence, in her last
book, of wider scope. Persuasion does not, of course, like Vanity Fair, echo
the distant hum of the whole of the human life; it is, however, a “mirror of
bright constancy.” Jane Austen’s observation, unusually keen always—and
that is no mean qualification, for has not humor its source in observation?—
here unites with the wisdom of forty to make a picture softer in tone, more
delicate in modelling, more mellow, than its companions of her girlhood,
or than its immediate predecessors in her later period. The book marks the
beginning of a third period, beyond the entrance to which she did not live to
go. It is not pretended that she would, with any length of life, have produced
heroic paintings of extensive and complicated scenes, for that was not her
field; it may reasonably be supposed that, had she lived, her miniatures
might, in succeeding years, have shown predominantly the sympathetic
quality which in Persuasion begins to assert itself. Arnold says that Homer is
“rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought,”
and adds that he is “also, and above all, noble.” Jane Austen, usually rapid,
simple, plain, and natural, is not noble in the sense in which Arnold uses
the word; nor is there quite enough of the divine madness in her method
to crown her a genius. Scott, not always rapid, simple, plain, and natural,
occupies the throne of nobility and genius. It is the last to which she would
have aspired; her attributes are rather those of the artist. She kept her hazel
eyes open in the narrow world she lived in, saw accurately and humorously
its gently undulating surface, and, without exaggeration of the importance
of her subject or distortion of its relations, expressed, for love of the work,
and with rare skill, what she felt. The reader who, amid the conflict of our
“fierce intellectual life,” is insensible to “the exquisite touch which renders
ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of
the description and the sentiment,” loses the unique opportunity for tranquil
enjoyment afforded by the high comedy of manners of the provincial Jane
Austen, the artist.
Notes
1. Quarterly Review, vol. xiv., October 1815; vol. xxiv., January 1821.
2. M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the other hand, states, in the preface to
Chérie, his belief that “la derniere Evolution du roman, pour arriver à
General 79
devenir tout a fait le grand livre des temps modemes, c’est de se faire un livre
de pure analyse.”
—W.B. Shubrick Clymer, “A Note on Jane Austen,”
Scribner’s Magazine, March 1891, pp. 377–84
William Dean Howells (1891)

Which brings us again, after this long way about, to the divine Jane and her
novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they
were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature
nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing
more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material and Jane Austen
was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire
truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English
novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and
Slavic and Latin artists.
—William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction,
1891, Sec. 15
Walter Raleigh “Jane Austen” (1894)

This Sir Walter Raleigh was a writer and professor in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, not to be confused with the Sir Walter Raleigh
who established a colony in North Carolina in the sixteenth century.
Raleigh agrees with Thomas Babington Macaulay and Goldwin Smith in
their estimations that Austen’s writing is comparable to William Shakespeare’s,
though Raleigh pointedly writes that Shakespeare’s work “exhibits the less
majestic calm.” Raleigh also agrees with George Henry Lewes that Austen’s
work cannot be fully appreciated by the reader who is unable to perceive
or appreciate the nuances present in her work, which remain “inaudible to
gross ears.” Misreading Austen as less than perfection is clearly, according to
Raleigh, the fault of the reader. Students exploring topics related to literary
theory may want to study reader response, to help determine how much
responsibility lies with the writer and how much lies with the reader in the
unique partnership entered into when reading a book.
Raleigh offers the observation that “the real Jane Austen” cannot be
found in any of her books. He writes that “Her own views on the subject
of marriage she does not trouble to explain,” meaning that she does not
provide narrative commentary in her works in order to interpret events
80 Jane Austen
and extricate her intended meaning for the reader. In this way Austen
differs greatly from eighteenth-century writers such as Henry Fielding,
who offers extensive authorial commentary in novels such as Tom Jones.
Comparing Austen and Fielding may lead students to an understanding
of the evolution of novel writing, although students must also consider
that George Eliot and other authors who came after Austen returned, to
some extent, to the kind of commentary that is closer to Fielding’s.
One question students might ask concerning Raleigh’s claim to have
found none of Jane Austen in her novels is: how would he know? He
mentions earlier in his review that there is little or nothing left of Austen’s
personal writings and effects, making it nearly impossible to know
what her actual views might have been. W.B. Shubrick Clymer opposes
Raleigh’s claim by stating that Austen writes only from the writer’s point
of view, but again students can ask how well supported Clymer’s position
could be, given the lack of personal writings.
Raleigh notes that Austen blurs the line between fact and fiction in
her novels, leading readers to believe wholeheartedly in the environment
she creates and then exposing them to her satirical treatment of the
characters and their world. Austen, Raleigh claims, is so subtle in this
approach that many readers claim that she did nothing but write down
scenes from life as it passed her by. These various contentions allow
students to study the evolution of fiction and the reading public’s
understanding of the term. Readers of the early nineteenth century
attributed several different meanings to the word “fiction” and were
often confused, especially when the writer was a woman, about what
was true and what was invented in any given novel.
QQQ
The comparison between Jane Austen and Shakespeare, suggested by
Macaulay, is curiously attractive. Both left scant record of their personal
convictions and emotions; indeed the Sonnets are a fuller confession than can
be gathered from all the letters and remains of the later writer. Enthusiastic
students of Miss Austen have ransacked her novels for traces of her affairs of
the heart, and of her political and religious opinions, in a manner and with a
result that recall the efforts of Shakesperian commentators. There is at least a
semblance of likeness in the attitude that each assumed to friends and family,
to Stratford and to Seventon; the purchaser of New Place who did not collect
and publish his own works may be compared, perhaps mistakenly, with
the lady who refused literary society and wrote for her own and her sister’s
diversion. The stirring events of the times they lived in are as little reflected
General 81
or recorded in the pages of one as of the other. These may be resemblances

merely fanciful. What is not fanciful is the sameness of artistic impersonality,
of serene abstraction from life, that characterises both writers equally. Of the
two, Shakespeare, eternally susceptible to temptation by a gleam of poetry,
exhibits the less majestic calm. He can hardly be content for long with the
supremacy of an inferior kingdom. “The hand which drew Miss Bates,” says
Mr. Goldwin Smith, in his admirable Life of Jane Austen, “though it could not
have drawn Lady Macbeth, could have drawn Dame Quickly or the nurse in
‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ” The same hand, had it attempted the description of the
murder of the little princes in Richard III., would never have slipped into the
poetic metaphor that gives to Shakespeare’s hired assassins so unreal an air.
The perfection of Miss Austen’s workmanship has been seized upon by
unfavourable critics and used as a weapon of offence. She is perfect, they
allege, only as some are virtuous, because she has no temptation; she lives
in an abject world, dead to poetry, visited by no breath of romance, and is
placidly contented with her ant-hill, which she describes with great accuracy
and insight. It would be unjust to this type of criticism to interpret it merely
as a complaint that one who was of unsurpassed power in comedy and satire
did not forego her gifts and take up with romance and tragedy. If it has a
meaning worth considering, it means that even the comedy of life has in
it shades of pathos and passion to which she is constitutionally blind. And
this is to mistake her art. The world of pathos and passion is present in her
work by implication; her delicious quiet mirth, so quiet as to be inaudible to
gross ears, is stirred by the incongruity between the realities of the world as
she conceives them, and these realities as they are conceived by her puppets.
The kingdom of Lilliput has its meaning only when it is seen through the
eyes of Gulliver. A rabbit fondling its own harmless face affords no matter of
amusement to another rabbit, and Miss Austen has had many readers who
have perused her works without a smile. Sympathy with her characters she
frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, not
in that sturdy young patrician Emma, not even in Anne Elliot of Persuasion,
is the real Jane Austen to be found. She stands for ever aloof. Those who
wish to enjoy her art must stand aloof too, and must not ask to be hurried
through her novels on a personally conducted tour, with their admirations
and dislikes prepared for them. What, perhaps, has led hasty or unintelligent
critics strangely to misread her is that she never obtrudes the contrast spoken
of above; hardly ever, even as narrator, speaks in her own person. By the
most delicate of irony she allows the opinions and feelings of her characters
to colour her own matter-of-fact narration. “There certainly are not so many
82 Jane Austen
men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them,”
she remarks, on the first page of Mansfield Park. Stupid readers, who ought to
be in her books instead of outside them and trying to read them, agree with
her; good serious critics, on the trail of fine sentiments, exclaim in sorrow
that she says a hundred things like this. But she is thinking of the matrimonial
prospects of the three Misses Ward, and putting herself at the point of view
of the family, with a certain subtle literary politeness that is charm itself.
Her own views on the subject of marriage she does not trouble to explain.
But the folly of some of her characters implies the existence of wisdom; the
selfishness and pettiness of others involve the ideas of disinterestedness and
magnanimity, just as a picture painted in cold tints would lose its meaning
if there were no blue and red in the scheme of the universe. To ask for all
colours, always, within the limits of the frame, is absurd.
She compares her own work to miniature-painting on ivory, “on which
I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.” In
loving elaboration of detail she resembles no other writer so much as a
special favourite of hers, Cowper, whose letters display the same voluminous
fearlessness in the treatment of the trivial, with a like happy result. To quote
her except by pages at a time would be to do her an injustice. Here are no
sudden white-heats of exalted imagination or momentary illuminations of
the abysses of human life, but a steady stream of daylight on familiar objects,
a perfect proportion, and a clearness that seems to the inexpert to be due to
emptiness. The absolute transparency of her style, the medium in which her
creations live and move, is illusive in its nature; her readers can pass from the
commonplaces of life to the actions and speeches of her fictitious characters
with so little sense of shock, so faint a realization that they are passing from
life to a convention, that it is not to be wondered at if her craft has been
ignored or denied. Art was never applied to average material with so little
ostentation and so wonderful an effect. Her characters do not grow in her
mind as she writes, but step fully realized from her mind into the book. In
the opening pages of each of her novels there occur traits of character which
can be truly appreciated only on a second reading. Her close observation and
untiring realism might entitle her books to be used as historical documents—
authoritative descriptions of middle-class life in the English counties during
the period of the Napoleonic war. Only her satirical effects at times betray
the freedom with which she is handling and shaping the material supplied
by life.
Satire is the element in which she lives. It would be difficult to name
an English author, except perhaps Swift, whose works are more intimately
General 83
pervaded with the spirit of satire. Their methods and scope are, of course,
utterly different: there is not a trace of the savage indignation of Swift to
be found in all her writing. And yet her power, wielded by a less gentle
and submissive temper, would have furnished a very efficient light-armed
auxiliary to the war engaged in by Gulliver. She has the true fighter’s instinct
for the weak point in the adversary’s armour, although she exhibits it only in
the tourney of a summer’s day. It is amusement, not victory, that she seeks,
and her feats are like that feat of Saladin in The Talisman, who although he
could not cleave an iron mace asunder with a broadsword, could cut a veil of
gossamer as it floated in the air.
—Walter Raleigh, “Jane Austen,”
The English Novel, 1894, pp. 261–66
George Saintsbury (1896)

George Saintsbury is the first writer to explicitly mention irony as an inte-
gral part of Austen’s novels. Students might surmise why irony in Austen
remained largely undiscussed until the close of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps it was overlooked because, as Saintsbury mentions, readers did
not expect to find irony in women’s writing.
QQQ
They (her novels) had no enormous or sudden popularity, but the best judges,
from Scott downwards, at once recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is
not too much to say that by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit
has been acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm
and discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent
of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she is
the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father of the
nineteenth century romance.
One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness.
Even the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any novelist
of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are misleading.
Northanger Abbey was written more than twenty years before it appeared,
and the bulk of Pride and Prejudice (which some hold to be the best and
most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at least as Northanger
Abbey. That is to say, almost at the very time of the appearance of Camilla
(to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an original subscriber), a book not
strikingly more nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson,
84 Jane Austen
though a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss Burney
herself had been when she wrote Evelina was drawing other girls, who,
putting aside the most trivial details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be
living girls to-day.
The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted; the
touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting some readers,
the delicate and ever present irony either escaping or being distasteful to
others, while the extreme quietness of the action and the entire absence
of excitement probably revolt a third class. But the decriers do not usually
attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt
once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol
Miss Austen’s method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing
but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric
observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic
that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily
high compliment—a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic
“Janites” have ventured—inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even
conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent and
gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did it probably occur to him
that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort,
“Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss
Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally
feminine gift?”
It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about the method,
which, with the addition of a certain nescio quid, giving it its modern
difference, may be said to combine the peculiarities of Fielding and of
Richardson, though it works on a much smaller scale than either. It has the
intense and pervading, though not the exuberant and full-blooded, living-
ness of Fielding, and it also has something not unlike a feminine counterpart
and complement of his pervading irony; while it is not unlike Richardson
in building up the characters and the stories partly by an infinity of tiny
strokes of detail, often communicated in conversation, partly by the use of
an exceedingly nice and delicate analysis of motive and temperament. It is in
the former respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all,
women who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine
gift; and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do
not as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers to
Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray—even if it be not improper to use the
term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than difference—in
General 85
the use of this potent but most double-edged weapon. Her irony indeed
is so subtle that it requires a certain dose of subtlety to appreciate it, and
it is not uncommon to find those who consider such personages as Mr.
Collins in Pride and Prejudice to be merely farcical, instead of, as they are
in fact, preachers of the highest and most Shakespearian comedy. But there
would be no room here to examine Miss Austen’s perfections in detail; the
important thing for the purposes of this history is to observe again that she
“set the clock,” so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to
be nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded violent and
romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very least degree on describing
popular or passing fashions, amusements, politics; but confined herself
to the most strictly ordinary life. Yet she managed in some fashion so to
extract the characteristics of that life which are perennial and human, that
there never can be any doubt to fit readers in any age finding themselves
at home with her, just as they find themselves at home with all the greatest
writers of bygone ages. And lastly, by some analogous process she hit upon
a style which, though again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and
therefore now reviled as “stilted” and formal by those who have not the gift
of literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, and, save in the
merest externals, is neither ancient nor modern.
—George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth
Century Literature, 1896, pp. 128–31
Edmund Gosse (1897)

It has long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the only writer
with whom Jane Austen can fairly be compared is Shakespeare. It is obvious
that she has nothing of his width of range or sublimity of imagination; she
keeps herself to that two-inch square of ivory of which she spoke in her
proud and simple way. But there is no other English writer who possesses so
much of Shakespeare’s inevitability, or who produces such evidence of a like
omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, Jane Austen gives the
reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about her
creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions.
She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate
that we mistake it for nature. She never mixes her own temperament with
those of her characters, she is never swayed by them, she never loses for
a moment her perfect, serene control of them. Among the creators of the
86 Jane Austen
world, Jane Austen takes a place that is with the highest and that is purely
her own. . . .
It is difficult to say that she was influenced by any predecessor, and, most
unfortunately, of the history of her mind we know almost nothing. Her
reserve was great, and she died before she had become an object of curiosity
even to her friends. But we see that she is of the race of Richardson and
Marivaux, although she leaves their clumsy construction far behind. She was
a satirist, however, not a sentimentalist. One of the few anecdotes preserved
about her relates that she refused to meet Madame de Stael, and the Germanic
spirit was evidently as foreign to her taste as the lyricism born of Rousseau.
She was the exact opposite of all which the cosmopolitan critics of Europe
were deciding that English prose fiction was and always would be. Lucid,
gay, penetrating, exquisite, Jane Austen possessed precisely the qualities that
English fiction needed to drag it out of the Slough of Despond and start it
wholesomely on a new and vigorous career.
—Edmund Gosse, A Short History of Modern
English Literature, 1897, pp. 295–97
Vida D. Scudder (1898)

Using Scudder’s words as inspiration, students discussing historical con-
text may want to examine the extent to which contemporary readers rely
on Austen’s novels as offering lucid and accurate portraits of real life in
early-nineteenth-century England. Scudder would perhaps argue that we
accord the novels a realism they do not actually achieve and that Austen’s
fictive and subjective representations of her time period are of dubious
documentary value.
QQQ
Miss Austen, in the last generation, in the very heyday of the romantic
imagination, had written her modest and undying sketches of the life she
knew, the tranquil life that lingered unchanged in the by-ways of England.
Her conditions and temperament conspired to impose limitations which
make her art perhaps more enduring than that of her great successors, since
from very scarcity of material she was forced to individualize after much our
present manner. But on account of these very limitations, her work has slight
value as social evidence to the wider phases of contemporary life.
—Vida D. Scudder, Social Ideals in
English Letters, 1898, pp. 129–30
General 87
Janet Harper
“The Renascence of Jane Austen” (1900)
As to Miss Austen’s style, we can scarcely define its attraction, for in it
we get no music, no magic, no caressing phrases; it is not trenchant; we
carry away no glittering epigrams, but it is apt and spirited, and has that
indefinable felicitous touch that genius alone gives. The qualities without
which no sustained writing can exist—knowledge, observation, toleration,
and expression—are all there, deepening and mellowing towards the end, and
make a solid foundation on which to rest her easy, graceful dialogue, in which
part of her art she might be said to be without a rival.
—Janet Harper, “The Renascence of Jane Austen,”
Westminster Review, April 1900, p. 445
Earl of Iddesleigh “A Chat about

Jane Austen’s Novels” (1900)
The Earl of Iddesleigh’s initial argument, his originating premise, is that
Austen’s range is narrow not because she was incapable of expanding her
authorial scope but because she chose to write about a limited part of
society. In this excerpt, Iddesleigh agrees with Walter Raleigh in his asser-
tion that there is no harm in being exceptionally good at one literary mode
rather than just passably capable at a range of them.
The remainder of the Earl of Iddesleigh’s writing reflects on Austen’s
individual characters, first the men and then the women. It is clear that
Iddesleigh avoids criticizing Austen in any respect, but he does find fault
with a number of her characterizations. He attributes these errors to
Austen’s very personal point of view, rather than to her abilities as an
author. Various statements throughout his text support this: “perhaps she
shows her contempt for them a little too plainly” and “I cannot fancy that
Austen thought much of her, or she would not have allowed her to be so
entirely eclipsed by the vivacious and winning Mary Crawford.” Clearly
Iddesleigh feels strong personal connections (or a lack thereof) with
particular characters, and he assumes that Austen feels likewise, rather
than considering that she constructs certain characters with a specific
intention to further the larger all-encompassing story she is trying to tell.
This notion speaks to Austen’s ability as a psychological author, rather
than a plot-centered writer. Several reviewers mention that she is far more
concerned with aspects of personality in her novels than with action.
88 Jane Austen
Students would do well to look at the beginnings of the psychological

novel, sometimes called psychological realism, and perhaps determine
when and where such writing began as well as when and how (or perhaps
if) it became popular. Does Austen’s focus on character make her less
likely to be included in any category of popular fiction, in her century or
in our own? All of Austen’s major novels have been made into films, some
several times, so students interested in film and the transition from novel
to movie might investigate what makes Austen’s work so compelling
onscreen, particularly since there is little action in her books.
Another important task for students could involve following in
Iddesleigh’s footsteps and elaborating on Austen’s characterizations.
Iddesleigh groups characters according to type: Austen’s “bad young
men,” for example. Students might look at several Austen characters of
the same description in order to determine the nuances or gaps in their
characterizations, as well as possibly Austen’s overall perception of such
general character categories.
QQQ
In proceeding to speak of Miss Austen’s writings I am mainly guided by the
wish to protest against one or two erroneous views which still exist among
the unconverted, and primarily against the idea that her range was narrow.
This delusion arises in great part from her own famous expression about
her books, which she declares to be work upon ‘a little bit of ivory two inches
wide,’ and to be done ‘with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after
much labour.’ The sentence shows plainly enough that Miss Austen’s modesty
concealed her greatness from her own eyes, but its precise signification does
not strike me as very obvious. It must, no doubt, imply that she restrained
her genius within certain limits. What those limits were, we have to inquire;
but my own impression is that they applied to events and not to characters,
and that Miss Austen only bound herself by a determination that all the
circumstances in her stories should be such as might occur in ordinary life.
It is frequently alleged, however, that she confined herself too much to
the middle classes of society. That she left the lower classes alone must be
admitted and possibly regretted. Certainly one would have been glad to have
learned what James himself thought of that ‘corner into Vicarage Lane’ which
Mr. Woodhouse so dreaded, and to have listened to Nanny indulging herself
in a free criticism on her mistress, Mrs. Norris.
But of the aristocratic element we have plenty. There is General Tilney
with his “very old friends the Marquis of Longtown and General Courteney.”
He belongs to trie pre-revolutionary era, and many things might be done by
General 89
him which have since become impossible. Though her tastes and manners are
very different, Lady Catherine de Bourgh is of the same type. Darcy has blue
blood in his veins, and Anne Elliot is dainty and high-bred to the tips of her
fingers; while of all the great ladies in fiction, Eleanor Tilney strikes me as
one of the most charming and quite the most truly drawn. Surely the whole
House of Lords envied that unnamed Viscount who became her husband.
There is another allegation that Miss Austen’s men are limited. This,
again, may partly arise from a remark made by herself that ‘they’ (meaning
Mr. Knightley and Edmund Bertram) ‘are very far from being what I know
English gentlemen often are.’ It may also find some imaginary support in
the fact noticed by the late Sir Frederick Pollock, that there is no scene of
any consequence in the novels in which some woman is not on the stage.
Now, the charge that an author’s characters are limited may mean either that
they are accused of individually lacking depth or breadth or force, or else of
being too much alike and wanting variety. Miss Austen’s men assuredly do
not fail in this latter way, so it is only the power and skill with which they are
presented to us that require examination.
I will at once venture to assert that there are three of Miss Austen’s
creations—Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Bennet, and Mr. Collins—who defy criticism.
In this respect and in their own degree they resemble even Falstaff and Don
Quixote. How they come to be what they are seems miraculous. The first is
a nervous invalid, the second a cleverish embittered squire, and the third
a fulsome clergyman. Such personages promise little enough, but there is
added to them ‘the consecration and the poet’s dream,’ and they stand forth
high among the ranks of the immortals. There I leave them. No words of
mine shall profane their glory.
It is a long step downwards to what I shall call Miss Austen’s ‘bad young
men,’ with whom I think she has come most near to failure. But even here
she provides us with ample variety. Willoughby is weak, Wickham is a ne’er-
do-well, John Thorpe is vulgar and conceited, and Henry Crawford proves in
the end to be a slave to his own desires. Of course they are all selfish, but so
is every ‘bad young man.’ I have lately remarked much praise bestowed upon
John Thorpe by critics from whom it is presumptuous to differ. If any of them
should chance to see this article, I ask them to forgive my presumption, and
I base my plea upon the pain I am inflicting on myself in finding fault with
one of Miss Austen’s characters, instead of joining in the commendations
of judges for whose opinions I entertain the most profound respect. But
I lament to say that to me John Thorpe appears dreadfully crude. With
Wickham and Willoughby Miss Austen never seems entirely at home. They
90 Jane Austen
are necessities to her stories, and perhaps she shows her contempt for them a
little too plainly. Still, there is a ring of genuine passion in Willoughby’s love
for Marianne. Indeed, of all Miss Austen’s lovers they are the most stormy
pair. Henry Crawford is treated, as he deserves, with much more respect.
He is painted with great care, and due weight is allowed to his many good
qualities. We recognise it as quite natural that the two Miss Bertrams should
pull caps for his favour. Though his weakness ultimately ruins him, he is far
from being weak all round. Miss Austen really seems to have hesitated as to
his fate. Up to the final catastrophe she left it possible for him to marry Fanny
and become a virtuous country gentleman. Edmund would have been lucky
to have secured Mary, but the difficulty may have been Maria. Her marriage
with Mr. Rushworth had got to bring about its own punishment, and the
elopement presented the most obvious means.
It is an easy transition from Henry Crawford to the ‘good young men,’
who again differ widely from each other. In one of them, as I think, Miss
Austen has achieved a splendid success. Henry Tilney is absolutely true and
absolutely charming. He is an English gentleman of the very best kind—
gay, witty, and helpful, with a full sense of the duties and responsibilities
of life. Our knowledge of him is complete, and our liking for him never
wavers. He is delightful at the outset, when he astonishes Mrs. Allen by his
intimate acquaintance with muslin, and he remains delightful up to the final
visit to Fullerton, when he so thoughtfully preserves Catherine from any
conscientious objection to his suit.
With the exception of a brief spell of parental opposition, the course of
Henry Tilney’s love is perfectly smooth. This is as it should be with such a
fascinating hero, to whom we may imagine that any of Miss Austen’s heroines,
excepting Anne Elliot, who was nearly thirty, must have succumbed. Darcy
himself might have found in him a victorious rival. Darcy, however, is
an admirable lover, and his courtship, with its changing fortunes, is most
interesting. I cannot quite believe in all the expressions attributed to him
when he first proposed to Elizabeth in the ‘humble abode’ of Mr. Collins, but I
think that is the only occasion on which his ‘Pride’ runs away with him. From
the time of the meeting at Pemberley he is quite excellent. His overwhelming
love for Elizabeth is powerfully shown in the scenes at Pemberley and
Lambton, and so are the difficulties which he found in displaying it after the
return to Longbourn. Darcy is one of the heroes who is worthy of his bride.
Frank Churchill is another, only he is more than worthy of the unattractive
Jane Fairfax. If he pushes too far the principle that all is fair in love and
war, his high spirits and cheerfulness easily earn our forgiveness, while his
General 91
famous hair-cutting expedition to London is one of those touches of which

Miss Austen alone is capable. Almost equally fine is the petulant outburst of
temper when Jane at last opposes his wishes, and which Emma humanely
cures by pointing out the door of the dining-room in Donwell Abbey.
For the rest of the lovers I care less. Bingley is pleasing enough as far as
he goes, but he is not of first-rate consequence, and I must own to finding
Edmund Bertram and Captain Wentworth rather dull. Mr. Knightley is surely
just a wee bit ponderous, while in Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars and
Colonel Brandon seem to me to stand on a quite inferior level.
It would be gross flattery to Mr. Elton to call him either a lover or a hero,
but he is a good specimen of the tame cat with very ugly claws. He would be
altogether detestable only that we are bound to remember in his excuse that
Emma did treat him in a truly maddening style. She would have annoyed
most people by offering them Harriet Smith instead of herself, but a snob
like Mr. Elton must have been specially offended by such a proposal. Another
disagreeable gentleman is Sir Walter Elliot, and it is sad to think that his
selfish vanity was never disturbed. There was no Emma in the circles in which
he lived. In such minor characters as Sir Thomas Bertram, Charles Musgrove,
Admiral Croft, and William Price we get examples of Miss Austen’s exact
fidelity to nature. If you want to know what a respectable head of a family is
like, you need only look at Sir Thomas. Charles Musgrove is emphatically the
eldest son of a country gentleman, living on good terms with his father but
with a separate establishment. Admiral Croft is bluff and hearty, as an admiral
ought to be after a successful career, and William Price is a gallant sailor lad
whom everyone except Miss Norris is forced both to like and admire. But
there is one other officer, Captain Harville in Persuasion, about whom there
is a peculiar interest. Miss Austen shrank from emotional display, but when
Captain Harville, who is mourning for the loss of his sister, is mentioned it is
usually with the most delicate tenderness. Persuasion was completed in 1816,
and by that time Miss Austen’s health had begun to fail, while in the preceding
year she had been greatly distressed by the dangerous illness of her brother
Henry. These sorrows may have influenced her treatment of Captain Harville,
but in any case it is a further and a remarkable proof of her powers.
In passing on to Miss Austen’s women it is natural to ask what other author
or authoress can show such a gallery of feminine portraits, so numerous, so
diverse, so true, so elaborate, and all so good? The answers of the faithful can be
anticipated. But the faithful, though thus far agreed, differ widely over the merits
of the separate pictures. No one should speak too positively in such a matter, but
to me it seems that where many are great, Emma is the greatest of all.
92 Jane Austen
‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,’
writes Miss Austen, and I believe it is speciously argued that after these words
the most respectful conduct on the part of her worshippers is to carry out
her expectations and dislike Emma. At any rate many of them do so, and
Miss Austen has spared no pains to provide them with good reasons for their
unfavourable verdict. There is not an atom of mercy shown, but Emma’s faults
and follies are laid before us by a ruthless hand, and they are quite horribly
real. Emma did really come within an ace of ruining Harriet Smith’s life
when she so unjustifiably forced her to refuse Robert Martin. She did really
allow herself to discuss with Frank Churchill the probability of Mr. Dixon
preferring Jane Fairfax to the wife he had just married, and she did in truth
barbarously insult poor Miss Bates. How could Miss Austen still like her?
The answer is perhaps twofold. From an artistic point of view, Miss
Austen must have quite loved Emma, who provided her with such superlative
opportunities for fooling, and in whom she has obtained one of her most
conspicuous triumphs. In spite of her sins, Emma is adored by all connected
with her, and we are made to feel that their adoration is natural. Who but
Miss Austen could have brought out such a result? Secondly, we may notice
that Miss Austen always cares more for the active virtues, with which Emma
was well endowed, than she does for their passive sisters. Emma did shocking
things, but then she did nice things that more than counterbalanced them,
and she was thus in Miss Austen’s eyes much superior to any character which
is mainly composed of negative qualities. We ourselves must look at Emma
all round. We must remember how everything contributed to make her
what we call spoilt. From her early girlhood she was mistress of all around
her. Fancy the position of a young lady, rich, vigorous, handsome, and
prosperous, whom only one person in the world ever ventured to criticise,
and that person her lover!
But whether we like Emma or not, we cannot deny her great distinction.
In all comedy she has few equals. We see her under a great many different and
striking aspects, and she is always an actual living person.
It is said that every one has a double, and I used to know a lady who in her
youth must, I am sure, have been Emma’s very image. Experience also enables
me to vouch for the accuracy of the description of Emma’s shifts to keep
herself away from Harriet and Mr. Elton during the walk from the cottage,
and of her disappointment when she overheard their conversation and found
it was impersonal. I was once a spectator of a similar scene, and I fear that
through masculine obtuseness I was a nuisance to the lady who acted the part
of Miss Woodhouse.
General 93
And, lastly, Emma is such glorious fun. Her imagination does stretch
to such immeasurable lengths. Who but herself could have conceived the
‘ingenious and animating suspicion’ about Jane Fairfax and Mr. Dixon and
have remained quite blind to the significance of Frank Churchill’s conduct?
and of whom else could it be written ‘Emma continued to entertain no doubt
of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first she
thought it was a good deal, and afterwards but little’? For my own part, it is
with pride that I avow myself to be regardless of Emma’s misdoings, and to
be subjugated by her imperious charm.
It is, I suppose, generally agreed that Miss Austen’s three principal heroines
are Emma, Elizabeth Bennet, and Anne Elliot. None of them surpasses
Eleanor Tilney in truth, grace, and dignity, nor do they rival Catherine
Morland in exquisite and captivating simplicity; but they are worked out with
greater elaboration. There is, in a word, more of them. Elizabeth is probably
the most popular of the three, and it may be said of her that she is the wittiest
young lady who has appeared in fiction since the days of Shakespeare. Some
do not like Emma, and some think Anne deficient in that liveliness to which
Miss Austen has accustomed us, but I believe that the hostile critic of Eliza
Bennet has not yet been discovered. Anne Elliot is older and more grave than
any of the other heroines, and she is unlike them all. Miss Austen’s failing
health may have had some influence on the portrait, but in quiet beauty it
cannot be excelled. Of Eleanor Tilney I have already had occasion to speak,
but there remains for me the happiness of a word about Catherine Morland.
Catherine is sometimes called a lucky girl, and her worthy parents no doubt
regarded her in this light, but no luck could possibly exceed her deserts.
There is a subtle entrancing freshness about her like that of
the morning rose
That untouched stands,
and there is a perfectly unending delight in her views of life and proceedings.
How Miss Austen would have marvelled if she could have foreseen that Mrs.
Radcliffe’s immortality would come to depend upon Catherine’s adventure
with the mislaid collection of washing-bills!
I am not quite certain who ought to come next to the five just mentioned,
but I incline to Mary Crawford, though Marianne Dashwood is more
amusing. Marianne, indeed, with her ‘Sensibility’ gives Miss Austen finer
opportunities of poking fun at her heroine than she gets anywhere except
with Emma and Catherine Morland. Her noble resolve to lie awake for the
whole night after Willoughby’s departure, which she believed was to be only
94 Jane Austen
for a short time, and her miserable condition on the next day, did, no doubt,
depress her family, but we can only find her romantic spirit exhilarating.
Elinor Dashwood, her sister, is perhaps a little overburdened with ‘Sense,’
and Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is rather a poor creature. She is full of
the passive virtues, but I cannot fancy that Miss Austen thought much of her,
or she would not have allowed her to be so entirely eclipsed by the vivacious
and winning Mary Crawford.
I have now run through the list of the chief heroines, and the moment has
arrived at which I must give utterance to a reflection which applies to them
all, and which causes me the utmost distress. Every one of them must have
ruined her looks as far as was possible by the manner in which she did her
hair, and every one of them must have worn the most hideous dresses that
womankind has ever known! One comfort alone remains. Miss Austen had
too much taste to describe the prevailing fashions.
With the exception of her heroines, Miss Austen is severe upon her sex.
Among her other famous women I should say there are nine first-rate characters,
not one of whom is pleasing, while most of them are much the reverse. Miss Bates
and Mrs. Jennings are both completely amiable, but Mrs. Jennings is vulgar and
Miss Bates is primarily a bore. Some people, of whom I am not one, go so far
as to find her speeches tedious even to read. Charlotte Lucas, by marrying Mr.
Collins, in modern parlance gives herself away; and Lady Catherine de Bourgh
is imperious, inquisitive, and generally unpleasant; while Mrs. Bennet drives her
family almost mad with her intolerable folly. Mrs. Elton is simply odious in her
presumption and utter lack of refinement, and Isabella Thorpe is coarse in grain,
self-seeking, and insincere. The meanness of Mrs. Norris is perfect, and would
even be painful if it were not for such blessed reliefs as the meditated attack on
Nanny’s cousin and the affair of the green-baize curtain. Mary Musgrove is a
grumbling egotist, but with her determination always to take precedence of her
mother-in-law, and with her whole attitude towards her relations and towards
her own health, she seems to me inimitable.
—Earl of Iddesleigh, “A Chat about Jane Austen’s Novels,”
Nineteenth Century, May 1900, pp. 812–18

Elizabeth Bennet” (1901)
Students interested in comparative or international studies of literature
can pick up where Howells leaves off and perform a study of American
General 95
versus English novels of a particular time period. Do the respective

countries apply different criteria and standards to the novel? All else
being equal, students might want to draw up their own criteria for a
literary masterpiece.
QQQ
The fashion of Maria Edgeworth’s world has long passed away, but human
nature is still here, and the fiction which was so true to it in the first years of
the century is true to it in the last. “The Absentee,” “Vivian,” “Ennui,” “Helen,”
“Patronage,” show their kindred with “Belinda,” and by their frank and fresh
treatment of character, their knowledge of society, and their employment of
the major rather than the minor means of moving and amending the reader,
they all declare themselves of the same lineage. In their primitive ethicism
they own “Pamela,” and “Sir Charles Grandison” for their ancestors; but they
are much more dramatic than Richardson’s novels; they are almost theatrical
in their haste for a direct moral effect. In this they are like the Burney-
D’Arblay novels, which also deal with fashionable life, with dissipated lords
and ladies, with gay parties at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, with debts and duns,
with balls and routs in splendid houses, whose doors are haunted by sheriff ’s
officers, with bankruptcies and arrests, or flights and suicides. But the drama
of the Edgeworth fiction tends mostly to tragedy, and that of the Burney-
D’Arblay fiction to comedy; though there are cases in the first where the
wrong-doer is saved alive, and cases in the last where he is lost in his sins. The
author of “Evelina” was a good but light spirit, the author of “Belinda” was
a good but very serious soul and was amusing with many misgivings. Maria
Edgeworth was a humorist in spite of herself; Frances Burney was often not
as funny as she meant, and was, as it were, forced into tragical effects by the
pressure of circumstances. You feel that she would much rather have got on
without them; just as you feel that Miss Edgeworth rejoices in them, and is
not sure that her jokes will be equally blessed to you.
I
It remained for the greatest of the gifted women, who beyond any or all
other novelists have fixed the character and behavior of Anglo-Saxon fiction,
to assemble in her delightful talent all that was best in that of her sisters.
Jane Austen was indeed so fine an artist, that we are still only beginning
to realize how fine she was; to perceive, after a hundred years, that in the
form of the imagined fact, in the expression of personality, in the conduct
of the narrative, and the subordination of incident to character, she is still
96 Jane Austen
unapproached in the English branch of Anglo-Saxon fiction. In American

fiction Hawthorne is to be named with her for perfection of form; the best
American novels are built upon more symmetrical lines than the best English
novels, and have unconsciously shaped themselves upon the ideal which she
instinctively and instantly realized.
Of course it was not merely in externals that Jane Austen so promptly
achieved her supremacy. The wonder of any beautiful thing is that it is
beautiful in so many ways; and her fiction is as admirable for its lovely humor,
its delicate satire, its good sense, its kindness, its truth to nature, as for its
form. There is nothing hurried or huddled in it, nothing confused or obscure,
nothing excessive or inordinate. The marvel of it is none the less because it is
evident that she wrote from familiar acquaintance with the fiction that had
gone before her. In her letters there are hints of her intimacy with the novels
of Goldsmith, of Richardson, of Frances Burney, and of Maria Edgeworth;
but in her stories there are scarcely more traces of their influence than of
Mrs. Radcliffe’s, or any of the romantic writers whom she delighted to mock.
She is obviously of her generation, but in all literature she is one of the most
original and independent spirits. Her deeply domesticated life was passed
in the country scenes, the county society, which her books portray, far from
literary men and events; and writing as she used, amidst the cheerful chatter
of her home, she produced literature of still unrivalled excellence in its way,
apparently without literary ambition, and merely for the pleasure of getting
the life she knew before her outward vision. With the instinct and love of
doing it, and not with the sense of doing anything uncommon, she achieved
that masterpiece, “Pride and Prejudice,” which is quite as remarkable for
being one of several masterpieces as for its absolute excellence. There
have been authors enough who have written one extraordinary book; but
all Jane Austen’s books are extraordinary, and “Persuasion,” “Northanger
Abbey,” “Emma,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Sense and Sensibility,” are each a
masterpiece, inferior only to “Pride and Prejudice,” which was written first.
After the young girl of twenty had written it, she kept it half as many years
longer before she printed it. In mere order of chronology it belongs to the
eighteenth century, but in spirit it is distinctly of the nineteenth century, as
we feel that cycle to have been when we feel proudest of it. In manners as
much as in methods it is such a vast advance upon the work of her sister
novelists that you wonder whether some change had not already taken place
in English society which she notes, and which they fail to note.
The topics of the best fiction of any time will probably be those which
decent men and women talk of together in the best company; and such
General 97
topics vary greatly from time to time. There is no reason to think that
Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth were less pure-minded than Jane
Austen, but they dealt with phases of human experience which she did not
deal with, because their friends and acquaintances did so, without being
essentially worse than hers. A tendency towards a more scrupulous tone
seems to have been the effect of the general revival in religion at the close
of the last century, which persisted down to that time in our own century
when the rise of scientific agnosticism loosed the bonds of expression.
Now again of late years men and women in the best company talk together
of things which would not have been discussed during the second and
third quarters of the century. One must hedge one’s position on such a
point with many perhapses; nothing can be affirmed with certainty; the
most that can be said is that the tone if not the temper, the manners if
not the morals, which have lately been called fin de siècle, are noticeably
more akin to what was fin de siècle a hundred years ago, than they are
to what was thought fit in polite society fifty years ago. Possibly another
revival of religion will bring another change, such as the purity of Jane
Austen’s fiction may have forecast rather than reported. But we do not
know this, and possibly again her books are what they are in matter and
manner because the little world of county society which she observed was
wholesomer and decenter than the great world of London society which
Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth studied.
An author is as great for what he leaves out as for what he puts in; and
Jane Austen shows her mastery in nothing more than in her avoidance of
moving accidents for her most moving effects. She seems to have known
intuitively that character resides in habit, and that for the novelist to seek its
expression in violent events would be as stupid as for the painter to expect
an alarm of fire or burglary to startle his sitter into a valuable revelation of
his qualities. She puts from her, therefore, all the tremendous contrivances
of her predecessors, and takes her place quietly on the ground to which they
were, the best of them, falteringly and uncertainly feeling their way. After
De Foe and Goldsmith she was the first to write a thoroughly artistic novel
in English, and she surpassed Goldsmith as far in method as she refined
upon De Foe in material. Among her contemporaries she was as easily first
as Shakspere among the Elizabethan dramatists; and in the high excellencies
of symmetrical form, force of characterization, clearness of conception,
simplicity and temperance of means, she is still supreme: that girl who began
at twenty with such a masterpiece as “Pride and Prejudice,” and ended with
such a masterpiece as “Persuasion” at forty-two! . . .
98 Jane Austen
That protest already noted, that revolt against the arrogance of rank,
which makes itself felt more or less in all the novels of Jane Austen, might
have been something that she inhaled with the stormy air of the time,
and respired again with the unconsciousness of breathing. But whether
she knew it or not, this quiet little woman, who wrote her novels in
the bosom of her clerical family; who was herself so contentedly of the
established English order; who believed in inequality and its implications
as of divine ordinance; who loved the delights of fine society, and rejoiced
as few girls have in balls and parties, was in her way asserting the Rights
of Man as unmistakably as the French revolutionists whose volcanic
activity was of about the same compass of time as her literary industry.
In her books the snob, not yet named or classified, is fully ascertained
for the first time. Lady Catharine de Burgh in “Pride and Prejudice,” John
Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility,”Mr. Elton in “Emma,” General Tilney
in “Northanger Abbey,” and above all Sir Walter Eliot in “Persuasion,” are
immortal types of insolence or meanness which foreshadow the kindred
shapes of Thackeray’s vaster snob-world, and fix the date when they began
to be recognized and detested. But their recognition and detestation were
only an incident of the larger circumstance studied in the different stories;
and in “Persuasion” the snobbishness of Sir Walter has little to do with
the fortunes of his daughter Anne after the first unhappy moment of her
broken engagement. . . .
In primitive fiction plot is more important than character; as the art
advances character becomes the chief interest, and the action is such as
springs from it. In the old tales and romances there is no such thing as
character in the modern sense; their readers were satisfied with what the
heroes and heroines did and suffered.
When the desire for character arose, the novelists loaded their types with
attributes; but still there was no character, which is rooted in personality. The
novelist of to-day who has not conceived of this is as archaic as any romancer
of the Middle Ages in his ideal of art. Most of the novels printed in the last
year, in fact, are as crudely devised as those which have amused people of
childish imagination at any time in the last thousand years; and it will always
be so with most novels, because most people are of childish imagination. The
masterpieces in fiction are those which delight the mind with the traits of
personality, with human nature recognizable by the reader through its truth
to himself.
The wonder of Jane Austen is that at a time when even the best fiction
was overloaded with incident, and its types went staggering about under the
General 99
attributes heaped upon them, she imagined getting on with only so much
incident as would suffice to let her characters express their natures movingly
or amusingly.
—William Dean Howells,
“Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet,”
Heroines of Fiction, 1901, p. 37–65
t
works
t
Works 103
Pride and Prejudice

Unsigned (1813)
We had occasion to speak favorably of the former production of this author
or authoress, specified above, and we readily do the same of the present.1
It is very far superior to almost all the publications of the kind which have
lately come before us. It has a very unexceptionable tendency, the story is
well told, the characters remarkably well drawn and supported, and written
with great spirit as well as vigour. The story has no great variety, it is simply
this. The hero is a young man of large fortune and fashionable manners,
whose distinguishing characteristic is personal pride. The heroine, on the
first introduction, conceives a most violent prejudice against Darcy, which
a variety of circumstances well imagined and happily represented, tend to
strengthen and confirm. The under plot is an attachment between the friend of
Darcy and the elder sister of the principal female character; other personages,
of greater or less interest and importance, complete the dramatis personae,
some of whose characters are exceedingly well drawn. Explanations of the
different perplexities and seeming contrarieties, are gradually unfolded, and
the two principal performers are happily united.
Of the characters, Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, is supported with great
spirit and consistency throughout; there seems no defect in the portrait;
this is not precisely the case with Darcy her lover; his easy unconcern and
fashionable indifference, somewhat abruptly changes to the ardent lover. The
character of Mr. Collins, the obsequious rector, is excellent. Fancy presents
us with many such, who consider the patron of exalted rank as the model of
all that is excellent on earth, and the patron’s smiles and condescension as
the sum of human happiness. Mr. Bennet, the father of Elizabeth, presents
us with some novelty of character; a reserved, acute, and satirical, but
indolent personage, who sees and laughs at the follies and indiscretions of
his dependents, without making any exertions to correct them. The picture
of the younger Miss Bennets, their perpetual visits to the market town
where officers are quartered, and the result, is perhaps exemplified in every
provincial town in the kingdom.
It is unnecessary to add, that we have perused these volumes with
much satisfaction and amusement, and entertain very little doubt that their
successful circulation will induce the author to similar exertions.
104 Jane Austen
Note
1. In its issue of May 1812, the British Critic had praised Sense and Sensibility,
assuring its female readers “that they may peruse these volumes not only
with satisfaction but with real benefits,” sure to learn “many sober and
salutary maxims for the conduct of life, exemplified in a very pleasing and
entertaining narrative” (p. 527).
—Unsigned, The British Critic, vol. 41, no. 2 (1813) p. 189–90
Mary Russell Mitford (1814)

The want of elegance is almost the only want in Miss Austen. I have not
read her Mansfield Park; but it is impossible not to feel in every line of Pride
and Prejudice, in every word of Elizabeth, the entire want of taste which
could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved of such a man
as Darcy. Wickham is equally bad. Oh! they were just fit for each other, and
I cannot forgive that delightful Darcy for parting them. Darcy should have
married Jane. He is of all the admirable characters the best designed and
the best sustained. I quite agree with you in preferring Miss Austen to Miss
Edgeworth. If the former had a little more taste, a little more perception of
the graceful, as well as of the humorous, I know not indeed any one to whom
I should not prefer her. There is none of the hardness, the cold selfishness,
of Miss Edgeworth about her writings; she is in a much better humour with
the world; she preaches no sermons; she wants nothing but the beau ideal of
the female character to be a perfect novel-writer; and perhaps even that beau
ideal would only be missed by such a petite maitresse in books as myself, who
would never admit a muse into my library till she had been taught to dance
by the Graces.
—Mary Russell Mitford,
Letter to Sir William Elford (December 20, 1814)
Henry Crabb Robinson (1819)

Henry Crabb Robinson’s extensive diaries provide great insight into late-
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life. Like many readers and scholars,
Robinson thinks Pride and Prejudice is not only Austen’s best work, but one
of the best by any female writer. Students can write an evaluative argu-
ment comparing Austen’s works with one another or with other novels.
QQQ
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I sat up till two, as I did last night, to finish Pride and Prejudice. This novel
I consider as one of the most excellent of the works of our female novelists.
Its merit lies in the characters, and in the perfectly colloquial style of the
dialogue. Mrs. Bennet, the foolish mother, who cannot conceal her projects
to get rid of her daughters, is capitally drawn. There is a thick-headed servile
parson, also a masterly sketch. His stupid letters and her ridiculous speeches
are as delightful as wit. The two daughters are well contrasted—the gentle and
candid Jane and the lively but prejudiced Elizabeth, are both good portraits,
and the development of the passion between Elizabeth and the proud Darcy,
who at first hate each other, is executed with skill and effect.
—Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, January 12, 1819
Sir Walter Scott (1826)

Sir Walter Scott admires Austen’s “exquisite touch,” and students might
compare and contrast it with the “Big Bow-wow strain” and address such
questions as: In which books can each style be found? Do any books
include both styles? Does an author’s gender or background make him or
her more likely to write one type rather than another?
QQQ
Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen’s very finely written
novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the
involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the
most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like
any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace
things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the
sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!
—Sir Walter Scott, Journal, March 14, 1826

Students might read Brontë’s novels to surmise why she feels this nega-
tively about Austen’s “commonplace” settings and people. The two writ-
ers also provide evidence that all female authors did not write in a similar
fashion, and that the differences and similarities between the early and
mid-nineteenth century are greater than many people realize.
QQQ
106 Jane Austen
Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What
induced you to say that you would have rather written Pride and Prejudice or
Tom ]ones, than any of the Waverley Novels?
I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and
then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait
of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat
borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no
open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to
live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
—Charlotte Brontë, Letter to George Henry Lewes
(January 12, 1848)
W.F. Pollock “British Novelists” (1860)

Pollock’s comment that “[t]he moral of Miss Austen’s tales does not lie
in the consideration of the final fortunes of her personages, but in the
general opportunity afforded of regarding character and manners”
could lead students to more thoroughly acquaint themselves with the
manners, mores, and social codes of early-nineteenth-century England
and the extent to which such notions shaped and were imprinted on the
lives of Austen’s characters.
QQQ
In Pride and Prejudice, the characters are more complex, and those upon
which the greatest elaboration has been bestowed are not of the kind which
can be described by an epithet or two. Mr. Bennet, in this respect like Mr.
Palmer, derives many of his peculiarities from being united to a woman
of mean understanding and no cultivation; but he has the additional
misfortune to contend with, of uncertain temper and a more active amount
of foolishness. Driven back on his own reserve, caprice, and love of sarcasm,
he takes refuge with his books, and renounces the duties of domestic and
parental life. Jane Bennet is one of those attractive and gentle persons whom
everybody must like, but without the interest of peculiarity. This is reserved
for Elizabeth, whose occasional forwardness and want of perfect good
breeding, with her powers of amusement, love of the ridiculous, and her real
excellence and ability, make her alternately a person to like or be provoked
with. As admirers of Miss Elizabeth, and in common we suppose with the rest
of her friends, we must regret that the vivacity of her manners should ever
degenerate into pertness. Her enemies, too, will always remark on the course
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of coincidence by which her dislike to Darcy begins to disappear after seeing

his fine place in Derbyshire, and how she begins to comprehend that he is
exactly the man who in disposition and talents would most suit her, precisely
when the folly of Lydia has brought disgrace on her own family. It is true,
however, that at Pemberley she first learns Darcy’s real character, and the
worthlessness of Wickham, who had prejudiced her mind against him; and
it was the elopement of her sister which gave occasion for Darcy’s generous
and delicate assistance. Miss Austen, indeed, herself has anticipated and
disarmed this sort of objection, by a stroke of conscious power, equal to that
of Richardson in the allusion to Sir Charles Grandison and the ass between
two bundles of hay. For in answer to her sister’s inquiries, ‘How long she had
loved Mr. Darcy?’ Elizabeth is herself made to say, playfully, ‘I believe I must
date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’ Mary with
her books, and Lydia and Catherine with their officers, are very unworthy of
their elder sisters; and we might be almost inclined to hold Jane and Elizabeth
to some extent responsible for the faults and follies of the younger ones. But
with such parents, and with so little difference of age to give authority, it
would be unfair upon them to do so.
The pair of friends by whose visit to Hertfordshire the fortunes of the
Bennet family are so much affected, are admirably drawn. The popular, good-
looking, and gentlemanly Bingley, with his easy temper and manners, is one
of those people whom every one is always glad to meet, but whose absence
can be supported with equanimity. Darcy is perhaps the highest pitched of all
Miss Austen’s male characters. Externally haughty, reserved, refined to a fault,
and making enemies in general society because he will not take the trouble to
make himself agreeable, he has a noble mind and a generous temper.
Sir William Lucas (probably one of Peg Nicholson’s knights) and his lady
are specimens of not very wise but inoffensive and friendly people. It is a
capital touch (and distinguishes him from the common herd of pompous
civic knights), that though elated by his dignity, Sir William’s presentation at
St. James’s, acting on a kindly nature, had made him courteous, and anxious to
occupy himself in being civil to all the world. The servile and self-important
Mr. Collins is a special delineation. It is wonderful how so much absurdity
can be so well kept together and handled without producing weariness or
disgust. He is always good, but is perhaps to be seen at his greatest perfection
in his letters to Mr. Bennet, written on the occasion of Lydia’s going off
with Wickham, and on Elizabeth’s intended marriage to Darcy. Mr. Collins’
patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is of a commoner type. Pride, love of
management, and vulgarity still maintain themselves in the world, in spite
108 Jane Austen
of Miss Austen and other teachers. She is however allowed to get over her
discomfiture by the young lady who dares to engage herself to her nephew
against her commands, and she has sense enough to make the best of what she
cannot help. Wickham is, after all, not much more than a walking gentleman.
Of pleasing manners, but without principle or more than ordinary ability,
he is capable of making a superficial impression in his favour. Intensely self-
indulgent, he fortunately is without the necessary qualities to be more than a
second-rate villain. He can be bought with money, and his price is not high.
Contempt for him is complete when the necessary pecuniary arrangements
are made for his marriage with the wretched Lydia. The moral of Miss Austen’s
tales does not lie in the consideration of the final fortunes of her personages,
but in the general opportunity afforded of regarding character and manners;
but if any deduction is to be drawn from Pride and Prejudice, it is to the effect
that handsome and agreeable girls need not despair of making good matches,
although they may have bad connexions, and foolish or odd parents. Here, as
in the rest, the level of excellence is not high: we should prefer to live among
a very different set of people. Darcy, however, suggests loftier aspirations; and
if we could continue our acquaintance with the characters in this novel after
closing the volume, we should like to be often at Pemberley, and as seldom as
possible at Hunsford or Longbourn.
—W.F. Pollock, “British Novelists,” Fraser’s Magazine,
January 1860, pp. 30–35
James Oliphant
“Scott and Jane Austen” (1899)
It is an ungracious task to call attention to the limitations of an author to
whom we owe so much, but the value of Jane Austen’s contribution to the
art of fiction, as we find it at the beginning of the present reign, can only be
appreciated by distinguishing clearly what she achieved from what was left
to be achieved by her successors. While justly insisting that the true field
of fiction lay in the study of contemporary character and manners, she was
shut out by the narrowness of her lot from that breadth of outlook which
could alone have made her pictures representative of life as a whole. Notably
she excludes all reference to the humbler classes; her characters all belong
to her own rank of life, the country gentry and those who were on visiting
terms with them; or if any less respectable person appears incidentally, it is
only as a dependant or accessory to the upper middle-class society, outside
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of which she does not seem to feel herself on safe ground. Moreover, it is
a somewhat idle and pleasure-loving atmosphere—occasionally almost a
sordid atmosphere. Most of the men have several thousands a year and
nothing particular to do with them except to enjoy themselves, while the
ladies are too often occupied in the soul-destroying pursuit of trying to
secure a husband out of the aforesaid men either for their daughters or their
sisters or for themselves. Truly, little room for anything heroic in all this! All
the greater honour, however, to the artist who, while faithfully representing
the life she saw around her, has succeeded so unmistakably in showing us
what was worthy in it, as well as what was base and ignoble.
In point of construction, while we cannot reasonably complain of any
lack of intricacy or subtlety in the plots, we can recognise certain crudities
of treatment in almost all of them. Perhaps Pride and Prejudice is the only
one where the general design can be almost unreservedly praised, but even
in this, which is undoubtedly the finest of her novels, there is one serious
defect that is absent in none of them, namely, an inadequate sense of dramatic
climax. It may be ungenerous to find fault with the author for the perfunctory
manner in which she disposes of the minor figures in her story after the main
interest has been exhausted. In this respect she merely followed the tradition
which Scott also accepted (though, as it would appear from his occasional
apologies, not entirely without misgivings), and we cannot make it a matter
of serious reproach that she did not show the discretion of later artists in
ringing down the curtain on the most effective situation and leaving the
subsidiary issues to resolve themselves in the imaginations of the readers.
But it was entirely inexcusable that she should invariably fail to realise the
opportunity of making emotional capital out of the supreme psychological
moment of her denoument. Where the principal theme was avowedly the
ripening of sentiment and affection by mutual influence between the two
characters whose eventual union completed the story, it was a serious error
of judgment, if not a lack of artistic courage, which led her always to relapse
into frigid narrative at the very point where the leading persons of the drama
should have “taken the stage,” and admitted the audience to their fullest
confidence through the direct impression of living speech under the stress
of strong emotion. In Mansfield Park what could have been more interesting
than a vivid transcript of the scene where Fanny’s long-cherished love was
first made known to Edmund? But, to use a theatrical term, all this business
was done “of f, ” and we merely get a formal intimation that it duly took
place. In Pride and Prejudice, also, when Darcy renews his offer of marriage
after the chastening of his pride, and we are on the tip-toe of expectation to
110 Jane Austen
know exactly what Elizabeth will say, how disappointing when the author
steps in between us and her characters in the following sentence expressed
in perfectly correct but thoroughly undramatic phrases:—Elizabeth, feeling
all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now
forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him
to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change since
the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and
pleasure his present assurances.
Even in the delineation of character, where Jane Austen’s chief strength
lies, there is one shortcoming that should not escape critical notice. It was
inevitable that, writing as she did before the era of organic science, she should
betray what we must now hold to be an incomplete conception of the part
that is played by the forces alike of heredity and environment in the formation
of character. It would be idle indeed even to suggest such a standard if we
were merely estimating her historical significance, but when we are asked
by Mr. Augustine Birrell to regard her achievement in fiction as greater than
that of George Eliot, not relatively to her time but absolutely, we cannot but
remember that while the later writer’s creations seem all to be accounted for
in the destiny of their descent and their surroundings, the earlier novelist
too frequently presents us with characters that bear no definite relation to
their circumstances. All careful readers of Jane Austen’s books must have
been perplexed by discovering wide differences not merely of temperament
but of general tone and type among members of the same family, or between
parents and their children, which are not sufficiently explained to make them
easily credible. Of course such cases frequently occur in real life, but the artist
should illustrate the general truths of nature rather than her exceptional
freaks, and the neglect of this maxim, though it should be little noticed in
any single novel, may become marked when the writer’s work is regarded as
a whole. It is by her gallery of portraits that Miss Austen will live. There is
hardly a figure in her books that is not instinct with life; scarcely ever is there
any uncertainty or inconsistency in the drawing. She has been accused of
exaggeration in some of the characters that are held up to ridicule, but it can
scarcely be said that her portrayal of any of these becomes actual caricature.
Nor is it possible to agree with the stricture of Sir Walter Scott that the
prosing of the foolish people is apt to become tiresome. Indeed the only risk
which the author runs of wearying the readers by over-elaboration of analysis
and lack of movement in the dialogue, is rather in regard to the characters
that are meant to win our sympathy, who sometimes take themselves more
seriously than modern taste can find patience to approve. Yet on the whole
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how admirable these principal figures are! Considering how little opportunity
her scheme afforded for introducing variety of circumstance, it is wonderful
how much individuality she has been able to impart to her different heroes
and heroines—if one may use such terms in reference to stories that tell
only of familiar situations and personal interests. It is true that the young
men are not all equally worthy of the delightful partners that are mercifully
accorded to them, but when we remember how unsuccessful most novelists
have been with their youthful heroes, how commonly they have mistaken the
conventionally faultless for the truly ideal, we shall be glad to do justice to the
memorable achievement of this unpretentious artist. With her heroines she
has been happier, and most of these, if not all of them, have a sure place in
the select number of original and delightful creations whose existence forms
one of the chief pleasures in the life of the imagination. It is in the figure of
Elizabeth Bennet that the novelist has put forth all her powers, and we may
conjecture that in this maiden’s lively but kindly satire, if not also in her more
serious qualities, she represented Jane Austen’s own disposition and ways
of regarding life. In the narrative of the love between Elizabeth and Darcy,
which ran smoothly only after a gradual ripening of character on both sides
had enabled each to understand the other aright, we come upon an entirely
new note in fiction, which has been sounded to wonderful harmonies by the
greater artists who followed.
—James Oliphant, “Scott and Jane Austen,”
Victorian Novelists, 1899, pp. 25–30
Francis Hovey Stoddard “Growth of

Personality in Fiction” (1900)
Stoddard concludes that “We have gone a long way toward completeness
in the art of the novel when we reach the novel as Jane Austen writes it.”
Given the fact that Stoddard’s work here concerns the evolution of the
novel, students discussing the genre or the development of literary style
through the centuries can investigate how the novel has evolved since
Austen. Her work is often compared to Shakespeare’s, viewed as a pin-
nacle to which others aspire, but who were Austen’s influences? Studying
the eighteenth-century writers who may have inspired Austen can help
students argue whether or not Austen is as isolated as contemporary
readers are often led to believe, or whether she was a part of a community
of writers. This kind of research and comparison can also help students
tackle issues of the role intertextuality plays in Austen’s works: are there
112 Jane Austen
elements, plotlines, or characterizations that Austen has clearly inherited

from earlier writers? Which conventions of the novel does Austen change?
In other words, what does she bring to the genre that seems new and
makes her stand out among other novelists of her time?
Another possible area of study stemming from Stoddard’s work
is to develop, like Stoddard, criteria for the “perfect” novel based on
research and to determine, according to such criteria, how and why the
literary canon has developed (or some would argue stagnated) as it has.
The writing of novel theorists such as Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Jane
Spencer, and Patricia Meyer Spacks might prove helpful in such a study
and be worth seeking out.
QQQ
The first of these novels is Pride and Prejudice, and I take it for this purpose
rather because it is the first than because it is preeminently characteristic of
the author, or illustrative of the proposition I have named. It is the story of
the home life of the family of Mr. Bennet, who lived in circumstances of
reputable ease in a village whose limited society the reader comes to know
as well as though he had been native born. There is a humorous, whimsical
father, a serious, ingenious, designing, but inconsequent, mother, and there
are five daughters. The story is of the various happenings as these daughters
win their way to settlements in establishments more or less excellent. It
contains an imperishable picture of the high-spirited Elizabeth, who wins at
last by virtue of that nobler self-respect which conquers her own baser pride
and banishes all prejudice. If I may claim later that this is essentially a novel of
outer life rather than a novel of inner life; that it is essentially a novel of form
rather than a novel of quality; that it is essentially a novel of personage rather
than a novel of character,—I by no means imply that it is no more complete
a work of fiction than the Vicar of Wakefield, for there is a long step forward
in the novelist’s art from Goldsmith to Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is
an observation of life, though a satirical criticism of its outer phases, rather
than a study of any of its problems. It is apparently not written to set forth
any proposition of living or to develop any idea of excellence, but simply to
portray, impartially, objectively, an existing woman as Jane Austen saw her.
It is a dated society, and it is a dated woman, not the woman of all time, that
we have portrayed; but it is a society and a woman portrayed with marvellous
perfection. In going from The Vicar of Wakefield to Jane Austen we have
gone from singleness to complexity; for, whereas in The Vicar of Wakefield
we had sequence of incident, in Pride and Prejudice we have plot, or at any
rate an articulation of single incidents, actions, and emotions into a unity of
Works 113
circumstance, action, and emotion. And if we have in the formation of the

plot progress from singleness to complexity, we have this still more in the
characters and in the interest excited. The Vicar of Wakefield is a quality and
a characteristic put in human form; Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth are persons as
complexly organized as each of us believes himself to be. We have gone a long
way toward completeness in the art of the novel when we reach the novel as
Jane Austen writes it.
Indeed, if one considers with care, one finds that we have gone very
near to a perfection in this work of Jane Austen. We have a complete and
technically a very perfect novel form. We have a limited area of territory,
definitely located, and reasonably described. We have few characters, set
down with such exactness of description that not even one of the Pilgrims
in Chaucer’s “Prologue,” not even Robinson Crusoe on his island, not even
Bunyan’s Christian, is more perfectly known to us than is any one of these
village people. We have human emotions as real as our own; and urged on by
these emotions the whole play and counterplay of interest is perfectly known.
The characters form a community; and the simple, uneventful drama of the
community is complete. It is very near perfection.
Moreover, if we have a complete novel-form, we have an equally complete
method. One can use the style of Jane Austen as a model for study in the
schoolroom. There is repression in every detail; the plot is made simple; the
adjective is cut out of the sentences; every detail of finish is subordinated
to a requirement of sincerity, to a limited and selected variety. The humor
is cultivated, genial; it is the humor of an observer—of a refined, satisfied
observer—rather than the humor of a reformer; it is the humor of one who
sees the incongruities, but never dreams of questioning the general excellence
of the system as a whole. All this is the method of a completed ideal; a method
of manifest limits, but within its limits absolutely true.
Still further we may claim that this novel is not only an expression of a
complete novel form; it is not only expression of a complete literary method;
it is also an embodiment of completed ideals. For, however often we may find
a humorous comment in Jane Austen, we look in vain for a questioning of
the underlying basis of society. We find in it that the natural world, that the
family idea, that the social system, are taken with unquestioning acceptance.
There is no detail of nature in Jane Austen. The fields, the parks, the forests,
are accepted as totals concerning whose minute details curiosity would
indicate unsettled views, if not vulgar breeding. Only a gardener, in Jane
Austen’s novels, would describe or minutely examine a flower. There is no
questioning of the family notion; women must marry, and the wishes of the
114 Jane Austen
entire family, not the individual preferences, are most likely to determine the
choice. There is no questioning of the county family idea, of the patriarchal
community, as the best, or at least the permanent notion. It is a novel of
perfected form. Try it how you will, it stands for the completeness of that of
which The Vicar of Wakefield was in comparison but the crude and formless
sketch. A critic may read it and pronounce it perfect of its kind. A body of
doctrine of the novel can be formulated from the very complete examples
which one finds in Emma, in Sense and Sensibility, in Northanger Abbey, or
in Pride and Prejudice.
If this be true, why, then, was not this perfection of form the end and
completion of the novel? It is because perfection is next door to death;
imperfection is, after all, our greatest proof of immortality. All progress is
through death and resurrection; the body of this perfect novel is to perish, its
life is to go on in another form. The work of Jane Austen lacks one thing, and
that one thing is intensity of interest. It lacks it because the perfection is really
not the perfection of truth, but the perfection of finish. The novel fails to stir
our passions, to arouse our emotions, because it lacks the one vital quality
of intensity of passion. It is natural because a nature has been developed,
and it is true to such a nature; but natural as it is, it is mostly external nature
that we get. It is the external life, even of Elizabeth; it is the outward, the
unimpassioned, the unaroused, that is depicted; it is, after all, a novel of outer
rather than of inner life, a novel of personage rather than a novel of character.
It is the perfection of the novel of form; we must look beyond it for the novel
of interpretation.
—Francis Hovey Stoddard, “Growth of Personality in Fiction,”
The Evolution of the English Novel, 1900, pp. 52–58

Elizabeth Bennet” (1901)
The story of “Pride and Prejudice” has of late years become known to a
constantly, almost rapidly, increasing cult, as it must be called, for the readers
of Jane Austen are hardly ever less than her adorers: she is a passion and a
creed, if not quite a religion. A beautiful, clever, and cultivated girl is already
piqued and interested if not in love with a handsome, high-principled,
excessively proud man, when she becomes bitterly prejudiced against him
by the slanders of a worthless beneficiary of his family. The girl is Elizabeth
Bennet, the young man is Fitzwilliam Darcy, and they first meet at a ball,
Works 115
where he behaves with ungracious indifference to her, and afterwards at

the dinners and parties of a small country neighborhood where persons
theoretically beyond the pale of gentility are admitted at least on sufferance;
the stately manners of the day are relaxed by youth and high spirits; and no
doubt the academic elevation of the language lapses oftener on the lips of the
pretty girls and the lively young men than an author still in her nonage, and
zealous for the dignity of her style, will allow to appear in the conversation
of her hero and heroine.
From the beginning it seems to Darcy that Elizabeth shines in talk beyond
all the other women, though sometimes she shines to his cost. But banter from
a pretty girl goes farther than flattery with a generous man; and from the first
Darcy is attracted by Elizabeth Bennet’s wit, as much as he is repelled by her
family. In fact, he cannot get on with her family, for though the Bennets have
a sufficiently good standing, in virtue of the father’s quality as a gentleman, it
is in spite the mother’s folly and vulgarity, and the folly and vulgarity of all her
sisters but one. Mrs. Bennet is probably the most entire and perfect simpleton
ever drawn in fiction, and her husband renders life with her supportable by
amusing himself with her absurdities. He buries himself in his books and
leaves her the management of his daughters in society, getting what comfort
he can out of the humor and intellectual sympathy of Elizabeth and the
charming goodness of her elder sister Jane. The rest of his family are almost
as impossible to him as they are to Darcy, to whom Mr. Bennet himself is
rather impossible, and who resolves not only to crush out his own passion
for Elizabeth, but to break off his friend Bingley’s love for her sister Jane. His
success in doing the one is not so great but he duly comes to offer himself to
Elizabeth, and he owns in the humiliation of rejection that he believes he has
failed in the other.
From this point the affair, already so daringly imagined, is one of the most
daring in fiction; and less courage, less art, less truth than the author brings
to its management would not have availed. It is a great stroke of originality to
have Darcy write the letter he does after his rejection, not only confessing, but
defending his course; and it is from the subtle but perfectly honest sense of
character in her heroine that the author has Elizabeth do justice to him in what
she so bitterly resents. When she has once acknowledged the reason of much
that he says of her family (and she has to acknowledge that even about her
adored father he is measurably right), it is a question merely of friendly chances
as to the event. These are overwhelmingly supplied, to Elizabeth’s confusion,
by Darcy’s behavior in helping save her sister Lydia from the shame and ruin
of her elopement with the worthless Wickham. Lydia, who is only less entirely
116 Jane Austen
and delightfully a fool than Mrs. Bennet herself, is thus the means of Elizabeth’s
coming to such a good mind in regard to Darcy that her only misgiving is
lest it may be too late. But Darcy has been enlightened as well as she: he does
everything a man can to repair his wrongs and blunders, and with a very little
leading from Elizabeth, he is brought to offer himself again, and is accepted
with what may be called demure transport, and certainly with alacrity.
There is nothing more deliciously lover-like than the talks in which they
go over all the past events when they are sure of each other; and Elizabeth,
who is apt to seem at other times a little too sarcastic, a little too ironical, is
here sweetly and dearly and wisely herself. The latest of these talks was that
in which she “wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his ever having fallen in love
with her. ‘How could you begin? I can comprehend your going on charmingly,
when you had once made a beginning; but what could have set you off in the
first place?’ ‘I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look which first laid
the foundation. . . . I was in the middle of it before I knew I had begun.’ ‘My
beauty you had early withstood, and as to my manners—my behavior to you
was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without
rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now, be sincere; did you admire
me for my impertinence?’ ‘For the liveliness of your mind, I did.’ ‘You may as
well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, you were
sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with
the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your
approbation alone. I roused and interested you because I was so unlike them.
Had you not been really amiable you would have hated me for it, but in spite
of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and
just. . . . There, I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it, and, all things
considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable. To be sure, you knew no
actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love. . . . What
made you so shy of me when you first called, and afterwards dined here? . . .
You might have talked to me more.’ ‘A man who felt less might.’ ‘How unlucky
you should have a reasonable answer to give, and I should be so reasonable as
to admit it! But I wonder how long you would have gone on if you had been
left to yourself?’ ‘Lady Catharine’s unjustifiable endeavors to separate us were
the means of removing all my doubts. . . . My aunt’s intelligence had given me
hope, and I was determined at once to know everything.’ ”
The aunt whom Darcy means is Lady Catharine de Burgh, as great a
fool as Mrs. Bennet or Lydia, and much more offensive. [Lady Catherine de
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Burgh] has all Darcy’s arrogance, without a ray of the good sense and good
heart which enlighten and control it, and when she hears a rumor of his
engagement to Elizabeth, she comes to question the girl. Their encounter
is perhaps the supreme moment of objective drama in the book, and is a
bit of very amusing comedy, which is the more interesting to the modern
spectator because it expresses the beginning of that revolt against aristocratic
pretension characteristic of the best English fiction of our century. Its spirit
seems to have worked in the clear intelligence of the young girl to more
than one effect of laughing satire, and one feels that Elizabeth Bennet is
speaking Jane Austen’s mind, and perhaps avenging her for patronage and
impertinence otherwise suffered in silence, when she gives Lady de Burgh
her famous setting-down. . . .
In all this the heroine easily gets the better of her antagonist not only
in the mere article of sauce, to which it must be owned her lively wit
occasionally tends, but in the more valuable qualities of personal dignity.
She is much more a lady than her ladyship, as the author means she
shall be; but her superiority is not invented for the crisis; it springs from
her temperament and character, cool, humorous, intelligent and just: a
combination of attributes which renders Elizabeth Bennet one of the most
admirable and attractive girls in the world of fiction. It is impossible,
however, not to feel that her triumph over Lady de Burgh is something
more than personal: it is a protest, it is an insurrection, though probably
the discreet, the amiable author would have been the last to recognize or
to acknowledge the fact. An indignant sense of the value of humanity as
against the pretensions of rank, such as had not been felt in English fiction
before, stirs throughout the story, and reveals itself in such crucial tests as
dear “little Burney,” for instance, would never have imagined. For when
Miss Burney introduces city people, it is to let them display their cockney
vulgarity; but though Jane Austen shows the people whom the Bennets’
gentility frays off into on the mother’s side vulgar and ridiculous, they are
not shown necessarily so because they are in trade or the law; and on the
father’s side it is apparent that their social inferiority is not incompatible
with gentle natures, cultivated minds, and pleasing manners.
—William Dean Howells, “Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet,”

Heroines of Fiction, 1901, pp. 47–48
118 Jane Austen

Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
“Pride and Prejudice” (1913)
Austen’s grandnephew and nephew note that Pride and Prejudice is
presented from only the heroine’s point of view. The subtleties and
complexity of Austen’s narration make it possible for students to search
for places in the novel where the heroine is in control of her own story
versus passages where Austen tells us more than the heroine herself
knows or would admit.
QQQ
As she read and re-read Pride and Prejudice, Jane must have become aware
(if she did not know it before) that she had advanced far beyond Sense and
Sensibility. Indeed, the earlier work seems to fade out of her mind, so far
as allusions to its principal characters are concerned; while those of the
later novel remain vivid and attractive to their creator. Even the minor
characters were real to her; and she forgot nothing—down to the marriage
of Kitty to a clergyman near Pemberley, and that of Mary to one of Uncle
Philips’ clerks.
In this work there seemed to be hardly anything for which she need
apologise. Here everything is complete; the humour, though brilliant, is
yet always subordinate to the progress of the story; the plot is inevitable,
and its turning-point (the first proposal of Darcy) occurs exactly when it
ought; while all fear of a commonplace ending is avoided by the insertion
of the celebrated interview between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth. It gives
us also an excellent example of the way in which Jane Austen composed
her stories. We are always in the confidence of the heroine, who is hardly
off the stage throughout the whole novel; we see the other characters with
her eyes, even when they are persons—like Jane Bennet—with whom we
believe ourselves to be intimately acquainted. At the same time, such is
the subtle irony of the author that we are quite aware of her intention to
make us understand more of the heroine’s state of mind than the heroine
herself does, and to distinguish between her conscious and unconscious
thoughts. Elizabeth has to change from hatred to love—real hatred and
real love—in a volume and a half. But it would wound her self-respect
if she acknowledged to herself that the pace at which she moved was so
rapid; and the change is constantly only half admitted. Even near the end—
when she says that, if Darcy is prevented from seeking her hand by the
Works 119
representations of Lady Catherine, she shall soon cease to regret him—we

know that this is far from the truth: that her affection is really steadfast,
and that she is only trying to disguise from herself her own anxiety. Other
examples might easily be found.
“Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters,
1913, pp. 208–09
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

I was reading yesterday and today Sense and Sensibility, which I resumed
at the second volume. The last volume greatly improves on the first, but I
still think it one of the poorest of Miss Austen’s novels—that is, inferior to
Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice, which is all I have read.
—Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, September 22, 1839

W.F. Pollock’s excerpt provides a starting point for students exploring
reader-response theory and the ways in which readers’ responses are
embedded in historical context. Pollock notes that in Austen’s work “the
machinery of representation is almost wholly concealed from observa-
tion,” meaning that Austen does not blatantly interrupt her narratives in
order to interject her opinion or to help explicitly shape or influence her
readers’ opinions. Reader-response theory helps students look into the
ways in which Austen’s style helps and/or hinders readers’ immersion in
and understanding of plot, character, and the other elements that col-
lectively comprise the traditional novel. One of the questions students
might answer involves how Austen manipulates readers without them
knowing it. Those interested in further study might look at the extent to
which control lies with the readers and the extent to which it lies with
Austen and the text. The question then becomes whether the text elicits
the same response in all readers (you might want to delineate readers by
time periods, in order to incorporate an understanding of historical con-
text), or whether the responses are entirely or mostly up to the individual’s
emotional/psychological state.
120 Jane Austen
Such study also leads to fascinating questions about Austen’s intended

audience. Pollock claims that Austen writes “real life,” but certainly
today’s readers find a lot of material in Austen that seems foreign. Did
readers in Austen’s time use her works to escape, or did they read them
as true reflections of actual life? Determining who Austen might have
intended as her audience can help uncover many facets of the elements
and conventions of reading and writing.
QQQ
Miss Austen is, of all his successors, the one who most nearly resembles
Richardson in the power of impressing reality upon her characters. There is
a perfection in the exhibition of Miss Austen’s characters which no one else
has approached; and truth is never for an instant sacrificed in that delicate
atmosphere of satire which pervades her works. Like Richardson’s, her people
are made to develope themselves in the progress of the story through which
the reader accompanies them; and except when at the beginning of each novel
she may give a short account of the situation of its leading personages, the
machinery of representation is almost wholly concealed from observation.
The whole thoughts of the reader are abstracted from the world of outer life,
and are confined to the mimic world contained within the covers of the book
in his hand. No allusion or reference is ever made to real events or persons;
the figures never step out of their frame, and the frame itself is unseen. The
persons and events of this lesser world are, indeed, not heroical: they belong
not to the heights or depths or romantic regions of existence, but to the level
and ordinary passages of comfortable English upper life. The extremes of
manners are avoided; the characters are ladies and gentlemen belonging to
the same class as that of their painter—the daughter of a country clergyman
who mixed in society at Bath, Southampton, and the village in which she
ended her too short life. Hardly ever is a person of greater rank than a
baronet of easy means introduced, nor does any fall below the professional
and commercial classes.
The plots are simple but well constructed, sufficiently involved to excite
interest, and they are brought round at the end by means neither too obvious
nor unnatural. The field of view may be in some sense a small one; but like
that of a good microscope in able hands, there is abundance of light, and the
minutest markings of character are beautifully shown in it.
Miss Austen never attempts to describe a scene or a class of society
with which she was not herself thoroughly acquainted. The conversations
of ladies with ladies, or of ladies and gentlemen together, are given, but
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no instance occurs of a scene in which men only are present. The uniform
quality of her work is one most remarkable point to be observed in it. Let
a volume be opened at any place: there is the same good English, the same
refined style, the same simplicity and truth. There is never any deviation
into the unnatural or exaggerated; and how worthy of all love and respect is
the finely-disciplined genius which rejects the forcible but transient modes
of stimulating interest which can so easily be employed when desired, and
which knows how to trust to the never-failing principles of human nature!
This very trust has sometimes been made an objection to Miss Austen, and
she has been accused of writing dull stories about ordinary people. But her
supposed ordinary people are really not such very ordinary people. Let any
one who is inclined to criticize on this score, endeavour to construct one
character from among the ordinary people of his own acquaintance that
shall be capable of interesting any reader for ten minutes. It will then be
found how great has been the discrimination of Miss Austen in the selection
of her characters, and how skilful is her treatment in the management of
them. It is true that the events are for the most part those of daily life, and
the feelings are those connected with the usual joys and griefs of familiar
existence; but these are the very events and feelings upon which the
happiness or misery of most of us depends; and the field which embraces
them, to the exclusion of the wonderful, the sentimental, and the historical,
is surely large enough, as it is certainly the one which admits of the most
profitable cultivation. In the end, too, the novel of daily real life is that of
which we are least apt to weary: a round of fancy balls would tire the most
vigorous admirers of variety in costume, and the return to plain clothes
would be hailed with greater delight than their occasional relinquishment
ever gives. Miss Austen’s personages are always in plain clothes, but no two
suits are alike: all are worn with their appropriate differences, and under all
human thoughts and feelings are at work.
It is in the dramatic power with which her characters are exhibited that
Miss Austen is unapproachable. Every one says the right thing in the right
place and in the right way. The conservation of character is complete. We
can never exactly predict what a particular person will say; there are no
catch words or phrases perpetually recurring from the same person; yet we
recognise as soon as spoken the truthful individuality of everything that is
made to fall from each speaker. In this kind of genius she is without a rival,
unless we look for one in the very highest name of our literature. Sometimes,
in the admiration expressed for her greatest excellence, her claim to qualities
exercised more in common with others has been overlooked; yet whenever
122 Jane Austen
accurate description is wanted, either of places or persons, it is supplied with

ease and skill. Take, for instance, from Sense and Sensibility the account of
Mrs. Dashwood’s new residence in Devonshire.
As a house Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and
compact; but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was
regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted
green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles. A narrow
passage led directly through the house to the garden behind. On
each side of the entrance was a sitting-room, about sixteen feet
square; and beyond them were the offices and the stairs. Four
bedrooms and two garrets formed the rest of the house. It had not
been built many years and was in good repair. . The situation of
the house was good. High hills rose immediately behind, and at
no great distance on each side; some of which were open downs,
the others cultivated and woody. The village of Barton was chiefly
on one of these hills, and formed a pleasant view from the cottage
windows. The prospect in front was more extensive; it commanded
the whole of the valley, and reached into the country beyond. The
hills which surrounded the cottage terminated the valley in that
direction; under another name, and in another course, it branched
out again between two of the steepest of them.
Or take, as an example of personal portraiture, from the same novel, the
description of Elinor Dashwood and her sister.
Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a
remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form,
though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of
height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when,
in the common cant of praise, she was called a beautiful girl, truth
was less violently outraged than usually happens. Her skin was very
brown, but, from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly
brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was sweet and
attractive; and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a
spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight.
Sense and Sensibility was the first published of Miss Austen’s novels. It has
perhaps more of movement than its successors, and in no other is there a
character of so much passionate tenderness as belongs to Marianne. It is not,
however, as a whole, equal to her later works; yet it may be as often resorted
Works 123
to with advantage as any of them, and it is full of its author’s genius. How well
the littleness and respectable selfishness of Mr. John Dashwood are brought
out. How naturally his generous intentions to provide for his sisters dwindle
down from a splendid three thousand pounds to half that amount—then
to an annuity—then to an occasional present of fifty pounds—and lastly
to vague promises of kindness and assistance. The charming but not too
judicious mother of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood has always been one of
our greatest favourites among Miss Austen’s ladies. The sensible, considerate,
and self-denying Elinor is a beautiful character, and is well contrasted with
the enthusiastic and delightful, but somewhat unreasonable, Marianne. So
is the delicate, well-informed, and high-minded Edward Ferrars, with his
coxcomb brother Robert, and the agreeable but selfish Willoughby. The
youngest sister, Margaret, must not be forgotten, though she seldom appears;
for the object of her existence is amply justified by her utterance of the
famous wish ‘that somebody would give us all a large fortune a-piece,’ even if
she were not wanted to live with Mrs. Dashwood after her sisters are married.
Then there is the good-humoured and friendly Sir John Middleton, who
never came to the cottage without either inviting them to dine at the Park the
next day, or to drink tea that evening. We like Mrs. Jennings, with her good
nature and gossip, and her notion that poor Marianne, in the first agonies of
disappointed love, could be consoled by sweetmeats, constantia, and playing
at her favourite round game. Mr. Palmer, a gentleman when he pleases, but
spoiled by living with people inferior to himself, and discontented, even to
rudeness, with his silly wife, is brought out with much humour. We properly
feel how objectionable are the Miss Steeles, with their vulgar cunning and
admiration for smart beaux. We despise and shrink from the elder Mrs.
Ferrars, with her pride, ill-nature, and narrow mind. We cordially respect
and like the excellent Colonel Brandon, who though suffering under the
advanced age and infirmities of thirty-six, is at length accepted by the
youthful and once scornful Marianne. We are personally glad when Edward
is released from his odious engagement to the artful Lucy Steele, and when
his marriage with Elinor is rendered possible. Finally, we acquiesce in the
sober and natural sentences with which the characters are dismissed from
appearance. No poetical justice dogs those who have behaved wrongly and
foolishly, to make them miserable to the end of time. We are invited to
think of Willoughby as enjoying some share of domestic felicity with the
wife whom he married for money and without love. Robert Ferrars, who
actually marries the very woman for refusing to give up whom his brother
was disinherited in his favour, regains his mother’s goodwill—the two low
124 Jane Austen
natures suiting each other too well to be long separated—and is tolerably

happy with his underbred wife. This is as it all would be in real life, and so
Miss Austen, abjuring her undoubted right to inflict retribution, chooses it to
be in that transcript of an imagined portion of it which she has selected for
consideration in the tale called Sense and Sensibility. . . .
To Miss Austen all subsequent novelists have been infinitely indebted. She
led the way in the return to nature; she again described individuals instead of
classes or nationalities; she re-indicated and worked the inexhaustible mines
of wealth for the writer of fiction which everywhere lie beneath the surface
of ordinary life. None, however, have worked them like her. The aluminium
is all around us in the clay of our fields and in the common bricks of our
houses. It is one of the most plentifully distributed elements on earth. Its
abundance, however, in no way increases the facility of obtaining it: only the
subtle chemist can extract the coy metal for our use.
January 1860, pp. 30–35
Julia Kavanaugh
“Miss Austen’s Six Novels” (1863)
In this excerpt, Kavanaugh contradicts Pollock’s claims as expressed in his
January 1860 “British Novelists” article. Kavanaugh argues that Elinor and
Marianne from Sense and Sensibility are mere types, far from the realistic
portrayals that Pollock finds them to be. Such a claim might lead students
to study the novel genre and/or Austen’s novels in particular to determine
how heavily they were influenced by classical and medieval writings,
which often employed allegory to convey a particular theme or point of
view. Is Austen’s Sense and Sensibility a progression of the novel form in
terms of characterization, or is it a throwback to a much earlier style of
writing? Students might also compare Austen’s individual novels with one
another or with other writers’ works to determine for themselves whether
it is possible or likely for an author to write a novel containing no character
“types” that stand for abstract notions or qualities or represent a specific
group or a larger portion of humanity.
This mode of investigation could also help students learn how today’s
novels compare with Austen’s. Are twenty-first-century novelists more
likely to use character types, or are they inclined to make their characters
intensely personal, representing no one beyond a single individual?
Works 125
Students’ answers to this question will help them determine ways in which
they feel the novel, as a form, has evolved in terms of characterization.
QQQ
This delicate and yet direct power of character is still more forcibly displayed
in Sense and Sensibility, a far better tale than Northanger Abbey, but not one
of Miss Austen’s best. The two heroines of this tale are somewhat deficient in
reality. Elinor Dashwood is Judgment—her sister Marianne is Imagination.
We feel it too plainly. And the triumph of Sense over Sensibility, shown by the
different conduct they hold under very similar trials, is all the weaker that it
is the result of the author’s will.
—Julia Kavanagh, “Miss Austen’s Six Novels,”
English Women of Letters, 1863, Vol. 2, pp. 195–96
William Dean Howells

“Three of Jane Austen’s Heroines” (1901)
Howells writes that Sense and Sensibility “is built more than her other books
upon the lines of the accepted fiction of her time, or of the times before
hers.” Students can read books that Austen may have read before writing
the novel, and determine what “the lines of accepted fiction” were, and
how, in Howells’s opinion, Austen surpasses all earlier novelists.
QQQ
“Sense and Sensibility” is the most conventional, the most mechanical of
the author’s novels. The title, like that of “Pride and Prejudice,” implies the
task of developing two opposite characters in the antithesis which suggests
itself; but Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are contrasted much more directly
and obviously than Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. These, indeed, are often
interchangeably proud and prejudiced; but Elinor is always a person of
sense, and Marianne is always a person of sensibility. One sister always looks
the facts of life in the face; the other always sees them through a cloud of
romantic emotions. It is not pretended that the wise virgin escapes suffering
any more than the foolish, and so far the novel attests itself the effect of Jane
Austen’s clear perception and faithful observation. It abounds in the truth
and courage which distinguish everything she did, and it is perhaps more
humorously just and more unsparingly exigent of true ideals than some
other books of hers. But it is built more than her other books upon the lines
of the accepted fiction of her time, or of the times before hers. In the affair
126 Jane Austen
of Marianne’s false-hearted lover Willoughby there is almost a reversion to

the novel in which young men habitually sought the love of trusting girls and
betrayed it. It was in fact her earliest novel and she first wrote it in the form of
letters. Then, after she had practised her ’prentice hand to mastery in “Pride
and Prejudice,” she recast “Sense and Sensibility” in its present shape. It is
only inferior to her other novels; compared with most of the novels that had
gone before hers, this least of Jane Austen’s is a masterpiece; and the romantic
Marianne, even more than the matter-of-fact Elinor, is a picture of girlhood
touched in with tender truth, and with the caressing irony which still leaves
the character pleasing.
The story is distinctively modern in giving a description of the sister
heroines, which was probably an afterthought, and occurred to the
author in the making over. “ Miss Dashwood,” she says, “had a delicate
complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was
still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having
the advantage of height, was more striking. . . . Her skin was very brown,
but from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her
features were all good; her smile sweet and attractive, and in her eyes,
which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could
hardly be seen without delight.” Marianne’s mother is as romantic as the
girl herself, and it is by her connivance that the girl thinks it a kind of merit
to be a credulous simpleton, and to believe more in the love of the cruel
scoundrel who flatters and jilts her than he openly asks her to do. When
she finds herself in London, shortly after their parting in the country with
all the forms of tacit devotion, on his part, and he snubs her at their first
meeting in society, she owns in her shame and grief, that there has been
no engagement. “ ‘It was every day implied, but never professedly declared.
Sometimes I thought it had been—but it never was.’ Yet with a faith in his
unplighted truth as absolute as the sense of her own loyalty to him, she
would have been ready to seize upon him, and claim all his remembered
tenderness, if her sister had not prevented her.
“ ‘Good Heaven!’ she exclaimed, ‘he is there, he is there! Oh! why does
he not look at me? Why cannot I speak to him?’ ‘Pray, pray, be composed,’
cried Elinor, ‘and do not betray what you feel to every one present. Perhaps
he has not observed you yet.’ This, however, was more than she could believe
herself, and to be composed at such a moment was not only beyond the reach
of Marianne, it was beyond her wish. She sat in an agony of impatience that
affected every feature. At last he turned round again, and regarded them both;
she started up, and pronouncing his name in a tone of affection, held out her
Works 127
hand to him. He approached, and, addressing himself rather to Elinor than

Marianne, inquired in a hurried manner after Mrs. Dashwood, and asked
how long they had been in town. Elinor was robbed of all presence of mind
by such an address. . . . The feelings of her sister were instantly expressed. . . .
‘Good God, Willoughby! what is the meaning of this? Have you not received
my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?’ He could not then avoid it, but
her touch seemed painful to him, and he held her hand only for a moment.
‘I did myself the honor of calling in Berkeley Street, last Tuesday. . . . My card
was not lost, I hope?’ ‘But have you not received my notes?’ cried Marianne,
in the wildest anxiety. . . . ‘Tell me, Willoughby—for Heaven’s sake, tell me,
what is the matter?’ He made no reply; his complexion changed, and all his
embarrassment returned; but as if, on catching the eye of the young lady
with whom he had been previously talking, he felt the necessity of instant
exertion, he recovered himself again, and after saying, ‘Yes, I had the pleasure
of receiving the information of your arrival in town, which you were so good
as to send me,’ turned hastily away with a slight bow, and joined his friend.
Marianne, now looking dreadfully white, and unable to stand, sunk into her
chair. . . . ‘Go to him, Elinor,’ she said, as soon as she could speak, ‘and force
him to come to me. . . . I cannot rest, I cannot have a moment’s peace, till
this is explained—some dreadful misapprehension or other. Oh, go to him
this moment.’ ‘How can that be done? No, my dearest Marianne, you must
wait. This is not a place for explanations’ . . . Marianne continued incessantly
to give way . . . in exclamations of wretchedness. In a short time Elinor saw
Willoughby quit the room . . . and telling Marianne that he was gone, urged
the impossibility of speaking to him again that evening.” . . .
In an earlier age of fiction, if not of society, the folly of Marianne would
have meant her ruin; but in the wiser and milder aesthetics of Jane Austen
it meant merely her present heart-break, with her final happiness through
a worthier love. Hers is a very simple nature, studied with a simpler art
than such an intricate character as Emma’s. She has only at all times to be
herself, responsive to her mainspring of emotionality; and a girl like Emma
has apparently to be different people at different times, in obedience
to inconsistent and unexpected impulses. She is therefore perhaps the
greatest of Jane Austen’s creations, and certainly the most modern; yet
even so slight and elemental a character as Marianne is handled with the
security and mastery, which were sometimes greater and sometimes less
in the author’s work.
“Persuasion,” which was the latest of her novels, is in places the poorest,
and “Sense and Sensibility,” which is, on the whole, the poorest, has moments
128 Jane Austen
of being the greatest. There is no such meanness portrayed in all fiction as John
Dashwood’s, and yet you are made to feel that he would like not to be mean if
only he could once rise above himself. In Marianne and her mother, who are
such a pair of emotional simpletons, there are traits of generosity that almost
redeem their folly, and their limitations in the direction of silliness are as
distinctly shown as their excesses. Willoughby himself, who lives to realize that
he has never loved any one but Marianne, and has been given to understand
by the relation who leaves her money away from him, “that if he had behaved
with honor towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich,”
even he is not committed wholesale to unavailing regret. “That his repentance
of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not
be doubted. . . . But that he was forever inconsolable—that he fled from society,
or contracted a habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart—must
not be depended upon, for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently
to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humor, nor his house always
uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every
kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.”
—William Dean Howells, “Three of Jane Austen’s Heroines,”
EMMA
Sir Walter Scott “Emma” (1815)
Scott’s critique of Austen offers students a unique opportunity to com-
pare these two writers. Scott’s best-known works are Ivanhoe, Rob Roy,
and the Waverly novels, all of which contain action and adventure and
are considered historical fiction. Austen and Scott wrote during the same
time period, and yet their work is remarkably different both in its content
and reception. Students pursuing topics related to gender studies, inter-
textuality, historical context, and the evolution of the novel form may find
Scott’s essay of particular value.
In this excerpt, Scott initially differentiates Austen’s works from the
previous (eighteenth-century) style of writing by noting that Austen’s
books cannot be accused of “alarming our credulity nor amusing our
imagination with wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic
affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain attributes of
fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who
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actually live and die.” Studying eighteenth-century novels, particularly

those which we know Austen read, will allow students to develop their own
arguments about the ways in which the novel evolved as a form before
and during Austen’s time. Scott makes it sound as if Austen’s particular
style set her apart completely from other writers of her time, and that the
definite trend was toward her quieter style. Students might also note that
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published in 1818, offering a third
unique point of comparison, and perhaps helping to refute the argument
that men were more likely to write bold, adventurous tales.
Scott writes summaries of several of Austen’s novels, the longest for
Emma, which he claims has the least amount of actual story or traditional
plotting within it. Students should read these summaries carefully to
determine whether Scott is able to be completely objective about any
of these novels, or if he injects his own opinions here and there. This
exercise might lead students to write their own summaries of Austen’s
novels, attempting by turns to be completely objective or completely
biased while imagining someone who has never read Austen judging her
books by these summaries. This activity can then lead to further analysis
of Austen’s work and readers’ particular responses to it.
Another potential research project inspired by Scott involves comparing
Austen to artists of various mediums: painters, sculptors, musicians. He
states that her writing reminds him of the “Flemish school of painting,”
leading us to wonder what kinds of insights can be evoked about various
artists if the boundaries between various types of art are crossed.
QQQ
Accordingly a style of novel has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty
years, differing from the former in the points upon which the interest hinges;
neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety
of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which
were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare
occurrence among those who actually live and die. The substitute for these
excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and
injudicious use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really
exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the
splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation
of that which is daily taking place around him.
In adventuring upon this task, the author makes obvious sacrifices, and
encounters peculiar difficulty. He who paints from le beau ideal, if his scenes
and sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great measure exempted
130 Jane Austen
from the difficult task of reconciling them with the ordinary probabilities of
life: but he who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his composition
within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to
every reader. The resemblance of a statue of Hercules we must take on the
artist’s judgment; but every one can criticize that which is presented as the
portrait of a friend, or neighbour. Something more than a mere sign-post
likeness is also demanded. The portrait must have spirit and character, as
well as resemblance; and being deprived of all that, according to Bayes,
goes ‘to elevate and surprize,’ it must make amends by displaying depth
of knowledge and dexterity of execution. We, therefore, bestow no mean
compliment upon the author of Emma, when we say that, keeping close to
common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of
life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never
miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events,
arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments, greatly
above our own. In this class she stands almost alone; for the scenes of Miss
Edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by
her remarkable power of embodying and illustrating national character. But
the author of Emma confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society;
her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country
gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and
precision, belong to a class rather below that standard. The narrative of all her
novels is composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under
the observation of most folks; and her dramatis personae conduct themselves
upon the motives and principles which the readers may recognize as ruling
their own and that of most of their acquaintances. The kind of moral, also,
which these novels inculcate, applies equally to the paths of common life, as
will best appear from a short notice of the author’s former works, with a more
full abstract of that which we at present have under consideration.
Sense and Sensibility, the first of these compositions, contains the history
of two sisters. The elder, a young lady of prudence and regulated feelings,
becomes gradually attached to a man of an excellent heart and limited
talents, who happens unfortunately to be fettered by a rash and ill-assorted
engagement. In the younger sister, the influence of sensibility and imagination
predominates; and she, as was to be expected, also falls in love, but with more
unbridled and wilful passion. Her lover, gifted with all the qualities of exterior
polish and vivacity, proves faithless, and marries a woman of large fortune.
The interest and merit of the piece depend altogether upon the behaviour of
the elder sister, while obliged at once to sustain her own disappointment with
Works 131
fortitude, and to support her sister, who abandons herself, with unsuppressed
feelings, to the indulgence of grief. The marriage of the unworthy rival
at length relieves her own lover from his imprudent engagement, while
her sister, turned wise by precept, example, and experience, transfers her
affection to a very respectable and somewhat too serious admirer, who had
nourished an unsuccessful passion through the three volumes.
In Pride and Prejudice the author presents us with a family of young
women, bred up under a foolish and vulgar mother, and a father whose good
abilities lay hid under such a load of indolence and insensibility, that he had
become contented to make the foibles and follies of his wife and daughters the
subject of dry and humorous sarcasm, rather than of admonition, or restraint.
This is one of the portraits from ordinary life which shews our author’s talents
in a very strong point of view. A friend of ours, whom the author never saw
or heard of, was at once recognized by his own family as the original of Mr.
Bennet, and we do not know if he has yet got rid of the nickname. A Mr.
Collins, too, a formal, conceited, yet servile young sprig of divinity, is drawn
with the same force and precision. The story of the piece consists chiefly in
the fates of the second sister, to whom a man of high birth, large fortune, but
haughty and reserved manners, becomes attached, in spite of the discredit
thrown upon the object of his affection by the vulgarity and ill-conduct of her
relations. The lady, on the contrary, hurt at the contempt of her connections,
which the lover does not even attempt to suppress, and prejudiced against
him on other accounts, refuses the hand which he ungraciously offers, and
does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she accidentally visits
a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer. They chance to
meet exactly as her prudence had begun to subdue her prejudice; and after
some essential services rendered to her family, the lover becomes encouraged
to renew his addresses, and the novel ends happily.
Emma has even less story than either of the preceding novels. Miss
Emma Woodhouse, from whom the book takes its name, is the daughter of
a gentleman of wealth and consequence residing at his seat in the immediate
vicinage of a country village called Highbury. The father, a good-natured,
silly valetudinary, abandons the management of his household to Emma, he
himself being only occupied by his summer and winter walk, his apothecary,
his gruel, and his whist table. The latter is supplied from the neighbouring
village of Highbury with precisely the sort of persons who occupy the vacant
corners of a regular whist table, when a village is in the neighbourhood, and
better cannot be found within the family. We have the smiling and courteous
vicar, who nourishes the ambitious hope of obtaining Miss Woodhouse’s
132 Jane Austen
hand. We have Mrs. Bates, the wife of a former rector, past every thing but tea
and whist; her daughter, Miss Bates, a good-natured, vulgar, and foolish old
maid; Mr. Weston, a gentleman of a frank disposition and moderate fortune,
in the vicinity, and his wife an amiable and accomplished person, who had
been Emma’s governess, and is devotedly attached to her. Amongst all these
personages, Miss Woodhouse walks forth, the princess paramount, superior
to all her companions in wit, beauty, fortune, and accomplishments, doted
upon by her father and the Westons, admired, and almost worshipped by the
more humble companions of the whist table. The object of most young ladies
is, or at least is usually supposed to be, a desirable connection in marriage.
But Emma Woodhouse, either anticipating the taste of a later period of life,
or, like a good sovereign, preferring the weal of her subjects of Highbury
to her own private interest, sets generously about making matches for her
friends without thinking of matrimony on her own account. We are informed
that she had been eminently successful in the case of Mr. and Miss Weston;
and when the novel commences she is exerting her influence in favour of
Miss Harriet Smith, a boarding-school girl without family or fortune, very
good humoured, very pretty, very silly, and, what suited Miss Woodhouse’s
purpose best of all, very much disposed to be married.
In these conjugal machinations Emma is frequently interrupted, not only
by the cautions of her father, who had a particular objection to any body
committing the rash act of matrimony, but also by the sturdy reproof and
remonstrances of Mr. Knightley, the elder brother of her sister’s husband,
a sensible country gentleman of thirty-five, who had known Emma from
her cradle, and was the only person who ventured to find fault with her. In
spite, however, of his censure and warning, Emma lays a plan of marrying
Harriet Smith to the vicar; and though she succeeds perfectly in diverting
her simple friend’s thoughts from an honest farmer who had made her a
very suitable offer, and in flattering her into a passion for Mr. Elton, yet,
on the other hand, that conceited divine totally mistakes the nature of the
encouragement held out to him, and attributes the favour which he found
in Miss Woodhouse’s eyes to a lurking affection on her own part. This at
length encourages him to a presumptuous declaration of his sentiments;
upon receiving a repulse, he looks abroad elsewhere, and enriches the
Highbury society by uniting himself to a dashing young woman with as
many thousands as are usually called ten, and a corresponding quantity of
presumption and ill breeding.
While Emma is thus vainly engaged in forging wedlock-fetters for
others, her friends have views of the same kind upon her, in favour of a son
Works 133
of Mr. Weston by a former marriage, who bears the name, lives under the
patronage, and is to inherit the fortune of a rich uncle. Unfortunately Mr.
Frank Churchill had already settled his affections on Miss Jane Fairfax, a young
lady of reduced fortune; but as this was a concealed affair, Emma, when Mr.
Churchill first appears on the stage, has some thoughts of being in love with
him herself; speedily, however, recovering from that dangerous propensity,
she is disposed to confer him upon her deserted friend Harriet Smith. Harriet
has, in the interim, fallen desperately in love with Mr. Knightley, the sturdy,
advice-giving bachelor; and, as all the village supposes Frank Churchill and
Emma to be attached to each other, there are cross purposes enough (were the
novel of a more romantic cast) for cutting half the men’s throats and breaking
all the women’s hearts. But at Highbury Cupid walks decorously, and with
good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn, instead of flourishing it
around to set the house on fire. All these entanglements bring on only a train
of mistakes and embarrassing situations, and dialogues at balls and parties
of pleasure, in which the author displays her peculiar powers of humour and
knowledge of human life. The plot is extricated with great simplicity. The aunt
of Frank Churchill dies; his uncle, no longer under her baneful influence,
consents to his marriage with Jane Fairfax. Mr. Knightley and Emma are led,
by this unexpected incident, to discover that they had been in love with each
other all along. Mr. Woodhouse’s objections to the marriage of his daughter
are overpowered by the fears of house-breakers, and the comfort which
he hopes to derive from having a stout son-in-law resident in the family;
and the facile affections of Harriet Smith are transferred, like a bank bill by
indorsation, to her former suitor, the honest farmer, who had obtained a
favourable opportunity of renewing his addresses. Such is the simple plan of
a story which we peruse with pleasure, if not with deep interest, and which
perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where
the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful
excitement of curiosity.
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. The subjects
are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to
nature, and with a precision which delights the reader. This is a merit which
it is very difficult to illustrate by extracts, because it pervades the whole work,
and is not to be comprehended from a single passage. . . .
[Her merit] consists much in the force of a narrative conducted with much
neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters
134 Jane Austen
of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect. The faults, on the
contrary, arise from the minute detail which the author’s plan comprehends.
Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss
Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward
or too long dwelt upon, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction
as in real society. Upon the whole, the turn of this author’s novels bears the
same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields
and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned grounds of a show
mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. It is neither so
captivating as the one, nor so grand as the other, but it affords to those who
frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social
habits; and what is of some importance, the youthful wanderer may return
from his promenade to the ordinary business of life, without any chance of
having his head turned by the recollection of the scene through which he has
been wandering.
—Sir Walter Scott, “Emma,” Quarterly Review,
October 1815, pp. 192–200
William C. Macready (1834)

Finished Miss Austen’s Emma, which amused me very much, impressing
me with a high opinion of her powers of drawing and sustaining character,
though not satisfying me always with the end and aim of her labours. She
is successful in painting the ridiculous to the life, and while she makes
demands on our patience for the almost intolerable absurdities and
tediousness of her well-meaning gossips, she does not recompense us for
what we suffer from her conceited and arrogant nuisances by making their
vices their punishments. We are not much better, but perhaps a little more
prudent for her writings. She does not probe the vices; but lays bare the
weaknesses of character: the blemish on the skin, and not the corruption
at the heart is what she examines. Mrs. Brunton’s books have a far higher
aim; they try to make us better, and it is an addition to our previous faults
if they do not. The necessity, the comfort and the elevating influence of
piety is continually inculcated throughout her works—which never appear
in Miss Austen’s.
—William C. Macready, Diary, February 15, 1834
Works 135

The opinions Brontë expresses here are comparable to those of W.F.
Pollock, Francis Hovey Stoddard, and Julia Kavanaugh. On some level, all
of these readers and critics state that Austen’s novels keep their tension at
the surface, rather than delving into the psychological characterizations
of individuals. All four of these readers/critics wrote during the middle of
the nineteenth century, when England, well into Queen Victoria’s reign
and the changes ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, was on its way
to becoming the wealthiest nation in the world. This historical context
leads to intriguing questions about the differences between the novel
of Austen’s time and the novel of forty years later. The Victorian novel-
ists, such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, often
published their novels serially, one installment at a time, and addressed
such philosophical questions as whether or not the novel could be lifelike
and colorful all at once. Since Austen’s novels, in many scholars’ opinions,
defy categorization as Romantic or Victorian, comparing her work to such
novels is important and illustrative of the changes made to the novel form
as it became more common and popular.
Brontë’s works, which include Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, make
for interesting comparisons with Austen’s novels as well. Like Austen,
Brontë did not always write according to convention, and her work did
not necessarily fit the accepted mold of her time. Brontë’s distinction,
in this excerpt, between a “lady” and a “woman” is a telling one, given
the prominence of strong female characters in her works and leads us to
wonder if she employed the two terms in response to her disappointment
in Austen.
QQQ
I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s works Emma—read it with
interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself
would have thought sensible and suitable—anything like warmth or
enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place
in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would
have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outre and
extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of
genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature
delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement,
disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to
136 Jane Austen
her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood;
even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful
but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the
smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the
human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees
keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs
fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the
unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen
ignores; she no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race
than each man, with bodily vision sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane
Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and
rather insensible (not senseless) woman, if this is heresy—I cannot help it.
If I said it to some people (Lewes for instance) they would directly accuse
me of advocating exaggerated heroics, but I am not afraid of your falling
into any such vulgar error.
—Charlotte Brontë, Letter to W.S. Williams (April 12, 1850)

Emma will generally be recognised by the admirers of Miss Austen as the
best of her works. In delicate investigation of the nicer peculiarities of
character, and in its perfectly finished execution, it cannot be surpassed. It
is a pleasure even to write down the names of the persons composing the
little circle at Highbury. Emma, handsome, clever, and charming, too fond
only of management, and thinking perhaps a little too much of herself;
Mr. Woodhouse, as finely drawn as one of Shakspeare’s fools; Mr. and Mrs.
Weston, some time Miss Taylor; Mr. Knightley; the John Knightleys; Mr. and
Mrs. Elton; Frank Churchill; Jane Fairfax; Harriet Smith, whose patronage
by Emma was for the time so unfortunate for her; Perry, whose name has
become a household word for the family medical attendant; Mrs. and Miss
Bates. What a wonderful amount of reality and individualization do they
suggest to those who are already acquainted with them! What new pleasures
are untasted by those who have yet to visit at Hartfield and Rardalls, or to
spend the day at Donwell Abbey! No other novels but Miss Austen’s have ever
excited so much minute as well as general interest. In Emma, for instance,
a passage occurs (vol. ii., end of chap 16) which has led to frequent and
anxious research into the manners of polite society at the time. It is at the
first dinner given at Hartfield to the Eltons after their marriage. The party
Works 137
consisted of eight persons—Mr. Woodhouse and Emma, Mr. and Mrs. Elton,
Mr. Knightley, Mrs. Weston, Mr. John Knightley (the husband of the one and
the wife of the other not being present), and Jane Fairfax. They are assembled
before dinner; Mr. Woodhouse hands the bride into the dining-room, leaving
to follow three ladies and three gentlemen. These, however, did not pair off
together, as would be the case at present, but the ladies seem to have gone
out together, Emma and Jane Fairfax, arm in arm; and the gentlemen, it must
be presumed, followed them; and such appears to have been the custom of
the period. In another place in the same novel Miss Austen’s accuracy may
be impeached with more probability of success; for, ‘in the middle of June,’
or rather ‘at almost Mid-summer,’ strawberries are described as being eaten
from the beds in the gardens of Donwell Abbey, while the orchard is in
blossom at the neighbouring Abbey-Mill Farm—an anachronism—which we
have never met with any horticulturist able to explain by bringing together
even the earliest and latest varieties of apple and strawberry.
January 1860, pp. 30–35
Anthony Trollope “Emma” (1865)

The fact that Trollope’s writing was often compared to Austen’s brings to
light an obvious example for students to use in writing comparison/con-
trast papers. Trollope wrote prolifically and according to a strict regular
schedule, causing critics to remark that his writing was less realized than
that of other novelists, since one cannot write only from inspiration when
following such a rigid schedule. Austen, too, wrote according to a sched-
ule of sorts, putting her papers away whenever someone walked into the
room, picking up her pen again only when she had the time and solitude
to do so. In this excerpt, Trollope mentions specifically feminine and con-
textual elements in Austen’s writing that would make a comparison to his
own writing all the more nuanced and resonant.
Trollope first notes that Austen “is severe on the little foibles of women
with a severity which no man would dare to use,” causing readers to
wonder if this is at least part of the “distinctly feminine style” that so many
critics attribute to Austen. It is worth noting that Trollope was known (in
his day and after) for his remarkable insight into the minds and troubles
of women. Trollope also makes blatant distinctions between what was
allowed in literature and life in 1815 and what changes had befallen
society and literature by 1865. He writes, for example, that “nowadays, we
138 Jane Austen
dare not make our heroines so little.” Students might perform research to
determine if that is true of Victorian writers, and if so, why.
QQQ
Emma is undoubtedly very tedious;—thereby shewing rather the patience of
readers in the authors day than any incapacity on her part to avoid the fault.
The dialogues are too long and some of them are unnecessary.
But the story shews wonderful knowledge of female character, and is
severe on the little foibles of women with a severity which no man would
dare to use. Emma, the heroine, is treated almost mercilessly. In every passage
of the book she is in fault for some folly, some vanity, some ignorance,—or
indeed for some meanness. Her conduct to her friend Harriet,—her assumed
experience and real ignorance of human nature—are terribly true; but
nowadays we dare not make our heroines so little. Her weaknesses are all
plain to us, but of her strength we are only told; and even at the last we hardly
know why Mr Knightley loves her.
The humour shewn in some of the female characters in Emma is very good.
Mrs Elton with her loud Bath-begotten vulgarity is excellent; and Miss Bates,
long-winded, self-denying, ignorant, and eulogistic has become proverbial.
But the men are all weak. There is nothing in Emma like Mr Bennet and Mr
Collins, the immortal heroes of Pride and Prejudice. Mr Woodhouse, the
malade imaginaire, is absurd, and the Knightleys and Westons are simply
sticks. It is as a portrait of female life among ladies in an English village 50
years ago that Emma is to be known and remembered.
We have here, given to us unconsciously, a picture of the clerical life of
1815 which we cannot avoid comparing with the clerical life of 1865. After a
modest dinner party, when the gentlemen join the ladies, the parson of the
parish, a young man, is noticed as having taken too much wine. And no one
else has done so. But allusion is made to this, not because he is a clergyman,
nor is he at all a debauched or fast-living clergyman. It simply suits the story
that he should be a little flushed & free of speech. The same clergyman, when
married, declines to dance because he objects to the partner proposed to him;
and special mention is made of card parties at this clergyman’s house. How
must the mouths of young parsons water in these days as they read these
details, if they are now ever allowed to read such books as Emma.
I cannot but notice Miss Austen’s timidity in dealing with the most
touching scenes which come in her way, and in avoiding the narration of
those details which a bolder artist would most eagerly have seized. In the final
scene between Emma and her lover,—when the conversation has become
Works 139
almost pathetic,—she breaks away from the spoken dialogue, and simply tells
us of her hero’s success. This is a cowardice which robs the reader of much of
the charm which he has promised himself.
—Anthony Trollope, Emma, (Longman Cultural Edition)
“First Reviews and Later Reactions,” 1865, pp. 461–62
Margaret Oliphant (1882)

Margaret Oliphant’s observations regarding changes in Austen’s writ-
ing style, particularly concerning characterization, prompts students
to look at Austen’s works in the order in which they were written (Pride
and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Emma, Mansfield
Park, and Persuasion) to attempt to identify changes and growth in
Austen’s style. It is also comparatively rich to look at these novels in
the order in which they were published (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and
Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey), a
rearrangement that might complicate ideas concerning the progression
of Austen’s writing style. Logically, Northanger Abbey should be the most
sophisticated of Austen’s novels, since it was the last to be published.
But given the order in which the novels were written, it makes sense that
Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion provide nuances that Northanger
Abbey does not. Students might be interested in charting their own
perceptions of Austen’s progress as a writer, noting the connections
among her works and speculating as to which novel exemplifies the
most sophisticated writing.
QQQ
Emma, perhaps, is the work upon which most suffrages would meet as the
most perfect of all her performances. It is again the story of a girl, full of
mistakes and foolishness, but of a girl very different from Catherine Morland.
That delightful little maiden was very young, very simple, at the age when
life is all one sweet wonder and surprise to the novice; but Emma is more
mature and her own mistress, used to a certain supremacy, and to know
her own importance and feel herself a power in her little world. Perhaps the
author has scarcely the same sympathy for her that she had for her younger
heroine, for some of Emma’s mistakes are sharply punished, and her own
movements of self-reproach and self-conviction are very keen; but then her
errors are of a graver kind altogether, and involve the comfort of others, as
only the actions of an important personage with some responsibility on her
shoulders could do. But Emma’s wilful womanhood, and her busy schemes
140 Jane Austen
and plans for the settlement of other people’s fortunes, are scarcely less
attractive than the infantine freshness of Catherine: and the group round
her are drawn—we would say with greater perfection of experience and
knowledge of the world, did we not remember that Pride and Prejudice,
the first of the series, was as wealthy and varied in character. But, at least,
if Emma is little advanced in power of conception from that wonderful
work, there are traces of a maturing mind in the softened medium through
which the author contemplates her dramatis persona. In her earlier work,
excepting and not always excepting her pair of lovers, she has an impartial
and amiable contempt for all, and laughs at every one of them with a soft
cynicism which sees in the world chiefly an assemblage of delightfully
absurd persons, who lay themselves out to ridicule, turn where you will and
from every point of view. Even Darcy himself, though he imposes upon her
by his grandeur and heroic qualities, is not always safe from her dart of keen
and smiling derision, and nobody but Elizabeth, who occupies in the book
something of her own position, escapes her amused perception of universal
weakness. But by the time she reaches the length of Emma, those eyes full
of insight have acquired a deeper view. Amusement is no longer the chief
inspiration of her observant vision. She laughs still, but it is in another key.
Mrs. Bennet was vulgar and heartless, despicable as well as ridiculous; but
Miss Bates, though we laugh at her, excites none of the feelings of repulsion
which move us for almost all Elizabeth Bennet’s family, except Jane. The
broken stream of talk, the jumbled ideas, and everlasting repetitions of the
village busybody, touch us with an affectionate amusement. We are never
so angry with Emma as when, in her irritation after one of her failures, she
is unkind to Miss Bates. This good woman is managed with such skill and
tenderness that she cannot be too diffuse and wandering, too confused and
tedious, for the kindness we have for her. Her author laughs too, but softly,
with a glimmer of moisture in those keen eyes which had no sympathy to
spare for the Bennets; and in all Mr. Woodhouse’s maunderings there is
the same touch of humorous charity. They are respectable to her in their
weakness, as their predecessors were not. It is no longer saucy youth,
remorseless, amused with everything, picking up every human creature
about on the point of its dazzling spear for the ridicule of the world—but
a sweeter, chastened faculty, not less capable of penetrating and divining,
but finding something more to divine and penetrate than is dreamt of in
the philosophy of twenty. With such a deepening and ripening of moral
perception, what might we not have had if this wonderful observer of the
human comedy had lived to the full extent of mortal life? But this is a vain
Works 141
question, and we may console ourselves with the belief that the supply of
living energy in us is proportioned to the time we have to use it in.
—Margaret Oliphant, The Literary History of England,
1790–1825, 1882, Vol. 3, pp. 231–33

Emma Woodhouse, in the story named after her, is one of the most boldly
imagined of Jane Austen’s heroines. Perhaps she is the very most so, for it
took supreme courage to portray a girl, meant to win and keep the reader’s
fancy, with the characteristics frankly ascribed to Emma Woodhouse. We
are indeed allowed to know that she is pretty; not formally, but casually,
from the words of a partial friend: “Such an eye!—the true hazel eye—and
so brilliant!—regular features, open countenance, with a complexion—ah,
what a bloom of full health, and such a pretty height and size; such a firm
and upright figure.” But, before we are allowed to see her personal beauty we
are made to see in her some of the qualities which are the destined source of
trouble for herself and her friends. In her wish to be useful she is patronizing
and a little presumptuous; her self-sufficiency early appears, and there are
hints of her willingness to shape the future of others without having past
enough of her own to enable her to do it judiciously. The man who afterwards
marries her says of her: “ ‘She will never submit to anything requiring
industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. . . .
Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old she had
the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at
seventeen. She was always quick and assured . . . and ever since she was twelve
Emma has been mistress of the house and you all.’ ”
An officious and self-confident girl, even if pretty, is not usually one to
take the fancy, and yet Emma takes the fancy. She manages the delightful
and whimsical old invalid her father, but she is devotedly and unselfishly
good to him. She takes the destiny of Harriet Smith unwarrantably into
her charge, but she breaks off the girl’s love-affair only in the interest of a
better match. She decides that Frank Churchill, the stepson of her former
governess, will be in love with her, but she never dreams that Mr. Elton,
whom she means for Harriet Smith, can be so. She is not above a little
manoeuvring for the advantage of those she wishes to serve, but the tacit
insincerity of Churchill is intolerable to her. She is unfeelingly neglectful
142 Jane Austen
of Jane Fairfax and cruelly suspicious of her, but she generously does what
she can to repair the wrong, and she takes her punishment for it meekly
and contritely. She makes thoughtless and heartless fun of poor, babbling
Miss Bates, but when Knightley calls her to account for it, she repents her
unkindness with bitter tears. She will not be advised against her pragmatical
schemes by Knightley, but she is humbly anxious for his good opinion. She
is charming in the very degree of her feminine complexity, which is finally
an endearing single-heartedness.
Her character is shown in an action so slight that the novel of “Emma”
may be said to be hardly more than an exemplification of Emma. In the
placid circumstance of English country life where she is the principal social
figure the story makes its round with a few events so unexciting as to leave
the reader in doubt whether anything at all has happened. Mr. Elton, a
clerical snob as odious as Mr. Collins in “Pride and Prejudice” is amusing,
indignantly resents Emma’s plan for supplying him with a wife in Harriet
Smith, and marries a woman who has Emma’s defects without their qualities.
Frank Churchill keeps his engagement with Jane Fairfax a secret till all the
possible mischief can come from it, and then acknowledges it just when the
fact must be most mortifying and humiliating to Emma. After she has been
put to shame before Knightley in every way, she finds herself beloved and
honored by him and in the way to be happily married. There are, meantime,
a few dances and picnics, dinners and teas; Harriet Smith is frightened by
gypsies, and some hen-roosts are robbed. There is not an accident, even of the
mild and beneficent type of Louisa Musgrove’s in “Persuasion”; there is not
an elopement, even of the bouffe nature of Lydia’s in “Pride and Prejudice”;
there is nothing at all so tragic as Catharine Morland’s expulsion by General
Tilney in “Northanger Abbey.” Duels and abductions, of course, there are
none; for Jane Austen had put from her all the machinery of the great and
little novelists of the eighteenth century, and openly mocked at it. This has
not prevented its being frequently used since, and she shows herself more
modern than all her predecessors and contemporaries and most of her
successors, in the rejection of the major means and the employment of the
minor means to produce the enduring effects of “Emma.” Among her quiet
books it is almost the quietest, and so far as the novel can suggest that repose
which is the ideal of art “Emma” suggests it, in an action of unsurpassed
unity, consequence, and simplicity.
It is difficult to detach from the drama any scene which shall present
Emma in a moment more characteristic than other moments; but that
in which Knightley takes her to task for her behavior to Miss Bates can
Works 143
be chosen, because it illustrates the courageous naturalness with which

she is studied throughout. “While waiting for the carriage, she found Mr.
Knightley at her side. He looked around, as if to see that no one were near,
and then said, ‘Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used
to do. . . . I cannot see you acting wrong without a remonstrance. How
could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in
your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? Emma, I had not
thought it possible!’ Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to
laugh it off. ‘Nay, how could I have helped saying what I did? Nobody could
have helped it. It was not so very bad. I dare say she did not understand
me.’ ‘I assure you she did. She felt your full meaning. She has talked of
it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it—with what
candor and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honoring your
forbearance . . . when her society must be so irksome.’ ‘Oh,’ cried Emma,
‘I know there is not a better creature in the world; but you must allow that
what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.’
‘They are blended, I acknowledge,’ he said, ‘and were . . . she a woman of
fortune, I would leave her every harmless absurdity to take its chance. . . .
Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is
from being the case! She is poor; she is sunk from the comforts she was
born to; and if she should live to old age must probably sink more. Her
situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You,
whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from
a period when her notice was an honor—to have you now, in thoughtless
spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before
her niece, too—and before many others, many of whom (certainly some)
would be entirely guided by your treatment of her. This is not pleasant to
you, Emma, and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will—I
will tell you truths while I can . . . trusting that you will some time or
other do me greater justice than you can do now.’ While they talked, they
were advancing towards the carriage; it was ready, and before she could
speak again he had handed her in. He had misinterpreted the feelings
which had kept her face averted and her tongue motionless. They were
combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern.
She had not been able to speak, and on entering the carriage, sunk back for
a moment overcome; then reproaching herself for having taken no leave,
making no acknowledgment, parting in apparent sullenness, she looked
out with voice and hand eager to show a difference; but it was too late. He
had turned away, and the horses were in motion. . . . Emma felt the tears
144 Jane Austen
running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any
trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.”
It is not on such grounds, in such terms, that a heroine is often talked
to in a novel, and it is not so that she commonly takes a talking-to. But it is
to be remembered that Knightley is not only Emma’s tacit lover; he is the
brother of her sister’s husband, and much her own elder, and as a family
friend has some right to scold her. It is to be considered also that she is
herself a singular type among heroines: a type which Jane Austen perfected
if she did not invent, and in that varied sisterhood she has the distinction, if
not the advantage, of being an entirely natural girl, and a nice girl, in spite
of her faults.

Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh “Emma” (1913)
William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh use the word
“Austenish” to describe Emma. What criteria would one use to determine
whether or not a novel is “Austenish,” and why? This piece seems to offer
some criteria. Do you agree that the term could be accurately applied?
Why or why not? Which Austen novel, according to your criteria, is in fact
most “Austenish”?
QQQ
All through this year and the early part of the next, Emma (begun January
1814, finished March 29, 1815) was assiduously worked at. Although polished
to the highest degree, it was more quickly composed than any previous work
and gave evidence of a practised hand. It was also the most “Austenish”
of all her novels, carrying out most completely her idea of what was fitted
to her tastes and capacities. She enjoyed having a heroine “whom no one
would like but herself,” and working on “three or four families in a country
village.” Emma appeals therefore more exclusively than any of the others to
an inner circle of admirers: but such admirers may possibly place it at the
head of her compositions. There are no stirring incidents; there is no change
of scene. The heroine, whose society we enjoy throughout, never sleeps away
from home, and even there sees only so much company as an invalid father
can welcome. No character in the book is ill, no one is ruined, there is no
Works 145
villain, and no paragon. On the other hand, the plot is admirably contrived
and never halts; while the mysteries—exclusively mysteries of courtship and
love—are excellently maintained. Emma never expresses any opinion which is
thoroughly sound, and seldom makes any forecast which is not belied by the
event, yet we always recognise her acuteness, and she by degrees obtains our
sympathy. The book also illustrates to the highest degree the author’s power
of drawing humorous characters; Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, and Mrs.
Elton in the first class, and Harriet Smith in the second. And the humour is
always essential to the delineation of character—it is never an excrescence.
It also depends more on what is said than on any tricks of speech; there are
no catchwords, and everyone speaks practically the same excellent English.
Besides this, Emma also gives a very good instance of the author’s habit of
building up her characters almost entirely without formal description, and
leaving analysis to her readers.
Her custom of following her creations outside the printed pages enables
us to say that the word swept aside unread by Jane Fairfax was “pardon”; and
that the Knightleys’ exclusion from Donwell was ended by the death of Mr.
Woodhouse in two years’ time. According to a less well-known tradition,
Jane Fairfax survived her elevation only nine or ten years. Whether the John
Knightleys afterwards settled at Hartfield, and whether Frank Churchill
married again, may be legitimate subjects for speculation.
“Emma,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, 1913, pp. 243–45

“Opinions of Emma” (1913)
This list kept by Austen indicates that she did not consider writing a mere
hobby. Students might look for parallels among those who liked the book
as well as among those who did not. Students might also investigate
whether knowledge of Emma’s reception appears to have influenced
Austen’s writing of Persuasion.
QQQ
The fact that she was honoured with a notice in the Quarterly did not
prevent the author from collecting and leaving on record the more domestic
criticisms of her family and friends.
146 Jane Austen
Opinions of Emma.
Captain F. Austen liked it extremely, observing that though there might

be more wit in P. and P. and an higher morality in M. P., yet altogether, on
account of its peculiar air of Nature throughout, he preferred it to either.
Mrs. Frank Austen liked and admired it very much indeed, but must still
prefer P. and P.
Mrs. J. Bridges preferred it to all the others.
Miss Sharp—Better than M. P., but not so well as P. and P. Pleased with
the heroine for her originality, delighted with Mr. K, and called Mrs. Elton
beyond praise—dissatisfied with Jane Fairfax.
Cassandra—Better than P. and P. but not so well as M. P.
Fanny K—Not so well as either P. and P. or M. P. Could not bear Emma
herself. Mr. Knightley delightful. Should like J. F. if she knew more of her.
Mr. and Mrs. James Austen did not like it so well as either of the three
others. Language different from the others; not so easily read.
Edward preferred it to M. P. only. Mr. K. liked by everybody.
Miss Bigg—Not equal to either P. and P. or M. P. Objected to the sameness
of the subject (Matchmaking) all through. Too much of Mrs. Elton and H.
Smith. Language superior to the others.
My Mother thought it more entertaining than M. P., but not so interesting
as P. and P. No characters in it equal to Lady Catherine or Mr. Collins.
Miss Lloyd thought it as clever as either of the others, but did not receive
so much pleasure from it as from P. and P. and M. P.
Fanny Cage liked it very much indeed, and classed it between P. and P.
and M. P.
Mrs. and Miss Craven liked it very much, but not so much as the others.
Mr. Sherer did not think it equal to either M. P. (which he liked the best of
all) or P. and P. Displeased with my pictures of clergymen.
Miss Bigg, on reading it a second time, liked Miss Bates much better than at
first, and expressed herself as liking all the people of Highbury in general, except
Harriet Smith, but could not help still thinking her too silly in her loves.
The Family at Upton Gay all very much amused with it. Miss Bates a great
favourite with Mrs. Beaufoy.
Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Perrot saw many beauties in it, but could not think
it equal to P. and P. Darcy and Elizabeth had spoilt them for anything
else. Mr. K, however, an excellent character; Emma better luck than a
matchmaker often has; pitied Jane Fairfax; thought Frank Churchill better
treated than he deserved.
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Countess Craven admired it very much, but did not think it equal to P. and
P. which she ranked as the very first of its sort.
Mrs. Guiton thought it too natural to be interesting.
Mrs. Digweed did not like it so well as the others: in fact if she had not
known the author would hardly have got through it.
Miss Terry admired it very much, particularly Mrs. Elton.
Henry Sanford—very much pleased with it—delighted with Miss Bates,
but thought Mrs. Elton the best-drawn character in the book. Mansfield Park,
however, still his favourite.
Mr. Haden—quite delighted with it. Admired the character of Emma.
Miss Isabella Herries did not like it. Objected to my exposing the sex in the
character of the heroine. Convinced that I had meant Mrs. and Miss Bates for
some acquaintance of theirs. People whom I never heard of before.
Mrs. Harriet Moore admired it very much, but M. P. still her favourite of all.
Countess of Money delighted with it.
Mr. Cockerell liked it so little that Fanny would not send me his opinion.
Mrs. Dickson did not much like it—thought it very inferior to P. and P.
Liked it the less from there being a Mr. and Mrs. Dixon in it.
Mrs. Brandreth thought the third volume superior to anything I had ever
written—quite beautiful!
Mr. B. Lefroy thought that if there had been more incident it would be equal
to any of the others. The characters quite as well-drawn and supported as in any,
and from being more everyday ones, the more entertaining. Did not like the
heroine so well as any of the others. Miss Bates excellent, but rather too much
of her. Mr. and Mrs. Elton admirable and John Knightley a sensible man.
Mrs. B. Lefroy ranked Emma as a composition with S. and S. Not so
brilliant as P. and P. nor so equal as M. P. Preferred Emma herself to all
the heroines. The characters, like all the others, admirably well drawn and
supported—perhaps rather less strongly marked than some, but only the
more natural for that reason. Mr. Knightley, Mrs. Elton, and Miss Bates her
favourites. Thought one or two of the conversations too long.
Mrs. Lefroy preferred it to M. P., but liked M. P. the least of all.
Mr. Fowle read only the first and last chapters, because he had heard it was
not interesting.
Mrs. Lutley Sclater liked it very much, better than M. P., and thought I had
“brought it all about very cleverly in the last volume.”
Mrs. C. Cage wrote thus to Fanny: “A great many thanks for the loan of
Emma, which I am delighted with. I like it better than any. Every character is
thoroughly kept up. I must enjoy reading it again with Charles. Miss Bates is
148 Jane Austen
incomparable, but I was nearly killed with those precious treasures. They are
unique, and really with more fun than I can express. I am at Highbury all day,
and I can’t help feeling I have just got into a new set of acquaintance. No one
writes such good sense, and so very comfortable.”
Mrs. Wroughton did not like it so well as P. and P. Thought the authoress
wrong, in such times as these, to draw such clergymen as Mr. Collins and
Mr. Elton.
Sir J. Langham thought it much inferior to the others.
Mr. Jeffrey (of the Edinburgh Review) was kept up by it three nights.
Miss Murden—Certainly inferior to all the others.
Captain C. Austen wrote: “Emma arrived in time to a moment. I am
delighted with her, more so I think than even with my favourite, Pride and
Prejudice, and have read it three times in the passage.”
Mrs. D. Dundas thought it very clever, but did not like it so well as either
of the others. . . .
It was not the first time she had collected a miscellaneous set of opinions
on her work. The two following critiques on Mansfield Park—apparently
from two ladies of the same family—will illustrate the sort of want of
comprehension from which the author had to suffer when she got outside the
limits of her own immediate circle.
Mrs. B.—Much pleased with it: particularly with the character of Fanny
as being so very natural. Thought Lady Bertram like herself. Preferred it to
either of the others; but imagined that might be want of taste, as she did not
understand wit.
Mrs. Augusta B. owned that she thought S. and S. and P. and P. downright
nonsense, but expected to like M. P. better, and having finished the first
volume, flattered herself she had got through the worst.
“Opinions of Emma,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters,
1913, pp. 259–62
MANSFIELD PARK
William C. Macready (1836)
Finished Mansfield Park, which hurries with a very inartificial and disagreeable
rapidity to its conclusion, leaving some opportunities for most interesting
and beautiful scenes, particularly the detailed expression of the “how and
the when” Edward’s love was turned from Miss Crawford to Fanny Price. The
Works 149
great merit of Miss Austen is in the finishing of her characters; the action and
conduct of her stories I think frequently defective.
—William C. Macready, Diary, July 10, 1836

In Mansfield Park the characters are still more like such as may be
encountered every day. They are not, however, the less distinct and well
marked as individual specimens; and this novel shows an advance in the
construction and conduct of the story. It contains also more of those passages
of fine observation on life and manners which deserve to be remembered and
extracted for the commonplace book.
January 1860, pp. 30–35
Adolphus Alfred Jack “Miss Austen” (1897)

Jack’s analysis of Mansfield Park and Austen’s writing in general offers a
vital counterargument to readers and critics (Frances Ann Kemble and
George Eliot, among others) who conflate Austen’s biography with her
writing, claiming that she was only able to write so well because she was
merely recording events as they happened to her. Jack finds Austen’s
biography, in terms of her youth, perplexing rather than explanatory: “It
is as if it were possible to be at once old and young.” He feels that she
probably did write down events that happened to her (or were likely to),
but adds that her power of reflection and nuance regarding these events
is incomparable. Students confronting the various theories surround-
ing biography and autobiography might look at the confusion readers
exhibit (particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when
the concept of fiction and the novel form were both relatively new)
regarding how much of a novel should be regarded as a reflection of
the author’s life and how much it should be understood as pure fiction.
Is such a distinction arbitrary, or is it even necessary? Students examin-
ing historical context might expand on this study by looking at potential
consequences various writers (including Austen) faced when their work
was read as largely autobiographical.
Jack also compares Mansfield Park to the fairy tale Cinderella, perhaps
leading students to speculate as to any further similarities among Austen’s
novels and specific fairy tales or the fairy tale form in general.
QQQ
150 Jane Austen
Very different is the tone of Mansfield Park, justly considered its author’s most
finished production. But in reading we are conscious that half our wonder
is gone. The result may be, and in some ways is, more considerable than
anything achieved by the earlier efforts. In Mansfield Park, Miss Austen’s art
is seen in its most delicate form, her style is quieter, the effects she produces
with it are even subtler than before. Nevertheless it is the mature fruit of a
mature tree. What delights incomparably in the books of the first period, is
the union of girlish freshness, of youthful zest, with the admirable mental
balance which only experience can give. “Is it possible,” asks Mr. Jowett in his
diary, “for youth to have the experience and observation and moderation of
age, or for age to retain the force of youth?” Miss Austen’s powers grew and
deepened, but in her first books we find the sense and discrimination of her
last, and it is this which taken together with their gaiety gives to them their
peculiar charm. It is as if it were possible to be at once old and young, as if
a girl were to go to a ball, dance it out, and enjoy everything as much as any
one there, with the full unreflecting reception essential for perfect enjoyment,
and yet immediately after see the matter with the eyes of one who had gone
to judge of the characters. This union of youth and age then, of things hardly
ever found together, gives a mark even more distinguishing than excellence to
such a novel as Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park is altogether an old book,
perfect perhaps if we leave out of account the melodrama of the conclusion,
and the occasional flapping of an extremely white white choker, but still old,
with all its merit with none of the merit of youth.
Pride and Prejudice is gay, Mansfield Park is almost sombre; in Pride
and Prejudice the minute touches are dashed in with laughing haste; in
Mansfield Park everything is laboriously minute; in Pride and Prejudice
there is a smile for every one, and every one deserves a smile; in Mansfield
Park Mrs. Norris is a character altogether repulsive, on whom sympathy
would be wasted. A real figure enough this petty tyrant of a paltry sphere,
but from Pride and Prejudice one would not have learnt that Miss Austen
had her acquaintance, or that of the set which surrounds her. Sir Thomas
Bertram is of a genus extinct, Lady Bertram the most indolently selfish
of stupid ladies, and Edmund Bertram with his “principles,” his reputable
and shallow judgments, the most exasperating of heroes, so exasperating
that one thinks not once of the old saying that in the beginning there
were three species, men, women, and curates. From these one turns with
relief to find no relief in Julia and Maria, Thomas Bertram, Yates, and the
“lady-killer” Crawford. But how delightedly one discovers among them
Mary Crawford and Fanny Price, the two most delicately-drawn figures in
Works 151
the whole of Miss Austen’s delicate gallery. Nothing could be happier than
their juxtaposition—the friendless Fanny doing in the plain innocence of
her nature the offices of an universal friendship, and Mary fingering her
harp in the seat of the parsonage window and weaving the spells of beauty
and mirth. One is pleased too with the fitness of things that arranges for
Cinderella having enough of the leaven of Cinderella in her to find in
Edmund the fairy prince, and provides for the princess, a rather mundane
one who thinks much of her lover’s chance of a baronetcy, ultimately
escaping him. One is pleased with the denouement, however little with
the means by which it is brought about. Mary’s brother and Bertram’s
sister, who is married to a certain Mr. Rushworth, elope together, and
the light comments and practical suggestions of Mary result in a final
quarrel between her and her fiance. The reader familiar with Miss Austen’s
earlier novels exclaims in mild astonishment when he is brought up by an
incident of this texture, a violent departure from ordinary conduct, with
neither passion nor seriousness to explain it. It is true that occurrences of
this kind have given opportunity not only to tragedians, but in Mansfield
Park the incident, narrated with the precision of a newspaper, brings
us too near to the atmosphere of the divorce court, and Miss Austen’s
treatment of it to that of the Sunday-school. There is no serious medium,
she would give us to understand, between talking extravagantly of sin, and
treating such matters as of little account. “Let other pens dwell on guilt
and misery,” she concludes near the end of the book, “I quit such odious
subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in
fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
There must be a strange comfort in Pharisaism, else sympathy with the sect
had not survived.
—Adolphus Alfred Jack, “Miss Austen,”
Essays on the Novel, 1897, pp. 263–67
Hiram M. Stanley “Mansfield Park” (1897)

Hiram M. Stanley identifies several avenues for student research, begin-
ning with his opinion that the “womanliness” in Austen’s work is what
“chiefly attracts the masculine mind.” Stanley mentions several male read-
ers (most of whom are represented in this volume) who are particularly fas-
cinated with Austen’s female characters. This begs the question of Austen’s
intended and actual audiences: if Austen wrote today, would her work be
referred to as “chick lit,” relevant only to female experience, or would it be
152 Jane Austen
considered accessible to both genders? Students might identify textual

evidence in Austen’s works that points toward aligning her novels with
one categorization or another.
Stanley also feels that “in Fanny Miss Austen has in large measure
written down herself.” Of course students might study Austen’s biography
to learn whether this is in fact true. Another potential direction for
research is to study all of Austen’s novels to determine which heroine/
character you feel is most like Austen and why. This is certainly not an easy
task, given the dearth of biographical information available on Austen,
but this type of informed speculation can enrich theories surrounding
both writing style and historical context.
Students more interested in writing style than biography might
imitate Stanley by finding a passage in one of Austen’s novels that they
can argue is particularly representative of some aspect of Austen’s
writing. The facet of Austen’s writing that makes it uniquely belonging
to the author is difficult to articulate, but attempting to do so can
help students determine their arguments about writing in general as
it concerns gender, historical period, class, or politics. For example,
what is it about Austen that would lead Stanley and others to refer to
particular phrases and sentences as “thoroughly feminine . . . and one
most characteristic of Jane Austen”?
Novel theorists will be greatly intrigued by Stanley’s definition of
the “function of the novelist to be not in relating great events but in
making small ones interesting.” If this is true, what other writers might
be considered great novelists? Which writers does this definition reject?
Does Stanley’s definition delineate among the novel and other genres?
Theorists of the novel including Dale Spender, Nancy Armstrong, and
M.M. Bahktin might be helpful in generating a definition of what would
constitute a great novelist.
QQQ
How well I recall the greatest literary pleasure of my life, its time and place!
A dreary winter’s day without, within a generous heat and glow from the
flaming grate, and I reclining at my ease on the library lounge, Mansfield Park
in hand. Then succeed four solid hours of literary bliss, and an absorption so
great that when I mechanically close the book at the last page it is only by
the severest effort that I come back to the real world of pleasant indoors and
bleak outdoors. I was amazed that I, a hardened fiction reader, should be so
transported by this gentle tale of Miss Austen’s, and yet I enjoyed to the full
the after-taste of her perfect realistic art.
Works 153
This first enthusiasm, however, soon abated, and I began to see flaws, to
note the prolixity and unevenness of the work, and to feel that it was almost
school-girlish in tone and sentiment. While the verisimilitude is, indeed,
fascinating, the realization is far from profound. And the characters are too
onesided for full human beings—are only puppets, each pulled by a single
string. Edmund Bertram is, perhaps, the most woodeny of these marionettes.
Lady Bertram, the languid beauty, seems often overdrawn. Mrs. Norris is a
perfect busybody, but a pettiness so absolutely consistent at length rouses
our suspicions and irritates us. We feel that human nature, outside of the
madhouse, does not fulfil the single types so completely.
But in Fanny Price we find no flaw of artistic presentment. Here comes
before our eyes a real, a free, a complex human being, in whose veins, as
Gautier remarks of Balzac’s characters, “runs a true red blood, instead of ink,
which common authors pour into their creations.” Further, I am acquainted
with no more charming figure in fiction than Fanny; she is so completely,
perfectly, deliciously feminine in instinct, feeling, manner, and intelligence,
and in every way a most engaging revelation of a budding womanliness. This
womanliness, slightly bourgeoise, perhaps, but never vulgar or gross, depicted
so surely and delicately, is, I think, the element in Miss Austen’s work which
chiefly attracts the masculine mind, and which delighted Macaulay, Scott,
Guizot, Whately, and Coleridge. Masson reports that he had known the most
hard-headed men in ecstasies with it, and that the only objection as brought
against it by ladies is that it reveals too many of their secrets. Jane Austen
certainly accomplishes the delineation of the character of Fanny with a
fascinating, unobtrusive fidelity to feminine nature, and with a clearness and
wholeness in the creation, miniaturely Shakesperean.
I cannot resist the impression that in Fanny Miss Austen has in large
measure written down herself. Certain it is that both show the same gentle
and true femininity, the same domestic kindliness, the same delicacy of
perception, and the same sensitiveness. Both are fond of dancing, and
the ball episode in Mansfield Park, a masterpiece of quiet realism, takes,
no doubt, much of its colouring from Miss Austen’s own disposition and
experience. Both likewise delight in the drama, and are keenly sensitive to
natural beauty.
The situation in Mansfield Park is the most interesting imaginable. Fanny
is in love with her cousin Edmund, but he treats her and confides to her
as a brother, while he himself, in entire ignorance of Fanny’s feelings, is in
love with Mary Crawford. The womanly reserve of Fanny in concealing her
affection under the severest trials—as when Edmund seeks her sympathy in
154 Jane Austen
his own love affair—is most skilfully depicted. Meanwhile Henry Crawford
starts a flirtation with Fanny, telling his sister that he means to make “a small
hole in Fanny Price’s heart”; but this ends in Fanny, unknown to herself,
making a very large hole in Crawford’s heart. This complex of cross purposes
is worked out with the greatest truth and delicacy.
If I were to select a single passage to illustrate these remarks on the
delightful artistic quality of Mansfield Park, I should choose the opening
pages of Chapter XXIV., where Henry Crawford talks with his sister about his
proposed flirtation with Fanny; but I think even a few sentences will illustrate
Miss Austen’s wonderful skill.
“I do not quite know,” says Henry Crawford, “what to make of Miss Fanny.
I do not understand her. I could not tell what she would be at yesterday. What
is her character? Is she solemn? Is she queer? Is she prudish? Why did she
draw back, and look so grave at me? I could hardly get her to speak. I never
was so long in company with a girl in my life—trying to entertain her—and
succeeded so ill! Never met with a girl who looked so grave on me! I must try
to get the better of this. Her looks say, ‘I will not like you, I am determined
not to like you,’ and I say she shall.”
“Foolish fellow! And so this is her attraction after all! This it is—her not
caring about you—which gives her such a soft skin, and makes her so much
taller, and produces all these charms and graces! I do desire that you will
not be making her really unhappy; a little love perhaps may animate and do
her good, but I will not have you plunge her deep, for she is as good a little
creature as ever lived, and has a great deal of feeling. ‘
“It can be but for a fortnight,” said Henry, “and if a fortnight can kill her,
she must have a constitution which nothing could save. No, I will not do
her any harm, dear little soul! I only want her to look kindly on me, to give
me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we
are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think,
be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at
Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall never be happy again. I
want nothing more.”
“Moderation itself!” said Mary. “I can have no scruples now.”
Surely this is a charming bit of characterization, and it is but one of many,
equally lively and lifelike.
Not the least pleasing of Miss Austen’s touches are her confidential “asides”
to the reader, as when mentioning Fanny’s idea that repeated discouragement
would in time put an end to Crawford’s infatuation, she says to the reader,
“How much time she might, in her own fancy, allot for its dominion is
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another concern. It would not be fair to inquire into a young lady’s exact
estimate of her own perfections,” a thoroughly feminine remark, and one
most characteristic of Jane Austen.
While Jane Austen is always a consistent realist, yet she is never
unfeelingly objective and harshly photographic, as is too often the case with
our latter-day realists, like De Maupassant and Howells, whose art, often
hard and laboured, whose incessant conscious straining to realize, only
repel and weary us. Miss Austen’s work in the main shows a spontaneity of
touch and a sympathetic quality in the very acuteness of its analysis which
is peculiarly engaging. Not so much by set rule as by sheer insight and
intuitive grasp, she achieves verisimilitude without taint of improbability
or unreality. How perfectly she gives us the atmosphere of Mansfield Park!
How well we realize the leisurely life of the good people there, the men
hunting, lounging, and making love; the women talking, embroidering, and
falling in love; and yet both being entirely free from stupidity and stolidity!
Jane Austen may be only one of the little masters of realism, yet in giving
the milieu she is excelled by no novelist—no, not even by Balzac. And
further, if with Schopenhauer we define the function of the novelist to be
not in relating great events but in making small ones interesting, then Miss
Austen in Mansfield Park is quite unsurpassed.
—Hiram M. Stanley, “Mansfield Park,”
Essays on Literary Art, 1897, pp. 47–53

In this excerpt, Howells delineates the heroines of Austen’s novels, point-
ing out that no two are loved for the same qualities. Students might look at
how, specifically, Austen differentiated among female characters that may
easily have ended up more alike than different. Students might also ask if
Austen affords the same individualism to her male characters.
QQQ
It was not Jane Austen’s way to do anything wholesale; she was far too well
acquainted with life, and of too sensitive an artistic conscience for that; and
especially in “Mansfield Park” is one aware of the hand that is held from
overdoing. As in “Sense and Sensibility,” and in fact all her other novels, the
subordinate characters are of delightful verity and vitality. Mrs. Norris is
of a meanness which in its sort may almost match with John Dashwood’s,
156 Jane Austen
and Lady Bertram’s indolent affections and principles form a personality of

almost unique charm. These sisters of Mrs. Price who made an unhappy love
marriage beneath her, are of the same quality as she, and their differentiation
by environment is one of the subtle triumphs of the author’s art.
It is by the same skill that a character so prevalently passive as that of
sweet Fanny Price is made insensibly to take and gently to keep the hold of
a heroine upon the reader. It would have been so easy in so many ways to
overdo her. But she is never once overdone, either when as a child she meets
with the cold welcome of charity in her uncle’s family, where she afterwards
makes herself indispensable, or in her return to her childhood home, which
has forgotten her in her long absence. It is not pretended that she is treated
by her cousins and her aunts with active unkindness, and she suffers none
of the crueller snubbing which cheaply wins a heroine the heart of the
witness. When she goes back to Portsmouth on that famous visit, after
nine years at Mansfield Park, it is not concealed that she is ashamed of her
home, of her weak and slattern mother, of her drinky, smoky, and sweary,
father, of her rude little brothers and sisters, of the whole shabby and vulgar
household. None of the younger children remember her; her father and
mother, from moment to moment, in their preoccupation with her brother,
who comes with her to get his ship at Portsmouth (we are again among
naval people), fail to remember her. All the circumstances are conducive
to disgust and resentment in a girl who might reasonably have expected to
be a distinguished guest for a while at least. But once more that delicately
discriminating hand of Jane Austen does its work; it presently appears that
the Price household is not so altogether impossible, and that a girl who
wishes to be of use to others is not condemned to lasting misery and disgrace
in any circumstances. Always the humorous sense of limitations comes in,
but the human sense of good-will is there; the recognition of the effect of
good-will is distinct but not elaborate. There is more philosophizing and
satirizing than would be present in a more recent novel of equal mastery;
but the characterization is as net as in the highest art of any time.
Sweet Fanny Price goes back to Mansfield Park with almost as little notice
from her family as when she came to Portsmouth; but she has done them
good, and is the better and stronger for her unrequited self-devotion. It is not
pretended that she takes any active part in supporting the family at Mansfield
Park under the disgrace which has befallen them through the elopement of
one daughter to be divorced and of another to be married. Her function is
best suggested by the exclamation with which her aunt Bertram falls upon
her neck, “Dear Fanny, now I shall be comfortable.” To be a comfort, that
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has always been Fanny Price’s rare privilege, and she imparts to the reader
something of the consolation she brings to all the people in the story who
need the help of her sympathy. Possibly there was never a heroine, except
Anne Eliot, who was so passive, without being spectacularly passive, if it is
permitted so to phrase the rather intangible fact; and yet who so endeared
herself to the fancy.
One is not passionately in love with Fanny Price, as one is with some
heroines; one is quite willing Edward Bertram should have her in the end; but
she is one of the sweetest and dearest girls in the world, though these words,
too, rather oversay her. She is another proof of Jane Austen’s constant courage,
which was also her constant wisdom, in being true to life. It is not only wit
like Elizabeth Bennet’s, sensibility like Marianne Dashwood’s, complexity
like Emma Woodhouse’s, or utter innocence like Catharine Morland’s that
is charming. Goodness is charming, patience, usefulness, forbearance,
meekness, are charming, as Jane Austen divined in such contrasting types as
Fanny Price and Anne Eliot. If any young lady has a mind to be like them, she
can learn how in two of the most interesting books in the world.

“Mansfield Park” (1913)
The author broke new ground in this work, which (it should be remembered)
was the first dating wholly from her more mature Chawton period. Though
her novels were all of one type she had a remarkable faculty for creating an
atmosphere—differing more or less in each book; and an excellent instance
of this faculty is worded by the decorous, though somewhat cold, dignity of
Sir Thomas Bertram’s household. In this household Fanny Price grows up,
thoroughly appreciating its orderliness, but saved by Edmund’s affection and
her own warmhearted simplicity from catching the infection of its coldness.
She required, however, an experience of the discomforts and vulgarity of
Portsmouth to enable her to value to the full the home which she had left.
In the first volume she had been too much of a Cinderella to take her proper
position in the family party, and it was a real stroke of art to enhance the
dignity of the heroine through the courtship of a rich and clever man of
the world. A small point worth noticing in the third volume is the manner
158 Jane Austen
in which, when the horrible truth breaks in upon Fanny—and upon the
reader—the tension is relaxed by Mrs. Price’s commonplace remarks about
the carpet.
Probably, most readers will look upon the theatricals and the Portsmouth
episode as the most brilliant parts of the book; but the writing throughout
is full of point, and the three sisters—Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, and Mrs.
Price—are all productions of the author’s most delicately barbed satire. Mrs.
Norris, indeed, is an instance of her complex characters so justly praised by
Macaulay. One thinks of her mainly as parsimonious; but her parsimony
would be worth much less than it is, if it were not set off by her servility to Sir
Thomas, her brutality to Fanny, and her undisciplined fondness for her other
nieces. Lady Bertram is formed for the enjoyment of all her readers; and a pale
example of what she might have become under less propitious circumstances
is given by Mrs. Price. Mrs. Norris, we are told, would have done much better
than Mrs. Price in her position. It must have given lane Austen great pleasure
to make this remark. None of her bad characters (except possibly Elizabeth
Elliot) were quite inhuman to her, and to have found a situation in which
Mrs. Norris might have shone would be a real satisfaction.
One more remark may be made on Mansfield Park. It affords what perhaps
is the only30 probable instance in these books of a portrait drawn from life.
She must, one would think, have had in her mind her brother Charles—as
he had been twelve or fourteen years earlier—when she drew so charming a
sketch of a young sailor in William Price.
We must not forget, however, the author’s strong denial of depicting
individuals, and her declaration that she was too proud of her gentlemen
“to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B.”; nor yet her modest
confession, when speaking of two of her favourites—Edmund Bertram and
Mr. Knightley—that she was aware they were “very far from what I know
English gentlemen often are.”
Jane Austen may perhaps enjoy the distinction of having added words or
expressions to colloquial English. The name “Collins” is almost established
as the description of a letter of thanks after a visit; and we have heard of
a highly intelligent family among whom a guinea is always alluded to as
“something considerable” in memory of the sum believed (on the authority
of the Memoir) to have been given to William Price by Aunt Norris.31
Notes
30. No doubt there were other cases in which particular traits of character
were taken from those around her. Her brother Francis certainly thought
Works 159
that the domestic industry of Captain Harville (in Persuasion) was copied
from himself. (Addenda to Sailor Brothers.)
31. The Memoir calls it “one pound.” The difference is not material, but Mrs.
Norris would probably not be above giving herself the benefit of the doubt.
“Mansfield Park,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters,
1913, pp. 235–36

“Opinions of Mansfield Park” (1913)
It was not the first time she had collected a miscellaneous set of opinions
on her work. The two following critiques on Mansfield Park—apparently
from two ladies of the same family—will illustrate the sort of want of
comprehension from which the author had to suffer when she got outside the
limits of her own immediate circle.
Mrs. B.—Much pleased with it: particularly with the character of Fanny
as being so very natural. Thought Lady Bertram like herself. Preferred it to
either of the others; but imagined that might be want of taste, as she did not
understand wit.
Mrs. Augusta B. owned that she thought S. and S. and P. and P. downright
nonsense, but expected to like M. P. better, and having finished the first
volume, flattered herself she had got through the worst.
“Opinions of Mansfield Park,” Jane Austen:
Her Life and Letters, 1913, p. 263
NORTHANGER ABBEY
Anonymous “Northanger Abbey

and Persuasion” (1818)
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this anonymous review is its
contradictions. First the writer claims that Austen’s “stories are utterly and
entirely devoid of invention,” but then the writer goes on to state his or her
160 Jane Austen
annoyance with Northanger Abbey because “Some of the incidents in it are

rather improbable, and the character of General Tilney seems to have been
drawn from imagination, for it is not a very probable character.” This and
other contradictions in this excerpt suggest the overall difficulty in deter-
mining what elements of her works Austen was specifically drawing from
real life as she knew it versus those aspects she was simply inventing. Most
readers of her time period (like this one excerpted here) acknowledge
Austen’s amazing verisimilitude, but the lack of biographical information
about Austen has always made it difficult to determine where the reali-
ties begin and end. Researching Austen’s biography in light of her novels
would allow students to draw inferences and, in some cases, conclusions
regarding connections between her life and work. Employing this kind
of biographical theory might lead students to ask larger questions about
what effects the conflation of fiction and biography have on readership,
reception, and the perception of a writer’s skill.
This anonymous writer tries to draw such clear connections between
Austen’s life and work that he or she misses some of the elements of
Austen’s style completely. For example, the writer makes the point
that Austen’s “want of imagination (which is the principle defect of her
writings) is useful to her in this respect, that it enables her to keep clear
of all exaggeration.” He or she then goes on to exemplify this by claiming
that Northanger Abbey is “simply, the history of a young girl” who makes
mistakes “in consequence of her imagination, (which had just come
fresh from reading the Mysteries of Udolpho).” Apparently, according to
this writer, readers are not to be surprised that a young woman would
expect her life to play out according to the plot of the novel she most
recently read. What such a literal reading causes this anonymous writer
to disregard is Austen’s satiric look at the gothic novel and her ability
to gently poke fun at readers who take their fiction too seriously. (See
Margaret Oliphant’s 1882 Northanger Abbey entry for a more discerning
reading.) Reading Northanger Abbey alongside The Mysteries of Udolpho
and other gothic novels will give students the opportunity to delineate
what Austen finds humorous about the gothic novel and the people who
read the subgenre. Students exploring these types of comparisons might
also read Northanger Abbey alongside The Female Quixote, by Charlotte
Lennox. Lennox wrote in the eighteenth century and constructed her
novel along the same lines as Austen does in Northanger Abbey, except
that Lennox pokes fun at the romance novel and readers who take it too
much to heart. Such novels can offer unexpected and subtle insight into
the authors’ views of reading in general and the dangers therein.
QQQ
Works 161
With respect to the talents of Jane Austen, they need no other voucher, than
the works which she has left behind her; which in some of the best qualities of
the best sort of novels, display a degree of excellence that has not been often
surpassed. In imagination, of all kinds, she appears to have been extremely
deficient; not only her stories are utterly and entirely devoid of invention,
but her characters, her incidents, her sentiments, are obviously all drawn
exclusively from experience. The sentiments which she puts into the mouths
of her actors, are the sentiments, which we are every day in the habit of
hearing; and as to her actors themselves, we are persuaded that fancy, strictly
so called, has had much less to do with them, than with the characters of
Julius Caesar, Hannibal, or Alexander, as represented to us by historians. At
description she seldom aims; at that vivid and poetical sort of description,
which we have of late been accustomed to, (in the novels of a celebrated
anonymous writer) never; she seems to have no other object in view, than
simply to paint some of those scenes which she has herself seen, and which
every one, indeed, may witness daily. Not only her characters are all of them
belonging to the middle size, and with a tendency, in fact, rather to fall
below, than to rise above the common standard, but even the incidents of
her novels, are of the same description. Her heroes and heroines, make love
and are married, just as her readers make love, and were or will be, married,
no unexpected ill fortune occurs to prevent, nor any unexpected good
fortune, to bring about the events on which her novels hinge. She seems to
be describing such people as meet together every night, in every respectable
house in London; and to relate such incidents as have probably happened,
one time or other, to half the families in the United Kingdom. And yet, by
a singular good judgment, almost every individual represents a class; not a
class of humourists, or of any of the rarer specimens of our species, but one
of those classes to which we ourselves, and every acquaintance we have, in
all probability belong. The fidelity with which these are distinguished is often
admirable. It would have been impossible to discriminate the characters of the
common-place people, whom she employs as the instruments of her novels,
by any set and formal descriptions; for the greater part of them; are such as
we generally describe by saying that they are persons of “no characters at all.”
Accordingly our authoress gives no definitions; but she makes her dramatis
personae talk; and the sentiments which she places in their mouths, the little
phrases which she makes them use, strike so familiarly upon our memory
as soon as we hear them repeated, that we instantly recognize among some
of our acquaintance, the sort of persons she intends to signify, as accurately
as if we had heard their voices. This is the forte of our authoress; as soon as
162 Jane Austen
ever she leaves the shore of her own experience, and attempts to delineate
fancy characters, or such as she may perhaps have often heard of, but possibly
never seen, she falls at once to the level of mere ordinary novellists. Her merit
consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation; no ridiculous
phrase, no affected sentiment, no foolish pretension seems to escape her
notice. It is scarcely possible to read her novels, without meeting with some
of one’s own absurdities reflected back upon one’s conscience; and this, just
in the light in which they ought to appear. For in recording the customs and
manners of common-place people, in the common-place intercourse of life,
our authoress never dips her pen in satire; the follies which she holds up to
us, are, for the most part, mere follies, or else natural imperfections; and
she treats them, as such, with good-humoured pleasantry; mimicking them
so exactly, that we always laugh at the ridiculous truth of the imitation, but
without ever being incited to indulge in feelings, that might tend to render
us ill-natured, and intolerant in society. This is the result of that good sense
which seems ever to keep complete possession over all the other qualities of
the mind of our authoress; she sees every thing just as it is; even her want of
imagination (which is the principal defect of her writings) is useful to her in
this respect, that it enables her to keep clear of all exaggeration, in a mode
of writing where the least exaggeration would be fatal; for if the people and
the scenes which she has chosen, as the subjects of her composition, be not
painted with perfect truth, with exact and striking resemblance, the whole
effect ceases; her characters have no kind of merit in themselves, and whatever
interest they excite in the mind of the reader, results almost entirely, from the
unaccountable pleasure, which, by a peculiarity in our nature, we derive
from a simple imitation of any object, without any reference to the abstract
value or importance of the object itself. This fact is notorious in painting;
and the novels of Miss Austen alone, would be sufficient to prove, were
proof required, that the same is true in the department of literature, which
she has adorned. For our readers will perceive (from the instance which we
are now about to present, in the case of the novels before us,) that be their
merit what it may, it is not founded upon the interest of a narrative. In fact,
so little narrative is there in either of the two novels of which the publication
before us consists, that it is difficult to give any thing like an abstract of their
contents. Northanger Abbey, which is the name of the first novel, is simply, the
history of a young girl, the daughter of a country clergyman of respectability,
educated at home, under the care of her parents; good kind of people, who
taught their large family all that it was necessary for them to know, without
apparently troubling themselves about accomplishments in learning of any
Works 163
kind, beyond what our fathers and mothers were instructed in. Our heroine
is just such a person, as an education under such circumstances, would lead
us to expect; with respect to the hero of the tale, (for every heroine must
have a hero) that which fortunately threw one in the way of Catherine, was
a journey to Bath which she happily made, in company with the lady of the
manor, who was ordered to that place of fashionable resort, for the benefit of
her health. The first evening of Catherine’s acquaintance with the gaiety of the
Bath balls, was unpromising, from the circumstance that neither she, nor Mrs.
Allen, her chaperon, had any knowledge of a single individual in the room;
and the manner in which our authoress paints the effects of this circumstance
upon the feelings and conversation of both, is sufficiently entertaining; but
our heroine’s second visit, was more favourable; for she was then introduced
to a young clergyman, who is the other wheel upon which the interest of the
narrative is made to run. The young clergyman’s name was Tilney.
The description of our heroine’s residence at Bath, is chiefly taken up with
an account of her intimacy with a family of the name of Thorpe, consisting of
a foolish mother, a foolish son, and four or five foolish daughters; the eldest of
whom is a fine handsome girl, thinking of nothing but finery and flirting, and
an exact representation of that large class of young women, in the form they
assume among the gayer part of the middling ranks of society; for flirts, like all
other parts of the animal kingdom, may be divided into two or three species.
The character is pourtrayed with admirable spirit and humour; but the
impression conveyed by it, is the result of so many touches, that it would be
difficult to place it before our readers by means of extracts. During the time of
our heroine’s intimacy with this family, the acquaintance with Mr. Tilney goes
on; he proves to be the son of a General Tilney, a proud rich man; but who,
in consequence of misinformation respecting the circumstances and family
of Catherine, acquiesces in Miss Tilney’s request of inviting Catherine to pass
a few weeks with them, at their family seat of Northanger Abbey. This visit
forms the next and only remaining incident in the novel; the result of it was
the marriage of Catherine with the son. The circumstance which principally
renders the history of our heroine’s residence at Northanger Abbey amusing,
arises from the mistakes which she makes, in consequence of her imagination,
(which had just come fresh from the Mysteries of Udolpho,) leading her
to anticipate, that the Abbey which she was on the point of adorning by
her presence, was to be of the same class and character, as those which
Mrs. Radcliffe paints. On her arrival, she was, as may be supposed, a little
disappointed, by the unexpected elegance, convenience, and other advantages
of General Tilney’s abode; but her prepossession was incurable. . . .
164 Jane Austen
Catherine, in a few days, was forced to resign all her hopes of discovering
subterraneous passages, mysterious pictures, or old parchments; but, however,
she still hoped to be able to detect a hidden secret, in the instance of the
General, who having been an unkind husband to his late wife, and being,
moreover, of a haughty and supercilious temper, she naturally concluded must
have the weight of his wife’s untimely end upon his conscience. A thousand
little circumstances combined to give strength to her suspicions. But we have
no room for extracts; if our readers wish to be entertained with the whole
history of our heroine’s mistakes in this way, we can safely recommend
the work to their perusal, Northanger Abbey, is one of the very best of
Miss Austen’s productions, and will every way repay the time and trouble
of perusing it. Some of the incidents in it are rather improbable, and the
character of General Tilney seems to have been drawn from imagination, for
it is not a very probable character, and is not pourtrayed with our authoress’s
usual taste and judgment. There is also a considerable want of delicacy in all
the circumstances of Catherine’s visit to the Abbey; but it is useless to point
them out; the interest of the novel, is so little founded upon the ingenuity or
probability of the story, that any criticism upon the management of it, falls
with no weight upon that which constitutes its appropriate praise, considered
as a literary production. With respect to the second of the novels, which the
present publication contains, it will be necessary to say but little. It is in every
respect a much less fortunate performance than that which we have just
been considering. It is manifestly the work of the same mind, and contains
parts of very great merit; among them, however, we certainly should not
number its moral, which seems to be, that young people should always marry
according to their own inclinations and upon their own judgment; for that if
in consequence of listening to grave counsels, they defer their marriage, till
they have wherewith to live upon, they will be laying the foundation for years
of misery, such as only the heroes and heroines of novels can reasonably hope
even to see the end of.
—Anonymous, “Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,”
British Critic, March 1818, pp. 296–301

This is the same type of self-recrimination seen in Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s 1855 letter. Crabb and Barrett Browning recognize that they
might be misreading Austen, leading students to investigate how much
Works 165
responsibility lies with readers to interpret a book as intended and how

much lies with writers to convey their message clearly.
QQQ
I went on with Persuasion, finished it, began Northanger Abbey, which I have
now finished. These two novels have sadly reduced my estimation of Miss
Austen. They are little more than galleries of disagreeables and the would-be
heroes and heroines are scarcely out of the class of insignificants. Yet I ought
to be suspicious perhaps of my own declining judgment.
—Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, September 23, 1842
Thomas Babington Macaulay “Journal” (1876)

It has only been fairly recently that scholars have begun to regard Austen
as not only a writer of the world as she knew it, but a writer with some-
thing to say about that world. Scholars now readily debate whether or
not Austen should be considered a feminist, as well as whether or not
her writings (most notably Mansfield Park) can be read in terms of her
commentary on world events, such as the French Revolution. Macaulay
picks up on Austen’s potential social and political commentary early,
comparing her with Charles Dickens, in fact, placing her talents above
those of Dickens.
Macaulay writes in the 1850s, at the height of Dickens’s popularity,
and yet finds that he falls short of Austen’s talent. Students interested
in studying Austen in light of the Victorian novel may find no better
comparison than with Dickens. He, according to Macaulay, was a bit
heavy handed in his social criticism, while Austen integrated hers so
seamlessly that it is still difficult to tease out. Comparing the two writers
will allow students to formulate arguments about writing style in terms
of social commentaries, the possible influences of gender, the Romantic
versus the Victorian age, the reception of full-length publication versus
serialized release, and the growth of the novel.
QQQ
Home, and finished Persuasion. I have now read over again all Miss Austin’s
novels. Charming they are; but I found a little more to criticise than
formerly. Yet there are in the world no compositions which approach nearer
to perfection. . . .
I read Dickens’s Hard Times. One excessively touching, heart-breaking
passage, and the rest sullen socialism. The evils which he attacks he caricatures
166 Jane Austen
grossly, and with little humor. Another book of Pliny’s letters. Read Northanger
Abbey; worth all Dickens and Pliny together. Yet it was the work of a girl. She
was certainly not more than twenty-six. Wonderful creature!
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Journal
(May 1, 1851; August 12, 1854), cited in G. Otto Trevelyan,
The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 1876, Vol. 2, pp. 249, 320
Margaret Oliphant (1882)

Margaret Oliphant explores issues of intertextuality as they arise from
the juxtaposition of Northanger Abbey, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Students might study all
three works to determine the extent to which Austen uses pieces or ele-
ments of the previous two.
QQQ
Northanger Abbey is once more on the higher level. Such a picture of
delightful youth, simplicity, absurdity, and natural sweetness, it is scarcely
possible to parallel. Catherine Morland, with all her enthusiasm and her
mistakes, her modest tenderness and right feeling, and the fine instinct which
runs through her simplicity, is the most captivating picture of a very young
girl which fiction, perhaps, has ever furnished. Her biographer informs us
that when Miss Austen was very young she amused herself with writing
burlesques, “ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments
which she had met with in sundry silly romances.” It is to be hoped that
he did not rank the Mysteries of Udolpho among these silly romances; for
certainly it is with no ungenial criticism that the young author describes the
effect upon her Catherine’s ingenuous mind of the mysterious situations and
thrilling incidents in the books she loves. It is, on a small scale, like the raid
of Cervantes upon the books of chivalry which were so dear to him, and
which the simple reader believes, and the heavy critic assures him, that great
romancer wrote Don Quixote to overthrow. Miss Austen makes her laughing
assault upon Mrs. Radcliffe with all the affectionate banter of which she was
mistress—the genial fun and tender ridicule of a mind which in its day had
wondered and worshipped like Catherine. And she makes that innocent
creature ridiculous, but how lovable all through!—letting us laugh at her
indeed, but tenderly, as we do at the follies of our favourite child. All her
guileless thoughts are open before us—her half childish love, her unconscious
candour, her simplicity and transparent truth. The gentle fun is of the most
Works 167
exquisite description, fine and keen, yet as soft as the touch of a dove. The
machinery of the story is wonderfully bad, and General Tilney an incredible
monster; but all the scenes in Bath—the vulgar Thorpes, the good-humoured
Mrs. Allen—are clear and vivid as the daylight, and Catherine herself
throughout always the most delightful little gentlewoman, never wrong in
instinct and feeling, notwithstanding all her amusing foolishness.
—Margaret Oliphant, The Literary History
of England 1790–1825, 1882, Vol. 3, pp. 228–29

“Anne Eliot and Catherine Morland” (1901)
One of the things that Jane Austen was first in was the personal description
of her heroines. Almost to her time the appearance of the different characters
was left to the reader’s imagination; it is only in the modern novel that the
author seems to feel it his duty to tell how his people look. We have seen
how meagerly and formally the heroines of “The Vicar of Wakefield” are
presented. In “Sir Charles Grandison,” there is a great pretence of describing
the beauty of Harriet Byron, but the image given is vague and conventional.
So far as I recall them, the looks of Fanny Burney’s and Maria Edgeworth’s
heroines are left to the reader’s liking; and I do not remember any portrait
even of Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” It is in her later stories that
Jane Austen offers this proof of modernity among so many other proofs of it,
and tells us how her girls appeared to her. She tells us not very elaborately, to
be sure, though in the case of Emma Woodhouse, in “Emma,” the picture is
quite finished. In “Persuasion” Anne Eliot is slightly sketched; and we must be
content with the fact that she had “mild dark eyes and delicate features,” and
that at the time we are introduced to her she fully looked her twenty-seven
years. But this is a good deal better than nothing, and in “Northanger Abbey”
Catharine Morland is still more tangibly presented. “The Morlands . . . were
in general very plain, and Catharine was, for many years of her life, as plain
as any. She had a thin, awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank
hair, and strong features. . . . At fifteen, appearances were mending. . . . Her
complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and color,
her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence.” At
seventeen, when we make her acquaintance, her manners were “just removed
from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and when
in good looks, pretty.”
168 Jane Austen
These particulars are from that delightful first chapter where the character
as well as the person of the heroine is studied with the playful irony in
which the whole story is conceived. From the beginning we know that it is a
comedy the author has in hand; and we lose sight of her obvious purpose of
satirizing the Radcliffe school of romance in our delight with the character of
the heroine and her adventures in Bath and at Northanger Abbey. Catharine
Morland is a goose, but a very engaging goose, and a goose you must respect
for her sincerity, her high principles, her generous trust of others, and her
patience under trials that would be great for much stronger heads. It is no
wonder that the accomplished Henry Tilney falls in love with her when
he finds that she is already a little in love with him; and when his father
brutally sends her home from the Abbey where he has pressed her to visit his
daughter on the belief that she is rich and will be a good match for his son,
it is no wonder that Tilney follows her and offers himself to her. She prevails
by her innocence and sweetness, and in spite of her romantic folly she has so
much good heart that it serves her in place of good sense.
V
The chapters of the story relating to Catharine’s stay at the Abbey are
rather perfunctorily devoted to burlesquing romantic fiction, in accordance
with the author’s original design, and they have not the easy charm of the
scenes at Bath, where Catharine, as the guest of Mrs. Allen, meets Henry
Tilney at a public ball. “Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females
whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any
men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. . . . The air
of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling
turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible,
intelligent man like Mr. Allen. In one respect she was admirably fitted to
introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere, and
seeing everything herself, as any young lady could.” But at the first ball she
knows nobody, and she can only say to Catharine from time to time, “I wish
we had a large acquaintance here,” but at their next appearance in the Lower
Rooms (how much the words say to the reader of old-fashioned fiction!)
the master of ceremonies introduces a partner to Catharine. “His name was
Tilney. He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, had
a pleasing countenance, a very lively and intelligent eye, and, if not quite
handsome, was very near it. . . . When they were seated at tea she found him
as agreeable as she had already given him credit for being. . . . After chatting
for some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects around
Works 169
them, he suddenly addressed her with—‘I have hitherto been very remiss,
madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you
how long you have been in Bath, whether you were ever here before, whether
you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert, and how
you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent; but are you now at
leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are, I will begin directly.’ ‘You
need not give yourself that trouble, sir.’ ‘No trouble, I assure you, madam.’
Then, forming his features in a soft smile, and affectedly softening his voice,
he added with a simpering air, ‘Have you been long in Bath, madam?’ ‘About
a week, sir,’ replied Catharine, trying not to laugh. ‘Really!’ with affected
astonishment. ‘Why should you be surprised, sir?’ ‘Why, indeed?’ said he in
his natural tone. ‘But some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply,
and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other.
Now let us go on. Were you ever here before, madam?’ ‘Never, sir.’ ‘Indeed!
Have you yet honored the Upper Room?’ ‘Yes, sir; I was there last Monday.’
‘Have you been to the theatre?’ ‘Yes, sir; I was at the play on Tuesday.’ ‘To the
concert?’ ‘Yes, sir; on Wednesday.’ ‘And you are altogether pleased with Bath?’
‘Yes, I like it very well.’ ‘Now, I must give one more smirk, and then we may
be rational again.’ Catharine turned away her head, not knowing whether she
ought venture to laugh. ‘I see what you think of me,’ said he gravely. ‘I shall
make but a poor figure in your journal to-morrow. . . . I know exactly what
you will say. Friday went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe
with blue trimmings, plain black shoes; appeared to much advantage, but was
strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man who would make me dance
with him, and distressed me by his nonsense.’ ‘Indeed I shall say no such
thing.’ ‘Shall I tell you what you ought to say?’ ‘If you please.’ ‘I danced with a
very agreeable young man, had a good deal of conversation with him, seems
a most extraordinary genius; hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is
what I wish you to say.’ ‘But perhaps I keep no journal.’ ‘Perhaps you are not
sitting in this room, and I am not sitting beside you.’ ”
It is plain from the beginning what must be Catharine’s fate with a
young man who can laugh at her so caressingly, and what must be his with
a girl so helplessly transparent to his eyes. Henry Tilney is as good as he is
subtle, and he knows how to value her wholesome honesty aright; but all
her friends are not witty young clergymen, and one of them is as little like
him in appreciation of Catharine’s rare nature as she is like Catharine in the
qualities which take him. This is putting it rather too severely if it conveys
the reproach of wilful bad faith in the case of Isabella Thorp, who becomes
the bosom friend of Catharine at a moment’s notice, and the betrothed of
170 Jane Austen
Catharine’s brother with very little more delay. She is simply what she was
born, a self-centred jilt in every motion of her being, and not to be blamed
for fulfilling the jilt’s function in a world where she is divined in almost her
modern importance. In this character, the author forecasts the supremacy
of a type which had scarcely been recognized before, but which has since
played so dominant a part in fiction, and as with the several types of snobs,
proves herself not only artist but prophet. Isabella is not of the lineage of the
high and mighty flirts, the dark and deadly flirts, who deal destruction round
among the hearts of men. She is what was known in her time as a “rattle”;
her tongue runs while her eyes fly, and her charms are perpetually alert for
admiration. She is involved in an incessant drama of fictitious occurrences;
she is as romantic in her own way as Catharine is in hers; she peoples an
unreal world with conquests, while Catharine dwells in the devotion of one
true, if quite imaginary lover. . . .
The born jilt, the jilt so natured that the part she perpetually plays is as
unconscious with her as the circulation of the blood, has never been more
perfectly presented than in Isabella Thorp, in whom she was first presented;
and her whole family, so thoroughly false that they live in an atmosphere of
lies, are miracles of art. The soft, kindly, really well-meaning mother, is as great
a liar as her hollow-hearted, hollow-headed daughter, or her braggart son who
babbles blasphemous falsehoods because they are his native speech, with only
the purpose of a momentary effect, and hardly the hope or wish of deceit. His
pursuit of the trusting Catharine, who desires to believe in him as the friend
of her brother, is the farcical element of the pretty comedy. The farce darkens
into as much tragedy as the scheme will suffer when General Tilney, a liar in
his own way, is taken in by John Thorp’s talk, and believes her very rich; but it
all brightens into the sweetest and loveliest comedy again, when Henry Tilney
follows her home from his father’s house, and the cheerful scene is not again
eclipsed till the curtain goes down upon her radiant happiness.
—William Dean Howells, “Anne Eliot and Catherine Morland,”
PERSUASION
Maria Edgeworth (1818)
Sir Walter Scott, among others, makes explicit comparisons between
the novels of Maria Edgeworth and those of Austen. The comparison is a
Works 171
fascinating one for students to take on, as Edgeworth always wrote with
moral purpose, and yet was occasionally derided as being too scandalous.
QQQ
I entirely agree with you, my dearest aunt, on one subject, as indeed I
generally do on most subjects, but particularly about Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion. The behaviour of the General in Northanger Abbey, packing off
the young lady without a servant or the common civilities which any bear
of a man, not to say gentleman, would have shown, is quite outrageously
out of drawing and out of nature. Persuasion—excepting the tangled, useless
histories of the family in the first fifty pages—appears to me, especially in
all that relates to poor Anne and her lover, to be exceedingly interesting and
natural. The love and the lover admirably well drawn: don’t you see Captain
Wentworth, or rather don’t you in her place feel him taking the boisterous
child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa? And is not the first
meeting after their long separation admirably well done? And the overheard
conversation about the nut? But I must stop: we have got no further than the
disaster of Miss Musgrave’s jumping off the steps.
—Maria Edgeworth, Letter to Mrs. Ruxton (February 21, 1818)

Northanger Abbey, the first written but latest published of the series, is
not unworthy of its companions, although it was not thought deserving
of publication until after its writer’s reputation was made. Persuasion is
memorable for containing Anne Elliott, the most perfect in character and
disposition of all Miss Austen’s women. Through it also Lyme Regis and its
Cobb are made as much classic ground in prose fiction by Louisa Musgrove’s
accident, as they were before famous in English history as the landing-place
of the luckless Monmouth.
January 1860, pp. 30–35
Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1886)

Sir Francis Hastings Doyle’s story about the truth behind Persuasion lends
a larger biographical component to this novel than any of Austen’s other
works. Doyle wonders why Austen’s family members, presumably knowing
the story, would not have written about it, and students might speculate
172 Jane Austen
as to their reasons. An important question to ask after reading Doyle’s text

is whether or not it changes one’s reading or understanding of Persuasion,
and if so, how (or if not, why not). Clearly it makes Doyle all the more recep-
tive to this particular Austen novel, but certainly there were readers and
critics who, for the same reasons, would not have been so open or willing
to accept the story. The ways in which the conflation of fiction and biogra-
phy were both damaging and redeeming for women writers in particular
would make for a fascinating study for students addressing biography,
historical context, or intertextuality in the novel.
In light of its potentially offering a fuller biographical portrait of its
author than her previous novels, Persuasion can be studied in terms of its
differences from those other works. In other words, does this final Austen
novel have fundamental stylistic or content variations from her earlier
works? Is the tone different? If so, is it simply the potentially biographical
content that accounts for such peculiarities, or might there be other
factors to consider? If there are few apparent distinctions made between
this and Austen’s other novels, is that because her other novels also
contain large amounts of biography, or for other reasons entirely?
QQQ
I am one of the regular Austen vassals, and consider her as without a rival
among English writers, in her own line and within her own limits. I should
not say, as Macaulay says, that she ranks next to Shakspeare, any more than
I should put a first-rate miniature painter on the same level with Raphael
or Titian. It is enough for me that she stands alone as a first-rate miniature
painter in her own particular school of design.
When Lord Brabourne picks out Pride and Prejudice as her best piece of
work, he must excuse me for differing from him. If he had said it was likely
to amuse ordinary novel readers more than Persuasion, or Mansfield Park, or
Northanger Abbey, well and good. But to my mind, it is not equal to any one
of those three works, if we are on the look out for her special excellences; I
mean exquisiteness of finish, delicacy of humour, and sureness of touch. Lady
Catherine de Burgh is a caricature, Sir William Lucas is a caricature, nay Mr.
Collins himself, full of glorious humour as the sketch of him is, still seems
to me something of a caricature. Yes, and worse than this, Elizabeth Bennet,
the heroine, is more than once, without the authoress intending anything
of the kind, pert and vulgar, an accusation which no one would dream of
bringing against Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park,
or Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. My belief is that Jane Austen,
disappointed at the poor success of Northanger Abbey, abandoned her own
Works 173
natural manner in Pride and Prejudice, and tried to catch the public eye by
the adoption of a broader style of drawing, and more decided colours. I am
far from saying that we gain nothing by this effort of hers, but we also lose
something, and what we lose is some of that peculiar quality distinguishing
her from all other novelists. To me, Persuasion is the most beautiful and the
most interesting of her stories. Especially do I think it the most interesting,
because it contains, unless I am mistaken, more of herself, more of her own
feelings, hopes, and recollections, than the rest of her books put together.
And this brings me to my main reason for touching upon Miss Austen at all,
since as an authoress she needs no help or recommendation from anyone. If
you draw your inference from what she has written, you would suppose she
had never been out of England, but so far from this being the case, unless my
informant made a most unaccountable blunder, the one romance belonging
to her brief career, the one event which darkened, and possibly shortened her
life, took place after the peace of 1802, and took place in Switzerland.
A friend of mind, Miss Ursula Mayow, being on a visit at a country house
in the Austen district, was taken to an afternoon party by her friends. Whilst
there, some of the guests began to talk of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, then just
published, and a voice was heard in the distance saying this: ‘Yes, I like
it very much; it reminds me of my Aunt Jane.’ To Miss Mayow, a devoted
Austenite, there could be no doubt who was meant by ‘my Aunt Jane,’ and
accordingly she went as soon as she could and introduced herself to the
speaker. This was the story told her, and if it be true, why Mr. Austen Leigh
and Lord Brabourne say nothing, and apparently knew nothing about it, I
cannot explain. Mr. Austen, accompanied by his two daughters, Cassandra
and Jane, took advantage of the long delayed peace to undertake a foreign
tour. Whilst in Switzerland they fell in with a young naval officer, the Captain
Wentworth we may assume, afterwards delineated with such tenderness and
skill in the novel of ‘Persuasion,’ a novel not given to the world till after her
death. This course of true love ran perfectly smooth, and but for the cruelty
of fate, Jane Austen’s career would probably have been altogether a different
one, happier perhaps for herself, if less important to the world. But before
the arrangements for this marriage were taken in hand, so at least in their
blindness Jane and her lover imagined, a momentary separation was agreed
upon between them. Mr. Austen and his daughters settled for themselves,
that whilst their friend enjoyed himself in climbing mountains, and threading
difficult passes, they would jog on to Chamouni, and wait quietly there till he
rejoined them. This was done, but they did not find him on their arrival, nor
did any tidings of his whereabouts reach them. Anxiety passed into alarm,
174 Jane Austen
and alarm into sickening terror; then at last, just as the Austens were about
to return home, full of the gloomiest apprehensions, the fatal message they
had been expecting came to them from a remote mountain village. Jane’s
lover had over-walked and over-tasked himself. After a short illness he died
of brain fever, but he had just managed, before his senses left him, to prepare
a message for the Austens to tell them of his coming end. They returned to
England, and according to the narrator, ‘Aunt Jane’ resumed her ordinary
life as the rector’s daughter, never recurring to her adventures abroad. She
seems as it were to have turned a key on the incidents of that year, and shut
them away from her for ever. She had a desk which her niece promised to
show to Miss Mayow, if she would come over to their house, and to this
desk ‘Aunt Jane’ retired whenever the work of the parish left her any leisure,
and wrote a letter or a chapter in a novel as the case might be. This story
lends a great charm to Persuasion. When we think of this woman of genius,
at once delicate and strong, who had determined to live a life of duty and
patient submission to the inevitable, unlocking her heart once more as she
felt the approach of death, and calling back to cheer her last moments those
recollections which she had thought it her duty to put aside, whilst there
was yet work to do on earth, we are drawn to her by a new impulse, which
heightens our admiration, and warms it into a real personal affection.
—Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, Reminiscences,
1886, pp. 353–57

“Anne Eliot and Catherine Morland” (1901)
William Dean Howells’s statement about which readers prefer Anne Eliot
and which prefer Elizabeth Bennet raises concerns of whether Austen
wrote for different audiences at different times of her life. Was she, for
example, always writing for her own age group, making Persuasion more
suitable for people in their mid- to late thirties?
QQQ
People will prefer Anne Eliot to Elizabeth Bennet according as they enjoy
a gentle sufferance in women more than a lively rebellion; and it would not
be profitable to try converting the worshippers of the one to the cult of the
other. But without offence to either following, it may be maintained that
“Persuasion” is imagined with as great novelty and daring as “Pride and
Prejudice,” and that Anne is as genuinely a heroine as Elizabeth.
Works 175
In “Persuasion” Jane Austen made bold to take the case of a girl, neither
weak nor ambitious, who lets the doubts and dislikes of her family and
friends prevail with her, and gives up the man she loves because they think
him beneath her in family and fortune. She yields because she is gentle
and diffident of herself, and her indignant lover resents and despises her
submission if he does not despise her. He is a young officer of the navy, rising
to prominence in the service which was them giving England the supremacy
of the seas, but he is not thought the equal of a daughter of such a baronet
as Sir Walter Eliot. It is quite possible that in her portrayal of the odious
situation Jane Austen avenges with personal satisfaction the new order
against the old, for her brothers were of the navy the family hope and pride
of the Austens were bound up with its glories. At any rate, when Sir Walter’s
debts oblige him to let Kellynch Hall, and live on a simple scale in Bath, it is
a newly made admiral who becomes his tenant; and it is the brother of the
admiral’s wife who is Anne’s rejected lover, and who now comes to visit his
sister, full of victory and prize-money, with the avowed purpose of marrying
and settling in life.
Seven years have passed since Frederick Wentworth angrily parted with
Anne Eliot. They have never really ceased to love each other; but the effect has
been very different with the active, successful man, and the quiet, dispirited
girl. No longer in her first youth, she devotes herself to a little round of duties,
principally in the family of her foolish, peevish younger sister; and finds her
chief consolation in the friendship of the woman who so conscientiously urged
her to her great mistake. The lovers meet in the Musgrove family into which
Anne’s sister has married, and Wentworth’s fancy seems taken with one of the
pretty daughters. Divers transparent devices are then employed rather to pique
the reader’s interest than to persuade him that the end is going to be other than
what it must be. Nothing can be quite said to determine it among the things that
happen; Wentworth and Anne simply live back into the mutual recognition of
their love. He learns to know better her lovely and unselfish nature, and so far
from having formally to forgive her, he prizes her the more for the very qualities
which made their unhappiness possible. For her part, she has merely to own
again the affection which has been a dull ache in her heart for seven years. Her
father’s pride is reconciled to her marriage, which is now with a somebody
instead of the nobody Captain Wentworth once was. Sir Walter “was much
struck with his personal claims, and felt that his superiority of appearance
might not be unfairly balanced against her superiority of rank. . . . He was now
esteemed quite worthy to address the daughter of a foolish, spendthrift baronet
who had not principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in
176 Jane Austen
which Providence had placed him.” As for Anne’s mischievous, well-meaning

friend who had urged her to break with Wentworth before, “there was nothing
less for Lady Russell to do than to admit that she had been completely wrong,
and to take up a new set of opinions and hopes.”
II
This outline of the story gives no just sense of its quality, which resides
mainly in its constancy to nature; and it gives no sufficient notion of the
variety of character involved in the uneventful, quiet action. Anne’s arrogant
and selfish father, her cold-hearted, selfish elder sister, and her mean, silly,
empty-headed younger sister, with the simple, kindly Musgrove family, form
rather the witnesses than the persons of the drama, which transacts itself
with the connivance rather than the participation of Sir Walter’s heir-at-law,
the clever, depraved and unscrupulous cousin, William Walter Eliot; Lady
Russell, the ill-advised adviser of the broken engagement; the low-born,
manoeuvring Mrs. Clay, who all but captures the unwary Sir Walter; the
frank, warm-hearted Admiral Crofts and his wife, and the whole sympathetic
naval contingent at Lyme Regis. They brighten the reality of the picture, and
form its atmosphere; they could not be spared, and yet, with the exception of
Louisa Musgrove, who jumps from the sea-wall at Regis, and by her happy
accident brings about the final understanding of the lovers, none of them
actively contributes to the event, which for the most part accomplishes itself
subjectively through the nature of Anne and Wentworth.
Of the two Anne is by far the more interesting and important personage;
her story is distinctly the story of a heroine; yet never was there a heroine
so little self-assertive, so far from forth-putting. When the book opens we
find her neglected and contemned by her father and elder sister, and sunken
passively if not willingly into mere aunthood to her younger sister’s children,
with no friend who feels her value but that Lady Russell who has helped her
to spoil her life. She goes to pay a long visit to her sister as soon as Kellynch
Hall is taken by the Croftses, and it is in a characteristic moment of her
usefulness there that Wentworth happens upon her, after their first cold and
distant meeting before others.
The mother, as usual, had left a sick child to Anne’s care, when “Captain
Wentworth walked into the drawing-room at the Cottage, where were only
herself and the little invalid Charles, who was lying on the sofa. . . . He started,
and could only say, ‘I thought the Miss Musgroves, had been here; Mrs.
Musgrove told me I should find them here,’ before he walked to the window
to recollect himself, and feel how he ought to behave. ‘They are up-stairs with
Works 177
my sister; they will be down in a few minutes, I dare say,’ had been Anne’s
reply in all the confusion that was natural; and if the child had not called to
her to come and do something for him, she would have been out of the room
the next moment, and released Captain Wentworth as well as herself. He
continued at the window, and after calmly and politely saying, ‘I hope the little
boy is better,’ was silent. She was obliged to kneel by the sofa, and remain there
to satisfy her patient, and thus they continued a few minutes, when, to her
very great satisfaction, she heard some other person crossing the vestibule. It
proved to be Charles Hayter,” who supposes Wentworth to be his rival for one
of the Miss Musgroves. He seats himself, and takes up a newspaper, ignoring
Wentworth’s willingness to talk. “Another minute brought another addition.
The younger boy, a remarkably stout, forward child of two years old, having
got the door opened, made his determined appearance among them, and went
straight to the sofa to see what was going on, and put in his claim to anything
good that might be given away. There being nothing to eat, he could only have
some play, and as his aunt would not let him tease his sick brother, he began
to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in a way that, busy as she was about
Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him, ordered, insisted, and
entreated in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the
greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly. ‘Walter,’ said she, ‘get
down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.’
‘Walter,’ cried Charles Hayter, ‘why do you not do as you are bid? . . . Come to
me, Walter.’ But not a bit did Walter stir. In another moment she found herself
in the state of being released front him; some one was taking him from her,
though he had bent down her head so much that his sturdy little hands were
unfastened from around her neck and he was resolutely borne away, before she
knew that Captain Wentworth had done it. . . . She could not even thank him.
She could only hang over little Charles with most disordered feelings with the
conviction soon forced upon her by the noise he was studiously making with
the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks . . . till enabled by the
entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her patient to their
care and leave the room. She could not stay. . . . She was ashamed of herself,
quite ashamed of being so nervous, and of being overcome by such a trifle;
but so it was, and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to
recover her.”
III
As any practised reader of fiction could easily demonstrate, this is not the
sort of rescue to bring about a reconciliation between lovers in a true novel.
178 Jane Austen
There it must be something more formidable than a naughty little boy that
the heroine is saved from: it must be a deadly miscreant, or a mad bull, or a
frightened horse, or an express train, or a sinking ship. Still it cannot be denied
that this simple, this homely scene, is very pretty, and is very like things that
happen in life, where there is reason to think love is oftener shown in quality
than quantity, and does its effect as perfectly in the little as in the great events.
Even the most tremendous incident of the book, the famous passage which
made Tennyson, when he visited Lyme Regis, wish to see first of all the place
where Louisa Musgrove fell from the Cobb, has hardly heroic proportions,
though it is of greater intensity in its lifelikeness, and it reverses the relations
of Anne and Wentworth in the characters of helper and helped.
“There was too much wind to make the high part of the new Cobb
pleasant for the ladies, and they agreed to get down the steps to the lower, and
all were contented to pass quietly and safely down the steep steps excepting
Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. . . . She was
safely down, and instantly to shew her enjoyment, ran up the steps to be
jumped down again. He advised her against it, thought the jar too great; but
no, he reasoned and talked in vain, she smiled and said, ‘I am determined I
will’: he put out his hands; she was too precipitate by half a second; she fell
on the pavement on the Lower Cobb, and was taken up lifeless! There was
no wound, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her
face was like death. . . . Captain Wentworth, who had caught her up, knelt
with her in his arms, looking on her with a face as pallid as her own in an
agony of silence. ‘She is dead!’ screamed Mary, catching hold of her husband,
and contributing with her own horror to make him immovable; and in the
same moment, Henrietta, sinking under the conviction, lost her senses, too,
and would have fallen on the steps, but for Captain Benwick and Anne, who
supported her between them. ‘Is there no one to help me?’ were the first
words that burst from Captain Wentworth. ‘Go to him; go to him,’ cried
Anne; ‘for Heaven’s sake, go to him. Leave me and go to him. Rub her hands,
rub her temples; here are salts; take them, take them.’ Louisa was raised up
and supported between them. Everything was done that Anne had prompted,
but in vain; while Captain Wentworth, staggering against the wall for his
support, exclaimed in the bitterest agony, ‘Oh, God! Her father and mother!’
‘A surgeon!’ said Anne. He caught at the word; it seemed to rouse him at once;
and saying only, ‘True, true; a surgeon this instant.’ . . . Anne, attending with
all the strength and zeal and thought, which instinct supplied, to Henrietta,
still tried, at intervals, to suggest comfort to the others, tried to quiet Mary, to
animate Charles, to assuage the feelings of Captain Wentworth. Both seemed
Works 179
to look to her for direction. ‘Anne, Anne,’ cried Charles, ‘what in Heaven’s
name is to be done next?’ Captain Wentworth’s eyes were also turned towards
her. ‘Had she not better be carried to the inn? Yes, I am sure; carry her to the
inn.’ ‘Yes, Yes, to the inn,’ repeated Wentworth. . . . ‘I will carry her myself.’ ”
Anne has to show, with all this presence of mind, a greatness of mind
superior to the misery of imagining that Wentworth is in love with Louisa,
and that his impassioned remorse is an expression of his love. Only when
they are going home together, to tell Louisa’s parents of the accident, does
she make one meek little tacit reflection in her own behalf. “ ‘Don’t talk of it,
don’t talk of it,’ he cried. ‘Oh, God, that I had not given way to her at that fatal
moment! Had I done as I ought! But so eager and so resolute! Dear, sweet
Louisa!’ Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now to question the
justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage
of firmness of character. . . . She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel
that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favor of happiness
as a very resolute character.”
—William Dean Howells, “Anne Eliot and Catherine Morland,”

“Persuasion” (1913)
One potential task for students interested in the act of writing and the
process of revision, as well as any biographical influences that may exist in
Persuasion, is to read the original cancelled chapter that the Austen-Leighs
mention and then compare this unofficial version of the novel, with the
once elided text, to the work as it is published and widely known.
QQQ
Meanwhile, Jane had been for some months engaged on Persuasion. It was
begun before she went to London in the autumn of 1815 for the publication
of Emma; but that visit and all that happened to her during the winter must
certainly have interrupted its composition, and possibly modified its tone. It
is less high-spirited and more tender in its description of a stricken heart than
anything she had attempted before.
In May, Cassandra and Jane left Chawton to spend three weeks at
Cheltenham, stopping with their brother at Steventon, and with the Fowles
at Kintbury on the way, and again at Steventon on their return. Jane must
180 Jane Austen
have been decidedly out of health, for the change in her did not escape the
notice of her friends. But whatever was the exact state of her health during
the first half of this year, it did not prevent her from being able, on July 18,
to write “Finis” at the end of the first draft of Persuasion; and thereby hangs
an interesting tale, which we cannot do better than relate in the words of
the Memoir.
The book had been brought to an end in July; and the re-engagement of
the hero and heroine effected in a totally different manner in a scene laid
at Admiral Crofts’ lodgings. But her performance did not satisfy her. She
thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better.
This weighed upon her mind—the more so, probably, on account of the
weak state of her health; so that one night she retired to rest in very low
spirits. But such depression was little in accordance with her nature, and was
soon shaken off. The next morning she awoke to more cheerful views and
brighter inspirations; the sense of power revived; and imagination resumed
its course. She cancelled the condemned chapter, and wrote two others,
entirely different, in its stead. The result is that we possess the visit of the
Musgrove party to Bath; the crowded and animated scenes at the White Hart
Hotel; and the charming conversation between Captain Harville and Anne
Elliot, overheard by Captain Wentworth, by which the two faithful lovers
were at last led to understand each other’s feelings. The tenth and eleventh
chapters of Persuasion, then, rather than the actual winding-up of the story,
contain the latest of her printed compositions—her last contribution to the
entertainment of the public. Perhaps it may be thought that she has seldom
written anything more brilliant; and that, independent of the original manner
in which the dénouement is brought about, the pictures of Charles Musgrove’s
good-natured boyishness and of his wife’s jealous selfishness would have been
incomplete without these finishing strokes. The cancelled chapter exists in
manuscript. It is certainly inferior to the two which were substituted for it;
but it was such as some writers and some readers might have been contented
with; and it contained touches which scarcely any other hand could have
given, the suppression of which may be almost a matter of regret.
“Persuasion,” Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters,
1913, pp. 264–65
Chronology
QQQ
1775 Jane Austen is born on December 16 in the village of

Steventon, Hampshire, to George Austen, parish clergyman,
and Cassandra Leigh Austen. She is the seventh of eight
children. She and her sister Cassandra are educated at Oxford
and Southampton by the widow of a principal of Brasenose
College and then attend the Abbey School at Reading. Jane’s
formal education ends when she is nine years old.
1787–93 Writes various pieces for the amusement of her family, the
most famous of which is Love and Friendship. She and her
family also perform various plays and farces in the family
barn, some of which are written by Jane.
1793–97 Writes her first novel, the epistolary Lady Susan, and begins
the epistolary Elinor and Marianne, which will become Sense
and Sensibility.
1796–97 Completes First Impressions, an early version of Pride and
Prejudice. Her father tries to have it published without
success. Austen begins Sense and Sensibility and Northanger
Abbey.
1798 Finishes a version of Northanger Abbey.
1801–02 George Austen retires to Bath with his family. Jane possibly
suffers from an unhappy love affair (the man in question is
believed to have died suddenly), and also probably becomes
engaged for a day to Harris Bigg-Wither.
1803 Sells a two-volume manuscript entitled Susan to a publisher
for £10. It is advertised but never printed. This is a version of
Northanger Abbey, later revised.
181
182 Chronology
1803–05 Writes ten chapters of The Watsons.

1805–06 George Austen dies. Jane abandons work on The Watsons.
She, her mother, and her sister live in various lodgings in
Bath.
1806–09 The three Austen women move to Southampton, living near
one of Jane’s brothers.
1809 Jane, her sister, and her mother move to Chawton Cottage,
in Hampshire, which is part of the estate of Jane’s brother
Edward Austen (later Knight), who has been adopted by
Thomas Knight, a relative. Edward has just lost his wife, who
died giving birth to her tenth child, and the household is now
in the care of Jane’s favorite niece, Fanny.
1811 Decides to publish Sense and Sensibility anonymously and at
her own expense. It appears inNovember in a three-volume edition.
1811–12 Revises First Impressions extensively and begins Mansfield
Park.
1813 Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. In Three Volumes. By the
Author of “Sense and Sensibility” is published in January. A
second edition of it, as well as a second edition of Sense and
Sensibility, comes out in November.
1814 Mansfield Park is published anonymously and in three
volumes. It sells out by November. Austen begins Emma.
1815 Completes Emma and begins Persuasion. Emma is published
in December, anonymously and in three volumes, by a new
publisher.
1816 A second edition of Mansfield Park is published.
1817 A third edition of Pride and Prejudice is published. Austen
begins Sanditon. She moves to Winchester, where she dies
after a year-long illness, on July 18. She is buried in Winchester
Cathedral. After her death, her family destroys much of her
correspondence in order to protect her reputation.
1818 Persuasion and Northanger Abbey are published together,
posthumously and anonymously.
Index
QQQ
A Austen, Henry (brother), 5–10

Accuracy “Austenish,” Emma and, 144–145
of characterization, 50–53 Austen-Leigh, James Edward, 6, 11–14
Emma and, 136–137 Austen-Leigh, Richard Arthur
Frances Ann Kemble on, 27 Austen’s views of Henry Fielding
George Barnett Smith on, 56 and, 55
George Eliot on, 34–35 description of Austen by, 14–17
George Henry Lewes on, 33 on Emma, 144–148
importance of, 42–43 on Mansfield Park, 157–159
lack of appreciation of, 25–26, on Persuasion, 179–180
40–41, 58 on Pride and Prejudice, 118–119
Sense and Sensibility and, 120– Austen-Leigh, William
121 Austen’s views of Henry Fielding
Addison’s disease, 2 and, 55
Anonymity of publications, reasons description of Austen by, 14–17
for, 6 on Emma, 144–148
Aristocracy, focus on, 88–89 on Mansfield Park, 157–159
Artistry on Persuasion, 179–180
acceptance of, 36 on Pride and Prejudice, 118–119
Charlotte Brontë on, 33
Emma and, 129, 133–134 B
realism and, 79 Balzac, 68–69
writing as, 6, 30, 41–42, 82 Bell, Currer, 35, 40. See also Brontë,
Asides, Mansfield Park and, 154–155 Charlotte
Atmosphere, creation of, 157–158 Bennet, Elizabeth, 94–99
Audiences, character preferences of, Biases, biographies and, 6, 11, 14
174–179 Big Bow-wow strain, 105
Austen, Cassandra Leigh (mother), 1 Biographies
Austen, Cassandra (sister), 6 autobiographies vs., 149–151,
Austen, George (father), 1, 7, 28 152–153, 160–161
183
184 Index
family members and, 6, 11, 14 Chick lit, 48, 151–152

Persuasion and, 171–174 Chorlet, G.F., 47–49
Birth of Jane Austen, 1, 7 Cinderella story, Mansfield Park and,
Boldness, 48 149–151
Braddon, M.E., 51 Clarissa (Richardson), 50
Brontë, Charlotte. See also Bell, Clergymen, portrayal of, 65, 138
Currer Clymer, W.B. Shubrick, 66–79
on Austen, 33, 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32
comparison to, 54–55, 62 Coleridge, Sara, 32
connection of life to work and, 6 Collins, as new word, 158
on Emma, 135–136 Collins, Wilkie, 51
on Pride and Prejudice, 104–105 Context
Browne, Thomas, 71 changing, 11–14, 28, 50
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 35 femininity and, 137–138
Brydges, Samuel Egerton, 11 irony and, 83
Burney, Frances, comparison to, 6, 7, novel form and, 135
95–97 Pride and Prejudice and, 106
reader-response theory and,
C 119–124
Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 49 realism and, 86
Cervantes, Miguel de, 166 Controversy, lack of interest in, 59
Characterization Cowper, William, influence of, 12,
accuracy of, 50–53, 65–66, 161– 13, 14
162, 164 Crabbe, George, influence of, 12,
changes in style of, 139–141 13–14
dialogue and, 74 Curiosity, 68
Emma and, 136–137 Curtis, George William, 6, 54–55
errors in, 87, 124–125
failures and successes of, 89–92 D
George Barnett Smith on, 56 Daniel Deronda, 76–77
habit and, 97 D’Arblay, Frances (Burney),
of heroines, 166–170 comparison to, 6, 7, 95–97
individualism in, 155–157 Death of Jane Austen, 2, 8, 28–29
lack of depth in, 62–63 Depth, lack of, 62–63
lack of physical descriptions in, Description, 42. See also Accuracy
38–39 Dialogue
Mansfield Park and, 149, 152–153, plot and character development
160–161 and, 74
plotting and, 98 skill in, 26, 51
in Pride and Prejudice, 106–108, Dickens, Charles
110 comparison to, 165–166
Sense and Sensibility and, 121– periodicals and, 12
123, 124–125 Didacticism, 66–67, 75
Shakespeare and, 38 Dobson, Austin, 69
skill in, 26, 30–31, 36–37 Domesticity
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 54 Maria Jane Jewsbury on, 27–31
Index 185
requirement for, 11 Femininity

William Dean Howells on, 96 Anthony Trollope on, 137–138
Don Quixote (Cervantes), 166 changing historical context and,
Doyle, Frances Hastings, on 28
Persuasion, 171–174 male readers and, 151–155
Dramatic presentation, 37 writing abilities and, 45–46, 60
Fiction
E biography vs., 149–151, 152–153,
Edgeworth, Maria 160–161
comparison to, 6, 7, 95–97, 104, growth of personality in, 111–114
170–171 Pride and Prejudice and, 108–109
on Persuasion, 170–171 Sense and Sensibility and, 125–
Elegance, lack of, 104 128
Eliot, George Fielding, Henry, comparison to, 55,
on Austen, 34–35 80, 84
comparison to, 54–55, 56, 62, 72, Fin de siècle, 97
110 Fitzgerald, Edward, 53–54
Daniel Deronda and, 76–77 Form, perfection of, 96
differences from, 68–69 Frankenstein (Shelley), 48, 129
Emma (Austin)
Anthony Trollope on, 137–139 G
characterizations in, 37, 91–92 Gender roles
Charlotte Brontë on, 135–136 accomplishments and, 11, 12–13,
didacticism in, 75 15
Margaret Oliphant on, 139–141 David Masson on, 45–46
opinions of, 145–148 heroes and, 64–65
Walter Scott on, 41, 128–134 Maria Jane Jewsbury on, 27–31
W.F. Pollock on, 136–137 writing and, 47–48, 60
William and Richard Arthur Goethe, comparison to, 55
Austen-Leigh on, 144–148 Gosse, Edmund, 6, 85–86
William Dean Howells on, Gothic fiction, 48, 49, 160
141–145
William Macready on, 134 H
Evans, Mary Ann (George Eliot) Haggard, H. Rider, 60
on Austen, 34–35 Hales, John W., 54
comparison to, 54–55, 56, 62, 72, Hard Times (Dickens), 165–166
110 Harper, Janet, 87
Daniel Deronda and, 76–77 Heroes/heroines
differences from, 68–69 boring nature of, 69
Excitement, lack of, 57–58 characterization of, 166–170
Emma and, 141–144
F gender roles and, 64–65
Fairy tales, Mansfield Park and, Mansfield Park and, 155–157
149–151 as narrators, 118
The Female Quixote (Lenox), 160 overview of, 93–94
Feminism, Austen and, 165–166 peculiarities of, 76
186 Index
Persuasion and, 77 J
realism of, 31 Jack, Adolphus Alfred, on Mansfield
similarities to Austen, 152 Park, 149–151
writing for different audiences James, Henry, 70–71
and, 174–179 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 135
Heroism, lack of, 39, 109 Jewsbury, Maria Jane, 27–31
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Jilts, 170
60–61 Johnson, Samuel, influence of, 12, 13,
Historical context 49
changing, 11–14, 28, 50
femininity and, 137–138 K
irony and, 83 Kavanaugh, Julia, on Sense and
novel form and, 135 Sensibility, 124–125
Pride and Prejudice and, 106 Kebbel, T.E., 50–53
reader-response theory and, Kemble, Frances Ann, 27
119–124 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 60
realism and, 86
Howells, William Dean L
on Austen, 79, 94–99 Lang, Andrew, 34, 57–60, 69
on Emma, 141–145 Lemaitre, Jules, 71
on Mansfield Park, 155–157 Lennox, Charlotte, 160
of Northanger Abbey, 167–170 Letters, use of, 72–74
on Persuasion, 174–179 Lewes, George Henry, 33, 35–45
on Pride and Prejudice, 114– Literary forms, evolution of, 12
115 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 32–33
on Sense and Sensibility, 125–
128 M
writing wholly as artist and, 6 Macaulay, Thomas Babington
Human character. See on Austen, 46–47, 65, 66, 80, 85
Characterization comparison to, 35–36
Humor on Northanger Abbey, 165–166
Emma and, 92–93, 138, 140 Macready, William
observation and, 78 on Emma, 134
skill in, 26, 40, 49, 52, 75, 96 on Mansfield Park, 148–149
Walter Raleigh on, 82–83 Mansfield Park (Austen)
Hunt, Leigh, 68 Adolphus Alfred Jack on, 149–151
characterization in, 37
I didacticism in, 75–76
Iddesleigh (Earl of), 87–94 George Henry Lewes on, 44
Individualism, Mansfield Park and, Hiram M. Stanley on, 151–155
155–157 W.F. Pollock on, 149
Interpretation, readers and, 164– William and Richard Arthur
165 Austen-Leigh on, 157–159
Intertextuality, 166–167 William Dean Howells on,
Irony, 83–85, 118 155–157
Ivanhoe (Scott), 128 William Macready on, 148–149
Index 187
Masson, David, 45–46 Emma and, 128–133

Maupassant, Guy de, 70–72 evolution of, 111–114
Memories of Clegg the Clergyman, 75 Hiram M. Stanley on, 152
Middlemarch (Eliot), 34, 68, 72 historical context and, 135
Mitford, Mary Russell, 5, 104 Sense and Sensibility and, 124–
Modesty 125
Andrew Lang on, 57
of Austen, 6, 9–10, 14 O
Maria Jane Jewsbury on, 27 Observation, 78, 162
Molière, 46 Oliphant, James, 6, 108–111
Mood, 150 Oliphant, Margaret, 139–141, 166–167
Morality Omniscience, 85–86
Archbishop Whatley on, 21 Othello (Shakespeare), 38
Emma and, 140–141 Our Village (Mitford), 5
Maria Edgeworth and, 170–171
Maria Jane Jewsbury on, 28 P
value of writings and, 53 Pamela (Richardson), 50
Morley, Henry, 55 Parodies, 75
Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) Passion
Northanger Abbey and, 160, avoidance of, 62
166–167 by implication, 81
satire of, 75 lack of as limitation, 39, 40
love and, 59–60
N perfection and, 114
Narrowness of range, 65, 87–94, Perfection, 81, 114
108–109 Pericles (Landor), 72
Nature, Sir Walter Scott on, 25 Periodicals, acquaintance with, 12
Needlework, 17 Persuasion (Austen)
Noble, James Ashcroft, 62 Frances Hastings Doyle on,
Northanger Abbey (Austen) 171–174
contradictory anonymous review Maria Edgeworth on, 170–171
of, 159–164 pathos in, 77–78
Henry Crabb Robinson on, publication of, 5
164–165 reception of Emma and, 145–148
Margaret Oliphant on, 166–167 W.F. Pollock on, 171
publication of, 5 William and Richard Arthur
as satire, 74–75 Austen-Leigh on, 179–180
self-knowledge and, 49 William Dean Howells on,
Thomas Babington Macaulay on, 174–179
165–166 Philology, 68
William Dean Howells on, Plots, intricacy of, 30
167–170 Plotting
youthfulness of, 63 characterization and, 98
Novel form deficiencies in, 38, 42, 63–64,
development of genre of, 55–56, 109
83–84 dialogue and, 74
188 Index
Emma and, 131–133 Raleigh, Walter, 79–83

lack of focus on, 87 Range, narrowness of, 65, 87–94,
Politics 108–109
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, Reader-response theory, historical
35 context and, 119–124
George Eliot on, 34 Realism
lack of interest in, 59, 113–114, 134 artistry and, 79
Thomas Babington Macaulay on, historical context and, 86
165–166 Mansfield Park and, 155
Pollock, W.F. psychological novels and, 87–88
on Emma, 136–137 Thomas Wentworth Higginson
on Mansfield Park, 149 on, 61
on Persuasion, 171 Religion, 10, 21–25
on Pride and Prejudice, 106–108 Revisions, Persuasion and, 179–180
on Sense and Sensibility, 119–124 Richardson, Samuel
Popularity, causes of, 60–61 comparison to, 50, 51, 53, 70, 84,
Practical utility, 21–25 120
Pride and Prejudice (Austen) influence of, 12, 14
characterization in, 37 Robinson, Henry Crabb
Charlotte Brontë on, 104–105 of Northanger Abbey, 164–165
Currer Bell on, 40 on Pride and Prejudice, 104
Frances Hovey Stoddard on, on Sense and Sensibility, 119
111–114 Rob Roy (Scott), 128
George Henry Lewes on, 44 Romance, lack of, 81
Henry Crabb Robinson on, 104 Romantic period, view of historians
humor, 75–76 in, 12
James Oliphant on, 108–111 Romantic poets, opinions of, 32
Mary Russell Mitford on, 104
self-knowledge and, 49 S
unsigned review of, 103–104 Saintsbury, George, 83–85
Walter Scott on, 104 Sand, George, comparison to, 62
W.F. Pollock on, 106–108 Satire
William and Richard Arthur Mansfield Park and, 158, 160
Austen-Leigh on, 118–119 Northanger Abbey and, 74–75,
William Dean Howells on, 96, 168
114–115 Pride and Prejudice and, 112
Prostitutes, female writers and, 6 skill in, 82–83, 86
Provinciality, 67–68 Scandal, lack of, 51
Psychological novels (realism), 87–88, Scott, Walter
134–135 on Austen, 35, 36–37, 69–70
Purity, Henry Austen on, 6–10 on Emma, 41, 128–134
influence of, 12, 14
R nature and, 25
Radcliffe, Ann objectivity of, 129
gothic fiction and, 48, 49 plotting of, 64
parody of, 75, 160, 166 on Pride and Prejudice, 104
Index 189
Scudder, Vida D., 86 lack of interest in, 59

Self-knowledge, 48, 49 Thomas Babington Macaulay on,
Sensation fiction, 50–51 165–166
Sense and Sensibility (Austen) Southey, Robert, 32
didacticism in, 75 Specialization, 87
Henry Crabb Robinson on, 119 Stanley, Hiram M., on Mansfield
Julia Kavanaugh on, 124–125 Park, 151–155
self-knowledge and, 49 Stoddard, Frances Hovey, on Pride
W.F. Pollock on, 119–124 and Prejudice, 111–114
William Dean Howells on, Style, 51–52, 139–141
125–128 Subtlety, 79
Shakespeare, William Supernatural fiction, 48
characterization and, 38
comparison to, 24, 46–47, 55, 79, T
80–81, 85–86 Trollope, Anthony, on Emma, 137–139
gender roles and, 64
Shelley, Mary, 48, 129 V
Sheridan, Richard, 46 Villette (Brontë), 135
Shirley (Brontë), 135
Simplicity, skill in, 54 W
Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson), Walpole, Horace, 48, 49
10, 13, 14 Westminster Review, 34
Smith, George Barnett, 34, 55–56 Whatley (Archbishop), 21–25, 69–70
Smith, Goldwin, 62–66 Word-painting, 56
Social consciousness Wordsworth, William, 32
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and,
35 Y
George Eliot on, 34 Youthfulness, Northanger Abbey and,
lack of, 113–114, 134 63

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Bloom’s Classic Critical Views

Edited and with an introduction by

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series design by Erika K. Arroyo

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Introduction by Harold Bloom xi

Thomas Babington Macaulay “Madame D’Arblay” (1860) 46

Sense and Sensibility 119

Mansfield Park 148

Northanger Abbey 159

Mary Russell Mitford (1815)

promise a long succession of amusement to the public, and a gradual increase

Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1834)

James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870)

William Austen-Leigh and

remarks on her inability to enjoy it. A concert in Sydney Gardens, however,

Archbishop Whately “Modern Novels” (1821)

failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones, which it is necessary to

Sir Walter Scott (1822)

Unsigned “Mrs. Gore’s Women as They Are—

to produce a very powerful emotion, and including only such events as

Frances Ann Kemble (1831)

Maria Jane Jewsbury “Literary Women,

readers calling Austen a feminist with particular agendas embedded

been engraved; and of no woman, whose writings are as numerous and

a more amiable person. We think some of Miss Austen’s works deficient in

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1839)

George Henry Lewes “Recent Novels:

Charlotte Brontë (1848)

—Charlotte Brontë, Letter to George Henry Lewes

George Eliot “The Progress of Fiction

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1855)

George Henry Lewes

Babington Macaulay. Students will find it valuable to read each of these

to produce weariness—first, by encouraging incompetent writers to do what

We have endeavoured to express the delight which Miss Austen’s works

David Masson (1859)

Among these lady-novelists, Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen were,

Thomas Babington Macaulay

students exploring the history and evolution of literature to study

to examine conduct and etiquette books of Austen’s time to determine

T.E. Kebbel “Jane Austen” (1870)

reconciliation.” The most popular sensation writers of the nineteenth

Edward FitzGerald (1870)

after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it composes him—like Gruel: or like

John W. Hales (1873)

George William Curtis

—George William Curtis, “Editor’s Easy Chair,”

Henry Morley (1881)

George Barnett Smith

Andrew Lang “Letter to Jane Austen” (1886)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1887)

James Ashcroft Noble (1889)

Goldwin Smith (1890)

distinguished from Henry and Edmund by the broadest difference of colour

W.B. Shubrick Clymer

attaching to it is perhaps as accidental as that attaching to the word curiosity,

William Dean Howells (1891)

Walter Raleigh “Jane Austen” (1894)

or recorded in the pages of one as of the other. These may be resemblances

1775 Jane Austen is born on December 16 in the village of

1803–05 Writes ten chapters of The Watsons.