William Deresiewicz Read online

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  nilia (The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë [London: Penguin, 1986], p. 114). For the popularity of Kotzebue and Schiller and the relative obscurity of Goethe in England at this time, see Frederick Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). While the impact on Austen of Schiller’s plays, in particular, deserves investigation, there seems little evidence that he was a major influence. The impact of Rousseau is another question worthy of study. 22. Examples of this position include Leavis, “Jane Austen: Novelist of a Changing Society,” quoted above, and Auerbach, “Romantic Imprisonment”: “Jane Austen regarded the poetry of her Romantic contemporaries with a certain lofty and sardonic mistrust, if she regarded it at all” (p. 11). 23. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” Persuasion, p. 33. 24. Persuasion, p. 331. 25. Jane Austen, Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 184. 26. For a review of several of the more prominent expressions of this opinion with respect to Byron—in an article that emphatically does not share it—see Knox-Shaw, “Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” p. 47 n. 2 and n. 4. 27. Letters, p. 131 (2022 June 1808). 28. Letters, p. 257 (58 March 1814). 29. Letters, p. 164 (1011 Jan. 1809), and p. 201 (29 Jan. 1813). 30. Letters, p. 277 (28 Sept. 1814). 31. Letters, p. 323 (1617 Dec. 1816), p. 295 (3 Nov. 1815), and p. 297 (23 Nov. 1815). 32. As discussed in Brian Southam, “Was Jane Austen a Bonapartist?,” in Report for the Period 2000 (Alton, Hampshire: Jane Austen Society, 2000), p. 30. Southam, who seems to have no doubt that Austen was an admirer of Byron’s work (p. 29), adds that “[w]hatever it was about the poem that impressed [her], she was at pains to copy it out in her finest copper-plate hand” (p. 30). His article reproduces Byron’s original version side-byside with the manuscript, which is in the University of Southampton Library. 33. For mocking references to the taste for the picturesque in nearly all her novels, see John Dixon Hunt, “The Picturesque,” in Jane Austen Companion, pp. 326329. A number of critics have also argued that the handling of Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice constitutes a satire of Sir Charles Grandison and the Grandisonian “patrician hero” (e.g., Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion, pp. 75108). 34. Marvin Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). See also Jane Nardin, Those Elegant Decorums (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), p. 2, who speaks of the “double vision in her art” whereby Austen ridicules values and institutions to which she gives her approval as a moralist. 35. For her admiration of Pope, see Letters, p. 245 (26 Oct. 1813): “There has been one infallible Pope in the World.” 36. See note 6 above. 37. Persuasion, p. 33. 38. Austen’s most up-to-date readers include Fanny, who reads Crabbe and Scott, and Anne, who, like Benwick, reads Scott and Byron. Scott, as I noted above, was also inserted into Marianne Dashwood’s syllabus during the Chawton revision to keep her reading current.

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  39. That Austen mentions Wordsworth explicitly only in a very late manuscript and Coleridge not at all is, of course, the strongest support for the argument that she did not read them, or at least not with any particular interest. The argument from silence must be treated very cautiously, however, especially with respect to a writer about whose intellectual life our knowledge is so clearly incomplete. Doody relies on it repeatedly in making the most systematic recent survey of Austen’s reading, a choice that leads her to conclude, quite unacceptably, that “[w]e can doubt if [Austen] ever read Spenser” and “[t]here is no hint that this last of the Augustans had ever read Dryden” (“Jane Austen’s Reading,” p. 356). The same logic would force us to conclude that Austen knew nothing of Schiller, either, even though his plays were widely translated, reviewed, and performed from the early 1790s (see Ewen, Prestige of Schiller in England, pp. 926). 40. Coleridge’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads consist of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Nightingale, “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” “The Dungeon,” and (from 1800 onward) “Love.” Other important poems Austen would likely have seen by 1812 include “The Eolian Harp” (first published in Poems on Various Subjects, 1796), “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (Annual Anthology, 1800), the Dejection Ode (Morning Post, 1802), and “Frost at Midnight” and “Fears in Solitude” (Poetical Register, 18081809 [1812]). “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” did not appear until late May of 1816, less than three months before the completion of Persuasion (though Harris seems right that “Pinney, with its green chasms between romantic rocks” [Persuasion, p. 117] alludes to the “deep romantic chasm” of “Kubla Khan” [l. 12] [Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, p. 195 and “Jane Austen and the Burden of the (Male) Past,” p. 94]). 41. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 127 (hereafter cited parenthetically). Critics who see these references as Wordsworthian include Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, p. 50; Tave, “Jane Austen and One of Her Contemporaries,” p. 70; Litz, “Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” p. 226; Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel, p. 68; and Galperin, “What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?,” p. 380. 42. It is also worth noting, as further evidence of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s prominence by this point, that in Waverley, published the same year as Mansfield Park, Scott casually quotes both “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Idiot Boy” (both of which had as yet appeared only in Lyrical Ballads), in each case clearly expecting his audience—that is, the great mass of the reading public—to recognize the passage without the aid of either title or author (Waverley [London: Penguin, 1985], pp. 432, 439). 43. The Poems did not come out until after the manuscript of Emma was complete, but The Excursion came out early in its drafting, presumably long before Austen wrote the passage in chapter 41 that contains the allusion. 44. Jane Austen, Emma (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 284 (hereafter cited parenthetically). The phrase comes from William Cowper, The Task (1785), IV.290. 45. Wordsworth’s lines, by his own acknowledgment, more closely echo a phrase from Young’s Night Thoughts, “Senses … half create the wondrous world they see” (see William Wordsworth, Poems, vol. 1 [London: Penguin, 1977], p. 954), but by 1798 the Night Thoughts (17421745), while still read, lay more than fifty years in the past, while The Task (1785) remained the most beloved work of England’s most prominent poet and

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  Wordsworth’s most important “pre-Romantic” predecessor. That Wordsworth was not reworking Cowper’s line at least unconsciously, given the closeness in subject matter of the two passages, is hard to believe. 46. Marilyn Butler, “Jane Austen’s Sense of the Volume,” in Jane Austen in a Social Context, p. 63. 47. The ensuing discussion draws on the following sources: R. W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) II:xixiii (“Introductory Note”) and II:400407 (“Chronology of Pride and Prejudice”); B.C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 5262; P. B. S. Andrews, “The Date of Pride and Prejudice,” Notes and Queries 213 (1968): 338342; A. Walton Litz, “Chronology of Composition,” in Jane Austen Companion, pp. 4752; and Jo Modert, “Chronology Within the Novels,” in Jane Austen Companion, pp. 5359.47 48. But as noted above, see Leavis, “A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writing,” for the late novels as the result of continuous revision dating back to very early in Austen’s career. 49. Reproduced in Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, p. 53. The omitted portion reads: Mansfield Park, begun somewhere about Feby 1811—finished soon after June 1813 Emma begun Jany 21st 1814, finished March 29th 1815 Persuasion begun Augt 8th 1815 finished Augt 6th 1816 50. Persuasion, p. 339. 51. Letters, p. 202 (29 Jan. 1813). 52. Quoted in Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, p. 54. 53. In the view of D. W. Harding, “[t]he story that Sense and Sensibility existed first in the form of letters is improbable; it derives solely from a note made at the age of 64 by a niece who was not born until 1805” (“Introduction” to A Memoir of Jane Austen, Pe
rsuasion, p. 269). 54. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 11 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 55. Letters, p. 333 (13 March 1817). 56. Le Faye, “Chronology of Jane Austen’s Life,” p. 11. 57. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together some nine months later, five months after Austen’s death. The final title was in both cases supplied by Austen’s brother Henry. Austen had intended to call Persuasion The Elliots (Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 145). 58. But see Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 106, who dates Henry Tilney’s reference to “a mob of three thousand men” to the latest of the three periods in question and claims that the novel’s portrait of General Tilney “reflect[s] the national concerns of the second half of 1816.” And see Margaret Anne Doody, “The Short Fiction,” in Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, pp. 8499, who argues that major revisions were made on

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  all three of the early novels to bring them in line with the more conservative tastes of the Regency. 59. It is one of the ironies of this story that of the letters that were spared by Cassandra during her destruction of her sister’s correspondence, none survive from the first twenty-two months of the family’s residence in Chawton—the period, and more, that AustenLeigh gives for the revision of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice—or from the nineteen months preceding the publication of Pride and Prejudice—the period given for the revision of that novel by most scholars. There are also no letters for the period from late May, 1801, to late August, 1804—the time during which Susan/Catherine/Northanger Abbey was “finished”—nor from mid-September, 1796, to early April, 1798—the time during which First Impressions was written and the revision of Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility begun, if not also completed. And those hiatuses are the only four such in the correspondence, which begins in January, 1796—after the drafting of Elinor and Marianne. 60. Chapman, Novels of Jane Austen, II:407. 61. Woolf, “Jane Austen,” pp. 136137. 62. Chapman, Novels of Jane Austen, II:400. A full date is one that includes both the day-month date and the day of the week. 63. Discussed in Modert, “Chronology Within the Novels,” p. 56. 64. It is, for example, the dating to which Modert gives pride of place. See also Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 177, where that dating becomes the basis of the argument that Austen set the novel at a very particular moment in the evolution of the debate over slavery and the slave trade. 65. Modert, “Chronology Within the Novels,” p. 56. 66. Crabbe’s great popularity is attested by the fact that in Waverley, published the same year as Mansfield Park, Scott is able to refer to him, without mentioning his name, as “our English Juvenal,” clearly confident that his readers will recognize the allusion (Waverley, p. 479). 67. A few chapters before the mention of the Tales, we find the company at Sotherton “loung[ing] away the time as they could with … Quarterly Reviews” (87). The Quarterly Review did not begin publication until 1809. 68. Chapman, Novels of Jane Austen, II:13. 69. Chapman, Novels of Jane Austen, II:401402. 70. Chapman, Novels of Jane Austen, II:406. 71. Andrews, “Date of Pride and Prejudice,” p. 339. 72. Andrews, “Date of Pride and Prejudice,” p. 340. 73. “It seems to me incredible that the gay and young-in-heart Pride and Prejudice, and the mature and bitter Mansfield Park, can really be simultaneous productions of the same stage in the author’s development” (p. 339). 74. It should be mentioned that Chapman’s theory has been so widely accepted in part because it dovetails with another, later, theory about the evolution of the Pride and Prejudice manuscript, one that is similarly widely accepted and similarly without evidentiary foundation: that First Impressions was, like Elinor and Marianne (in Caroline AustenLeigh’s account), an epistolary novel. The idea was first floated by Southam (Jane Austen’s

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  Literary Manuscripts, pp. 5859), who reasoned that the relative weakness of Sense and Sensibility as compared with Pride and Prejudice must be due to its having been Austen’s first effort in direct narrative. But Southam admitted that there is “no evidence” for such a conjecture and acknowledged that “we might expect some remark in the family biographies … had First Impressions been an epistolary novel” (p. 58). And other, equally plausible explanations of Sense and Sensibility’s relative weakness are not hard to imagine, starting with the difficulty of transforming an existing epistolary manuscript, if such Elinor and Marianne was, into the direct mode. Or it may simply be that Austen wrote a weaker novel after having written a stronger one. As John Halperin asks, why must we assume that writers always get steadily better, especially when so many artistic careers (George Eliot’s, for example) display a more complex trajectory (Life, p. 66)? 75. For John Halperin, “[t]here can be little doubt that Jane Austen had [Pride and Prejudice] down in fairly finished form by the time her father offered it to a London publisher … on 1 November 1797” (Life , p. 65); Jan Fergus also sees little significant revision at Chawton (Jane Austen: A Literary Life [Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991], pp. 8182); and Clare Tomalin writes, in reference to both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, that “the central characters and plot structures were in place by 1800 … and that although she did work on them, they were substantially the books we know” (Jane Austen: A Life [London: Viking, 1997], pp. 154155). 76. J. F. Burrows’s statistical analysis of linguistic patterns also affirms this conclusion (Computation Into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], pp. 132133). 77. In fact, though the juvenilia are remembered for their brief, high-spirited burlesques, they end with a number of extended attempts at more serious narrative forms— most important, Lady Susan—ones that clearly show Austen working toward Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions. So it is not wrong to see the first of the novel manuscripts as continuous with the last of the juvenilia, as long as we are clear what each of those things were. 78. Indeed, the order in which Austen’s first three novels are conventionally enumerated itself constitutes an argument about the significance of the later revisions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. The way we think about each of those books, as well as about the shape of the first half of Austen’s career, would be very different if we enumerated them, as I think we should, as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey. As for the insistence that First Impressions could not be much like the Pride and Prejudice we know, since no one, having written a novel like that, would go on to write one like Northanger Abbey—that, too, is a circular argument. Who is to say what kind of novel naturally follows any other kind? Does Mansfield Park naturally follow Pride and Prejudice? Does Emma naturally follow Mansfield Park? Besides, it is not at all implausible that Austen, having written two straightforward narratives, would wish to cleanse her palate with a sophisticated meta-fictional entertainment like Northanger Abbey. There is also a more mundane argument for the plausibility of this order of composition: First Impressions was rejected by a publisher sight unseen. Austen immediately set about rewriting Elinor and Marianne but was presumably dissatisfied with the results, since as far as we know, she did not even bother sending it out for publication. She may simply have sought to

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  make her next project more saleable—as it proved to be, even if, once sold, it was not published. 79. Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, p. 155.