"A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen" edited by Susannah Carson
In a piece called “Emma
and the Legend of Jane Austen,” Lionel Trilling addresses the two kinds of
admiration for Jane Austen. He quotes none other Henry James, who admired Miss
Austen, and who indeed had a moral and artistic affinity with her. Mr. James
proclaimed that her reputation had exceeded her intrinsic interest and was
unwarranted. He blames: “the body of publishers, editors, illustrators,
producers of magazines, which have found their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody’s
dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose.” In the more recent past,
Dr. Leavis expresses his impatience with Miss Austen’s admirers while he honors
her work. The same essential notion emerges in the work of Dr. Mudrick and D.W.
Harding. Mudrick describes “a mere mass of cozy family adulation, self-glorif
[ication] … and nostalgic latterday enshrinements of the gentle-hearted
chronicler of Regency order.”
For some part of A
Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen,
an admirable collection edited by Susannah Carson, the issue of the “ownership”
of Jane Austen – who has the right to admire her the most – rears its rather
ridiculous head. The fact that there exist in parallel two main thrusts of Jane
Austen love, the one where the charm of setting and sweetness of outcome rule,
which I call the visceral, and the other dominated by academic research, and
which deals with the more recondite, esoteric matters of exegesis and
comparative aesthetics, which I will term the cerebral. For those of us who
look for patterns, tricks, and subtle effects in our fiction, Jane Austen is a
magnificent delight, over and over. And yet, how much less magnificent can
Austen be to the devoted “lay” reader, who returns to her favorite novel,
knowing that once again, the delights can be depended on? This is ridiculous,
as I said. I can quote from a critic: “Long life, good health, and much
prosperity to the reader who simply enjoys the narrative.” And I myself, have
no qualms whatever to acknowledging a deep, visceral love for the Austen
oeuvre, and it coexists quite nicely, thank you, with my delight in her subtler
shadings, those lovely and beautifully-expressed barbs that skewer, and those
ineffable expositions of psychology and human nature. I like “dear Jane” too.
So I guess, there you have it. True devotion to Jane Austen
should be reserved (according to some) to those with the background, taste,
credentials, and temperament to understand the literary merits, and shunned by
the rest. Fat chance, and rightly so. I must admit to liking her work first and
foremost for the ruthless candor of her observations of Regency hypocrisy and
cant. At least they look and sound like hypocrisy and cant to us now. She
strikes as far ahead of her times when portraying human motivation and real
longing. The quality of her individuals never flags, never fails to ring
exactly true, no matter the character’s state in life. Others enjoy Jane Austen
– perhaps revere is a better word – for her portrayal of manners, her tight,
quiet plots, her felicitous heroines, and her fulsome heroines. Why not? I like
all those things, too, and admit to a good measure of reverence myself.
Apparently I’m in decent company.
E.M. Forster famously opens an essay on Jane Austen, “I am a
Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen … She is my
favorite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed … The
Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he so freely ascribes to his
idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.”
E.M. Forster was no neophyte when it comes to judging a
fiction’s quality, bit I read his words impressed by his visceral, rather than
his cerebral, enjoyment. Isn’t this what Henry James, and professors Mudrick
and Harding object to? These issues present perhaps the high water mark to the
flood tide of her reputation. Implicit within the arguments is the acknowledged
truth, a “truth universally acknowledged,” that Jane Austen, that peerless
portraitist and storyteller, that purveyor of gentle manners cloaking a barbed,
prickly sarcasm, ranks at the very top of artists writing English narrative.
Yes, right there with Shakespeare. We find we can hardly blame critics and scholars
for their apparent proprietary feelings toward her. We all feel that way.
I stared out wanting to review this collection. Ms. Carson,
the editor, leads the festivities off with a fine, thought-provoking essay of
her own. The work carries the subtitle “33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane
Austen.” The collection does not lack for star power. Besides Forster’s
need-I-say-hardly “imbecile” views, we get perception, insight, circumspection,
and appreciation from Eudora Welty, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Lionel Trilling
(twice), W. Somerset Maugham, Anna Quindlen, Louis Auchincloss, Janet Todd, Amy
Heckerling, Margot Livesey, Jay McInerney, and Virginia Woolf. Contributions
from lesser-known scribes add light and weight, as well.
We do have a mix here, between the cerebral and the visceral,
and perhaps nowhere is the visceral more in evidence than Martin Amis’s wish
for a twenty-page extension to Pride and
Prejudice to get a detailed description of the Darcys’ wedding night, “with
Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.” The cerebral,
however, is everywhere. And I reserve
the highest rank for Harold Bloom.
Mr. Bloom treasures Persuasion
above all, as do I. He compares Anne Elliot to Rosalind of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, saying they are the two
heroines who carry almost omniscient understanding of the stories. He says of
Anne and Rosalind, “Their poise cannot transcend perspectivizing completely,
but Rosalind’s wit and Anne’s sensbiliy, both balanced and free of either excessive
aggressivity or defensiveness, enable them to share more of their creators’ poise
than we ever come to do.” Mr. Bloom goes on to cite others’ elegant points, and
to make his own, about the deep understanding and unceasing and unspoken
communication between Anne and Captain Wentworth. These points, and the truth,
that Anne outshines Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet in understanding,
sympathy, and virtue, helped clarify for me the lovely features of this masterwork,
to which Mr. Bloom ascribes “extraordinary aesthetic distinction.” He avers to
feeling sad after each rereading, but I must say I never felt so tinged. The
joy is, I admit, more alloyed than that accompanying Sense and Sensibility and Pride
and Prejudice, but not at all because we value the heroine less. Appropriately
enough, Mr. Bloom describes the novel as having a “canonical persuasiveness.”
We all read Jane Austen for different reasons. Whether you
value her satisfying plots, her persuasive characters, or her sparkling wit,
you will find 33 new perspectives, all from artists themselves, for reading and
appreciating her work all over again.
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