What's Been Happening to Jane Austen?

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Pritchard, William H

THERE'S AN ADMIRABLE SORT OF READER for whom the above question doesn't need asking, since what's been happening to Jane Austen has been happening ever since Walter Scott assured readers that "Those . . . 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." Such general readers find it eminently natural and highly pleasurable to reread the six finished novels at regular intervals, always encountering something to make the latest reading a fresh one. They may or may not pick up unfinished or unpublished (during her lifetime) works like Lady Susan or The Watsons or Sanditon, and they may or may not be moved to look at recent biographies, the best of which is by Claire Tomalin. But I suspect they will stay clear of the fearful parade of books and essays produced by academic critics of the writer, specialists in this or that area of Austen-work that, in one way or another, those critics will demonstrate to be very "problematic" indeed.1

An even more recent biography of her is a mini one by the late Carol Shields, herself a skilled novelist, in the Penguin Lives series, and it may be a good place to begin for readers who never felt impelled to seek out a life of Austen (in my case the disinclination has been similar to not much caring about Shakespeare's life).2 Carol Shields won my sympathy early on when she addressed the problem of deciding what to call her subject: The Novelist?; Ms. Austen? ("unthinkable"); Miss Austen (but her sister Cassandra deserves that title). "Jane" is also unsatisfactory, while "Austen on its very own possesses an indelicacy." So we're left with "Jane Austen"-or at least that's the form Shields applies, even though it's politically incorrect not to call her "Austen," since one speaks of "Dickens" or "Trollope." Shields's book puts forward nothing revelatory about her subject (she goes along with Claire Tomalin's suggestion that Jane Austen died of a lymphoma, rather than the Addison's Disease that had been earlier favored). But I'm in her debt for directing me to Sanditon, the novelistic fragment Austen gave up on three months before she died, which Shields thinks not only "as vigorous and inventive as her earlier work," but also shows her on the verge of widening her scope as a writer. At any rate, to my fresh, untutored eyes Sanditon's twelve chapters contain some of the finest and funniest comedy in all of Jane Austen's work.

You would never gather that, however, from rereading the pages on Sanditon that conclude William H. Galperin's The Historical Austen.3 "The Body in Persuasion and Sanditon" (watch out for anyone writing about The Body these days) is the last of eight chapters written throughout in an absolutely jawbreaking idiom and a manner of nothing less than wall-to-wall solemnity. Mr. Galperin is intelligent, a scholar, has read every previous book about his subject and a good many besides, but his insights tend to get expressed in a style like the following from the Sanditon chapter:

In raising the spectre of the antireal, particularly as a contestional mode where realism is concerned, I am not suggesting that probabilistic fiction maintains a referentiality independent of either contrivance or of the many complications that language as an arbitrary and figurative apparatus, brings to any verbal act. I am suggesting only . . . (etc.)

I worked hard at this book but kept breaking down at moments like the following, only part of a much longer sentence:

. . . so her project overall is virtually suspended between certain generic imperatives, the majority clustering around free indirect discourse as an armature of the realistic imagination, and a generic memory (for want of a better term) where, in modes ranging from allegory to epistolarity, reading and interpretation may ultimately supersede narrative authority.

"Project," by the way, is another of the dread overused words of which the armature of current literary commentary is enamored.

Who would guess from reading such discourse, as the friends of Michel Foucault like to call it, that Sanditon contains perhaps the funniest sequence in all of Jane Austen, as its sensible heroine, Charlotte Heywood, takes tea with the hypochondriacal Parker sisters and their brother, observing the peculiar "enjoyments in Invalidisms" of Arthur Parker and his buttered toast:

. . . "I hope you will eat some of this Toast," said he, "I reckon myself a very good Toaster; I never burn my Toasts-I never put them too near the Fire at first-& yet, you see, there is not a Corner but what is well browned.-I hope you like dry Toast."-"With a reasonable quantity of Butter spread over it, very much"- said Charlotte-"but not otherwise.-" "No more do I"-said he exceedingly pleased-"We think quite alike there.-So far from dry Toast being wholesome, I think it a very bad thing for the Stomach. Without a little butter to soften it, it hurts the Coats of the Stomach. I am sure it does.-I will have the pleasure of spreading some for you directly-& afterwards I will spread some for myself.-Very bad indeed for the Coats of the Stomach-but there is no convincing some people.-It irritates & acts like a nutmeg grater.-" He could not get command of the Butter however, without a struggle; His Sisters accusing him of eating a great deal too much, & declaring he was not to be trusted; - and he maintaining that he only eat enough to secure the Coats of his Stomach;-& besides, he only wanted it now for Miss Heywood.- Such a plea must prevail, he got the butter & spread away for her with an accuracy of judgement which at least delighted himself; but when her Toast was done, & he took his own in hand, Charlotte c^sup d^ hardly contain herself as she saw him watching his sisters, while he scrupulously scraped off almost as much butter as he put on, & then seize an odd moment for adding a great dab just before it went into his Mouth.