9 - Traditional Approaches to Austen, 1991–2008

Summary

IT MAY BE BEST TO BEGIN THIS CHAPTER with a cautionary note. It is almost impossible to find any criticism of Austen written after the 1970s that does not somehow take into account the work of theorists, especially feminist critics and those who have made great advances in placing Austen's fiction in its historical and cultural context. Nevertheless, there continue to be studies published that, in the main, use methodologies developed in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth — critical biographies, influence studies, and comparative analyses, to name a few. The books and essays discussed below are representative of these approaches. As the sheer number of these studies suggests, despite the emphasis in academic circles on new theoretical approaches to critical analysis, there has been no dearth of traditional studies of Austen published between 1990 and the present.

Biographies

What the novelist and essayist John Updike described as the problem of producing competent biographies of great writers like Austen, whom he calls an “exalted literary performer about whom we seem to know so little” (Due Consideration, 7), seems not to have stopped scholars from writing new studies of her life, and during the past twenty years a handful have appeared. As one might expect, each biographer attempts to take a new slant on Austen's life in order to say something that has not been said, or at least not said so well as he or she can say it.