6 - Jane Austen

Summary

Two decades of intense experimentation and revision preceded the publication of Jane Austen's six major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818). Constantly playing off the tradition, she merges the dramatic interiority of Samuel Richardson with the authorial voice of Henry Fielding to expose characters' minds while prompting the judgement of readers. That flexible narrative voice would catch the attention of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, among others. Even in her last unfinished fragment, Sanditon, Austen was still evolving new techniques and subjects. But her affection for irony, satire, and parody derives just as clearly from Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. Thus Austen, poised between two centuries, writes novels that are as compact, witty, and incisive as plays. Austen's relation to predecessors and contemporaries may be traced through the books she owned, says she has read, alludes to, or seems to echo. Even that may represent a mere fraction of what she knew, for as F. R. Leavis remarks, 'she read all there was to read, and took all that was useful to her - which wasn't only lessons'. Like most authors, Austen made books out of other books as well as out of life. If readers are active rather than passive consumers of texts, so too writers poach freely from other writers. Thus Austen's appropriations signify not lack of imagination, not plagiarism, not submission to 'influence', but sheer competitiveness. Her rewriting of fellow novelists particularly implies critique, for comparisons reveal her irresistible literary-critical impulse to improve upon them.