The main Austen appeal is essentially escapist. People, judging from the books I have seen, like to imagine themselves in Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes. The attraction of the average reader is not to the satire, but to the image her works evoke of rich people doing nothing and having a jolly good time about it too. That doesn’t really sound interesting to me, but there you have it. This is why Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of her books. It is written in short chapters comprised almost entirely of witty, back-and-forth bantering. Not much happens, and everything is unremittingly light-hearted. Meanwhile, some of her more serious works, like Persuasion and Mansfield Park, are not as well known.
The truth is, the attraction to Jane Austen is an attraction to a fantasy. Which leads me to my next point: her works were really not radical or daring satires of the upper classes. Instead, they read as light-hearted odes to the rich and landed—gently teasing but essentially celebratory. True, Mansfield Park is about a girl from a poor family, but certainly Austen never wrote about the working class or the ordinary citizen. George Eliot’s criticism of her fellow female novelists could well be applied: “The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as ‘dependents;’ they think five hundred a-year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and ‘baronial halls’ are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister.”
Jane Austen could probably best be compared to P.G. Wodehouse in this respect, another great figure in the history of the English comic novel. Americans tend to read his Wooster/Jeeves novels as daring exposes of the stupidity of the British upper classes. But really, the people Wodehouse was talking about had already ceased to exist, or at least, to matter, when he was writing. Instead of mocking them, he was lamenting their passing. It was escapist fare meant to depict an imaginary place in which the biggest concern on everyone’s mind was whether or not Lord Chuffnell Chuffington would be coming to dinner and how many buttered scones ought to be served if he was. Jane Austen similarly depicts a fantasy realm in which real life does not intrude. No labor troubles, no Luddites, no crime, no poverty, no disease—just marriage and the possibility of more marriage.
Okay, fine, so Jane Austen didn’t write about the working class. But most people feel it wouldn’t be fair to expect her to do so. They fall back on two arguments. First of all, many women, unfortunately enough, seem to worry that Jane Austen is all they have. After all, what other female, pre-Victorian nineteenth century novelists can you think of? But for that matter, how many male novelists from that time period can you think of? Maybe the period 1800-1830 just wasn’t the best time for that literary genre. And of course, in the Victorian era, there was a tremendous proliferation of female novelists, including the Brontes, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. The second argument is that it’s unfair to expect well-educated 19th century women to have written about class conflict. But once again, take the Brontes, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Charlotte Bronte took an openly pro-worker stance in her novel Shirley, about the Luddites.
Maybe Emily was silent on the issue, but Anne, the youngest Bronte, was a controversial, even shocking Realist who mercilessly depicted class snobbery in Agnes Grey. We’ve already seen George Eliot’s thoughts on the place of the workers in literature, and Elizabeth Gaskell was practically known for her pro-working class novels. The “she was a product of her time and place,” line just doesn’t hold up. Her female characters were dependant and disempowered. Yet many female authors in the 19th century were able to create independent-minded female characters. She was also class-biased, locked into heavy moralizing, and uninterested in brutal reality. True, many writers in the 19th century also had these problems, but the best ones, the ones we remember, were able to get around them. Jane Austen is sometimes seen as daring, but female writers only a few decades later, as we have seen, were doing things far more radical.
Okay, maybe I’ve been too hard on her. I am not an expert on Jane Austen by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m sure most people will see my somewhat “political” analysis of her work as narrow-minded. So let me say one thing: Jane Austen is funny. Her wit and irony are sharp and clever. I’ve got nothing against people reading her, I just feel that the steady inflation of her reputation has gone too far. Let me make a suggestion: let’s view Jane Austen as an important innovator. As someone who added a great deal to the tradition of the English comic novel. But not as the greatest mind, or even the greatest wit, of her century. If we could just back off from Jane Austen for awhile—let her be for a few years and then come back to her work with a clear head—we might be able to get a better handle on what is important and what is not in English literature.
