Austen's Fame: Not Universally Acknowledged?

Jane's Fame

Reviewed by Philip Hensher

(Image from Amazon.com)

In "Now universally acknowledged," a recent article published in The Spectator, the novelist and literary critic Philip Hensher has 'reviewed' Claire Harman's recent book on Jane Austen.

Hensher says little about the book under review but says it in an entertaining manner as he riffs off the book to score his own points about Austen's talent. Austen was not always universally acknowledged, and Hensher points to the rather pointed remarks of a couple of 19th-century 'critics':

Some people haven't cared for Austen -- Charlotte Bronte, who called her novels 'an accurate, daguerrotyped portrait of a commonplace face', or Mark Twain, who wonderfully and ambivalently said that 'every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone'.

Both remarks strike me as wonderfully ambivalent.

Bronte's acknowledges Austen's accuracy in portraying the subject chosen . . . though she thinks it ill-chosen:

And what did I find [in Pride and Prejudice]? . . . An accurate, daguerrotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden. (Barbara M. Benedict, "Sensibility by the Numbers: Austen's Work as Regency Popular Fiction," in Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, edited by Deidre Lynch (Princeton University Press, 2000), page 63)

Bronte's dismissive remark acknowledges not merely Austen's accuracy but also her skillful care for and cultivation of the chosen subject.

Twain's remark implies that he's read her repeatedly. Here's a more complete account:

From letter 13 September 1898, first published, lacking the third sentence, in Letters (1917), ii. 667, ed. AB Paine; sentence added in 'Mark Twain and the Art of Writing', Brander Matthews, Harper's Magazine, October 1920: 'I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read "Pride and Prejudice" I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. (B. C. Southam, Jane Austen: 1870-1940, The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1996), page 232)

Twain admits to a frenzied inability to compose a reasoned, critical review of Austen . . . but isn't he also confessing to having read and re-read Pride and Prejudice?

Be that as it may, Bronte's criticism is more reasoned and more resonant than Twain's, for Austen's world does strike one as limited. I always wonder, for instance, what the various servants are thinking as they go about their largely anonymous but essential tasks. For Austen to focus on that, however, would have meant writing a different sort of novel, with a different set of limitations. Austen's novels work within the limits set, but their greatness lies in how they transcend those limits, as Hensher observes:

And yet there is a kind of universal genius there, and the formula of 'three or four families in a country village' means something to almost everyone. The French anarchist Félix Fénéon discovered her while languishing in prison for possession of ten detonators and a vial of mercury, and translated her most elegantly ('Personne qui ait jamais vu Catherine Morland dans son enfance ne l'aurait supposée née pour être une héroïne'). It was noted in the early 1960s that Nigerian rural schoolchildren had no problems with the dilemmas of Pride and Prejudice, and in recent years Bollywood adaptations, and a delightful Valley Girl version of Emma, Clueless, have demonstrated a high degree of cultural transferability. There seems no reason why these novels should not go on forever.

In other words, it is a truth now universally acknowledged, that this single woman in possession of a great talent, though in want of critical acclaim among mid-19th-century critics, is one of our greatest writers.