Jane’s Fame

by Claire Harman, Canongate, 384pp, £20 Week Bookshop £18 (incl. p&p). For half a century after Jane Austen’s death aged 41 in 1817, her fame was “no more than a feeble glimmer”, said John Carey in the Sunday Times. As Claire Harman explains in her “rich, incisive” study of “how Austen conquered the world”, during Austen’s lifetime she did have a small, dedicated following: Lady Byron praised her gift for naturalistic description, and the Prince Regent asked that Emma be dedicated to him. But Wordsworth deplored her lack of “attractions”; her own family thought her brother, a glum poet, was the family’s real writer; and her books sold little: early editions were pulped or remaindered. “She gained a few fans among the great Victorians. Macaulay compared her to Shakespeare. Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice 17 times.” But she remained obscure. In the 1860s, the verger at Winchester Cathedral was puzzled when literary pilgrims sought her grave: “Pray, Sir,” he asked one, “can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady?” The “cult” of Austen only took hold in the 1870s. By 1894, the critic George Saintsbury had “coined the term ‘Janeites’ for her votaries”.

The turning point, it seems, was a “myth-mongering” memoir written in 1870 by a nephew, said Frances Wilson in the Daily Telegraph. It cast her – in reality, a tough professional author – as a twinkly spinster scribbling playfully in the sitting room of her home at Chawton, “a secret smile playing along her tiny mouth”. This “Divine Jane” took root in the public imagi-nation: Rudyard Kipling wrote a story about a secret sect of Austen devotees on the Western Front, sustained in their gallantry by their love for her.

Harman is very good on the Austen-mania of recent years, said Paula Byrne in the Sunday Telegraph – which was driven by the film Clueless, a Valley Girl version of Emma, and the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. She reveals that a “bashful Colin Firth refused to go bare-chested in ‘that scene’ – little realising the impact his wet shirt would have on legions of fans”. None of this material is particularly new; “it’s the quality of the insights and interpret-ations that make the book such a good read”. The sections about “ludicrous” academic inter-pretations are also good value, said Philip Hensher in the Spectator. An essay called Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl is a lecture-room favourite, and it is now well-established in the academy that Mansfield Park “is ‘about’ slavery, just as Emma is about something called ‘heteronorm-ativity’”. This is “an entertaining book” which tells you all you need to know “about the afterlife of Austen’s novels”.

FIRST POSTED APRIL 9, 2009