In part due to your enthusiastic advocacy, I've been reading and rereading Austen myself recently. I likewise find it striking both how straightforwardly evident Austen's ethical priors often are and how reluctant many modern scholars are to actually accept them, and sincerely grapple with the possibility that her perspective may be wiser and more humane than those of the modern academy. As noted in your podcast conversation with Oliver Traldi, there is plenty of philosophical content that one could profitably chew over in Austen if one is willing to take her (in my opinion) pretty unerring judgments of character seriously. I took a stab at advocating for the Austenian virtues myself this month:
Jane Austen, like Shakespeare, tends to make all the attempts to categorise her in totality as one thing or another entirely superfluous, she escapes them all, because she is many things at once. You can say she is conservative or liberal or patriarchal or feminist. Ultimately these are all ways of seeing things in refraction, partially and not the whole. One thing I realise about her now though is how her wit, and humour, is actually quite a deep weapon to examine and interrogate and question and scrutinise because nothing escapes her universal wit. That may make it all sound schematic, but I think its part of the delight. She asks how can we judge someone when so much clouds our view - status, desire, social expectation, money. And yet she doesn't then suggest these things are not important. Her characters have to balance things out to find truth and happiness. Everything is seen with that eye. And the whole thing. Love, marriage and the desire for 'a good match' with material security and mutual attraction, intellectual and conjugal, is the eternal story, so her stories will never pass they will always nag and delight us.
Bravo Henry! My admiration for your critical brilliance is tempered only by my chagrin that I could never emulate it! This article seems to me absolutely spot on… Thank you.
I love that Austen shows Willoughby complacent in the life he chose. She refuses to let her reader romanticize him by picturing him pining away. I confess to being not quite satisfied with Edward, but I still love the book and see it as Austen making very clear it is the sisters' proximity to one another which ensures their happy ending.
This is a great review, and would have pleased Jane Austen, unlike the dessicated scholar-speak of some critics who seem to have missed the point of her novels entirely. But one cavil: wasn't Northanger Abbey the first Austen novel?
She is the antithesis of everything Nabokov would teach about literature AND how to read ~~ when he wasn’t chasing butterflies.
Wonderful essay, as per usual, Henry. I’m currently listening to Julie Andrews’ genius reading of Emma, free on Noiser podcasts. She gets — and delivers — everything. (Pride & Prejudice also, in the same series.)
“An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence”
Christopher Hitchens
In part due to your enthusiastic advocacy, I've been reading and rereading Austen myself recently. I likewise find it striking both how straightforwardly evident Austen's ethical priors often are and how reluctant many modern scholars are to actually accept them, and sincerely grapple with the possibility that her perspective may be wiser and more humane than those of the modern academy. As noted in your podcast conversation with Oliver Traldi, there is plenty of philosophical content that one could profitably chew over in Austen if one is willing to take her (in my opinion) pretty unerring judgments of character seriously. I took a stab at advocating for the Austenian virtues myself this month:
https://www.untroubled.blog/p/jane-austen
Jane Austen, like Shakespeare, tends to make all the attempts to categorise her in totality as one thing or another entirely superfluous, she escapes them all, because she is many things at once. You can say she is conservative or liberal or patriarchal or feminist. Ultimately these are all ways of seeing things in refraction, partially and not the whole. One thing I realise about her now though is how her wit, and humour, is actually quite a deep weapon to examine and interrogate and question and scrutinise because nothing escapes her universal wit. That may make it all sound schematic, but I think its part of the delight. She asks how can we judge someone when so much clouds our view - status, desire, social expectation, money. And yet she doesn't then suggest these things are not important. Her characters have to balance things out to find truth and happiness. Everything is seen with that eye. And the whole thing. Love, marriage and the desire for 'a good match' with material security and mutual attraction, intellectual and conjugal, is the eternal story, so her stories will never pass they will always nag and delight us.
A superb piece! So heartening that someone is writing like this, now.
Yes, these critics that 'stand outside the book'...exactly. And when you do that it so easily slips into an attitude of superiority.
Bravo Henry! My admiration for your critical brilliance is tempered only by my chagrin that I could never emulate it! This article seems to me absolutely spot on… Thank you.
I love that Austen shows Willoughby complacent in the life he chose. She refuses to let her reader romanticize him by picturing him pining away. I confess to being not quite satisfied with Edward, but I still love the book and see it as Austen making very clear it is the sisters' proximity to one another which ensures their happy ending.
The tragic truth is that academics are unequipped to deal with humor and thus ignore or misinterpret it.
Just re-read it and agree it is very funny. Thank you
This is a great review, and would have pleased Jane Austen, unlike the dessicated scholar-speak of some critics who seem to have missed the point of her novels entirely. But one cavil: wasn't Northanger Abbey the first Austen novel?
“A relativistic terminology of comparatives and negatives asserts the security of positive and absolute essences”
This is a real statement from this professor?‽!! (Probably.) Her website:
https://englishcomplit.unc.edu/faculty-directory/inger-s-b-brodey/
She is the antithesis of everything Nabokov would teach about literature AND how to read ~~ when he wasn’t chasing butterflies.
Wonderful essay, as per usual, Henry. I’m currently listening to Julie Andrews’ genius reading of Emma, free on Noiser podcasts. She gets — and delivers — everything. (Pride & Prejudice also, in the same series.)
Amen