Jane Austen and her world

Jane Austen
EMMA
An annotated edition
Edited by Bharat Tandon
560pp. Harvard University Press. £31.50 (US $35).
978 0 674 04884 3
Susannah Fullerton
A DANCE WITH JANE AUSTEN
How a novelist and her characters went to the ball
160pp. Frances Lincoln. £16.99.
978 0 7112 3245 7
Janine Barchas
MATTERS OF FACT IN JANE AUSTEN
History, location, and celebrity
336pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. $45; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £23.50.
978 1 4214 0640 4
Maggie Lane
UNDERSTANDING AUSTEN
Key concepts in the six novels
208pp. Robert Hale. £16.99.
978 0 7090 9078 6

Published: 7 February 2013

A still from Emma (1996), directed by Douglas McGrath

T here has been much talk in recent years about the end of the book, but the Austen industry appears not to have heard the news. All four of the books under review are published in high-quality hardback editions, with Bharat Tandon’s annotated edition of Emma being the most handsome. Its large size and heavy weight, complemented by thick, wood-textured endpapers, acid-free cream-vellum paper, generous margins and woven bindings suggest an object important in its own right, an object and a form that will not go quietly into the good night.

Its rich illustrations range from frontispieces and portraits to caricatures and Regency fashion plates, including a fine one for the Beaver Hat. Tandon’s explanatory notes are similarly comprehensive and serve to link Austen not only to contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charles Lamb, but also to lexical and thematic lines that run backwards, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to Seneca, and forwards to James Joyce and the contemporary novelist Edward St Aubyn. When, for example, Emma’s brother-in-law John Knightley’s temper is described as “philosophic”, Tandon’s note glosses this as “stoical” and links it to Squire Allworthy in Fielding’s Tom Jones before quoting – to brilliant effect – the American Anne Moore in St Aubyn’s Never Mind: “But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say, ‘He was very philosophical about it’? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something”.

Tandon is especially attuned to the culture of Regency food and drink. In a long conversation about gruel – characterized in the introduction as “some of the most transcendently banal conversation in the whole of Austen’s fiction” – Emma’s sister, Isabella Knightley, complains that her housekeeper “had never been able to understand what she meant by a basin of nice smooth gruel, thin, but not too thin”. Pity the housekeeper didn’t have this edition to hand, as she would find Maria Rundell’s recipe for “Water Gruel” in the note on page 53. Similar information is available for spruce beer, thirty-one flavours of ice cream, cured ham, drop cakes and so on. Tandon is not only informative about such matters, but also witty, noting in his comprehensive introduction that “there are times when navigating through the plot of Emma . . . can feel uncomfortably like swimming through gruel, too – after all, one never knows exactly when another morsel of proper narrative substance is going to emerge from the quotidian gloop that is so often the stuff of life in Highbury”. Far from gloopy, Tandon’s notes often function as brief scholarly and historic articles in their own right, and the combined effect of these notes and illustrations is an edition of almost Talmudic ambition, but one that carries its erudition without sacrificing readability.

Holding a book of this size and weight, one is reminded not only of the book as a thing, but also of the important role that things themselves play in books

Holding a book of this size and weight, one is reminded not only of the book as a thing, but also of the important role that things themselves play in books. In literary studies, this has fostered a new method of criticism under the heading of “thing theory”. Taking its cue from anthropology, this practice considers how objects are invested with meanings beyond their material existence – as with, say, the piano given by Frank Churchill to Jane Fairfax in Emma around which so many of Emma’s lurid (and mistaken) speculations about Jane turn. In Emma, objects and things are invested with particular value by Harriet, who keeps “the end of an old pencil” and a piece of fabric sticking plaster given to her by Mr Elton in a box marked Most precious treasures, here illustrated with an image of a Tunbridge-ware box featuring a characteristic inlaid wood pattern. Such illustrations, and the further indexing work done by Tandon’s glosses, are useful because Austen typically handles descriptions of clothes, furniture, houses and other things with considerable restraint.

Given this, readers wishing for more details about Austen’s ball scenes, for a clearer sense of what would be worn at a ball, what kind of music would be played, and what sort of manners were typical, will want to consult Susannah Fullerton’s A Dance with Jane Austen. Fullerton has combed Austen’s novels and letters and contemporary books on country dancing and illustrated her findings with caricatures, sketches, menus and even stills from film adaptations of the novels. Her writing is brisk and confident, though some of the impact of her illustrations is lost by the failure to provide explanatory captions. This may not bother her intended audience, however; more than the Harvard annotated Austen series, this book is intended for the Austen enthusiast – the “Janeite”. It is full of decorative exclamation marks – “It was vital to look one’s absolute best for a ball!” – and comments that seem purely adulatory, as when we are told that “Jane Austen had a good appetite and enjoyed her food”.

It would be a mistake, however, to read Austen’s fiction as primarily, or even predominantly, about things. In a letter, Austen famously concluded that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”, and her novels focus not only on the courtship plots that structure her narratives, but also on the manners, the judgement, the subtlety and the tact required to negotiate day-to-day encounters with those whom, like Mrs Elton in Emma, one often loathes but of whom one will likely never be free. They are novels of social evaluation, of minute and careful observation, both of manners and of internal mental processes, novels in which ideas and thoughts matter. As James Wood notes, “Emma is one large mental chamber”. Austen’s works, therefore, are novels in which even seemingly simple words bear multiple resonances, and in this context, Tandon’s notes are superb. Glosses on key words and concepts such as “charm”, “liberality”, “propriety”, “mediocre” and “air” offer explanations of abstractions whose simplicity means that their significance and resonance might easily be overlooked by the casual reader.

With titles such as Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, it will hardly come as a surprise that abstract nouns bear considerable weight in Austen’s fiction. In developing this point in Understanding Austen: Key concepts in the six novels, Maggie Lane surveys Austen’s oeuvre through abstract terms ranging from air and address, liberality and candour, delicacy and forbearance to propriety and decorum. Each chapter works like a glossed concordance, briefly introducing key terms and then surveying their uses through Austen’s six major novels. In her insistence on the central importance of abstraction, Lane declares that “Jane Austen’s was an age of abstract nouns”. This may be true, but because Lane limits the explanatory context of Austen’s language to Austen’s own work, we are left to wonder how this distinguishes it from any other age, just as we are left to wonder what in particular about Jane Austen’s use of abstractions distinguishes her from contemporaries. When, for example, Lane opens her chapter on “Mind” with the claim that “While person, countenance, air and address are the terms by which Jane Austen assesses the outward appearance and presentation of the individual, mind, together with spirit and temper . . . are used by her to dissect the personality within”, one wonders how this sets her apart from, say, Maria Edgeworth or Fanny Burney, who uses similar terms in Camilla in observing that, “To save the mind from preying inwardly upon itself, it must be encouraged to some outward pursuit. There is no other way to elude apathy, or escape discontent; none other to guard the temper from that quarrel with itself, which ultimately ends in quarrelling with all mankind”. If Austen’s use of such abstractions are what make her work timeless and universal, as Lane suggests, we might wonder why Edgeworth and Burney do not have quite the same exalted status as Austen.

To what extent, then, should we consider Austen’s stories timeless and universal?

To what extent, then, should we consider Austen’s stories timeless and universal? Both Lane and Fullerton want us to regard them thus, but one of the great merits of Tandon’s edition is that, without breaking the spell of Austen’s fiction, he presents her work as so very much of her time, whether that be in her conceptual relation to moralists such as Samuel Johnson, or in the social resonances of foodstuffs, clothing and card games. Austen’s novels may not make many direct references to contemporary history or politics, but they are full of moments that we might describe, after the language philosopher Paul Grice, as implicature, moments that indirectly refer to the shared background knowledge of her audience in order to implicate something not actually stated. In Emma, for example, Mr Woodhouse’s preference for quadrille over whist marks him as out of fashion.

Though she does not use the term, Janine Barchas relies on similar moments of implicature in Matters of Fact in Jane Austen. This is a book whose charm and clarity easily overcome any initial resistance one might have to its central claim that Austen’s work actively partakes in what historians now call “celebrity culture”, and that we might read Austen’s topical references as pioneering a unique prototype of historical fiction before Walter Scott. One of Barchas’s most surprising – and ultimately convincing – claims is that Austen, like James Joyce after her, “not only names her fictional characters with uncanny historical precision but maps them with equal care through historical settings”. She illustrates this with careful attention to Austen’s own historical reading and letters, prints of contemporary maps, portraits and country houses. Scholars have long recognized that names such as Emma Woodhouse and Fitzwilliam Darcy derive from historical names in the English peerage, but Barchas’s Austen is an even more exacting historicist, one whose choice of names and settings makes deliberate play with eighteenth-century history and celebrity. Attention to such details helps Barchas fix a more precise date for Lady Susan. One of the many additional pay-offs of this fine study is how attention to names forces a reconsideration of Austen’s seeming preference for the Navy over the landed gentry in Persuasion. Through meticulous work with books on the baronetage and navy lists, Barchas reveals how Persuasion’s sailors (Wentworth and Croft) have names taken from aristocratic records, while landed gentry (Carteret and Elliot) originate in naval indexes. This reversal complicates the novel’s apparently blunt advocacy of the new over the old, the sea over the land.

These are all books, then, that point from moments in Austen’s fiction to the larger contexts that surround them. Pointing of this sort is the kind of work that has proved particularly effective in digital hypertext, a form that makes readers aware of links to additional information while leaving to them the choice of whether or not to click. It might therefore seem counter-intuitive to publish this kind of indexing work in a book when hypertext seems like a more amenable format. But part of the monumentality of these books, especially a deluxe edition like Tandon’s Emma, is a testament to the material value of the book at a moment when new kinds of digital reproduction make it easier, though perhaps less attractive, to integrate extra-textual information and commentary. Whether that testament is a dying gasp, whether the book and new forms of digital media are competing or complementary forms, remains to be seen. If these comments seem misguided, it might be best to leave the final word to Austen herself, who observes that “seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, a little mistaken”.

Jonathan Sachs is the author of Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British imagination, 1789–1832, 2010. He teaches English literature at Concordia University in Montreal.