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Jane Austen Bicentenary essays
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EDITED BY JOHN HALPERIN
PMJDE & PREJUDICE. I
CHAPTER I. It is a truth universally acknow¬ ledged, that a single man in posses¬ sion of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. flowever little known tiie feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neigh})ourhood, tliis truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful projierty of some one or other of their daugh¬ ters. “ My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his
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MARY LASCELLES
Jane Austen and the novel
My motto is taken from Professor Sutherland’s Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry. ‘All through the eighteenth century’, he says, ‘poetry was regarded as an art: the art of making poems. Coleridge and Shel¬ ley, you might almost say, wrote poetry: Dryden and Pope wrote poems.’^ It is my contention that, whereas Scott, you may fairly say, wrote fiction, Jane Austen wrote novels. As a truism, this would be readily accepted. To maintain it as truth is another matter. No one who has been long engaged in the precarious business of criticism would undertake to prove anything. A modest endeavour to verify particular intuitions may be acknowledged; but even this recjuires, if not evidence, tokens which will pass for critical currency, and currency requires agreement. ‘The eighteenth-century poet’. Professor Sutherland continues, ‘invariably thought in terms of the poem, the thing to be made; and the critics were always ready to tell him how it should be (or more often, perhaps, how it should have been) written.’ Neither poet nor critic felt any hesitation in framing an agreed notion of the artifact in terms they both understood. But, beyond a few pleasantries in letters to scribbling nephew or niece, a few asides to Cassandra, Jane Austen has left little indication of the scope and aim of the novel as she saw it, while its earliest critics are mainly concerned with moral issues - an enquirer from another civili¬ zation could not hope to frame a critical theory out of their praise or c-ensure. What I am seeking has to be inferred from Jane Austen’s practice - alike what she does and what she refrains from doing; together with certain delicate allusions to the convention within
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Mary Lascelles which she was working. For there is an artistic convention which she discernibly accepts - which she would no more despise and ignore than a poet would propose to write a sonnet and produce eleven lines of irregular verse ending in the middle of a sentence. This convention is clearly distinguishable from the conventional artifices and false values of the transient, the merely fashionable novels of her own day, to which she reacted in hilarious mockery. Having written about that long ago,^ I now forbear, except in so far as some point of comparison seems unavoidable. The convention within which Jane Austen writes belongs to a distinct species of novel. Walter Raleigh, looking at it from a mascu¬ line point of view and calling it the novel of ‘domestic satire’, laid down this condition: ‘Man is stripped of the public trappings on wh