“Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.” — W.H. Auden on Jane Austen

“The little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush.” — Jane Austen on her writing

In 2020 – which feels like it was 1,000 years ago, I reviewed the new film adaptation of Emma., directed by Autumn de Wilde – her first feature, astonishingly. The date of my review is March 20, 2020. And so it had begun. I loved the film so much. Inspired by it, I decided to re-read Emma. It’s been years. I think I read it in high school. I re-read Pride and Prejudice, on average, every 5 years or so. I know whole sections practically by heart. But with Emma, it was almost like the first time reading it. I always forget how funny Jane Austen is. Her eye is so sharp it’s brutal. There’s a Tom Wolfe-ian ruthlessness in her eye: you could imagine her contemporaries not wanting to invite her to a garden party because she would see all, she saw beneath the public-facing masks. Emma is a fascinating book because the primary character does not know herself. She is not a pleasant character. Andrew H. Wright, author of Jane Austen’s Novels: A Study in Structure, wrote, “[Emma has] supreme self-confidence and serene delusion.” Serene delusion! Emma acts in childish imperious ways, making a complete mess of multiple peoples’ lives, through her mistaken belief that her powers of match-making are second-to-none. She hurts people. She ruins people’s potential for happiness. She uses people, but – and this is crucial – she has no idea she’s using them. It’s clear to US, reading it, why she does it, it’s clear to the people AROUND her … but her own motivations are completely opaque to her. This can make for frustrating reading, I suppose, but for me, it makes for a hilariously engaging read. Part of the tension of the book is thinking, as you read, “When is Emma gonna get it? When is she going to actually look within herself and realize why she is doing what she is doing? When will she EVER admit to her flaws?” When this moment finally comes, her whole world comes crashing down. And she must then “eat crow”, as they say, and trudge around to everyone she’s hurt, apologizing for what she’s done, making amends, and then turning herself inside out to undo the damage she’s done. She is a fascinating character, extremely well-drawn.

Jane Austen said, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” I love this! Emma was the last of Austen’s novels published during her lifetime.

Austen’s work, of course, lends itself to cinematic adaptation (in so many of the adaptations, the dialogue is lifted wholesale from the book: why would you alter it?) Austen didn’t write a lot, and you can see the quick maturation process between Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, published only two years apart. Sense and Sensibility relies heavily on the binary formulation, drawing it out in obvious ways. She’s already in the thick of her own talent, her own gift for storytelling, but you can feel the slight lack of development and characterization (speaking comparatively, of course. 9 writers out of 10 don’t start as strongly as she did. Nobody’s going to DIS Sense and Sensibility.) But if you read Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice back to back, the difference is so apparent, startlingly so. It’s like Sense and Sensibility was a rough draft for the second book, a circling around the issues that interested her, the tensions in the culture and how it impacted women and male-female relationships, the bifurcation of these qualities – sense, sensibility, pride, prejudice … It’s all there in Sense and Sensibility, but Pride and Prejudice shoots these ideas into the stratosphere. That book glitters and crackles, and the caricature-ish personalities in Sense and Sensibility are gone. We still get the broad characters, the “personalities”, but they appear to walk and talk on their own. You feel no marionette strings. Pride and Prejudice is an amazing leap into mastery.

“By a Lady”

I love Auden’s observations of Jane Austen in his poem “Letter to Lord Byron”.

from “Letter to Lord Byron”
By W.H. Auden
There is one other author in my pack
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided I’d give a fright to
Jane Austen if I wrote when I’d no right to,
And share in her contempt the dreadful fates
Of Crawford, Musgrove, and of Mr. Yates.

Then she’s a novelist. I don’t know whether
You will agree, but novel writing is
A higher art than poetry altogether
In my opinion, and success implies
Both finer character and faculties
Perhaps that’s why real novels are as rare
As winter thunder or a polar bear…

She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
‘Twas rash, but by posterity she’s read.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

QUOTES:

Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art, 1939:

Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters.

Jane Austen’s brother Henry:

Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it.

Joyce Carol Oates:

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

Sebastian Faulks:

If I hadn’t read all of Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn’t know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn’t have any idea what was going on in anybody else’s mind.

^^ I love that so much.

Howard Jacobson:

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence’s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish.

Critic Robert Polhemus:

To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule … and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good.

Sir Walter Scott, 1815 review of Emma – in general Austen’s books were not reviewed:

The art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.

Michael Dirda:

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is ‘ghost story’ time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

Director Whit Stillman, whose superb Love & Friendship, starring Kate Beckinsale, based on an early short story by Austen, captures the whole Austen THING to perfection:

I don’t think there’s anything cliche feminine about Jane Austen. And, anyway, her earliest champions were Sir Walter Scott and the Prince Regent.

I love Whit Stillman.

Cathleen Schine:

Emma is my favorite Jane Austen novel – one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.

Whit Stillman:

My theory in the ’90s was that I didn’t want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility was beautiful, but other ones, I didn’t think justice was being done. It’s not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Jane Austen:

Her writings are a capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much.

Marvin Mudrick on Emma:

Emma prefers the company of women, more particularly of women whom she can master and direct;…this preference is intrinsic to her whole dominating and uncommitting personality.

Jane Austen, letter of advice to her niece, 1814:

Having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.

Jan Fergus:

[Austen was] an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

[In the first sentence of Emma,] there is a delicate play of modern irony about the psychological perimeter of this sentence that is almost impossible to arrest and define. It is an atmospheric rippling, an undulating vocal convection. The sentence contains the whole novel. Rhetorically, it is a glissando from eighteenth-century to nineteenth-century style. The grand public oratory of “handsome, clever, and rich” sinks down to the small, homely “vex,” the thorn that will prick the bubble of Emma’s pride. As the sentence ends, we hear the new obliqueness of modern writing and almost see the author’s hidden smile. Philosophically, Austen’s novels, though contemporaneous with High Romanticism, affirm the eighteenth-century world-view, with its neoclassic endorsement of the sexually normative. Only in Emma is there anything sexually ambivalent (Emma’s infatuation with Harriet), and even there it is slight and discreet.

The first sentence of Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Salman Rushdie:

I think the space between private life and public life has disappeared in our time. There used to be much more distance there. It’s like Jane Austen forgetting to mention the Napoleonic wars. The function of the British army in the novels of Jane Austen is to look cute at parties. It’s not because she’s ducking something, it’s that she can fully and profoundly explain the lives of her characters without a reference to the public sphere. That’s no longer possible.

Sir Walter Scott on Jane Austen, 1826:

… the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting … is denied to me.

Eudora Welty:

I love and admire all [Jane Austen] does, and profoundly, but I don’t read her or anyone else for “kindredness”.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Egoism is the androgyne’s raison d’etre. Self-complete beings need no one and nothing. Jane Austen’s Emma illustrates the social novel’s association of androgyny with selfish privation…Emma’s autocracy and lesbian flirtation are a single phenomenon, a hermaphroditic hierarchism which the social novel cannot tolerate…In other words, the novel itself, in its formal essence, rises up to check the pretensions of the charismatic personality, humanizing and normalizing it for marriage, foundation of the social order. There is a parallel with English Renaissance literature, where the Amazon sacrifices her androgyny for the public good.

You could pick a Camille Paglia sentence out of a blind lineup.

Truman Capote:

These are the enthusiasms that remain constant: Flaubert, Turgenev, Chekhov, Jane Austen, James, EM Forster, Maupassant, Rilke, Proust, Shaw, Willa Cather – oh the list is too long, so I’ll end with James Agee, a beautiful writer whose death over two years ago was a real loss. Agee’s work, by the way, was much influenced by the films.

Allegra Goodman, “Pemberley Previsited, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen”:

The rain poured down all the first night and kept coming the next day. It was too wet to take the baby out, so he played on the floor and I listened to the rain. It rattled on the skylight in the stairwell and thrummed the roof, and I began to reread Pride and Prejudice. I read the book slowly and uncritically, lying on our new blue sofa in our new sparsely furnished town house. I read it because my mother had loved Jane Austen and because rereading it for solace was something she might have done. I read it because my mother was like Jane Austen in her wit, her love of irony, and her concision. My mother was shrewd like Austen, and ingenious, she flourished in difficult professional situations. And like Austen, my mother had died young with her work unfinished.

It rained all day, and I kept reading steadily. I didn’t laugh, but I smiled at Mr. Bennet and Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Mr. Darcy didn’t bother me at all, but strode into the book, a dashing hero brooking no doubt or literary disappointment. Perhaps he was only a figure of romance, and perhaps Pemberley was just Austen’s castle in the air. The romance and the castle were no less powerful for their escapist construction. Indeed, what I found irresistible this time was the way Austen combines astute social satire with fairy tale. The combination did not seem awkward to me, but inspired. The satire is exquisite, while the fairy tale is viscerally satisfying. How delightful to watch Elizabeth rise like Cinderella above the impediments of her mother and her younger sisters! Her mother is not wicked, but she is thoughtless and vulgar. Her sisters, with the exception of Jane, are pedantic, insipid, and lusty, and, as such, throw as many obstacles in Elizabeth’s way as if sabotage had been their intent. And, of course, Mr. Bingley’s sisters supply their venom. Naturally, the obstacles make Elizabeth’s victory more delicious. Hers is the triumph of wit over vulgarity, self-respect over sycophancy. Until this reading, I had never appreciated Austen’s fairy-tale so well, but perhaps I had never needed it as much. No one dies in Pride and Prejudice – not even of embarrassment, as feckless Lydia and Wickham demonstrate. I no longer faulted the book for its cheerfulness or made invidious comparisons with Henry James. A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia:

There are not many great writers who oblige us to accept that inattention might have been essential to their vision. Jane Austen left the Napoleonic wars out of her novels, but we assume that she heard about them.