Jane Austen: The Critical Reception

Bonnie Blackwell Although Austen was little known in her own lifetime, shortly after her death her critical ascent began: in 1830 the Edinburgh Review acknowledged that Miss Austen has never been so popular as she deserved to be, and each succeeding generation has worked to compensate for that early oversight. Today an entire critical industry is devoted to explicating Austens small canon. A typical year now sees the publication of more than 150 articles and fifteen critical books on Austens life and works, and every critic who discusses the English novel as a genre has to account for her achievement. She has therefore played a part in virtually every wave of literary criticism. She has been subjected to New Critical investigations of irony; she has been put on the couch by Freudians; she has been critiqued for her class consciousness by Marxists; she has been interrogated by disciples of feminism, queer studies, and gender studies. In this essay, Bonnie Blackwell offers an overview of that long critical tradition, beginning with the readings Austen got from her family and close friends and continuing to the present. J.L. During his 1868 term as Englands prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was asked if he found time to read novels. In Disraelis surprising replyAll six of them, every yearthe PM, himself a novelist since the age of twenty-two, obliterates the whole genre of novels from competition for his attention while asserting the utter centrality of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Sense and Sensibility (1811), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818), and Northanger Abbey (1818) to British heritage, so well known that they and their author need not be named. Disraeli invites us to imagine what about reading Austen has prepared him to be prime minister or consoled him when the job was fatiguing. We need not puzzle too long on
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what aspect of Austens prose enabled him to give this precisely crafted answer, for her heroines reading habits are often subject to impertinent queries. Catherine Morland fares poorly when Henry Tilney disparages her taste for nice books, by which he supposes she means well-bound ones (Northanger Abbey 121). Caroline Bingley attempts to lower Lizzy Bennet in Darcys estimation by sardonically accusing her of being a great reader who has no pleasure in anything else (Pride and Prejudice 74). Her reply, that I deserve neither such praise nor such censure, is a model for Disraeli in how to sidestep the intellectual trap of being judged socially for ones private reading; to her creator he gives all the credit. In this anecdote, a testimony both to Austens ability to predict human nature and to her lessons in style, we find the dual nature of Austens reception throughout the nearly two hundred years since the publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811. Critics address a variety of concerns, from the status of women and the disenfranchised to the price of sugar or barouches, but most critical treatments of Austen fall into two broad camps: those that judge her by a standard of realism, thereby comparing the books to lived experience, either of the Regency or the present; and those that address some aspect of her style, especially her use of irony. Some generations of realistbound criticism find her books reprehensibly silent on such historical events as the Atlantic slave trade and the Napoleonic Wars. Other critical schools invoke a different strain of realism, the psychological realism of recognizable and nuanced human personalities, and find much to admire in Austens psychological portraits. Her foolish vicars, more concerned with brokering their own advantageous marriages than with caring for the spiritual lives of their brethren, and her selfish mothers blind to their childrens faults continue to resonate with this school.

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Biography and Early Reception

Jane Austen has been the subject of numerous biographies, including several written by family members and recent standouts by John Halperin and Claire Tomalin.1 All note the centrality of her family to the formation of her character. She was the seventh of eight children born to the rector of Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775. Her family was neither rich nor well connected, but the Austens were literary: her fathers library included some five hundred volumes that were sold at his retirement for about 200 (Halperin 127), or approximately $40,000 in todays terms. This was a shocking indulgence on the income of a clergyman who had eight children and who frequently appealed to relatives to cover his debts, but the library was a wonderful resource for a fledgling novelist. By her teens, Austen was an energetic, productive author of arch, knowing prose; reading it, one wonders how she achieved so much worldliness at fifteen. Her pleasure in recording the worlds folly continued until her distressingly early death at age forty-one, of symptoms many have interpreted as Addisons disease.2 Austens precocious start in the literary life ripened into a highly fertile period in her early twenties. At twenty-one, she wrote First Impressions in 1796-97; she later revised it in 1810 and 1813 into Pride and Prejudice. In 1797, Austen began converting a two-year-old manuscript, Elinor and Marianne, into Sense and Sensibility, and in 179899, she composed works published posthumously as Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey. She sold Northanger Abbey (then called Susan, though unrelated to the novella Lady Susan) in 1802 for 10 to a publisher, Crosby, who advertised it but never printed it; she was finally able to purchase the work back for the same price in 1816 (Halperin 101). Despite early signs of brilliance, Austen did not see her work in print until age thirty-five, and she enjoyed only six years of moderate financial gain from her works. Her earnings from those six years 670, or about $130,000were offset by losses on Mansfield Park and family debts, but even in gross they are equivalent only to what Maria
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Edgeworth, the most successful woman writer of her day, earned yearly in her career, which spanned several decades. Austen was not, then, the best-paid or the most-celebrated woman writer of her day and, indeed, took some years in accommodating her distinctive ironic voice and her plots to the demands of the Regency publishing world. Edward Copeland regards Austens own lack of wealth as the reason money . . . especially spendable income, is the love-tipped arrow aimed at the hearts of both her heroines and her readers (132). Certainly it is undeniable that she pays enormous attention to the incomes and potential earnings of her marriageable characters and that while her heroines loudly disdain the vulgar bargain of marrying for money, nonetheless they have the very good luck to marry rich men for love. Jane Austens family members and small social circle were her earliest critics; their objections and accolades are still raised to this day, so this reception history of her work allows them their say. Her siblings read, and often starred in, her juvenilia, including The Beautiful Cassandra, a spoof in which her sister indulges in a passion for bonnets and ices, and Henry and Eliza, a romance named for her brother and first cousin, who later married. Her mothers relations, the Leigh Perrots, were the first to remark that Darcy and Elizabeth had spoilt them for anything else, a sentiment that sums up a still-burgeoning cottage industry in adapting, updating, and admiring Pride and Prejudice (Halperin 289).3 Her mother was the first of many to dislike Mansfield Parks heroine Fanny Price, whom she found insipid. Her sister Cassandra offered an ingenious solution to give this excessively moral character some needed nuance and spark: marry her off to her antithesis, Henry Crawford, a suggestion Austen scaled back to an extended pursuit and rejected marriage proposal (Tomalin 225). Other friends and relatives admitted to shameful pleasure whenever the urbane and irreligious Mary Crawford triumphs over Fanny. Janes brother Henry claimed to like his namesake Crawford, properly, as a clever, pleasant man, as well as he liked Fanny, a dual allegiance that may not have been repeated since (Halperin 251). Her friend Miss
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Sharp, a governess, faulted the psychological dimensions of another considering the trade, Emmas Jane Fairfax. She felt that the would-be governesss secret engagement to Frank Churchill rang false; Frank was selfish and rash enough to carry on a secret engagement and correspondence, but the discreet Miss Fairfax was decidedly not (Tomalin 250). Austens familys compliments and objections reveal a high priority for realism, including psychological realism, as the goal of fiction. Austens brothers scrupulously policed her verisimilitude, sometimes at her requestwhen she asked them to time journeys she did not have the opportunity to make to ensure that her characters move about England in a reasonably timely fashionand sometimes quite contrary to her liking. In one instance, her brother Edward Knight remarked after reading Emma, Jane, I wish you would tell me where you get those apple-trees of yours that come into bloom in July, a fairly deflating assessment of four hundred pages undone by one misunderstood subclause.4 Yet, an exacting critic herself, Austen satirized the hard-tobelieve in other novels. In a letter critiquing Mary Bruntons Self-Control, she joked that her own books might make more of a splash in the world if she imitated the heroines solitary journey on a tiny boat down an American river, though in her version, she smirked, the young lady would cross the Atlantic and land in Gravesend in her hand-built canoe (Halperin 267). Her realism has, for many readers, been the chief quality to praise in Austen: her subtle portraits of human folly resonate with many. Given the major themes and developments in Austen criticism, however, we may ask whether the realism question has limited our criticism unduly, preventing us from asking other questions. Contemporary reviewers of Austens novels did praise her realism, which they typically called probability or believability, and at times her moral lessons. The first review she ever received, on Sense and Sensibility in Critical Review (1812), calls the novel both wellwritten and probable. Three months later, The British Critic declared Sense and Sensibility to be fortified with sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life, chiefly in the chastening of the emoCritical Reception 41

tional sister who falls in love with a male coquet, Willoughby (quoted in Halperin 205). Pride and Prejudice was more extravagantly praised by the same publication a year later, when it was declared far superior to almost all the publications of its kind to come before us and the first edition sold out within six months (quoted in Halperin 210). Mansfield Park, her next novel, was not reviewed at all and lost its publisher money. With the publication of Emma, Austen received somewhat tepid reviews: the four major reviewsin Literary Panorama, British Critic, Monthly Review, and Gentlemens Magazine all found it light and trifling in comparison to the weightier Sense and Sensibility and more vivacious Pride and Prejudice. Just when, in 1816, it looked as though Austen would not receive serious critical attention from her peers, her publisher John Murray convinced the powerful Sir Walter Scott to pay the very high compliment of a comprehensive assessment of her work in Quarterly Review. In Austens own favorite review, Scott praised her whole oeuvre, excepting Mansfield Park, which he failed to mention. It was some compensation that he rescued the underrated Emma from other critical diminishments by extolling what he called its insight into the human heart. Austen, he writes, has the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and of presenting to the reader . . . a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him (quoted in Halperin 291). Clearly, this tribute to Austens palpable skill intentionally diminishes her originality and novelty, and preserves those qualities for Scotts own reputation.

The Rise of the Novel

In his monumental study The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt concedes that the majority of eighteenth-century novels were written by women, though he limits his books scope to Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding because, he claims, womens control over the novel was a purely quantitative dominance (298). Watt elides female writers from
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his study and blames the predominantly female readership of the novel for the shortfalls of realism in eighteenth-century fiction (301). Despite the frank misogyny of his critical study, Watt reserves a special, though very limited, place in his pantheon of realist novelists for Jane Austen, who he claims solved most of the obvious technical weaknesses troubling the novels of the three male authors who consume his works study (301). The irony of his compliment to Austen is twofold: the scale of his inquiryone-tenth the space given to Fielding and onetwentieth that for Richardsoncontradicts his ranking of her contribution, and, more troubling still, it neutralizes her own spirited defense of the female-dominated novel form in Northanger Abbey, where she asks that female heroines, authors, and readers all openly avow their mutual respect: Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body! (59). Austens exceptionalismthe careful construction of her as the one female author from three centuries of novel writing worth defending was a time-honored tradition long before Ian Watts study. Henry James noted that many found our dear, everybodys dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, whatever that critical purpose might be (quoted in Johnson, Austen 211). Many critics of the novel have posited a clean break between Austen and her female predecessors, one that contradicts her own admiration for Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe. Yet other critics have put Austen in a context and a genealogy of female influence, and not all are corrections antedating Watt. B. G. MacCarthy published an ambitious study of female writers just after World War II that implicitly sides with Watt in seeing a flood of mediocrity in womens writing since 1621 yet also finds not one but more than fifty cogent influences, as she calls them, among females writing prose. MacCarthy manages to praise the distinctive style of Austen while placing her within the context of her female influences and predecessors, and she does so within Watts key critical term, realism, which she finds women novelists particularly qualified to create (29).
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By the date of publication for Marilyn Butlers Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Austens ascension to the great pantheon of British writers, once contentious, was no longer controversial. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Butler sees Austen as part of the old conservative establishment that Butlers generation of Oxford students sought to critique. Butler places Austen squarely within a repudiated Tory tradition and makes a spirited argument that readers should consider what her values are before idolizing her: Before Austen could be trusted to assist ones choices in the modern world, we needed to know what hers had been (xxxiii). MacCarthy admires Austens moral individualism, writing that not even the literary patronage of the Prince Regent could persuade her from the right of keeping her own literary conscience (29), whereas Butler finds Austens domestic, home-bound, village bound novels . . . programmatically conservative, a disappointment because she had wanted and expected Austen to be a non-partisan liberal moralist (xiv). Butlers reading of a politically retrograde Austen has been widely critiqued, especially by Julia Prewitt Brown, Elaine Showalter, and Sandra Gilbert, all of whom have disputed her positioning of Austen as regressive. Butler was nonetheless influential in creating an Austen generally assumed to be the most resistant to feminist, Marxist, and other progressive readings (Evans 1). Nancy Armstrongs Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), which offers many important feminist revisions to Ian Watts story of male contributions to the novel, nonetheless inherits the icon of a conservative, Tory Austen. For example, Armstrong contrasts Northanger Abbey with what she believes is the more progressive Jane Eyre. Quoting a scene in which Henry Tilney shames Catherine Morland for expecting remnants of a murder in his family homeRemember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable Armstrong claims that Austen teaches the heroine of her first novel to understand the excesses of patriarchal culture as a feature of women and the undisciplined imaginations of women, not as a social reality
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(206). Claudia L. Johnson, in contrast, maintains that Austen is not on the side of Sir Thomas Bertram and General Tilney, repressive patriarchs at home and colonizers abroad: Austen may dismiss alarms concerning the gothic machinery . . . , but alarms concerning the central gothic figure, the tyrannical father, are commensurate to the threat they pose (Jane Austen 35). Postcolonial critics have come to argue that Fanny Price stands in for the absent figure of the slave in Mansfield Park, since the naming of the novel is an homage to a landmark abolitionist decision, Lord Mansfields ruling in the Somerset case in 1772, widely understood to outlaw slavery in Britain. Gary Kelly notes that such names would have been familiar to Austens contemporary readers, who would not have regarded her as apolitical, given the obvious references to the Napoleonic Wars and other social upheavals in her novels (158-59). Raymond Williams frames a Marxist challenge to the common misconception that Jane Austen ignored or effaced the social realities of her day, obliterating everything from Napoleon to the Atlantic slave trade with the fiction of purely personal relationships (113). Williams rejects the false dichotomy between the personal world of Austens courtship novels and the real-life concerns of Regency England, drawing our attention to her preoccupation with the gentrys struggles to reproduce itself as an acquisitive high-bourgeois society at the point of its most evident interlocking with an agrarian capitalism that is itself mediated by inherited titles and family names (115). Williams was one of the first to notice the critical edge to Austens preoccupation with wealth and status, and his tradition is continued in criticism by Edward Copelands illuminating work on money in Austen and in Austen adaptations by filmmakers Roger Michell (Persuasion, 1995) and Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, 2005), who resist heritage cinemas aestheticdetached capital, detached income, detached consumption . . . in incidentally surviving and converted houses that no ones labor seems to support and maintain. Michell and Wright reinsert livestock and laborers intrusively, not picturesquely, back into the
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Austen landscape and insist on a grubby realism in the makeup, costumes, and lighting of their films mise-en-scnes. In another, more dominant school of adaptation referred to as heritage cinema, Austens limited descriptions of fashion, person, and placeher habit of simply describing Pemberley as a large modern house on rising groundsis corrected or supplemented to create visual banquets for audiences seeking a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques of the source novels (Higson 109-29). Cinematic interpretations of Austen deserve special mention here: not only is each film a critical reading of a novel, but also many enfold postcolonial criticism of Austen into their scripts. For example, Patricia Rozemas Mansfield Park (1999) seeks to bring the books quiet subtext on slavery to the forefront of the film. As Troost and Greenfields edited collection Jane Austen in Hollywood observes, Austen adaptations noticeably influence popular perceptions of the original source texts, particularly among students, for whom the films have a demonstrable didactic function. Following a series of E. M. Forster novel adaptations in the 1980s on the part of the filmmaking team of James Ivory and Ishmail Merchant, Jane Austen soon surpassed Forster as the most adapted of English authors in a cluster of adaptations in the mid-1990s, and adaptations continue to be made. Pride and Prejudice, first brought to the screen in 1940 by MGM, was remade in 1995 by the BBCs Andrew Davies and in 2005 by Joe Wright. Except for Northanger Abbey and Lady Susan, all of Austens novels have had adaptations that have gone into wide release, either in period pieces or in contemporary analogies, such as Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Clueless (1995). These adaptations have brought new generations of readers to the Janeite cult, and the latest development is in biographical studies of the author, including Julian Jarrolds Becoming Jane (2007) and the BBC film Miss Austen Regrets (2008), which offer competing explanations of Austens mysterious spinsterhood, given the primacy of courtship and marriage in her novels. Austens spinsterhood has provoked questions about her views on
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the satisfactions of male-female love, as have the portrayals of married couples throughout her books, whose troubled relationships call into question the very notion of a happily ever after. Mrs. Croft may be the only happily married woman in all of Austen who is likable on her own terms, or who has not made a bargain the heroine rejected herself, like Charlotte Collins (ne Lucas).5 One interpretation of Austens spinsterhood frames it as her strongest testimony to the belief that one should marry only for love; the fact that Austen never married, then, supports the primacy of the romance plot rather than undermining it for biographer Claire Tomalin and filmmaker Julian Jarrold. Both treat Austens brief flirtation with Tom Lefroy in 1796 (mentioned exactly thrice in her letters) as the love of her life, a strict analogy to Cassandras own permanent eschewal of marriage in tribute to the death of her fianc Tom Fowle. The popularity of Jarrolds Becoming Jane, which extends these three brief epistolary references into two thrilling hours of highly convincing chemistry between the leads Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy, will assure that this explanation is influential for some time. A more intricate elucidation of Austens spinsterhood comes from biographer John Halperin and from the BBC biographical film Miss Austen Regrets, both of which construct from Austens novels, family recollections, and letters not a pining, dejected monogamist but an accomplished flirt who was never able to choose among half a dozen attractive offers of marriage throughout her twenties and thirties, none of which came from Tom Lefroy. A third cause for Austens spinsterhood has also been suggested in the last twenty years: when Terry Castle reviewed the Deirdre Le Faye edition of Austens letters in the London Review of Books, the LRB chose to run the review under the incendiary banner Was Jane Austen Gay? The initial response was shockingly negative; many readers assumed that the author took a prurient view of innocent habits, such as sisters sharing beds and writing emotional letters, that were common and unquestioned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Castles inquiry is, in fact, far less inflammatory and definitive than the review
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title suggests, or than most respondents assumed; she writes elliptically that were one wanting to make a vulgar case for Austens homoeroticism, the letters to her niece Fanny would be the place to look (82). Castle purposely refuses sweeping claims about Austens sexual orientation, providing instead a close reading of the correspondence between Cassandra and Jane Austen, which she finds suffused with a primitive adhesivenessand underlying Erosof the sistersister bond.6 Castle, like Halperin, asks us to reconsider the conservative promoter of marriage we have inherited in the light of some significant tendencies to mock marriage and child rearing in her letters. Jane Austens six courtship novels and one novella marry off a total of twenty couples, parceling even those without reciprocal attractions to their intended mates (such as Reginald de Courcy and Frederica Vernon, or Marianne and Colonel Brandon) into tidy marriages. Given the prevalence of the heterosexual courtship plot as the form of closure in all her novels, Austen may seem, at first blush, like one of the least amenable authors for queer readings. Queer theorya critical rubric fashioned from a former insultdescribes any gendered identity representing a challenge to the monolith of two opposite sexes that can express their desires only through compulsory heterosexuality (Sedgwick 8). Closer inspection, however, reveals troubled portraits of marriage in Austens books as well as very strong same-sex (or homosocial) bonds, particularly among women. In many Austen novels, a female friend labors to attach another female to her brother: Mary Crawford, Isabella Thorpe, and Georgiana Darcy insist on Fanny, Catherine, and Lizzy being their sisters in powerful scenes that eclipse the role of their brothers in completing the courtships; Sophie Croft reassures Anne Elliot about being a naval wife without seeming particularly aware that her words will promote the marriage of Anne and Sophies brother, Frederick Wentworth. While Castles essay may have been an infelicitous calling card for ushering in a new school of Austen studies, queer Austen nonetheless developed into a vibrant academic subspecialty over the past twenty
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years. Critics working in this tradition generally leave the authors own libidinal investments out of the question and focus on one of two main approaches: examining the rich emotional connections of female homosocial structures in Austens novels7 or adopting Oscar Wildes view that pure style, evacuated of morality, including sexual morality and tedious questions of who sleeps with whom, is the proper sphere of the queer critic. Of this latter group, D. A. Miller leads the pack: over the past twenty-five years, he has authored three of the finest books in Jane Austen studies, The Novel and the Police, Narrative and Its Discontents, and Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, as well as a charming Raritan article, The Late Jane Austen. Joseph Litvaks Strange Gourmets gives a special place to the light, pleasing, and aphoristic style of Pride and Prejudice, so similar to the dandys taste in well-turned phrases, while Miller points out that Austens portrait of Robert Ferrars picking out a toothpick case amounts to a merciless parody of a gay man, one that sticks in the readerly subconscious to make the surprise marriage of Robert to Lucy Steele all the more shocking (Jane Austen 15). Critical responses to Austens style need not fall exclusively under the aegis of queer theory; many things motivate critics to investigate what is distinctive and fascinating in her prose. As Virginia Woolf wrote, Of all authors she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness (quoted in Stoval 231). Wayne C. Booths A Rhetoric of Irony gives special place to Austens use of the traditional tropes of irony, providing an invigorating close reading of the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice: a single woman of no fortune is the one in want of a husband, he points out; a single man with money wants nothing at all to complete his happiness. This aphoristic substitution informs the style of all Pride and Prejudice, while books such as Persuasion and Emma rely on free indirect discourse, a subtle incorporation of a particular characters voice into the omniscient narrators prose that allows the author to satirize without preaching (Finch and Bowen). John F. Burrows examines the distinctive voices of particular characters in a quantitative analysis that posits Mr. Darcys letter as the
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most formal, elaborate prose in Austen; Burrows writes that style is not a belletristic fancy but a real presence, one that is now responsive to straightforward computational procedures (186). For many of us, however, the pleasures of reading Austen are not quantifiable in mathematical terms, and we will continue to debate the standards for measuring her imposing talents for many more generations.

Notes
1. The earliest was by her elder, and favorite, brother Henry, A Biographical Notice of the Author, included in the 1818 edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Later biographies include Caroline Austens My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir, James Edward Austen-Leighs A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary-Augusta Austen-Leighs Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, and William and Richard Austen-Leighs Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record. 2. Sir Zachary Cope was the earliest to make this diagnosis, in his 1964 article Jane Austens Last Illness. 3. Pride and Prejudice was the first of her novels to be adapted for the screen, in 1940, and has spawned more updates than any other, including a Bollywood musical (Bride and Prejudice). Perhaps the best-known adaptations are those in Helen Fieldings Bridget Joness Diary franchise. 4. In the Box Hill picnic scene in Emma, the title character pauses in the midst of midsummer strawberry picking to survey a view that includes Abbey-Mill Farm, with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending. Austens brother Edward Knight pointed out that if ripe strawberries were in the fields, the apple orchard would hardly be in blossom. Critic John Sutherland defends this description from charges of failed realism by supposing that it is meant to cover all four seasons, from flocks in pasture (spring) to cooler fall temperatures (necessitating the smoking chimney, which would hardly be a feature of a day described by Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax as beastly hot). He supposes that Austen intended this survey and therefore did not change the text at the printer despite her brothers criticism (17-18). 5. For an excellent discussion of Mrs. Croft as a naval wife, see Mary Ann OFarrells Telling Complexions (45-50). 6. The original essay appeared August 3, 1995; the argument and accompanying letters are reprinted in Castles The Austen Papers. 7. See Lisa L. Moores Desire and Diminution: Emma and George E. Haggertys Sisterly Love in Sense and Sensibility.

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Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Austen, Caroline. My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir. London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne, 1952. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002. ____________. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Robert P. Irvine. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002. Austen-Leigh, James Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. London: Oxford UP, 1926. Austen-Leigh, Mary-Augusta. Personal Aspects of Jane Austen. London: Murray, 1920. Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record. London: Smith, Elder, 1913. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Burrows, John F. Style. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975. Castle, Terry. The Austen Papers. Lingua Franca (Sept./Oct. 1995): 77-82. Cope, Zachary, Jane Austens Last Illness. British Medical Journal (18 July 1964): 182-83. Copeland, Edward. Money. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Evans, Mary Ann. Jane Austen and the State. London: Tavistock, 1987. Finch, Casey, and Peter Bowen. The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury: Style in Emma. Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 1-18. Haggerty, George E. Sisterly Love in Sense and Sensibility. Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. 73-87. Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Higson, Andrew. Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film. Fires Were Started: Cinema and Thatcherism. Ed. Lester Friedman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Johnson, Claudia L. Austen Cults and Cultures. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. ____________. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Kelly, Gary. Religion and Politics. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 51

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MacCarthy, B. G. The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists, 1621-1818. 1944. Cork, Ireland: Cork UP, 1996. Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003. ____________. The Late Jane Austen. Raritan 10.1 (1990): 55-79. ____________. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981. ____________. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Moore, Lisa L. Desire and Diminution: Emma. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. OFarrell, Mary Ann. Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Stoval, Bruce. Further Reading. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Sutherland, John. Emma. Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in NineteenthCentury Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Vintage, 1999. Troost, Linda, and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

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