Jane Austen, "Mansfield Park," A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism, and: Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues, and: Jane Austen, Critical Issues (review)

Gayle MacDonald diagnosed our culture's fascination with Jane Austen "two hundred years after she wrote her novels" as "jane addiction" (Globe and Mail, 17 March 2007). Apparently 2007 is a "banner year ... with two major feature films ... a slew of new adaptations on British television station itv and planned reprints of the author's novels with jazzy covers aimed at teens." If these three Palgrave publications are any indication, our appetite for scholarly works about Austen is equally insatiable.

In the first book, the narrowest of these studies, Sandie Byrne provides a thorough critical history of Mansfield Park. As such it updates B.C. Southam's Jane Austen the Critical Heritage, offering six chapters that detail critical responses to Mansfield Park from 1815 through to the late twentieth century, and a seventh on the critical responses to film adaptations. The chosen format has Byrne summarize each review before providing pertinent excerpts. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to distinguish between Byrne's editorial commentary and the excerpts themselves—especially when the latter are five or six pages long. This difficulty aside, Byrne provides a useful resource for those interested in the critical history of Mansfield Park with a general overview of Austen scholarship.

In the second text, which offers a careful deliberation on the philosophy of virtue throughout Austen, Sarah Emsley asserts that Austen is "ideologically conservative yet open-minded and flexible" (5) by "focusing on the ethics of ordinary life in her novels" (8). Central to her argument lies a belief that knowledge of both "Aristotelian and Christian influences on Austen" (5) enables us to uncover "the philosophical underpinnings of her fiction rather than to explicate didactic lessons that emerge from the novels" (4). Regardless "whether [Austen] read the work of such writers as Aristotle and Aquinas or absorbed her philosophy of the virtues through literature and culture," Emsley asserts, she "inherited a relatively coherent ethical framework of four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues, and her novels reflect that inheritance" (166). That Austen sees "virtue as not merely theoretical, but actively lived" (17) is evident in the way her heroines learn to balance competing virtues to secure a successful and fulfilling life. In this respect Emsley argues that Austen "goes further than Aristotle in exploring the dramatic moments when virtues compete with one another in creative tension" (41). Such a moment occurs when Catherine Morland denies the joint entreaties of her brother and friends to honour a prior engagement to walk with Henry and Eleanor Tilney, judging that "If I am wrong, I am doing what I believe to be right" (53). Emsley offers a nuanced reading of Austen that weaves criticism about her religious faith with criticism about her philosophical positioning. She deftly knits these two aspects together to provide a fuller but recognizable reading of Austen. While Persuasion is presented as the "closest thing to an explicit theory of the unity of classical and Christian virtues" (158)—perhaps only explicit because Austen did not live to revise the work—Emsley argues that Pride and Prejudice, because both Elizabeth and Darcy "come to understand justice through the educative power of love," is "Austen's greatest achievement" (168). While Emsley's rigorous study does not offer a dramatically original reading of Austen, it provides a new framework with its own specific terminology to discuss her. We leave the book with a clear sense of Emsley's belief that Austen combined Aristotelian and Christian concepts of virtue, which then influenced the fiction of Henry James, George Eliot, and...