The Loiterer and Jane Austen's Literary Identity

The Loiterer and Jane Austen's Literary IdentityLi-Ping Geng Jane Austen's literary identity has been a problem for some time. Austen critics have been making, essentially, two conflicting claims about her identity as a novelist. She is called either a "conservative" novelist whose "morality is preconceived and inflexible"1 or a progressive feminist who like "Wollstonecraft and Hays defies every dictum about female propriety and deference propounded in the sermons and conduct books which have been thought to shape her opinions on all important matters."2 Both claims, while shedding light on certain aspects of Austen's literary identity , seem to miss the essential quality of Jane Austen's narrative, which is intricate, complex, and dialectical. Insistent as they are, these claims seem to illustrate once again what Mary Waldron calls "the tendency to prioritise what we think was important over the perceptions of the author working within the cultural parameters of his/her time."3 One recent book on Jane Austen purports to give a "systematic consideration to those social and psychological supports that made Austen's writing possible and helped to enliven and extend her representational range"; however, the critic, as it turns out, is merely interested in the "impact ofCassandra Austen on the novelist's career" and that of some other "contemporary female 1 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 298. 2 Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), pp. xxiii-xxiv. 3 Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction ofHer Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 12-13. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 4, July 2001 580 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION friendship."4 Despite the fact that Jane Austen had six brothers and one sister , there is no mention ofthe vital nurturing and encouragement which the fledgling Jane had received from her father and these brothers.5 Owing to the arbitrariness of the critical approaches outlined above, Jane Austen's literary identity has been obscured even as it is being clarified . This essay seeks to illustrate one historical aspect of Jane Austen's literary identity that has so far attracted little attention, but yields, I believe , important insights into the formation ofJane Austen's comprehensive mind and ironic taste. I will argue that Jane Austen's two Oxford brothers , James and Henry Austen, may have had a large share in the shaping of their sister's literary identity, that their Loiterer essays offer the earliest inspiration to Jane as a precocious and aspiring writer of fiction, and that her probable collaboration with her male siblings in that Oxford publication helped her to develop a set ofunique literary principles and techniques which came to dominate not only her early writings but also her later compositions . Let us begin by taking a close look at the Loiterer in terms of its historical context and its publication history.6 The late 1780s and early 1790s saw the rise of college journalism in England. In a matter of years several periodicals sprang up: the Microcosm (1786-87) ofEton College, the Trifler (1788-89) of St Peter's College, the Flagellant (1792) of Westminster School,7 Olla Podrida (1787-88) of St 4 Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 3. 5 Mr George Austen, for example, wrote as early as 1797 to the London publisher Thomas Cadell to propose the publication of First Impressions. See James Edward Austen-Leigh, Memoir ofJane Austen, introduction by R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 137. Park Honan suspects that Henry Austen might have advanced his sister the money to publish Sense and Sensibility, since Richard Egerton only agreed to publish the book on commission (i.e., the author was responsible for all the expenses, which would run in the range of one to two hundred pounds); see Jane Austen: Her Life (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), p. 286. 6 In the past two hundred years or so, no comprehensive study has been undertaken to give a full and accurate account of this little-known eighteenth-century publication. A. Walton Litz's "The Loiterer: A Reflection of Jane Austen's Early...