Jane Austen's Art of Memory (review)

86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:1 In the first of these, devoted to Waverley, Kerr argues that Scott's first novel is a "fictive structure which permitted the projection and assimilation of a violent past" (p. 38), and the four other novels under consideration are viewed in the same valid but somewhat limiting terms. The chapter on Old Mortality thus opens with a detailed examination of the framework of that tale seen as a complex series of narrative moves designed to gain fictional control over conflicting versions of the Scottish past, and goes on to argue that in this novel Scott "thematizes ... the distance between socially determined languages and historical reality" so as to demonstrate the way in which "individuals are bound to read the events of their lives and the larger processes of history through the perceptual grid of their class prejudices" (p. 47). The discussion of The Heart ofMidlothian is similarly politicized; the "novel's generic tensions," especially as expressed in the concluding pastoral, are seen "as a product of Scott's effort to write an ambitious political fable" (p. 62). Here as elsewhere, however, the analysis of class relationships does not always demonstrate a full familiarity with the map of social hierarchies which Scott himself employed—there is a tendency, for example, to apply the term "aristocracy" to everyone from a small laird to the Duke of Argyle. Kerr has little sympathy for what he calls "Scott's tendency to exploit anti-realistic genres in the service of a conservative political vision" (p. 79), and on this and other occasions he refers with some exasperation to what he sees as Scott's ideological deviousness , his "disposition to literary trickery" (p. 79). He seems a good deal more comfortable when arguing for the interest deriving from suppressed autobiographical material in 77ie Bride of Lammermoor's "mingling of a historical narrative about the relation between classes with a complex love story" (p. 96), or when grappling with the metafictional complexities of Redgauntlet, but he returns at the conclusion of his discussion of the latter novel to the essential thesis of the study: "Working in his various disguises, Scott attempts to recast history, to recreate the past as he wished it had happened" (p. 122). Jane Mitigate University of Toronto Jocelyn Harris. Jane Austen's Art ofMemory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xi + 271pp. $US49.50. Jocelyn Harris, the distinguished editor and scholar of Richardson, turns here to Jane Austen, whose individual talent she places in a tradition comprising the works of Richardson and such other illustrious predecessors as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and Pope. Some of her findings have appeared before. In appendix 2 she shows how in the juvenilia Jane Austen served an apprenticeship to Richardson, even as she parodied Sir Charles Grandison. In chapter 5 she argues that in Mansfield Park Austen transposed Grandison into a more serious key, while also drawing on Milton's descriptions of Paradise for moral and thematic purposes. In chapter 7 she proposes that in Persuasion Austen derived from the Wife of Bath's Tale the story of the Loathly Lady, the theme of "gentillesse," the topic of "maistrie," and the defence of women's constancy . Scholars encountering these arguments in earlier appearances praised Harris for her fine ability to detect in Austen's novels verbal echoes of earlier works and to analyse complex transformations of inherited characters, themes, and episodes. That ability reappears in the present book. In chapter 1 Harris sees NorthangerAbbey as a novel which "dramatises Locke to display a method and a manifesto" (p. ix). Resisting REVIEWS 87 the tendency to devalue Catherine Morland as the simplest of Austen's heroines, she views her as a rational Christian whose experiences in Bath and at the Abbey teach her to prefer the "real and probable" over the "phancy" as a guide to moral behaviour. In Harris's reading, Catherine becomes "an Everywoman of the rational and ethical life" (p. 15); and one implication of her argument is that we need not seek radical sources for Austen's themes and characterization in, say, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In arguing against the blind...