Reading Jane Austen (review)

Mona Scheuermann argues that "the world we see in Austen's novels ... represents the core of the values of her time" (10). Austen "never questioned what she saw as God-given values" (10) and "has an un questioned moral compass" (133), "giv[ing] us as readers a feeling of comfort and security" (181). Reading Jane Austen examines a range of moral questions such as charity in Emma, and patronage and the theatricals in Mansfield Park. The latter novel, which Scheuermann sees as central in the Austen canon, is the focus of this study, allowing for detailed readings of passages which, in other accounts, sometimes get short shrift: Fanny's homecoming in Portsmouth, for example. The book's structure is innovative. Part 1, titled "A Moral Tapestry," contains three chapters on Mansfield Park before moving to Part 2, "Social Grids" (a chapter each on Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion) and Part 3, "Politics and History" (with only one chapter, it lacks development). The exclusion of Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, both mentioned only once, seems arbitrary. Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion are the "major novels" and the "most popular" (3), but apart from these two comments in the introduction, no reasoning is provided for the omission of two of Austen's novels (never mind "Sanditon," "The Watsons," "Lady Susan," or the early writings).

While Scheuermann situates Austen alongside Thomas Gisborne and especially Hannah More, she does not consider her "conservative": Austen "is not writing in defense of the status quo. Rather, she is writing about a culture where the values are so obvious that they seem to be all the world there is" (10). This attempt to sidestep the knotty problem of Austen's politics lacks persuasiveness. The final chapter breezily surveys radical revolutionary politics, the war with France, enclosures, industrialization, and food riots during Austen's lifetime, and thus it is unclear how the argument holds that Austen "represents the core of the values of her time." Given that, as the opening sentence of the chapter on "Politics and History" puts it, "England from the 1790s was a jittery nation" (169), there clearly was debate about "core values." And while Scheuermann does not neglect to state that Austen was "aware of a good deal of what was happening in her world" (10), Austen chose to "leave out many of the stressors of her time," instead "writing romances, in the sense that we use the word today, that is, escapist fiction" (171). But, even if we accept this reading, "escapist fiction" surely comes with a politics of its own. We also might say the same of Scheuermann's book, which proposes to rise above the supposedly narrow terms of feminist and postcolonial criticism. (As an aside, the endorsements chosen by Palgrave Macmillan speak of Austen's "liberat[ion]" from recent criticism. The chivalrous notion of Austen as an author in distress is curiously persistent.)

I could locate only four specific in-text citations to Austen scholars; the rather thin critical engagement is relegated to endnotes. Most striking is the casualness with which the postcolonial debate surrounding Mansfield Park is raised, and dismissed, in one parenthetical comment: "there should be honest commitment to the profession chosen, not simply a desire to milk it of whatever one can. This is true for the landowner, who should be a careful landlord or master, as Sir Thomas is when he journeys all the way to Antigua (and no, there is no support for the idea that these references show Austen being concerned with the slave trade, as some recent critics have insisted)" (58). Here, as elsewhere, "reading Jane Austen" (as per the book's vague title) is presented as a transparent activity. Scheuermann repeatedly appeals to what was allegedly obvious to Austen and her readers; only "time, distance, and political correctness ... make it difficult for modern readers" (47) to properly understand the novels. But it is not clear to me how Scheuermann arrives at her certainty about Austen...