The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser (review)

This book triumphantly sets out to restore popular culture to the heart of our understanding of Jane Austen. In so doing, it makes us think again about the critical truisms that have come to dominate not only Austen studies, but also studies of her reception and legacy. There have been, as Devoney Looser herself points out, a spate of books on the construction of Austen’s reputation in the past ten years or so—by Claire Harman, Annika Bautz, Claudia Johnson, Gillian Dow and Claire Hanson, Juliette Wells, and, indeed, myself. But, as Looser rightly says, such works (including my own) tend to pay lip-service to the importance of the popular in our understanding of Austen’s cultural status and rarely give it the sustained attention it deserves. Even such works as Deidre Lynch’s Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000), an early and ground-breaking work on the topic, and Kylie Mirmohamadi’s The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard (2014), which directly take fan culture as their subject, sometimes fall into the trap of reiterating what Looser calls “the musings of educational elites and old-guard culture makers” (215). This reiteration stems partly from our own critical training (that teaches us to give greater weight to the literary critical traditions within which we work than to the voices of popular culture) and partly from the fact that the archival record is so evanescent—patchy, circumstantial, and difficult to work with.

Looser’s book teaches us that we must do better. In each section, she examines particular assumptions about Austen (she was apolitical; she was limited; she was conservative) from a new perspective, bringing extensive fresh evidence to bear on those assumptions, and she repeatedly shows that what we think we know about Austen’s afterlives is biased, misguided, or just plain wrong. The quality of her research is exceptional; the extent to which she has succeeded in tracking down unknown or little-known materials, identifying people, and discovering new facts, is impressive. Throughout, Looser clearly demonstrates that what she calls “Austen’s mass popularity” has a long track record. As she puts it, “There was an awful lot going on for Jane Austen and popular culture prior to the 1990s Austen boom, some of which even made that boom possible” (222).

The book brings to vivid life people who have previously featured only as footnotes in scholarship (or who have not featured at all), showing how their actions helped to create or disseminate particular ideas about Austen. Suffragettes, spiritualists, schoolteachers, amateur actors, artists, and advertisers all played their part in “making” Austen, and Looser helps us to understand how their perceptions of Austen might facilitate a rather different understanding of the uses to which Austen’s name and works were put in the past. The Making of Jane Austen adds significantly to our knowledge of how Austen has been put to work in the service of different ideologies at different times, and in so doing it reminds us how our own ideological biases, as readers and critics, shape how we think about her work. In my own view, the most original and significant parts of this book are those dealing with Austen on the stage and in political discourse, although this is not to denigrate the sections on illustration and education. Others will no doubt find these sections equally compelling.

I initially had two cavils about this lovely book. The first was that while reading the section on Austen’s illustrators, I was frustrated by the limited number of illustrations depicted in the book. I was, however, impressed at the end to discover that the author had anticipated such a response, and in the final pages of the book, she directs readers to the large number of additional illustrations available on the book’s website. This seemingly simple solution to a problem faced by anyone who wishes to discuss visual material in...