Jane Austen (review)

Robert Miles's Jane Austen is a useful tool which gives a generous overview of recent trends in Austen criticism. It also provides a wealth of information (perhaps more than a North American reader will need or want) on the Home Counties, on Anglicanism and Evangelicalism during the Regency, and on the ideological conflicts of Whig and Tory. Miles's starting point is a last, unfinished essay by the late anglophile New York critic, Lionel Trilling, who asked, "Why Read Jane Austen Today?" Trilling died before answering the question, but Miles does his best to pinpoint the source of Austen's continuing appeal. The gist of Miles's argument is that she represents the Home Counties of England and embodies the readers' nostalgia for the old "small-t tory" idealism of Anglican rural England (6). In other words, he agrees with Marilyn Butler's reading of Austen, in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; rev. 1987), as ideologically a Tory and a conservative (a reading which causes Butler to dismiss the more romantic Persuasion as a "muddle"). Miles never refers explicitly to Claudia Johnson, whose analysis of Austen's progressive tendencies, in Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), has probably been the most influential riposte to Butler.

Q.D. Leavis asserted that we love Jane Austen "as a person" (quoted 1), and Miles's Introduction opens with the cliché (his word), "no other English writer is quite so English as Jane Austen" (1). The remainder of his analysis focuses on her "English-ness" and its definition, on why she is "our thing" (1). To this end, Miles's book is structured around four sections: (1) personality in fiction, (2) considerations of genre, (3) Austen's long-noted pioneering use of free indirect speech, and (4) considerations of class, gender, and nationalism.

In the first section, "Personality in Austen," he admits that all a realist can create is the illusion of personality. He proceeds to contrast her simple and complex characters through her focus on manners as "the semiological medium through which we socially know others and even ourselves" (25). He resists using E. M. Forster's distinction between "flat" (Miss Bates, Mr Woodhouse) and "round" (Elizabeth Bennet, Emma, Mr Darcy, Mr Knightley) characters and, instead, refers to the "flat" characters as "grotesques," a term which has the wrong connotation for readers of Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. He does recognize, however, that Jane Austen's fictional world "is amazingly inclusive" (26). He then proceeds to consider the novel of manners as a genre which reflects "a political ideology, with a history" (27). He makes a sweepingly negative statement about writers excluded from F. R. Leavis's "Great Tradition" of the novel of manners, implying that they refused to "accept that the self is how history has made it, which is why writers with strong antipathies to the British class structure, such as the Brontës, Hardy or Lawrence, have been hostile to the form, an hostility shared by American romancers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville" (27). In point of fact, the Brontës—or at least Charlotte and Anne—are fairly traditional in their social and religious beliefs, apart from their formal experimentation. Hawthorne, before Henry James, lamented the absence of history, culture, tradition, art in the materialistic young United States that precluded the writing of a novel of manners.

There is no arguing with Miles's contention that Jane Austen "is the key figure in the early nineteenth-century consolidation of the novel" (28), and he sees Northanger Abbey as the transitional work in which "Austen had first to square her accounts with romance" (29)—in this case the Gothic. Miles assumes that Northanger Abbey is entirely early, although we know that she revised it around 1803 and perhaps again at Chawton toward the end of her life. It was published posthumously, in 1818, together with Persuasion, often described as "the...