Jane Austen & Company: Collected Essays by Bruce Stovel (review)

Jane Austen & Company is a remarkable book: accessible, caring, honest, unpretentious, welcoming. The volume has been put together in memory of, and to honour, esteemed professor emeritus of English Bruce Stovel, who died in 2007, soon after his retirement from the University of Alberta. Edited by his widow, Nora Foster Stovel, it includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and afterword by Isobel Grundy – all from the University of Alberta as well. So the essays are enfolded by loving and unabashedly personal tributes.

The essays are selected in such a way as to highlight Stovel’s view of Austen, ‘the consummate comic author.’ To begin, they deal with Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, showing how essential both are to the origins of the comic novel in English. Stovel demonstrates Fielding’s debt to the Odyssey in Tom Jones, and incidentally shows his own easy familiarity with the classical tradition. In his piece on the always challenging Tristram Shandy, Stovel examines the novel as a species of gossip, which, he notes, ‘has a distinctive tone or mood … intimate, secretive, relaxed, detached, playful, impulsive, zestful,’ all of which serve to describe the ‘special appeal’ of Sterne’s work.

The first part of the collection’s frame concludes with ‘“Female Difficulties”: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Frances Burney’s Camilla.’ Both novels, though comic, are ‘muted and tragicomic in vision and tone,’ and both novelists are ‘ambivalent proto-feminists [who] have as their central theme the difficulties women face in a male-dominated society.’

Jane Austen’s Company includes Scott, as her contemporary, and Waugh and Amis as her heirs. Decline and Fall and Lucky Jim were two of Stovel’s favourite novels, over which he regularly fell to ‘chuckling … [or] collapsing into laughter.’ ‘Waverley and the Aeneid’ traces important parallels between Scott and Virgil but aims also to contrast Austen with Scott, even as both are comic novelists: she claims to be ‘the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress,’ while Scott is pleased to vaunt his erudition in his own editions.

At the heart of Jane Austen & Company are, of course, Stovel’s essays on Austen’s own work. ‘Jane Austen and the Pleasure Principle’ deals with all six novels, thus providing a valuable introduction to the essays that follow. He argues that, in their various ways, her novels all demonstrate that duty and pleasure can be happily combined. ‘Asking versus Telling’ draws its text from the first page of Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Bennet mocks his wife and her marital ambitions for her girls: ‘You want to tell me [as to the letting of Netherfield], and I have no objections to hearing it.’ What Stovel shows in this insightful study is the difference between false and true questions: ‘telling is easy and asking is hard.’ He considers ‘the issue of self-knowledge … [O]nly a person who can ask real questions can think and develop.’ Not surprisingly, he looks at Emma’s growth in terms of the relative veracity of the questions she asks herself, contrasting her superficial response to the Elton fiasco, which ‘signals that [her] discoveries have barely made a dent in her complacency,’ with her realization of her love for Mr. Knightley when she believes Harriet to be his object: ‘How long had [he] been so dear to her?’

‘A Contrariety of Emotion’ looks in detail at the ambivalent nature of Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s feelings for one another, comparing them to Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict: ‘each is the one the other loves to hate – and hates to love.’ ‘Once More, with Feeling’ considers the structure of Mansfield Park. Stovel argues that the first volume of this novel, culminating in Sir Thomas’s return, amounts to a prologue that is mirrored, ‘but writ much larger,’ in the subsequent volumes: always Fanny, ‘the most heroic of Austen’s heroines,’ is painfully isolated, harshly accused of ingratitude.

‘Comic Symmetry in Jane Austen’s Emma’ contrasts Emma with...