Receiving Austen and Scott

Annika Bautz's The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott compares readers' reactions to Austen and Scott from the Regency period to 2003, beginning with Austen and Scott as readers of one another's work. Austen complains in a letter to her sister Anna that Scott has no business writing good novels because his novels will take "bread out of other people's mouths." She is resolved not to like Waverly if she can help it but "fears she must" (2007, 1). Scott could regard Austen from a stronger position, however, praising Austen's ability to describe "the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life" as "the most wonderful I ever met with" (1). These short reactions wind up being characteristic of most readers' reactions from the Regency period to the end of the nineteenth century, as Walter Scott becomes the novelist against whom all others-including Jane Austen-are compared, while Austen is both praised and criticized for her close attention to everyday life. Bautz limits her survey of Scott's novels to those published between 1811 and 1818, the publication period of Austen's major novels, so is therefore concerned with the reception history of Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, and Scott's Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Rob Roy, and The Heart of Midlothian, with some discussion of Ivanhoe and other works. She further limits herself primarily to the reception history of these authors in England, including Scotland only to a lesser extent.

As a reception history, Bautz's work is not about Jane Austen or Walter Scott, but about their readers from the Regency period to the present. She does not seek to present an original reading of each author nor to argue a particular point about reception theory. She does acknowledge the influence of Iser's idea that a "text's reception [is] determined by the interaction between text and reader" (2007, 2), which unfortunately sounds more like a tautology than an argument, but does not seem to intend for her engagement with reader-response or reception theory to go further than this. Bautz instead "focuses on groups of readers rather than individuals, and on the impact of historical, literary and cultural context on these actual readers" (2). She divides Austen's and Scott's readers into interpretive communities (following Jauss), paying special attention to "the effects that social, gender and other differences between readers may have had on their reading" (2).

While this claim may seem to carry with it an identity politics edge, Bautz's approach is in practice numeric and very pragmatic: were men or women reading Austen in the greatest numbers, and when? What did they say? At the same time, quotations alone reveal early reviewers' attitudes toward women as authors and readers, so the information presented in Bautz's study could easily contribute to a study of changing attitudes towards women as well as towards women authors from the Regency era to the present. Bautz provides charts in chapter three dividing Austen's and Scott's readers into literati, aristocrats, and members of the professional class, each group of readers further subdivided into male and female. Her approach is primarily focused on what critics said about Austen and Scott as opposed to the general reading public who, due to the cost of early editions of these novels, came largely from the professional classes. However, Bautz's account of the general public's reaction to these authors, drawing in large part from personal letters, is probably the most unique contribution made by her work. Rather than arguing a theoretical or literary thesis, Bautz clearly, succinctly, and effectively presents a factually based, chronologically ordered reception history.

Bautz divides her presentation into three periods: responses contemporary to Austen and Scott published between 1811...