Prisoner and Paragon

Imagine the literary lovechild of Kathryn Sutherland's Jane Austen's Textual Lives (2005) and Karen Joy Fowler's kitsch romance Jane Austen's Bookclub (2004) and you end up with something approximating to Rachel M. Brownstein's latest book. In form, if not in tone, Why Jane Austen? is reminiscent of a non-fiction version of Julian Barnes's novel-cum-essay collection, Flaubert's Parrot (1984). The book's title has been adapted from an unfinished essay by the influential mid-twentieth-century critic Lionel Trilling, 'Why We Read Jane Austen' (1975). Brownstein, however, aims to do more than answer Trilling's question. Her intention is to explore 'why Jane Austen is on our minds now, and...her relationship to her characters and her readers – how she runs in and out of the minds of the people she imagined...and...the ways that imaginary others, historical and fictitious, inhabit and inform minds and lives' (p. 12). Even this diffuse formulation fails to compass the number of topics into which Brownstein dips her toes. Indeed, at its most broad Why Jane Austen? is missing Austen altogether.

An unsatisfying lack of thesis is symptomatic of the work as a whole. Despite the outward signposts of structure and argument (the book is divided into themed chapters) the reader is hard put to detect any unifying argument or subject. The ambling style of criticism means Brownstein has almost always slid into a new topic before properly exploring, or at least concluding, the one before. This makes the book hard to engage with critically – there is a wealth of interesting anecdote but little to either agree or disagree with.

A characteristic meander begins with Brownstein considering the differing reception of Byron and Austen (Austen and Byron being a pairing for which she seems to have an especial fondness, having written on them jointly previously) but sees Austen fade out with mysterious haste. From Byron, Brownstein makes the short leap to Wollstonecraft and, under a subheading 'The Romantic Paradigm', she enumerates with the unembarrassed enthusiasm of a Marianne Dashwood the 'vivid liveliness and amplitude of being' of the 'lustrous Mary Wollstonecraft' (pp. 167, 166). Eventually, in the section's last three lines, she returns to the subject of Austen to ponder whether 'Jane Austen as we imagine her, the confidante of her sister Cassandra and a cosy circle that has widened to include us, her secret friends, was nothing like a solitary wanderer. Or was she?' (p. 168). Having been given no indication of any arguments for or against (except for the single unexpanded comment that both Elizabeth Bennet and Mrs Croft in Persuasion 'echo some of Wollstonecraft's ideas', p. 166), the reader fully expects the next few pages to discuss precisely this. Properly done this would, perhaps, involve a consideration of the studies which have made the case for the influence of the Romantics in Austen's works, such as Clara Tuite's Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (2002) or William Deresiewicz's Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (2004) as well as her own readings of Austen's work. Instead, the question is left hanging and Brownstein neatly slips into the topic of Henry James's Byron-inspired dark tale The Aspern Papers (1888), about a man who falls in love with an author. Thence she moves to Colm Tóibín's biographical novel about Henry James, The Master (2004), and somehow the reader is carried to the section's close – an anecdote retold from Julian Barnes's memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) about his parents stuffing a pouffe with the torn-up scraps of their airmailed love letters – with very little idea of how she arrived there. It is all very interesting, and perhaps Brownstein, like Austen, does 'not write for such dull Elves, As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves', but even so, it scarcely begins to fulfil the promise contained within the introduction of the chapter's argument that Austen's 'notorious personal...