Pride and Prejudice, An Annotated Edition (review)

It is one thing to take up a much-loved novel and sink into it again, finding all the old familiar faces and visiting again the old familiar places. It is another thing entirely to reread Pride and Prejudice in the company of Patricia Meyer Spacks. In Spacks’s hands, the 1813 first edition is glossed, word by word, line by line, through notes that remove it from the shadow cast by one’s own pride and prejudice, and set again in the light.

Nor are we just with Spacks; we are in the company of all those readers and critics Spacks has absorbed in her career-long engagement with Austen. Drawing our attention to recent, as well as to less well known and even idiosyncratic studies (a book devoted to Mr Collins, for example), Spacks pays special attention simply to the words—the words that Jane Austen wrote: to Bharat Tandon’s finding that Lydia’s lament for Brighton “manages to compact teenage daydream with the rhetoric of biblical prophecy” (271n15), to the collection entitled The Talk in Jane Austen, and to the point that what is said depends in many ways on how it is heard. Austen’s famous comprehensibility, Spacks suggests, is at least partly illusory, the effect of a lexicon that is not as familiar as it seems. Spacks emphasizes those places where cognates such as “liberal,” “conscious,” and “nice” invite modern associations, obscuring Austen’s own. This means, of course, that the specialist who has a great deal to gain from the subtlety and precision of Spacks’s notes also has to endure being told that a shrubbery is “a plot planted with shrubs” (125n8), that calling “off ” someone’s attention is to call it “away” (82n2), and that when Elizabeth passes the “chief ” of the night in her sister’s room, she passes the “main part” (76n1). The volume shares the insights and discoveries of the specialist with a general readership—and by general, I mean Spacks has accomplished the tricky job of addressing all of the possible readers of this text. This makes it mystifying that routine academic apparatus is missing: the many essays to which Spacks refers have not been compiled into a bibliography, never mind an index. I have had to thumb these oversize, and beautifully illustrated, pages again and again, looking for the essay on “reflection,” or the one on the metaphor of “unfolding” with respect to characters, or to find which novel by Maria Edgeworth was so important. As a reference work, a compilation of definitions, readings, and approaches, an annotated edition needs to be quickly and easily searchable.

In addition to the attention to words, Spacks’s notes compose running themes: a wonderful reading emerges over the course of the first volume of how different characters play the forms of civility. Mr Bennet, for example, encourages Mr Collins to admit he rehearses his elaborate compliments to Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In turn, Mr Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth is a “mechanical performance of romantic interest”: he imagines he plays a part in a scripted en counter, the kind described in a conduct book where the only obstacle is the “natural delicacy” of dissembling womanhood (145n1, 146). One performance, in other words, expects another—an assumption that leads directly to Collins’s inability to hear Elizabeth’s emphatic refusals.

A further layer of notation concerns historical detail, from primogeniture to shoe roses. Spacks pays special attention to the military presence in the background of the lightest and brightest of texts, and this yields rich dividends. She finds echoes of Alexander Pope’s satire of the luxurious class—“And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine”—in Lydia’s unthinking catalogues of the latest events—“several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and ... Colonel Forster was going to be married” (12). Tracking the movement of Austen’s redcoats to Brighton, Spacks...