Too Much is Never Enough: Austen’s Texts and Contexts

Jane Austen’s legacy is everywhere: an award-winning web series; a dispute with an American pop star over jewelry; an art piece rising out of the Serpentine Lake at Hyde Park in the form Mr Darcy, the beloved hero of Pride and Prejudice. Austen has been zombified, fight-clubbed, theme-parked, and, in case you missed this stunning synecdoche of her current commodification, she is soon to appear on the British ten-pound note. This ubiquity inspires the question, “How much is too much?” Is Austen overexposed? Has Jane Austen “jumped the shark”? (That last question was the title of a 2013 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference panel.)

Claudia L. Johnson’s most recent work suggests that when it comes to all things Austen, too much is never enough. Johnson opens her long-awaited book, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, with a ghost story to evoke the ways in which Austen—body and spirit—has preoccupied her ardent readers since the nineteenth century. Johnson tells her own tale of visitation, risking evoking the incredulity of her fellow academics, but, like the book itself, the ghost story serves to effectively challenge the barriers between the physical and metaphysical and Austen scholarship and Austen fandom. In this way, Johnson offers a timely intervention in a long-held if rapidly dissolving divide and deftly places herself among the Janeites at the outset of a beautifully rendered piece of scholarship. Lucid prose, meticulous research, and cogent analysis, together with a generous number of illustrations, make this book not only essential reading for Austen scholars, but also that rare monograph with appeal for readers beyond the academy. Indeed, where do such distinctions lie when the New York Times offers a board game of “recent Austen industry highlights” that positions eminent Austen scholars beside the giant visage of the Nessie-like Mr Darcy menacing London last summer? (Mary Jo Murphy and Jennifer Schuessler, “Jane, Plain No More: A Year of Austen Glamour,” 8 August 2013, http://tinyurl.com/q8fl3lq).

As Johnson points out, the desire to claim some version of Austen and her works as “the” authentic or accurate Austen is long-lived, yet she suggests that academics have much to learn from other readers, who can “inspire us to re-read Austen in surprising and stunning ways” (15). She proves as much by analyzing some of the myriad ways in which Austen—icon and symbol for her corpus of writing—has been read throughout history, venturing answers to the questions of how and why Austen has become vested with such magical, legendary status. The enduring tendency to fetishize relics of Austen’s person is a function, Johnson argues, of both the paucity of material evidence of her life and body and the tendency to confer uncanny power on Austen’s works.

Johnson’s content ranges from Victorian versions of a fantastical fairy Austen and debates about the authenticity of various portraits of Austen, to the ways in which Austen’s work has been read during wartime, to, finally, the history and inventory of the Jane Austen’s House Museum at Chawton. Regarding the portraits, while Johnson makes her own case for some hitherto dismissed images, she also focuses on what the controversies surrounding these pictures say about those who adhere to or...