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  • Austen’s Allusions to Cultural History
  • Kim Wheatley
Janine Barchas. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 2012). Pp. xiii + 317. $45

A reader of Jane Austen might be forgiven for thinking that she took no interest in names. After all, she gave her own Christian name not only to the angelic Jane Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, but also to the heroine’s unpleasant sister-in-law in her unfinished novel The Watsons. Perhaps more disconcertingly, the first name of the beloved heroine of Pride and Prejudice reappears in Persuasion, where it is given to the unlovable Elizabeth Elliot. And speaking of Persuasion, one might note that this novel includes at least four and probably five characters named Charles (if we include the elder Mr. Musgrove), suggesting that names in Austen’s fiction are arbitrary badges of ultrarealism rather than sources of interpretive potential. Nevertheless, a few critics have probed Austen’s choice of first and last names, but Janine Barchas, in Matters of Fact in Jane Austen, goes much further in exposing the significance not just of character names in Austen, but also of place names and even mentions of distances between places. In this absorbing study, Barchas unearths real people, events, and locations that she claims are alluded to in Austen’s fiction. Challenging formalist readings that perceive Austen’s work as timeless or at least ahistorical, Barchas examines the novels in the context of Regency celebrity culture that has been brought alive in recent years by Romanticists such as Tom Mole [End Page 125] and Jerome Christensen, and Austen scholars such as Roger Sales and Jocelyn Harris. Barchas also tracks possible allusions to historical figures from the eighteenth century and earlier, showing the value of approaching Austen via eighteenth-century studies, as well as by way of her Romantic-era affiliations. At times a little heavy-handed, but more often deft in its touch, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen offers a wealth of fascinating historical detail to enrich our reading of Austen’s work.

Barchas organizes her study around specific Austen texts but does not follow the traditional format of devoting a chapter to each of the completed novels. Instead, she gives us a chapter on Lady Susan, two on Northanger Abbey, one on Austen’s juvenile work Evelyn, another on Sense and Sensibility, and a final chapter on Persuasion. She thus leaves room for other critics to apply her approach to Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Sanditon, and the rest of the juvenilia. Barchas’s underlying assumption is that Austen knew much more about Regency-era scandals and historical figures than some critics believe. Barchas draws on a newly available source, the Godmersham Park Library Catalogue, for evidence of Austen’s wide reading of nonfiction, including, for example, a 1776 edition of John Evelyn’s 1664 book on tree planting, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, that Barchas sees as informing both Evelyn and Sense and Sensibility. Finding in Austen a “profound historicism and geographical specificity” (3), Barchas sees Austen’s novels as closer to Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction than has hitherto been acknowledged, even though Scott, in the most famous early review of Austen—the Quarterly’s article on Emma—marveled at how Austen managed to make mere domesticity interesting. Barchas also invokes James Joyce’s Ulysses as a later example of the kind of fiction that rewards accurate knowledge of real-world settings. She does not entirely eschew a biographical approach, drawing at times on Austen’s personal knowledge of places such as Bath and Lyme Regis. In some cases, Barchas’s book offers less interpretive payoff than one might expect, but when she lingers over moments in Austen’s texts, her readings are nearly always illuminating. And the book is also full of enlightening illustrations.

Matters of Fact in Jane Austen begins and ends with Persuasion, as the first chapter focuses on Austen’s choice of the name Wentworth and uncovers a link with her use of the name Vernon in Lady Susan. Barchas mentions that Donald Greene, in a 1953 PMLA article, “Jane Austen and the Peerage,” had discussed...

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