Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic by Olivia Murphy (review)

Jane Austen was, in Virginia Woolf’s famous formulation, “of all great authors … the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness” (“Jane Austen at Sixty,” Athenaeum [1923]). In Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic, Olivia Murphy sets out to do just that—or, better, to catch Austen in the act of leapfrogging over her predecessors. Referring generously to many of the critics who have previously explored Austen’s debts to other writers, Murphy devotes herself to discovering why, given her assiduous reading of eighteenth-century novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Charlotte Smith, Austen’s own novels depart in marked ways from those of her predecessors and contemporaries. The answer lies, for Murphy, in the way Austen’s fiction functions at once as art and as criticism. As Austen invokes and reworks situations from earlier novels, or alludes to works by Shakespeare or Milton, she enacts a mode of critique that, Murphy claims, shapes not only the development of the novel, but also of literary criticism.

While the latter assertion goes mostly unsubstantiated here, a book-length study of Austen’s reading is a welcome addition to the flourishing fields of Austen studies and the history of reading. By focusing on Austen’s imaginative engagement with other novels and with British literary tradition more broadly, Jane Austen the Reader participates in a strand of Austen studies that includes Frank W. Bradbrook’s Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (1966), Kenneth L. Moler’s Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (1968), Jocelyn Harris’s Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (1989), Mary Waldron’s Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (1999), Jacqueline Pearson’s Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (1999), and William Deresiewicz’s Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (2004). Even as Jane Austen the Reader offers new insight into the breadth of Austen’s reading, it aims less at advancing our understanding of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century reading practices than at suggesting how Austen’s reading, her intensive critical engagement with the literature of her day, may be discerned through her writing.

Murphy pursues this argument through six chapters that situate Austen’s juvenilia, six completed novels, and Sanditon within an impressively broad frame of reference that includes English classics like Shakespeare and Milton, early novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, Gothic novelists from Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, and women writers like Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Frances Brooke, Sophia Lee, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah More, Jane West, Mary Hays, Germaine de Staël, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Brunton. Also noted are eighteenth-century quixotic novels, it-narratives, and popular works inspired by renewed interest in Arthurian legend, as well as works of criticism by Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. However wide-ranging, Murphy’s approach can sometimes seem more arbitrary than encyclopedic. As a shifting range of texts is brought to bear on Austen’s fiction, patterns emerge that sometimes allow the reader to see anew Austen’s achievement, but sometimes these shifting frames instead draw attention to this or that novel left out of Murphy’s account, or even to what can seem like a reluctance to engage the novels Austen read as sophisticated works in their own right.

Such reluctance becomes apparent early. Beginning with the parody “Frederic and Elfrida” allows Murphy to establish Jane Austen as a clever and self-assured consumer of popular sentimental novels that, in Murphy’s analysis, lack much of Austen’s knowing self-awareness. If Austen’s juvenilia lambastes the popular fiction of the 1780s and 1790s, Murphy contends that her later novels go still further. In her account, Sense and Sensibility reveals the emptiness of novelistic conventions and dismantles the moral structure upon which eighteenth-century novels were built. By Mansfield Park, Austen moves beyond the novel...