A Game of Speculation

Jane Austen has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. Not many scholars (and hopefully fewer and fewer readers) attach much credence to the image of the retired spinster, marooned in villages and rectories in the backwaters of Hampshire, but equally not many have tried to alter our perception of Austen quite as dramatically as Jocelyn Harris does in this remarkable book. Harris places Austen at the centre of the Regency communications hub, weaving information from letters, gossip, newspapers, city visits, stage performances, and satirical prints into her fiction, and evincing a fascination with celebrity culture that makes her as connected to the contemporary moment as any devotee of 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians' or Twitter. In the spectrum of Austen studies, the book stands at the opposite end to the restricted, censored, and official family view of the author as the polite, neutral observer of the domestic world. In response to Henry Austen's verdict that his sister's life was 'singularly barren' of important events, involving 'few changes and no great crisis' (p. 144), Harris presents an Austen enmeshed in the politics of her day and fascinated by the luminaries and notables of Regency culture, where 'specific satirical allusions to celebrities, scandals, and controversies' were profoundly 'significant for her creativity' (p. xvii). Instead of a fiction working with 'essential' human traits, Harris sees an author happy to use her novels for score-settling on behalf of the Burney family, prepared to revise Mansfield Park (1814) at the proof stage in order to piggyback on the success of Maria Edgeworth's Patronage (1814), satirising the Prince Regent and the duke of Clarence (both future kings – not bad for a mousey, non-political author), and basing a series of characters on the celebrities of her day, with Elizabeth Bennet's dazzle borrowed from the 'arch' and 'bewitching' (p. 218) persona that Shakespearean actress Dorothy Jordan had made part of her 'brand'.

The question of exactly how Austen connects to her own sociocultural moment lies at the heart of this book. Rather than the more oblique idea of Austen commenting on 'the condition of England', or Tim Fulford's argument that debates lie 'just below the surface' in her novels, to be detected by the 'knowing', Harris proposes a writer who continually addresses the great public events of her time (p. 187). In order to make this point, instead of skirting round the dangers of the biographical method, or treading carefully to avoid over-reading possible contexts, Harris jumps on any contemporary allusion or reference that might lead to an opening into the 'mind of Austen'. Readers who prefer certainties will find this approach problematic. At times speculation leads to another speculation, which then gives rise to a further 'possibility'. This can turn the book into a dizzying performance; a discussion of one minor character, the 'half Mulatto' Miss Lambe in the unfinished Sanditon (1817), leads to a whole chapter of suppositions about Austen's relationship to the abolition movement, and where the novel might have led. And yet this shifting hall of mirrors is one of the most fascinating chapters of the book, its meticulous reconstruction of her family's 'revulsion from the slave trade' (p. 265), her possible sympathy for the plight of Sara Baartman (better known as the 'Hottentot Venus'), and Austen's reading preferences making a major contribution to the ongoing debate about the politics of Mansfield Park.

By insisting on an Austen linked to circuits of information, Harris is in accord with the recent upsurge of interest in networks and reconfiguring the period in terms of connectivity. Her book follows her earlier opening up of this area, Jane Austen's Art of Memory (1989), as well as the work of critics such as Janine Barchas in Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location and Celebrity (2012). This book, however, feels very different. Barchas, for instance, by deepening the contextual significance of the Allen name in Northanger Abbey (1817), helps explain one...