Jane Austen: Whither or Whence?

"Whither Jane Austen?" Vain exercise! I would argue—had I more courage—that two great contemporary barriers to knowledge are the passion for speculating on future situations that we cannot know or, alternatively, reducing what can be known from the past's achievements to interpretations congenial to contemporary views and so distorting them, often beyond recognition.

As Andreas Kinneging has written on Montesquieu, but substituting Austen, "We should ask ourselves if we do justice to Austen if we insist on treating her as a precursor to our own concerns and categories. . . . A correct and complete understanding of Austen presupposes that we see her not as a predecessor to a new tradition, not as the harbinger of the new in the old, but as a participant in the discourse of her own day, elaborating on a tradition lying even further back in time" (280, 281). How are we to explain Jane Austen's unique influence as an author, with her immense, often obsessive influence? Certainly she is a very great writer—perhaps the greatest in English prose fiction—and a very entertaining one. But is it not also her position as a moralist that explains this enormous sway? Jane Austen does not just have admirers; she has adherents.

The bar for judging a moralist is high. Can we agree with Austen's perspective on all matters? She came into her creative majority around 1795, when she was beginning the early versions of her great works. From all we know (from rational sources) her views were largely consonant with those of her time and milieu. Of course, she was delightfully funny about how these views could be perverted and rendered absurd. But she still seems to have shared much of her era's perspective on, for example, gentility and the problematic aspects of romance and marriage between partners of disparate backgrounds. Harriet Smith would be the heroine of a modern Emma. But the differences in emphasis between her biases and ours do not matter so much as that Austen leads us into the jeweled inner workings of her precious clocks—one might think particularly of how finely Anne Elliot considers and reacts to all that is passing around her, to the new information slowly revealed and to her own regrets and ill-judgments.

Rather than "Whither Austen?" the worthwhile study, which seems often now neglected, is "From whence Austen?" From what ground did Austen's genius and moral acuity spring? What "tradition lying even further back in time?" The late Professor Gloria Gross has written about Samuel Johnson—Austen's "my Dear Dr. Johnson"—as her great mentor. Her first biographers, brother Henry and nephew James, said that Johnson was "her favourite author in prose" (Gross). Her mentor in fiction, Fanny Burney, was firmly in the Johnson circle as well, with her father, Dr. Burney, a principal member of Johnson's club.

As a moralist Johnson partly looked to classical sources. His great poems "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" were modeled on Juvenal's Satires. Like Austen he sought to use the struggles of life he experienced and observed to develop a morality true to nature yet permeated with humor (Misenheimer 149–50). But "Juvenal's spirit as it descended upon Johnson," Percy Hazen Houston writes, "was softened and made endurable in a mind accustomed to find an explanation and reconciliation of man's lot in the loftier purposes of the Divine Will" (25). Johnson wrote at the conclusion of his Rambler essays that his intention was to "giv[e] ardour to virtue, and confidence to truth" while allowing that some might embody "harmless merriment"; he considered his "principal design to inculcate wisdom or piety . . . exactly conformable to the precepts of Christianity, without any accommodation to the licentiousness and levity of the present age" (Johnson 208).

James Boswell quotes Johnson: "Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity; and as no man is good but as he wishes the good of others, no man can be good in the highest degree, who wishes not to others the largest measures of the greatest good" (244...