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1 The Odd Couple Mating Jane Austen with D. H. Lawrence It is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women. —D. H. Lawrence, letter of May 2, 1913 On the surface, you’d be hard-pressed to find two major British authors at further poles than Regency-era girl-favorite novelist Jane Austen and metaphorically muscular twentieth-century writer D. H. Lawrence. The first is popularly associated with clichés of prim convention and the cozy comforts of traditional moral convictions, the second with outrageous (some would say obscene or pornographic) sexual rebellion. Surely imagining them as a matched pair in literary history is only an occasion of absurdity; it seems preposterous at first to compare them in any way other than as authors at odds in what they do with a love story. Their differences are not only notorious but supposed to be obvious: first, Austen is quaint, while Lawrence is (or was at the time, or at least thought he was) daringly modern; second, where she was (arguably) conservative and concerned with convention, he was (arguably) radical in his views of social life. Furthermore, Austen’s writing is both brilliantly humorous and decorous, while Lawrence manages to be serious, preachy, and bawdy all at once. We may sum all this up by saying that she seems to belong wholly to a genteel drawing room, while fans of Laurentian love tend to think of . . . Nature. Surely the admirers of Austen and Lawrence treasure what is distinctive about their styles, which feature Lawrence’s hypnotic repetition, gloomy pronouncements , and undulating passionate prose, resembling mutterings during lovemaking , versus Austen’s precise and elegantly turned sentences. Put them against one 17 18 the glass slipper another, and who wins? Austenites would point out that her way with language is graceful, polite, sane, and exacting, while Lawrence has always struck some readers as cranky, rude, wordy, and often downright nutty. Whereas he is schematic and didactic, they would insist, she is light and bright and charming. Austen’s style, combining sharply honed observations of character and social mores with finely calibrated wit, has been much imitated. Yet detractors see Austen as often rigid and didactic in her prissy way, while Lawrence’s prose can be quite beautiful and poetic, something rarely said of Austen. I will confess that I adore them both, different as they are, faults and all. But let’s face it, the difference in their reputations so often comes down to sex: the much-repeated eternal opposition of restrained manners and desiring body. It’s all too easy to pit the pop image of Austen, eternal virgin and respectable maiden aunt (“Jane Austen, chaste and clear,” said the critic Rachel Brownstein ), against Lawrence, the sexy bohemian guy with his intense love affairs and quirky marriage. We think of her restraint and his passion, she as the bonneted and he as the unclothed. All that brings them together, seemingly, is the extremity of reactions they provoke: worshipped by fans and reviled by those whose cup of tea they most definitely are not. Famous among Austen-haters was Mark Twain, who made a classic jab (“Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”), as did the feminist Kate Millett a hundred years later while taking down D. H. Lawrence (“the transformation of masculine ascendancy into a mystical religion”).1 But for intellectual fun, I’m going to make a shotgun wedding between the two, metaphorically speaking, on the usual matchmaking grounds that though the reluctant couple may not like each other much—or even know each other at all—they are more compatible than may first appear. I am confident that love will emerge in the end . . . or at least their mutual interest in love. And I hope to show that, for all that they may seem to be polar opposites (which in popular wisdom attract), extremes of their super-feminine and weirdly phallic reputations , they are oddly alike in telling and sometimes ironic ways. One improbable resemblance is that each author developed a reputation concerning love quite contrary to the real themes of his or her writing. Austen attracts those who are nostalgic for life in a supposedly simpler time, when romance seemed opposite to sex, and when being a lady protected women from what the author Ariel Levy calls the...

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