Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists (review)

Deliberately flouting science and literature studies' standard method of pairing literary figures with a near-contemporary scientific text or concept, Peter Graham instead claims for himself the prerogative of the "essayist" as Michel de Montaigne originally invoked the term. As Graham writes in the introduction to Jane Austen & Charles Darwin, an essayist is "a person who's trying out ideas in a highly personal thought experiment" (xvi). Graham's thought experiment is one that takes in two authors that at first would seem anachronistic in their pairing—Austen lived from 1775 to 1817, Darwin from 1809 to 1882—and in their surface-level effect: as Graham poses it, is there not "a significant moral tension between the vision of Jane Austen, termed by Alasdair MacIntyre 'the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues' and that of Charles Darwin, whose principle of natural selection has been widely invoked as evidence that the practice of virtues is neither here nor there in a competitive world where the strongest (or most selfish) survive and the weakest (or most altruistic) go to the wall?" (xiii). This is the question that Graham invokes but leaves just beyond Tantalus's grasp. Why else would one pair two such seemingly opposing figures of the nineteenth century except to complicate and interrogate the standard popular opposition of Austen as cultivating moral choice and Darwin as undermining the place of ethics in human behavior?

This, however, is not Graham's thought experiment, and we are effectively not allowed to begrudge his decision to invoke it only to leave it. While not impervious to criticism, the rhetorical position of the "highly personal" makes for a particularly sturdy prophylactic measure. Why not, after all, one might ask, think through the relationship between two authors who one personally and deeply cares about? Graham, the co-editor along with Duncan Porter of The Portable Darwin (1993), has more serious purposes in mind here than this, of course, but he also does not disown the pleasure of the Janeite as well: his first admission is of his "broken-backed" volumes of R.W. Chapman's Austen, gifts inscribed and gifted by his grandparents and since then often reread. The volume puts forth a consistent and lucid argument on behalf of Austen and Darwin as nineteenth-century English empiricists. The methodology is earnestly analogical: Graham considers Austen's and Darwin's commonalities of perspective, subject matter, and biography; their distinctive differences of sex and gender, as well as financial, familial, and professional status. At times the analogical reasoning is strained—Darwin's interest in the details of domestic pigeons is "analogous" to Austen's interest in minutiae as evidenced primarily by her letters to Cassandra. More importantly, at times the reasoning is less than satisfying in its illumination of the novels: as Graham knows, when Austen wrote literary prose, she often eliminated the very minutiae in which she revels in her letters and satirized characters too immersed in detail. Graham argues, not quite convincingly, that Austen would have us respect the observations of Miss Bates and Harriet in Emma (1815). This is true to an extent, for Emma is famously erring in her observations and deductions, but it seems perverse to locate the naturalist or empiricist gaze in the annoying minutiae of Miss Bates, prose that (as Graham notes) the reader is tempted to skip.

Yet some of the insights born of juxtaposing Austen and Darwin are provocative. In understanding the two as participating in the English empiricist tradition, Graham brings to Austen a perspective that is long overdue; in thinking about Austen's novels as endeavors of a naturalist, Graham winningly shows us the connections between Darwin's and Austen's nuanced observations (what he calls "microcosmic particulars" [2]). He employs four terms—naturalist, novelist, empiricist, and serendipidist—to sketch out the relationship between Darwin and Austen. The first three are useful, if overly general, while...