The reception history of Jane Austen follows a path from modest fame to wild popularity. Jane Austen (1775–1817), the author of such works as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815), has become one of the best-known and most widely read novelists in the English language.Clark, Robert. "Jane Austen". The Literary Encyclopedia (subscription only). 8 January 2001. Retrieved 24 August 2008. Her novels are the subject of intense scholarly study and the centre of a diverse fan culture.
During her lifetime, Austen's novels brought her little personal fame. Like many women writers, she chose to publish anonymously, but her authorship was an open secret. At the time they were published, Austen's works were considered fashionable, but received only a few reviews, albeit positive. By the mid-19th century, her novels were admired by members of the literary elite who viewed their appreciation of her works as a mark of cultivation, but they were also being recommended in the popular education movement and on school reading lists as early as 1838. The first illustrated edition of her works appeared in 1833, in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series, which put her titles before thousands of readers across the Victorian period.Looser, Devoney. The Making of Jane Austen. 19–22.
The publication in 1870 of her nephew's Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public as an appealing personality—dear aunt Jane—and her works were republished in popular editions. By the start of the 20th century, competing groups had sprung up—some to worship her and some to defend her from the "teeming masses"—but all claiming to be the true Janeites, or those who properly appreciated her. The "teeming masses", meanwhile, were creating their own ways of honouring Austen, including in amateur theatricals in drawing rooms, schools, and community groups.Looser, Devoney. The Making of Jane Austen. 83–97.
In 1923, the publisher and scholar R. W. Chapman prepared a carefully edited collection of her works, which some have claimed is the first serious scholarly treatment given to any British novelist. By mid-century, Austen was widely accepted within academia as a great English novelist. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored numerous aspects of her works: artistic, ideological, and historical. With the growing professionalisation of university English departments in the second half of the 20th century, criticism of Austen became more theoretical and specialised, as did literary studies in general. As a result, commentary on Austen sometimes seemed to imagine itself as divided into high culture and popular culture branches. In the mid- to late 20th century, fans founded Jane Austen societies and clubs to celebrate the author, her time, and her works. As of the early 21st century, Austen fandom supports an industry of printed sequels and prequels as well as television and film adaptations, which started with the 1940 film Pride and Prejudice and evolved to include productions such as the 2004 Bollywood-style film Bride and Prejudice. On 5 November 2019 BBC News included Pride and Prejudice on its list of the 100 most influential novels.
Background
Jane Austen lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family on the lower fringes of the English gentry.Lascelles, 2. Her family's steadfast support was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer.Lascelles, 4–5; MacDonagh, 110–28; Honan, Jane Austen, 79, 183–85; Tomalin, 66–68. Austen read draft versions of all of her novels to her family, receiving feedback and encouragement,Le Faye, Family Record, 100, 114. and it was her father who sent out her first publication bid.Le Faye, Family Record, 104. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. With the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer.
Novel-writing was a suspect occupation for women in the early 19th century, because it imperiled their social reputation by bringing them publicity, viewed as unfeminine. Therefore, like many other female writers, Austen published anonymously.Fergus, 13–14. Eventually, though, her novels' authorship became an open secret among the aristocracy.Le Faye, Family Record, 225. During one of her visits to London, the Prince Regent invited her, through his librarian, James Stanier Clarke, to view his library at Carlton House; his librarian mentioned that the Regent admired her novels and that "if Miss Austen had any other Novel forthcoming, she was quite at liberty to dedicate it to the Prince".Qtd. in Le Faye, Family Record, 226; also see Jane Austen to J. S. Clarke , 11 December 1815, courtesy of janeausten.co.uk, 17 July 2011. Austen, who disapproved of the prince's extravagant lifestyle, did not want to follow this suggestion, but her friends convinced her otherwise: in short order, Emma was dedicated to him. Austen turned down the librarian's further hint to write a historical romance in honour of the prince's daughter's marriage.Le Faye, Family Record, 227.
In the last year of her life, Austen revised Northanger Abbey (1817), wrote Persuasion (1817), and began another novel, eventually titled Sanditon, which was left unfinished at her death. Austen did not have time to see Northanger Abbey or Persuasion through the press, but her family published them as one volume after her death, and her brother Henry included a "Biographical Notice of the Author".Le Faye, "Memoirs and biographies", 51. This short biography sowed the seeds for the myth of Austen as a quiet, retiring aunt who wrote during her spare time: "Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives ... [S]o much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her public she turned away from any allusion to the character of an authoress."Qtd. in Fergus, 12. However, this description is in direct contrast to the excitement Austen shows in her letters regarding publication and profit: Austen was a professional writer.Fergus, 12–13.
Austen's works are noted for their realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of free indirect discourse, burlesque and irony.Southam, "Criticism, 1870–1940", 102. They critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.Litz, Jane Austen, 3–14; Grundy, 192–93; Waldron, 83, 89–90; Duffy, 93–94. As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain, Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents".Gilbert and Gubar, 151. Austen's plots, though comic,Litz, Jane Austen, 142. highlight the way women of the gentry depended on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.MacDonagh, 66–75. Like the writings of Samuel Johnson, a strong influence on her, her works are fundamentally concerned with moral issues.Honan, 124–27; Trott, 92.
1812–1821: Individual reactions and contemporary reviews
Austen's novels quickly became fashionable among opinion-makers, namely, those aristocrats who often dictated fashion and taste. Lady Bessborough, sister to the notorious Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, commented on Sense and Sensibility in a letter to a friend: "it is a clever novel. ... tho' it ends stupidly, I was much amused by it."Southam, "Introduction", Vol. 1, 7. The fifteen-year-old daughter of the Prince Regent, Princess Charlotte Augusta, compared herself to one of the book's heroines: "I think Marianne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &tc".Honan, Jane Austen, 289–90; emphasis in original.
After reading Pride and Prejudice, playwright Richard Sheridan advised a friend to "[b]uy it immediately" for it "was one of the cleverest things" he had ever read.Honan, Jane Austen, 318. Anne Milbanke, future wife of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, wrote: "I have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior work." She commented that the novel "is the most probable fiction I have ever read" and had become "at present the fashionable novel".Honan, Jane Austen, 318–19; emphasis in original. The Dowager Lady Vernon told a friend that Mansfield Park was "[n]ot much of a novel, more the history of a family party in the country, very natural"—as if, comments one Austen scholar, "Lady Vernon's parties mostly featured adultery."Honan, Jane Austen, 347. Lady Anne Romilly told her friend, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, that "[Mansfield Park] has been pretty generally admired here" and Edgeworth commented later that "we have been much entertained with Mansfield Park".
Despite these positive reactions from the elite, Austen's novels received relatively few reviews during her lifetime:Fergus, 18. two for Sense and Sensibility, three for Pride and Prejudice, none for Mansfield Park, and seven for Emma. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious.Fergus, 18–19; Honan, Jane Austen, 287–89, 316–17, 372–73; Southam, "Introduction", Vol. 1, 1. They most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.Waldron, 83–91. Moreover, as Brian Southam, who has edited the definitive volumes on Austen's reception, writes in his description of these reviewers, "their job was merely to provide brief notices, extended with quotations, for the benefit of women readers compiling their library lists and interested only in knowing whether they would like a book for its story, its characters and moral".Southam, Vol. 1, 6. This was not atypical critical treatment for novels in Austen's day.
Asked by publisher John Murray to review Emma, the famous historical novelist Walter Scott wrote the longest and most thoughtful of these reviews, which was published anonymously in the March 1816 issue of the Quarterly Review. Using the review as a platform from which to defend the then disreputable genre of the novel, Scott praised Austen's works, celebrating her ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him".Scott, 58; see also Litz, "Criticism, 1939–1983", 110; Waldron, 85–86; Duffy, 94–96. Modern Austen scholar William Galperin has noted that "unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence from realistic practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence".Galperin, 96. Scott wrote in his private journal in 1826, in what later became a widely quoted comparison: