Jane Austen’s Word Process
Marilyn Butler
- Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method by J.F Burrows
Oxford, 245 pp, £25.00, February 1987, ISBN 0 19 812856 8
Why put the novels of Jane Austen onto a computer? The first thing that strikes you about Computation into Criticism is what it says about its Australian author’s dedication, or obsessiveness, or just plain nerve. Most literary research is cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s project of putting a dozen novels onto a computer was plainly from the first going to prove expensive. When one begins to cost Burrows’s travel, subsistence overseas, and time, together with computer-time, programmer-time and secretarial time, each of his 211 pages of text and 34 pages of statistical appendices comes to represent a sizeable public investment.
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[*] For avant-garde novelists, though not necessarily for popular ones, and certainly not for the middlebrow reader. Brian Southam’s new volume in the Critical Heritage series, Jane Austen, Vol II: 1870-1940 (Routledge, 308 pp., £18, 28 May, 0 7102 0189 3), shows that she achieved her status as the best-loved classic novelist in 1870, just as the novel of distinctive minor characters was losing its literary prestige. Southam’s 132-page introduction gives invaluable insights into the history of readers’ tastes, and extracts such as Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s influential popularising magazine article in 1871 and Reginald Farrer’s highbrow classic essay in 1917 seem to confirm that her general popularity owed most to the distinctiveness and charm of her comic minor characters.