Vol. 31 No. 8 · 30 April 2009
pages 17-18 | 2961 words
Too Good and Too Silly
Frank Kermode
- BuyThe Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, Vol. IX: Later Manuscripts edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree
Cambridge, 742 pp, £65.00, December 2008, ISBN 978 0 521 84348 5
- BuyJane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman
Canongate, 342 pp, £20.00, April 2009, ISBN 978 1 84767 294 0
The Cambridge Edition of Jane Austen is a production on the most monumental scale, involving nine beautiful but heavy volumes and something like a dozen editors, with a powerful editorial board and a team of learned commentators. One volume apiece goes to the major novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which originally appeared in a single posthumous volume, are here divided. Later Manuscripts, the last to appear and the largest volume of all, is the work of the general editor, Janet Todd, and of Linda Bree of the Cambridge University Press, which long ago set a standard for editing novelists with its multi-volumed D.H. Lawrence. The extent and minuteness of the labours of Todd and Bree, both in this volume and throughout the series, are almost painful to contemplate.
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 9 · 14 May 2009
From Kate Brayshay
Frank Kermode gets at what 21st-century Janeism is about: ‘It is said that among the television audience there were some who saw Darcy’s emergence from his pond – an event Austen omitted from her narrative – as the high point of the book’ (LRB, 30 April). And things have got worse since Andrew Davies’s 1995 serial. It is sad to think that there is a generation who, when they try to conjure Lizzy Bennet from the page, will have to fight back images of Keira Knightley pouting and pretending not to be beautiful in a mud-hemmed dress.
Janeism wasn’t always so aggressively female-friendly. Rudyard Kipling wrote the endearingly odd story ‘The Janeites’ (making the term famous) in 1924. His Janeites are not mob-capped elderly women of Bath, but soldiers and officers on the Western Front. Soldier Humberstall, invalided out of the army with a head wound, finds a way back to the front, to discover that he is only fit to be an assistant mess-waiter. He survives in the officers’ mess by being introduced into the ‘cult’ of Jane by the head mess-waiter – chalking ‘Reverend Collins’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’ and ‘General Tilney’ on the battalion’s guns brings him 100 cigarettes instead of a ticking off. But being able to speak to superiors on equal terms is not Jane’s only godmotherly power. When the battery is destroyed in a barrage, Humberstall is the only survivor. After he jokingly calls the senior nurse Miss Bates – a plot twist Ian McEwan would envy – she makes room for him on the hospital train, saving his life: ‘You take it from me … there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.’ Endowed with such healing power, it is no wonder that Pride and Prejudice was prescribed to shellshocked soldiers, or that Churchill said it was Austen’s novels he turned to when things seemed bleak during the Second World War. So it has not always been girls sighing over Darcy’s wet shirt; Lizzy has also had her devoted boy fans. In a lecture to the women of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1911, A.C. Bradley needed no scriptwriter’s prompting to say of Elizabeth Bennet: ‘I was meant to fall in love with her, and I do.’
Kate Brayshay
Melksham, Wiltshire
