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MISS AUSTEN
from the New Monthly Magazine (1852)
Unsigned
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The author, unknown since the article is unsigned, begins with a highly misogynistic statement-
"Given a subject of composition like the novel, it is reasonable to expect a goodly proportion of what Monkbarns called "womankind" among the compositors. The subject is at active to those tastes, and within the scope of those faculties, which are, generally speaking, characteristic of the fairer sex. Perhaps, indeed—and some critics would substitute" unquestionably" for "perhaps"—none but a man, of first-rate powers withal, can produce a first-rate novel; and, if so, it may be alleged that a woman of corresponding genius (quâ woman) can only produce one of a second-rate order. ... "
It's unclear if that's the author's own opinion as well or whether it's acceptance of a general assumption, based on same facts that produced slave trade - namely, force ruled. But the author goes on :-
" ... However that may be—and leaving the definition of what is first-rate and what second-rate to critics of a subtler vein and weightier calibre than we shall ever attain to—proofs there are, enough and to spare, in the literature of our land, that clever women can write, and have written, very clever novels; that this is a department where they feel and show themselves at home; that, in the symmetry of a complicated plot, the elaboration of varied character, and the filling-in of artistic touches and imaginative details, they can design and accomplish works which go down to posterity not very far behind those of certain titanic lords of creation. ... "
Author goes on to give details of various women writers of the era in English literature, from beginning of novels as art form to eighteenth century, who were not only popular and successful, much lauded, but also critically worthy of appreciation.
" ... As it was reasonable to predicate an abundance of female novelists, so is it evident, by every circulating library and every advertising journal, that such abundance exists. Almost the earliest pieces of prose fictions in our language are from the pen of a woman—not the most exemplary of her sex—Mistress Aphra Beha, the "Astraea" of Charles the Second's days. After the novel, more properly so called, had acquired a local habitation and a name amongst us, by the performances of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, we find, during the past century, an imposing array of "womankind" successfully cultivating these "pastures new." Clara Reeve wrote several tales of the "Otranto" type, all marked, in the judgment of Sir Walter Scott, by excellent good sense, pure morality, and a competent command of those qualities which constitute a good romance. If the Minerva Press deluged the town with its springtide of fluent nonsense, much of it the billowy froth of feminine as well as effeminate "Persons of Quality," there soon uprose to stem the current a succession of ladies who could cope better with its surges than Mrs. Partington with those of the Atlantic. Mrs. Radcliffe is by no means the beau-ideal of a novelist; yet even her atrocities were an improvement upon, and instrumentally fatal to, the squeamish woes of that maudlin clique. Then, too, came Charlotte Smith, of "Old Manor House" celebrity; and little Fanny Burney, with her Evelinas and Cecilias and Camillas; and the sisters Lee, with their "Canterbury Tales;" and the sisters Porter, of whom Anna Maria alone published half a century of volumes; and Mrs. Brunton, the still popular authoress of "Self-Control;" and Miss Edgeworth, whose gift it was to "dispense common sense to her readers, and to bring them within the precincts of real life and natural feeling." As we approach more closely to our own times, the name of the fair company becomes legion. Mrs. Shelley appears:
"And Shelley, four-famed—for her parents, her lord,
"And the poor, lone, impossible monster abhorred—
""Frankenstein," to wit—a romance classed by Moore with those original conceptions that take hold of the public mind at once and forever. ... "
And many more -
" ... Miss Ferrier is a foremost reaper of what Scott called the large harvest of Scottish characters and fiction, a harvest in which recent labourers (witness "Mrs. Margaret Maitland," etc.) have found new sheaves for their sickle. Lady Morgan presents us with a "Wild Irish Girl" and "Florence Macarthy." Mrs. Trollope is seen in the plethora of exhaustless authorship, surpassed therein only by Mrs. Gore, with her Heaps of "Polite Conversation," so true
"That one cannot but wish the three volumes were two;
"But not when she dwells upon daughters or mothers—;
"Oh, then the three make us quite long for three others!
"And who will not be ready to name Mary Russell Mitford, one of England's truest autochthonai? And Mrs. S.C. Hall, that kindly and wise-hearted limner of the lights and shadows of Irish life? And Mrs. Bray, of Tavistock, the accomplished delineator of Devonshire characters and submissions? and Lady Blessington, whose writings often beam, like her face in the golden age of Gore House, (before the entrée of Soyer and the Symposium,) with "enjoyment, and judgment, and wit, and good-nature?" and Mrs. Marsh, the powerful as well as industrious authoress of many an impressive fiction? and Currer Bell, one of the few who have lately excited a real "sensation?" and Mrs. Crowe, with her melodramatic points and supernatural adjuncts, some of which make even utilitarians and materialists look transcendental for the nonce? And Mrs. Gaskill, whose "mission" is as benevolent and practical as her manner is clear and forcible? The catalogue might be lengthened out with many other well-known titles, such as Landon, Martineau, Hoffland, Pardoe, Bowles, Pickering, Norton, Howitt, Johnstone, Ellis, Kavanagh, etc., etc."
This was the background on which Jane Austen grew up, wrote, and published, and was lauded by more than one prominent intellectual and author as comparable to Shakespeare in her excellence and quality of her writing.
"In her own line of things, Jane Austen is surpassed, perhaps equalled by none of this pleasant and numerous family. She is perfect mistress of all she touches, and certainly nil tetigit quod non ornavit—if not with the embellishments of idealism and romance, at least with the fresh strokes of nature. She fascinates you with common-place people. She effectually interests you in the "small-beer chronicles" of every-day household life. ... "
"You have actually met all her heroes and heroines before—not in novels, but in most unromantic and prosaic circumstances; you have talked with them, and never seen anything in them—anything, at least, worthy of three volumes, at half-a-guinea a volume. How could such folks find their way into a printed book? That is a marvel, a paradox, a practical solecism. But a greater marvel remains behind, and that is, how comes at that such folks, having got into the book, make it so interesting? ... We do not mean that we, or you, reader, or even that professed and successful novelists now living, could produce the same result with the same means, or elicit from the given terms an equivalent remainder. Herein, on the contrary, lies the unique power of Jane Austen, that where everyone else is nearly sure of failing, she invariably and unequivocally triumphs. What, in other hands, would be a flat, insipid, intolerable piece of impertinent dullness, becomes, at her bidding, a sprightly, versatile, never-flagging chapter of realities. She knows how far to go in describing a character, and where to stop, never allowing that character to soar into romance or to sink into mere twaddle. She is a thorough artist in the management of nature. Her sketches from nature are not profusely huddled together in crude and ill-assorted heaps—the indiscriminate riches of a crowded portfolio, into which genius has recklessly tossed its manifold essays, all clever, but not all in place; but they are selected and arranged with the practised skill of a disciplined judgment, and challenge the scrutiny of tasteful students of design."
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" ... Both Sir Walter Scott and Archbishop Whately—the one in 1815, the other in 1821—saw and proclaimed her distinguished merits in the pages of the "Quarterly Review." Sir Walter observes, that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments greatly above our own. She "confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society. Her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision belong to a class rather below that standard. The narrative of all her novels is composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation of most folks, and her dramatis personae conduct themselves upon the motives and principles which the readers may recognise as ruling their own and that of most of their acquaintances." So wrote the unknown novelist who had just given to the world "Waverley" and "Guy Mannering." Eleven years of personal and unparalleled triumph found Sir Walter confirmed in his admiration of Jane Austen; for, in 1826—that is, after he had composed "Rob Roy," and the "Tales of my Landlord," and "Ivanhoe," and " Quentin Durward," and while he was busy at "Woodstock"—we find the following characteristic entry in his diary, or "gurnal," as he loved to style it: "Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely-written novel of 'Pride and Prejudice.' That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!" An Edinburgh reviewer justly remarks, that ordinary readers have been apt to judge of her as Partridge judged of Garrick's acting. He could not see the merit of a man behaving on the stage as anybody might be expected to behave under similar circumstances in real life. He infinitely preferred the "robustious, periwig-pated fellow," who flourished his arms like a windmill, and ranted with the voice of three. Even thus is Miss Austen too natural for superficial readers. "It seems to them as if there can be very little merit in making characters talk and act so exactly like the people whom they see around them every day. They do not consider that the highest triumph of art consists in its concealment; and here the art is so little perceptible that they believe there is none." Meanwhile, readers of more refined taste and critical acumen feel something like dissatisfaction with almost every other domestic novelist, after they have once appreciated Miss Austen. After her unaffected good-sense, her shrewd insight, her felicitous irony, and the fruitful harvest of her quiet eye, they are palled by the laboured unrealities of her competitors. ... "
And when the author says -
"She walks without irons to keep her in shape, or stilts to exalt her. Her diction is innocent of sesquipedalia verba; her manners and deportment were learnt under no Gallic dancing-master. If she occasionally dons a piece of bijouterie, be assured that it is no paste jewellery, and that Birmingham was not its birthplace. The fresh bloom upon her cheek comes from fresh air and sound health, not from the rouge-pot or any cognate source. Between this novel-writer and the conventional novel-wright, what a gulf profound! Alike, but oh, how different!"
He or she is extolling her writer, praise disguised poetically.
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" ... We may well admit, with one of the authors of "Guesses at Truth," that ordinary novels, which string a number of incidents and a few commonplace pasteboard characters around a love-story, teaching people to fancy that the main business of life is to make love, and to be made love to, and that, when it is made, all is over, are little or nothing else than mischievous; since it is most hurtful to be wishing to act a romance of this kind in real life—most hurtful to fancy that the interest of life lies in its pleasures and passions, not in its duties. But then Miss Austen's are not ordinary novels; hers are not pasteboard characters; and, with all her devotion to the task of delineating this master-principle, she, too, teaches that it is not the main business of life—she, too, contends that duty is before pleasure and passion, sense before sensibility. ... Miss Austen's estimate of love in its true form is as far as can be from that of sickly sentimentalism or flighty school girlishness. She honours it only when invested with the dignity, intensity, and equable constancy of its higher manifestations—where it comprehends and fulfils its wide circle of duties, and is as self-denying as it is self-respecting. There is a righteous intolerance of the mawkish trash which constitutes the staple of so many love-tales, and one cannot but admire Horace Walpole, for once, when he stops unpatiently at the fourth volume of "Sir Charles Grandison," and confesses: "I am so tired of sets of people getting together, and saying, 'Pray, miss, with whom are you in love!' etc., etc." And we grant that Miss Austen is a little too prodigal of scenes of love-making and preparations for match-making; but let us at the same time insist upon the marked difference between her descriptions and those of the common herd of novelists, with whom she is unjustly confounded; the fact being, that her most caustic passages, and the hardest hits and keenest thrusts of her satire, are directed against them and their miss-in-her-teens' extravaganzas. Mr. Thackeray himself is not more sarcastic against snobbism, than is Miss Austen against whatever is affected or perverted, or merely sentimental, in the province of love."
" ... Nothing can be more judicious than her use of suggestions and intimations of what is to follow. And all is conducted with a quiet grace that is, or seems to be inimitable."
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"If this paper has something of the rechauffé odour of a "retrospective" review, it is written not without a "prospective" purpose; the writer being persuaded that Jane Austen needs but to be more widely known, to be more justly appreciated, and accordingly using this opportunity "by way of remembrance." ... "
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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.
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