Customer Reviews

Janeites : Austen's disciples and devotees

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This more than just a book on Jane Austen, this is a book on Jane Austen Fans. They are called 'Janeite's' after Rudyard Kipling's famous short story "The Janeites" about a group of soldiers recovering from injuries in the First World War - and the secret, almost Mason-like, society that has been formed in the world by her fans. If only this were true!

Deidre Lynch has collected together nine essays on Austen. The collection deals with the rise and fall of Jane's popularity as an author with the public and with literary critics through the ages and in different countries. Some of these author's are at the foremost of Austen research, William Galperin whose essay is Chapter 4 is one of the names I recognise best from my past reading and his essay on Austen's earliest readers is a fascinating historical perspective that blends in well with Claudia Johnson's essay (chapter one in this book).

For American's reading this book you might be most interested in chapter seven by Mary A Favret "Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America" - which also touches on the diabolical mess of a movie made in 1940 of Pride and Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.

There are two interesting departures from the simple discussion of critics and culture with two essays in this book - although they are both on questions often asked by Austen Fans. Chapter 5 by Clara Tuite is on the strange and ambiguous nature (to our modern ears anyway) of entails. This issue is most relevant to Austen's book Pride and Prejudice in which the Bennett girls will be left almost penniless because of an entail - a matter which means they must marry.

The other chapter of interest is chapter 8 by Roger Sales which is on the matter of servants - or very much the lack of them in Austen.

This book is by no means one that you would read cover to cover in a single sitting, it is an academic work, and is fully footnoted etc., however some of these essays are highly readable and enjoyable. I have a feeling that most people will treat this as some kind of university text and throw it away the moment they have passed their course. However if you are an Austen Fan, or are interested in her as an author then I would recommend this. It is an excellent and varied collection which manages to answer some of the key questions asked by Austen's fans on her works. It is also a great historical look at her fans through the ages, and the reasons for the ardency of afficiando's. At least take a look at chapter one and see if Austen is the author for you.

As a group, the nine essays and introduction which comprise this book irritated me profoundly. As a former editor and academic teacher, I was simply affronted by the uneven quality of the contributions: a couple were superb; several were above average; a couple were ok but not outstanding; and the remainder would rate from poor to absymally awful. Since the editor, as her introduction and the apparatus of the book shows, is a competent scholar, it is difficult to understand why she exercised no more control over the quality of the contents. Leaving that aside, and to avoid making some really odious comments on individual essays, I would particularly recommend to readers the articles by Barbara M. Benedict, "Sensibility by the Numbers: Austen's Work as Regency Popular Fiction," and Susan Fraiman, "Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism," which in themselves make the purchase of Janeites worthwhile.

If the reader believes the descriptions of this book and the introduction by Deirdre Lynch, they are probably expecting essays that chiefly deal with non-academic fans of Jane Austen. They don't, especially not with contemporary fans. Knowing that the authors are mainly academics, I don't mark this down for the often impenetrable writing, although I think "publish-or-perish" has a lot to answer for, but I wouldn't have read this if I had known what it actually was.

Lynch's essay is one of the better pieces in the book, and the non-academic may be amused by her rueful acknowledgement that unauthorized laity are reading and forming opinions without guidance from the experts. If the authors meant to study lay readers, I would have thought that they would have started with the Jane Austen societies. Lynch mentions the "Republic of Pemberly" website, but none of the authors consult it. The essays deal almost entirely with the opinions of critics and other literary figures such as E.M. Forster.

The authors would also have been well-advised to read Natalie Taylor's The Friendly Jane Austen: A Well-Mannered Introduction to a Lady of Sense and Sensibility, which divides the fans into four different main groups. Most of the authors take a very narrow view of what people enjoy in their reading. One writes about "Americanizing" Jane Austen; it apparently never occurs that one might not need to do that to enjoy a foreign author. One also doesn't have to identify with the gentry of Austen's books to identify with their common human feelings, desires and frailties.

There are some interesting snippets about early readers, lending libraries, Virago press authors, the movies, etc., but it is often buried in rambling academese and much is discussed elsewhere. Picking apart the details of books can be fun when it is done with the flair and wit of John Sutherland's Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?: Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford World's Classics), alas, he is not one of the authors. The piece on Edward Said's view of Jane Austen was one of the best essays, but again, what has this to do with lay Jane Austen fans?

I am sure that many academically-minded people would enjoy this book, but it is misleadingly described.