Austen the Romantic?

Though Austen lived almost two decades into the nineteenth century, she is usually characterized as a writer of the eighteenth. Her aesthetic and tastes were set in stone by 1800 (when she was 25), and she was untouched by romanticism. Indeed, she is often read as an anti-Romantic writer.

The situation is of course more complicated. Cowper, her favorite poet, was already developing “romantic” themes in his eighteenth century poetry. And William Deresiewicz has argued that Austen is quite directly indebted to Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron. A few bits of his argument capture the gist:

“None of the four [romantics] is among the authors her family mentions as her favorites . . . . There is no explicit mention of Wordsworth in her novels or unfinished manuscripts until we find him in Sanditon among the favorite authors – along with Scott, Burns, and others – of the absurd Sir Edward Denham, that Don Quixote of Don Juans. Coleridge is not mentioned at all in her novels or manuscripts, nor is either poet referred to in her letters. Scott and Byron, of course, are alluded to prominently in Persuasion; Scott is mentioned – along with Cowper and Thomson – as among the favorite authors of Marianne Dashwood and is quited admiringly by Fanny Price; and both poets are referred to in the letters, Scott several times, Byron once.”

Deresiewicz argues that Austen must have read the authors, more deeply that might be apparent. She gave a copy of Scott’s Marmion to her brother Charles, and quoted it in letters. Plus, her general reading habits argue in favor of the thesis that she knew the romantics well: “A reader whose reading was, as her brother tells us, ‘very extensive in history and belles lettres,’ and whose memory was extremely tenacious’; a reader carefully attuned and exquisitely responsive to the latest developments in the fiction, poetry, and drama of her day; a reader who, as a writer is always very careful to show us what her characters read, and that the most avid readers among them read what is most up-to-date – that such a reader would have neglected to read just those two poets, two of the half-dozen most important new poets of her adulthood, is improbably to the point of being incredible.”

The fact that she puts Scott and Byron to satirical purposes doesn’t mean she disliked them: “For Austen, satire was the sincerest form of flattery. Nothing could be more obvious from the juvenalia that the fiction she ridicules with such merciless glee she also passionately, guiltily adored. For one thing, she could never have known such books well enough to lampoon them as brilliantly as she does if she had not been reading them by the bucketful – and no one keeps reading what they simply despise. Parody, as that point, was an indirect way of handling her own divided response, her feelings of guilty pleasure . . . . She recognized the claims of sense, of course – of reason, of prudence – but the claims of sensibility – of energy, of desire – she did not have to recognize; they thrust themselves upon her. She esteemed ‘Elinor,’ but she loved ‘Marianne.’ She esteemed Pope, of the poets she encountered in her youth, but she loved Cowper; of the poets she encountered in her maturity, she esteemed Crabbe, but it is to Scott and Byron that she paid the supreme compliment of creating a character who loves them not wisely, but too well.”

More directly, Deresiewicz finds an allusion to Wordsworth, overlaying an allusion to Gilpin (theoretician of the picturesque) in the reference to Tintern Abbey in Mansfield Park . And in Emma , when Knightley begins to discern the special relationship between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax by reading small clues, Austen deliberately alludes to Cowper, but again with an overlay of Wordsworth: Cowper’s line, “Myself creating what I saw,” quoted by Austen, becomes in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” “eye, and ear, – both what they half create,/ and what perceive.”

The double allusion fits the context perfectly: “what Knightley is doing at that moment, after all, is precisely ‘half-perceiving, half-creating’ – observing signs and imagining, correctly, what lies behind them. This is not quite the kind of imaginative half-creation Wordsworth has in mind, but it does offer the same contrast to Cowper’s (and Emma’s) creation-from-whole-cloth – a responsible use of the imagination, grounded in careful observation, to discover hidden truths. And this is exactly the use of imagination Austen demands of her readers throughout the novel, both through the many puzzles and riddles she has us play along with her characters and, more important, through the very structure of the novel itself, a grand mystery story or puzzle-text that continually forces us to read clues and guess at the hidden truths that lie behind them.”