Jane’s tough world

In early August, Lev Grossman wrote a piece for Time on the continuing apotheosis of Jane Austen:

“It was a cliché 10 years ago to say that the Austen phenomenon was big. It has now burst completely out of its bodice. Jane Austen, who recorded the last gorgeous gasp of pre-industrial England, has herself become a thriving, throbbing industry. Pride & Prejudice alone sold 318,000 copies last year, according to Nielsen BookScan, and this is to say nothing of the numerous spinoffs by other, lesser hands that imagine the later life of Elizabeth Darcy, or her sex life, or recast her and her husband (or Austen herself) as detectives (the winning title in this category has to be Suspense & Sensibility) . . .

“And books are the least of it. Becoming Jane , an Austen biopic starring Anne Hathaway, opens this week. September will bring the movie of The Jane Austen Book Club . Masterpiece Theater is currently re-filming four of the novels— Mansfield Park , Northanger Abbey , Persuasion , and Sense & Sensibility —in preparation for a marathon broadcast of The Complete Jane Austen next year. We can’t seem to put down Austen, or leave her alone, or get to the end of her. She has become a commodity for which there is an infinite demand.

Along the way Grossman quotes Princeton’s Claudia Johnson, who described “the real Austen” as “very satiric, and ironic.” So far, so good. Then: “She’s very dubious about the world she lives in, but she’s not radical, or revolutionary. She does try to explore ways of finding pockets of resistance and independence in a world that’s pretty grim.” There’s something to this. Austen had something of the impish rebel about her. But as a description of her overall program, it’s hard to agree: Austen certainly did not her world “pretty grim,” nor think of it as a prison.

Grossman is way over the top when he says,

“There is a suggestion of Orwellian despair in Austen: as in 1984, her characters cannot hope to break the iron cage around them, can only clear a little space inside it where they can be themselves. Austen’s upper lip is defiantly stiff.”

His most telling observation is this parenthetical comment: “(Johnson notes, fascinatingly, that at the turn of the 20th century, Austen’s reputation was as a man’s novelist, not a woman’s—her hard-boiled, buttoned-down, unsentimental attitude was considered insufficiently feminine.)”