Jane Austen

As far as criticism and the public at large were concerned, Jane Austen was a minor writer of a past age. The point is nicely made by the comment Trollope wrote on the end-papers of his copy of Emma in 1865: 'It is as a portrait of female life among ladies in an English village 50 years ago that Emma is to be known and remembered.' What changed all this was the Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, published in 1870. Until then, the novelist had remained a shadowy figure. The bare facts were in a 'Biographical Notice' that her brother Henry had added to Persuasion and Northanger Abbey at the end of 1817, a few months after his sister's death. The 'Notice' was enlarged slightly in 1833.

Welcomed by her admirers, the Memoir also had the immediate effect of awakening public interest in an author virtually forgotten. This is not to say that overnight Jane Austen became widely read. But she instantly became an author widely written about, for the biography provided human interest and material for a flood of appreciative essays and reviews, many of them written by devoted readers keen to share their enthusiasm with the world at large.

All we now know about Jane Austen's method of writing, her craftsmanship, her careful revision of the manuscripts and the attention she gave to her proofs, confirms Austen-Leigh's 'dear Aunt Jane' as an endearing fiction. Doubtless, from his angle of vision, from what he had seen and known of her himself as a child (he was born in 1798), and gathered from his sisters, who helped him with the Memoir, Austen-Leigh wrote in good faith. Yet he also set out to maintain the illusion of Aunt Jane's ladylike amateurism. This was coupled with the idea that the family held first place in her life and that writing was simply a polite accomplishment that she permitted herself at odd moments when time and opportunity offered.

First made public in Lockhart's Life of Scott, 1837-38, these touching and perceptive remarks at once became the kernel of Jane Austen criticism, the statutory quotation. No article or essay could proceed far without it - not simply because Scott's paragraph carried the stamp of authority but because it pointed to a homely truth which ordinary readers could confirm for themselves. It was a truth with a lasting appeal, as we can see in Ezra Pound's comment that 'People will read Miss Austen because of her knowledge of the human heart, and not solely for her refinement.'

Equally baffling was the Introduction to another American high-school text, of Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1908 (with new editions until 1919), which advised the student that Jane Austen's novels 'are referred to now as models, and are especially acceptable to minds of a high order'.

It was with some success, then, that Austen-Leigh fashioned the sparse and discontinuous critical heritage up to 1870 into a seemingly compact and organised record. The orchestration was immediately effective. Reviews followed and a widespread interest in Jane Austen was awakened. The Memoir's first printing of one thousand copies was soon exhausted.

This lauding of Jane Austen at the expense of contemporary fiction was, in some quarters, seen as outright provocation and duly answered. The popular novelist James Payn, reviewing the Memoir in Chamber's Journal (5 March 1870), complained at the activities of the '"goody-goody" people' who condemn 'all that sensational stuff' and 'think it wrong to "waste their time over novels" of any sort, and they only recommend Miss Austen as a sort of alternative medicine, through which eventually the depraved literary stomach might be adapted for really wholesome food'. There was substance to his complaint and Jane Austen was soon to become a pawn in the dispute between the over-delicate Ruskinians and advocates of a more vigorous diet.