Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and the Academy

ALTHOUGH JANE AUSTEN'S LEGACY is now more powerful and influential than ever before, I believe that her life, our love, and her laughter actually get her into trouble. So how does knowledge of an author's life affect the reading of her works? How does loving her affect her academic reputation? And how does she still make us laugh, and why? After thirty years of conference-going, I'm still amazed that academics pay so little attention to her. Scholars do of course teach and publish on Austen, but we rarely talk about her at our meetings. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies this year, only 17 people out of 562 spoke about Austen, even though she drew much of her intellectual nourishment from the eighteenth century. Perhaps that's because her brief career slips between two literary periods: the long Eighteenth Century (from the Restoration up to either 1815 or 1832), and Romanticism (up to Victoria's accession in 1837). She rarely appears at Shakespeare conferences, even though she freely adapts and rewrites his plays. Nor is she any more visible in nineteenth-century circles. At the meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism in Toronto this year, only 4 out of 251 speakers even mentioned her. And yet critics now make a persuasive case for Austen being a Romantic pioneer, not just a follower. Does she come too early for nineteenth-century studies? Charlotte Bronte's condemnation forced to choose between herself and Austen, but I see dialogues between Jane Eyre and Emma, as well as shared affinities to Mary Wollstonecraft. Indeed, it might be said that all of Austen's heroines aspire to become Wollstonecraft's ideal, 'a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart,' as Elizabeth Bennet describes herself (PP 109). And given Austen's effect on writers such as Mrs. Gaskell, she might be expected to figure largely at nineteenth-century conferences. But she doesn't. Possible explanations include the move from single-author studies to multidisciplinary ones, the recovery of other women authors, and the general expansion of the canon. Comparisons with Samuel Johnson are nevertheless revealing. Johnson is a regular presence at eighteenth-century society meetings, I suggest, because so many of their founding members--most of them men--were his admirers. By contrast, much of the important work on Austen appears elsewhere, at conferences that focus on her life, works, and influence, especially those of the Jane Austen Society of North America and Chawton House Library. That matters little, but I still find it puzzling that Austen's institutional authority isn't so entrenched as Johnson's. The reason may lie in the Chicago conference's themes of life, love, and laughter. LIFE Johnson holds the advantage over Austen because of the sheer copiousness of materials about him, including portraits, a death-mask, a record of his autopsy, and--thanks especially to Boswell--his life. Nothing is spared, nothing obscured. Laid out before us like a specimen in an anatomy theatre, Johnson exhibits all his faults, virtues, and endearing foibles. How can one not identify with such a man? As Helen Deutsch writes in Loving Dr. Johnson, readers of Johnson and Boswell recognize their common truth in Johnson the man, rather than Johnson the writer (23). In other words, it is Johnson's flawed life and body rather than his art that catches their imagination. Johnsonians love their author primarily because they know so much about him. Materials for Jane Austen's life are by contrast sparse, and it takes a sensitive imagination to spin biographies out of 161 letters, a handful of poems and prayers, a few scattered impressions, and the recollections of family members. Several excellent biographies do in fact exist. But as Kathryn Sutherland proves in her important new edition of James Edward Austen-Leigh's memoir, the family's version of her is extremely misleading because they burnt the greater part of her letters, cut up or censored others, and turned the sharp-faced woman of Cassandra's portrait into the sweet girl of Victorian ideology (Textual Lives, ch. …

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