A Name to Conjure With

IT IS THE CUSTOM--though not without exceptions--to organize annual meetings of JASNA around specific works of Jane Austen--Vancouver's Emma, Milwaukee's Letters, Tucson's Mansfield Park. At times, of course, themes been chosen instead, as in Philadelphia's upcoming Brothers and Sisters in 2009. But the organizers of this year's annual meeting invited us to think in broader terms about what Jane Austen has given to us, what she has bequeathed. That, at least, is how I first understood the keyword legacy when I was asked to speak here. At that time, I planned to address the question Can we much Jane A new batch of dramatizations of Austen's novels was then being released on PBS, and they seemed to me to be so uninspired that I was willing to wonder, for the first time in my entire career, whether this legacy business--and I do mean business--had been taken far. Has Austen left us with much? Is she much with us? Is possible? Could we all do well to read, to watch, to love Jane Austen a bit less? This is not an idle question. Rightly or wrongly, Austen is not a writer ever associated with too much. If anything, we associate her with a fundamental stylistic and moral economy--with measure, containment, control. And yet is also true that the culture of Jane Austen knows no measure at all. As Reginald Farrer observed, There is no via media indeed where Austen is concerned (246). All the excess one so rarely finds inside Austen's novels one finds abundantly outside them--in the enthusiasm of readers who are never disappointed in or cloyed by her novels. Ever since the Victorian period, vaunting one's repeated re-readings of the novels has been the very touchstone of Janeism. Sir Francis Darwin brags that Macaulay himself could not endured to read her as often as I have (65-66). Reporting that Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times, Rowland Grey agrees that Austen's novels are best read and again (38-39). Though Reginald Farrer's essay takes great pains to situate itself as modern as opposed to Victorian, sustains the hyperbole of Victorian Janeism--the thousandth reading of 'Emma' or 'Persuasion,' he declares, will be certain to reveal ... jewels unnoticed before (251). The thousandth reading? Even secondary Janeite discourses absorb the desires of fans, as Lord Iddesleigh avers (prognosticating the appearance of JASNA's Persuasions, perhaps?): it would be a very delightful thing if a magazine could be started that should be devoted entirely to Miss Austen.... We are never tired of talking about her; should we ever, he asks, grow weary of reading or writing about her? (811). Janeites, from the get-go, then, are by definition a set of readers who cannot get enough of Jane Austen. If we did weary of her, we would not be Janeites. And if we wearied of the recent batch of PBS dramatizations, would to follow, as the night the day, that they weren't really Jane Austen but rather some crude imitation of her (like the designer knockoff perfume Amber wears in Clueless, in her Eltonian, wannabe effort to emulate the real thing that Chef/Emma wears). All of this is fine and good, and as water tight as only a syllogism could be, but would make for a pretty brief and predictable paper, and not the sort I like to write: Can we much Jane Austen? No. So I began to think of legacy in different terms. Consulting the OED, I discovered that the sense of legacy as bequest is in fact its second, later meaning. Its first (though now somewhat archaic) meaning is legation, what we might today call delegation. A legate is an envoy, an ambassador sent to speak in someone else's name. Let me now explore what Austen's legacy might be if we thought about in this older sense, as someone or something sent forth to speak in place of the real person. It is fitting, given the shift in emphasis from bequest to emissary, that I start with a ghost story, for ghosts are emanations, and emanations envoys of sorts. …

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