And
Consider This
Books
Janeites: Austen's
Disciples and Devotees
Edited by Deidre
Lynch; Princeton
University Press;
233 pages; $17.95
She is an industry,
Jane Austen is. The author and her works are memorialized on film
and on souvenirs with her image, and she inspires scholarly conferences
and dozens of dissertations yearly.
The phenomenon itself--the
Janeite culture--gets a going-over in this collection of essays.
Some of the subjects spring from contemporary concerns--Was Austen
gay? To what degree was she a feminist? How much does colonialism
figure in her writing--and a number of them are so academic as
to have little appeal for the general reader. But for anyone who
admires her books and reads them free of the tea-and-crumpet heritage
myth that surrounds her, there are riches to be mined.
A professor at the
University of East Anglia in Britain, Roger Sales, points out
how closely servants are to the events of Austen's books, especially
seen in the film version of Persuasion. They can be merely
period decoration, but they can also be a threat because they
are often privy to their masters' and mistresses' deepest secrets.
Barbara Benedict, who
chairs the English department at Trinity College in Connecticut,
is persuasive in her view of Austen as less an elitist littérateur
than a practical writer keenly aware of who her readers were,
and someone who freely borrowed from the conventions of the circulating
novels of her day.
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