Editor's note.
JANE AUSTEN: the "Romance Queen"? Jane Austen's novels for the hoi polloi? Pride and Prejudice in the supermarket, airport, and tube station? Headline Publishing's scheme to repackage Austen's novels for the marketplace is hardly shocking. This endeavor mirrors (with a difference) Robert Chapman's 1923 publication of Austen's novels as part of Oxford University Press's canon of great English texts. If the Chapman edition served to transport Austen from the drawing room to the oak-paneled libraries of academia, then Headline's paperbacks may boost Mansfield Park or Emma to the top of the charts.In "On looking into Chapman's Emma" (TLS, 13 January 2006), Kathryn Sutherland provides the historical context for Chapman's authoritative edition. The publishing project arose from the chaos of the First World War, precisely because Chapman, from an outpost in the Balkans, saw that industrial warfare threatened to undermine the values of civilization. Once he was de-mobbed and back at work in Oxford, Chapman set about formulating a list of writers whose words were the antidote to anarchy and confusion, and he included one novelist and one woman: Jane Austen.
Chapman chose Austen above all other women writers and beyond all other novelists, Sutherland says, "because of her limitations: because she is safe rather than or before she is great." The "small-scale intimacy" and the conventional marriage plots seem simultaneously to "[assert] Austen's availability and unavailability." Conjoined to the fact that she produced only a handful of novels and a circumscribed cache of letters, her "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village" seemed just the thing to generate a sense of order in the confused post-war 1920s.
When applied to Jane Austen, "safe" is a word--perhaps more than "limitations" or "great"--worth contemplating, especially in light of her current screen presence and designation as Queen of Romance. Big budget costume dramas have made Austen highly accessible: non-readers (as well as readers) flock to the movie theatres, and not just for the haberdashery and great houses. Perhaps because both the author and the novel appear so "available" and "safe," so seemingly undemanding for readers unused to Austen's art and to the complexities of the novel form, the makers of the newest film of Pride and Prejudice substituted their own dialogue for Austen's, edited out a few of the sisters, and stuck a pig in the Bennet house (the director confessed he had only recently read the book). Headline's Austen mania will ratchet up the commercial popularity stakes, but the availability of the books to desperate housewives in supermarkets will also bring an abundance of happy new readers.
Chapman, a classical scholar, wanted to de-sentimentalize Austen's work, which, he felt, suffered from an aura of oppressive gentility, so he laid on footnotes and illustrations. When E. M. Forster reviewed the six-volume set, he noted in his review that Chapman's edition would "[wake] the Jane Austenite up ... [from] primal stupor"; it would release old readers and new readers alike from the presupposition that there was only one way to read Austen: with "the mouth open and the mind closed." Headline's repackaged Austen series, which relies on cute pastel covers to lull buyers into purchasing classics, seems to regress to sentimentality. Let the buyer beware.
Harpies, fleas, bad breath, lovers and other strangers, the Battle of Trafalgar, feeling and humor, the weight of women--these are hardly "safe" topics. In the first section of this journal, the fourteen essays focusing on Jane Austen's Letters in Fact and Fiction seek to plumb the author's minute and panoramic observations of human life in all its contrarieties. If today, with the ease and efficiency of the internet, the art of the letter appears to be lost, the JASNA AGM in Milwaukee has generated an in-depth re-appraisal of the epistolary novel and of Austen's use of correspondence in her own life and in her novels. These essays on the political, religious, social, amatory, formal, and personal aspects of letters will send readers back to their bookshelves for even closer examination of texts.
In the second part of this journal, ten essays ask us to consider carefully how we read and what we view. The essays in The Miscellany are wide-ranging in their content and approach, with the intended effect of delighting and challenging us with carefully framed ideas. From the use of sound in film adaptations to the publishing history of the Persuasions / Northanger Abbey volume to speculation on the location of Longbourn, the essays make clear that there is more than one way to read Jane Austen.
Persuasions No. 27 will be my eighth and, I am grieved to say, my last issue as Editor. My predecessors Joan Austen-Leigh, Lorraine Hanaway, and Gene Koppel created very high standards of dialogue and argumentation, and I hope Issues 20-27 have extended the forum they established for friendly debates. I want to thank both the authors who submitted work over the past eight years and the distinguished members of the Editorial Board who generously assisted in selecting essays for publication. Cheers, as they say here in Yorkshire.
Will the slick supermarket paperbacks wake up potential Janeites to the pleasures of a fine text? Will they turn potential Janeites away from Regency bodice-rippers and toward the real thing? Perhaps each reissued novel should include a JASNA enrolment slip?
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| Title Annotation: | Jane Austen |
|---|---|
| Author: | Kaplan, Laurie |
| Publication: | Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal |
| Article Type: | Editorial |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUK |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2005 |
| Words: | 878 |
| Previous Article: | Annual general meetings of the Jane Austen Society of North America. |
| Next Article: | "The whinnying of harpies?" : humor in Jane Austen's letters. |
| Topics: | |