Discerning a Through Line in Austen's Oeuvre

The writings of the young Jane Austen have recently received considerable scholarly attention, while also achieving unprecedented visibility outside of the academy. The monograph Jane Austen, Young Author (Routledge, 2016) capped Juliet McMaster's distinguished career as an interpreter, editor, illustrator, and publisher of Austen's juvenilia. The following year, Oxford World's Classics added a new edition of Teenage Writings, coedited by Kathryn Sutherland, the foremost authority on Austen's manuscripts, and Freya Johnston. (Until recently available as a World's Classic is Catharine and Other Writings, updated by its editor Margaret Ann Doody in 2009.) Sutherland's own monumental five-volume annotated edition, Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, an update of her 2012 digital edition of the same title, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. The 2020 annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, held virtually, took as its theme “Jane Austen's Juvenilia: Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution.” The three plenary speakers were McMaster, Sutherland, and Peter Sabor, who edited the Juvenilia volume (2006) for the Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Jane Austen. In summer 2023, the award-winning Jane Austen Summer Program, hosted by the University of North Carolina, centered on Jane Austen's teenage writings. Also, Austen's House in Chawton, England, recently debuted a new grant-funded set of programs that encourage secondary students to find inspiration in what Austen composed when she was their age.Jane Austen, Early and Late enters the arena with a strong argument bolstered by erudition. Johnston's central purpose is to question how Austen's career has been understood in terms of early, middle, and late periods, on the evidence of family accounts of her composition, as well as of her works’ thematic and stylistic attributes. As Johnston compellingly contends, Austen's teenage writings have a great deal in common with her mature works, and vice versa. In her introduction, Johnston sums up her project as follows: “Jane Austen, Early and Late examines [Austen's] first known works and their reception, initially within and then, gradually, outside her own familial circle. It focuses on the dubious chronology of her compositions, her likely sources and influences, on her comic and stylistic repertoire, and on the relationship of her earliest known manuscript works to the later, celebrated novels” (17). On these bases, Johnston queries “whether it makes sense to refer to an ‘early’ or a ‘late’ Jane Austen at all” (17).Johnston capably recapitulates the publishing history of Austen's juvenilia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular attention to how disparagingly these works were viewed by her descendants. “It has taken an especially long time for her earliest writings to gain critical attention and discussion, let alone interest and praise,” she declares (10). My own research, which entailed discovering the unconventional acclaim of two American critics, complicates this view. In his 1891 biography, The Story of Jane Austen's Life, Oscar Fay Adams advocated for the appreciation of Austen's works in manuscript, from her teenage writings to the uncompleted novels known to us as The Watsons and Sanditon. In 1928, Charles Beecher Hogan, then finishing his undergraduate studies at Yale and aspiring to a career as an Austen scholar and collector, noted in his reading journal that he considered R. W. Chapman's recently published edition of Love and Freindship [sic] to be “a very important book. Tho perhaps not invaluable in itself, it easily shows the germs of all the great points in Jane Austen: observation, truth, humor, justice, & the great art of telling a story.”1Among Johnston's most valuable contributions is her skepticism about supposedly authoritative manuscript sources familiar to Austen scholars. She examines at length the two tiny pages on which Cassandra Austen jotted her recollections of the dates of composition and earlier titles of her sister's major novels. Cassandra's note that “North-hanger Abbey was written / about the years 98 & 99” prompts these incisive questions: Why . . . is so little information given about Northanger Abbey, a novel for which Jane Austen herself—in her authorial “Advertisement”—provides the detail that it was “finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication” (NA, p. 1)? Why is this early work placed at the end of the list? Does the strange form of the title—“North-hanger”—show traces of a Hampshire accent? . . . Does it perhaps indicate how the name of the abbey might have been spelt in the no-longer-surviving manuscript of the novel? Or might it reveal a lack of familiarity with that name when used as a title, one which was not given to the novel by Jane Austen herself? What relationship does the text of 1798–99 have to that of 1803, or indeed to that which was eventually published after Austen's death in 1817? (53)Of Rev. George Austen's letter—helpfully included in facsimile reproduction—offering to the London publisher Thomas Cadell “a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols, about the length of Miss Burney's,” Johnston points out that it is an assumption, not a fact, that Jane's father was referring to “First Impressions,” the predecessor of Pride and Prejudice (78).Illuminating too is the context Johnston provides for the description penciled on the inside cover of “Volume the Third” of Austen's teenage writings: “Effusions of Fancy / by a very Young Lady / consisting of Tales / in a Style entirely new.” As she remarks, this annotation “has traditionally been understood as the Rev. George Austen's, although it could with equal plausibility have been written by Jane or Cassandra Austen” (78). (Johnston's “Appendix: A Note on Marginalia” offers a master class in distinguishing Jane Austen's handwriting from that of her relatives, via two dozen never-before-published photographs of marginalia in the privately owned copy of Goldsmith's History of England that was annotated by generations of the Austen family.) Johnston makes a detailed case that “Effusions by young ladies were, by the late eighteenth century, an established genre” (78) of published works. Thus, whoever devised this description for Austen's teenage writings may, according to Johnston, have been not only imagining but also actively preparing for their future publication. In an unusual but gripping rhetorical maneuver, Johnston introduces this possibility with a counterfactual account of the publication in 1793 of “a slim miscellaneous volume, . . . Effusions of Fancy by a very young lady, consisting of tales in a style entirely new,” which launched its unnamed author's “career in satirical fiction” (77). Viewers of Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park (1999) will recall a similar inspiration there, as Edmund Bertram proudly reports to Fanny Price, whom Rozema has reinvented as a young writer in an explicitly Austenian mode, that he has “spoke[n] to a John Ward at Edgerton's [in] town and he's willing to publish, at our expense of course, but you would keep ten percent of profits. . . . I was thinking of a title: ‘Effusions of Fancy in a Style Entirely New by a Very Young Girl.’ ”2Distributed throughout Johnston's case studies of how apparently disparate works of Austen's relate to each other is a series of trenchant observations about authorial choices and effects, of which the following are representative examples: The desirability or not of completion as it relates to completeness—the need to have done, even if elements of the work are left undone or uncertain—is rehearsed in many of Austen's early as well as late pieces of fiction. (8)The teenage works are, collectively, exercises in stockpiling and consuming that stock as rapidly as possible once it has been gathered in, so that many stories read as if they have concluded in virtually the same breath as that in which they began. (148)Austen began from a very young age to think about the motives and scope of universal truths. What purchase, if any, does the universal continue to possess, when exemplified in a number of different situations and individual people? (208)Such declarations and questions not only contribute to scholarly thinking about Austen, but could also fuel lively conversations among students and, indeed, fans. Yet Johnston herself only rarely nods to how Austen matters to readers outside the academy. Her final chapter reflects briefly on “why [Austen] continues to provoke so many sequels or rewritings” (214) and on what “perhaps remains [the] chief draw [of Austen's style] for readers” (217).Regrettably, Jane Austen, Early and Late is unlikely to appeal to such readers, or to be comprehensible to all but the most advanced students, in large part because of its structure. Each chapter unspools without any discernible road map, with their titles—“Developing,” “Effusions of Fancy,” “Reading and Repeating,” “Dying with Laughter,” “Histories,” “The Village and the Universe”—providing only a hazy sense of what is to come. (Johnston does not employ chapter subtitles.) “Dying with Laughter,” it turns out, is about Austen's final composition, the so-called “Venta Verses,” and her next-to-last work, Sanditon, measured against the teenage writings—but why this endeavor takes place in the middle of the monograph rather than at the end (or elsewhere), we are left to guess. In Johnston's introduction, a highly original interpretation of Cassandra's portrait of her sister appears out of nowhere. Equally unheralded is the chief subject matter of “The Village and the Universe”: a rumination on the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Most chapters come to a close without explicit conclusions, as does the book as a whole.A further shortcoming is the unevenness of Johnston's acknowledgment of prior scholarship. She is admirably thorough when supplying evidence to support her assertions, as for instance when supporting her interpretation of Persuasion with words, deleted by Austen, that Sutherland has newly deciphered in the canceled chapters, and when collating what Johnston calls “a dense cluster of ‘truths’ being ‘universally acknowledged’ in publications of the 1780s and 90s, the years of Austen's literary apprenticeship” (207). Johnston demonstrates, moreover, how widely read she is in Austen criticism not only of the distant past but also of the last decade, drawing connections between her claims and articles that might seem to have little relevance to her project. Yet she gives very short shrift to much prior scholarship on the juvenilia per se. She dispatches the work of McMaster, Doody, and Christine Alexander in little more than a page. Most surprising is her lack of any sustained engagement with McMaster's Jane Austen, Young Author, which is at odds with her explicit claim that her own book, “like McMaster's, finds ‘the continuity as notable as the discontinuity’ between the teenage and the adult writer” (17). The common ground between Johnston's ideas and those Doody has espoused in recent years emerges only indirectly, from another of Johnston's pithy summaries: But Austen's might also be a career that is understood as a perpetual attempt to adjust the rival claims of satire and sentiment, Gothic and realism, a combination of young and old in which the early quixotic strain is not necessarily rejected or chastened but rather encouraged to live on, alongside other ways of seeing the world. To do justice to Doody, she has herself recently embraced something akin to this view of Austen's works, rejecting her earlier lament for the lost exuberance of a teenage comedian. (27)Surely the proper order is reversed: Johnston herself is developing a view akin to that lately advanced by Doody.Altogether, Jane Austen, Early and Late makes a resounding case for becoming well acquainted with the author's manuscripts, and for moving beyond critical commonplaces when considering Austen's supposed “development” as a writer. We do well to remember, as Johnston reminds us, that Austen returned to her teenage writings throughout her adult life and worked on her subsequent novels in an overlapping rather than discrete manner. Imaginative juxtaposition, which served Austen so fruitfully in her fiction, invigorates criticism of her works as well.