"Song of the Dying Swan"?: The Nineteenth-Century Response to 'Persuasion.'

And what are you reading, Miss--? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down the book with an affected indifference, or momentary shame.--It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.(1) This famous passage from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is part of a forthright defense of fiction against the belief, common in the early nineteenth century, that novels constituted at best a frivolous form of amusement. Significantly, in celebrating Fanny gurney's Cecilia and Camilla and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, the passage champions women novelists in particular. Subsequent decades of the nineteenth century were of course to see an increase in the prestige of the novel as a literary form, but it remained the case that women's achievements in the genre were often trivialized and patronized. One notable casualty of such treatment was the fiction of Austen herself. It is generally accepted that much Austen criticism before the important studies of Mary Lascelles, D. W. Harding, and F. R. Leavis in the 1930s and 1940s: was superficial and often sentimental--seldom registering, let alone analyzing, the force and pervasiveness of her irony. But the extent to which this state of affairs arose from persistent nineteenth-century conceptions of women's writing has not been sufficiently acknowledged. In Austen's case, two complementary tendencies seem to have been at work. Firstly, with the rise to prominence of numerous women novelists, especially from the 1830s onwards, there was much discussion of the features that might be specific to, or typical of, women's writing: critics habitually dealt with women novelists in such terms. But since the underlying contemporary assumption was that women's intellectual and creative powers were fundamentally inferior to men's, critics usually considered women's novels as inferior to men's as well-however much they might praise female authors for the peculiarly womanly strengths of their work. Secondly, women were conventionally believed to lack the inventive and imaginative capacities to venture beyond their own personal experience for their fictional material. Thus (it was thought) women's writing inevitably both expressed the essential qualities of womanhood and was restricted in its scope by the circumstances of the writers' lives.(3) For nineteenth-century commentators on Jane Austen, moreover, the available biographical material--Henry Austen's Notice accompanying the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1817 and James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of 1870--only served to confirm the relevance to her case of these pervasive notions about women's writing. These texts attributed to Jane Austen herself traits conventionally considered feminine, such as modesty. delicacy, sweetness, and gentleness, traits that were consequently identified in the novels. In addition, the Memoir especially enabled readers to equate the range and milieu of the novels with those of Austen's life. The belief that Jane Austen's fiction is both autobiographical and redolent of feminity pervades nineteenth-century commentary on all of the novels, and there was much generalization about them based on these assumptions. Yet Persuasion, the last novel Austen completed? was often seen as different from its; predecessors. It hence challenged the validity of generalizations about her work. and critics' sense of its novelty led them to try to define the novel's unusual character, especially its emotional power. While in some cases this endeavor resulted in a reinforcement of the conventional view of Austen, other commentators detected in her a creative talent and a critical judgment seldom attributed to women writers. …