THE ONCE AND FUTURE AUSTEN

Janet Todd's edition of Austen: Nevj Perspectives (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), volume three of new series of Women & Literature, probably ranks as best collection of essays on its subject in at least past ten years. A large collection, especially noteworthy for its fresh approaches and its focus on course of future criticism, it numbers nineteen separate pieces (in addition introduction); twelve of these repay serious attention?six offer good, solid work, and six others are even better, some of finest analyses available anywhere. And of these last editor has most compelling essay in book, Who's Afraid of Austen? a fascinating study of Virginia Woolf's ambivalent, uneasy response Austen. As Todd shows, Woolf praises as well as faults the mother of for her impersonality, nonpolemical stance, sureness of class, artistic perfection, and critical awareness. Because Austen fails accord with Woolf's ideas about women, women authors, and Woolf herself, she threatens later novelist, representing the context that limits and proves limits. This essay, readable, thorough, persuasive, tells much about both writers and conveys vividly a sense of a literary tradition and of women within that tradition. As such, it has great general merit and, more particularly, serves as a hallmark of excellence that so-called feminist criti? cism can achieve. In addition Todd, David Spring, David Monaghan, Ali stair M. Duckworth, Joel Weinsheimer, and Jocelyn Harris also have superior work their credit. Spring's Interpreters of Austen's Social World: Literary Critics and Historians clarifies confusion that has marked interpretation of Austen's society, providing an admira? ble account of early nineteenth-century England's rural elite, aristocracy, gentry, and nonlanded families, groups composing what Austen called neighborhood. He ends with plea, quite pertinent current criticism, that, among historians and literary critics [of novels], there might well be more awareness than now exists of what others are doing. In The Complexity of Austen's Novels Monaghan argues well for a full rather than thin reading, for richness of her created world, richness that captures the tensions of real living. Though she may at times appear in roles as varied as conservative ideologist, critic of status quo, idealistic fantasist, and jaundiced observer of human foibles, Monaghan correctly insists that to reduce her any of them is miss complexity of her achievement. In Jane Austen and Conflict of Interpretations, a dense but engaging and provocative essay, Duckworth also addresses issue of diverse and