Feminine Guardian of the Green Core

MUCH RECENT WRITING about Jane Austen has been concerned with situating her more firmly in her own context, or with relating her to ours. Her novels’ apparent immunity to the turmoil of their own era once led critics to concentrate on their ethical themes and their formal properties. More generally, Austen was associated either with a genteel, orderly, country-house world safely distant from the complexities of the present, or with a remote, stultifying society populated by prudes and snobs. But, in the last thirty years, commentators have debated Austen’s political and literary views, and how these are inflected by her sense of herself as a writer from a greatly disadvantaged sex. The recent spate of screen interpretations of her novels has generated much speculation about what these versions reveal of contemporary attitudes to Austen. These three new books, all by Australian academics, offer notable contributions. Penny Gay’s Jane Austen and the Theatre highlights Austen’s strong liking for theatrical performances, and discusses how plays, some of them by nowobscure women playwrights, were important influences on her novels. John Wiltshire’s Recreating Jane Austen is also concerned with questions of creative influence: how biographers engaged with Austen, how Austen responded to Shakespeare, and how film and television have appropriated Austen’s works. Meanwhile, in Romantic Austen, Clara Tuite examines both present and past, arguing that Austen’s novels themselves, in tandem with Romantic and post-Romantic cultural developments, created their own canonical and hence dehistoricised status. Jane Austen and the Theatre assembles the biographical evidence for Austen’s lifelong interest in theatre, challenging the assumption (usually based on the theatricals in Mansfield Park) that she was hostile to such displays. Moreover, Gay suggests, aspects of her plots and characters are probably L I T E R A R Y C R I T I C I S M