‘Admiring Pope no more than is proper’

Abstract

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose the detective monk tells his young disciple Adso, ‘Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around….’ The whole question of intertextuality is summed up in Adso’s subsequent observations:

Until then I had thought each book spoke of other things, human and divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that, not infrequently, books speak of books; it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was the place of a long centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another.¹

Even though Jane Austen might seem the most self-sufficient of English novelists, drawing upon nothing more than her own observation of life, the insistent ‘murmuring’ of other books is difficult to ignore when we take a close look at her work. The ‘imperciptible dialogue’ between her novels and the books she has read or that her characters are reading provides a fairly continuous subtext.

… for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper.

Sense and Sensibility