Surface and Subsurface

Abstract

I take the metaphor of my chapter title from Charlotte Brontë’s memorable criticism of Jane Austen:

She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood;… Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden … — this Miss Austen ignores.²

A version of this paper was originally published in Ariel, 5:2 (April, 1974), pp. 5–24. Since then, further discussions of Jane Austen’s handling of love and the passions have emerged. I refer the interested reader particularly to Barbara Hardy, “The Feelings and the Passions,” the second chapter of her A Reading of Jane Austen (London: Owen, 1975), pp. 37–65; Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “This Old Maid: Jane Austen Replies to Charlotte Brontë and D.H. Lawrence,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 30:3 (December, 1975), pp. 399–419; and A. O. J. Cockshut, Man and Woman: A Study ofLove and the Novel, 1740–1940 (London: Collins, 1977). It would be anachronistic to update further for this 1978 essay.