Abstract
Why is Jane Austen so frequently connected with notions of Englishness? Why is Austen’s England forever green? And when did this notion first conquer the popular imaginary? Through a reading of 1920s continuations of the novels, I argue that Austen was active in shaping Englishness in the aftermath of World War I—spearheading a movement towards nostalgia characteristic of the inter-war period. Little-known Austen sequels by Edith Brown, L. Oulton, E. Barrington and others are read alongside the early twentieth-century proliferation of war memorials to argue that the print afterlives are central to the 1910s–1920s reconstruction of Austen as a monument of national identity.
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Notes
- 1.
An average of 7000 British men were killed or wounded daily (Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, 6, 41]) (Fussell 1975), approximately 750,000 died during the war (J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995]). (Winter 1995). The Watsons (1928) is advertised as the work of Edith and her husband Francis Brown. However, since it is Edith who signs the preface, dedicates the book to her father and generally speaks in the first person singular, I will refer to this continuation as hers. Watsons (1928)
- 2.
C. M., “The Solace of Literature in the Trenches”, The War Illustrated, 22 December 1915, lxvi. http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Bibliography/Solace_01.htm. Accessed 1 September 2012. (C. M. 1915)
- 3.
Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (1995): 35–189, 132. (Assmann 1995)
- 4.
Ibid. (Assmann 1995)
- 5.
The notable exception is Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Janeites”, which takes Austen to the trenches. Kipling, “The Janeites”, in Debits and Credits (London: Macmillan, 1924–1926), 143–176 (Kipling 1924–1926). This story has been thoroughly studied by Claudia L. Johnson in a number of publications: “Austen Cults and Cultures”, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 211–226 (Johnson 1997); “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies”, in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 25–44 (Johnson 2000); and, more recently, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Chapter 3. (Johnson 2012)
- 6.
Kirk Savage, “The War Memorial as Elegy”, in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 639, 645. (Savage 2010)
- 7.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24, 19. (Nora 1989)
- 8.
Fussell, The Great War, 191, 210. (Fussell 1975)
- 9.
Martin Jarrett-Kerr, “The Mission of Eng Lit (Letters)”, Times Literary Supplement, 3 February 1984, 111. (Jarrett-Kerr 1984)
- 10.
A. C. Bradley, “Jane Austen: A Lecture” (1911), in Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, 2, ed. Ian Littlewood (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1998), 199–217, 204. (Bradley 1998)
- 11.
Sybil Brinton, Old Friends and New Fancies (London: Holden & Hardingham, 1913). (Brinton 1913)
- 12.
L. Oulton, The Watsons by Jane Austen, Author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, etc. Concluded by L. Oulton (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1923), 131 (Oulton 1923). Austen’s The Watsons is the story of Emma Watson, the daughter of an impoverished country parson. After her mother’s death, Emma is adopted by her rich aunt and uncle, the Turners, and brought up away from her closest relatives in comparative luxury. Following her husband’s death, Mrs Turner remarries, and Emma is returned portionless to her father.
- 13.
Catherine Anne Hubback, The Younger Sister (London: Newby, 1850) (Hubback 1850). Despite these notable attempts at fidelity, reviewers still thought that Oulton and Brown fell short of Austen. Writing for The Nation, Dorothy Graffe noted that Oulton failed to reproduce nineteenth-century diction, although her way of solving the plot was credible. Similarly, an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement criticised Brown’s historical inaccuracies and her failure to represent Regency manners. Graffe, “Not Jane Austen”, The Nation 116, no. 3019 (16 May 1923), 576 (Graffe 1923); “The Watsons”, Times Literary Supplement, 17 May 1928, 375.
- 14.
A. B. Walkley, “Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins”, in Pastiche and Prejudice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, 39–44). (Walkley 1921)
- 15.
Ibid., 43–44. (Walkley 1921)
- 16.
E. Barrington [Lily Adams Beck], “The Darcys of Rosings”, in The Ladies! A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), 235–268, 243, 252–253. (Barrington 1922)
- 17.
Plato, quoted in Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963), 21 (Havelock 1963). Along similar lines, Walkley advises that the best way to create pastiche is “surrendering, putting clean away your own personality”, for “how otherwise are you to take on another’s?”. Walkley, “Pastiche”, Pastiche and Prejudice, 1–6. (Walkley 1921)
- 18.
For a nuanced discussion of Plato’s uses of the term “mimesis”, see Havelock, Preface to Plato. (Havelock 1963)
- 19.
Stanley Baldwin, “On England and the West”, in On England, and Other Addresses (London: P. Allan), 1–16.
- 20.
Brown, The Watsons, 99; my italics.
- 21.
Baldwin, “On England”, 7.
- 22.
Ibid., 7–8.
- 23.
Hubback, The Younger Sister, vol. 1, 180. (Hubback 1850)
- 24.
- 25.
Quoted in Winter, Sites of Memory, 32. (Winter 1995)
- 26.
Oulton, The Watsons, 192–193. (Oulton 1923)
- 27.
Claudia L. Johnson and Peter Smith, among many others, have recognised the patriotism of Austen’s Emma. For Smith, the chief topic of this novel is “England, England’s weaknesses, the dangers inherent in those weaknesses, and the choices that might still be made to secure the nation’s future” (pp. 238–239). Johnson, “Austen Cults and Cultures”, 12; Smith, Politics and Religion in Jane Austen’s Emma, Cambridge Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1997): 219–241. (Smith 1997)
- 28.
Alistair Duckworth discusses this connection at length in The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). (Duckworth 1971)
- 29.
Barrington, “The Darcys of Rosings”, 242–243. (Barrington 1922)
- 30.
Oulton, The Watsons, 104, 124, 129. (Oulton 1923)
- 31.
Ibid., 210. (Oulton 1923)
- 32.
Hubback, The Younger Sister, vol. 3, 412. (Hubback 1850)
- 33.
Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 224. (Kumar 2003)
- 34.
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 125. (Butler 1993)
- 35.
Quoted in Southam, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940, 249. (Southam 1979)
- 36.
Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen (London: John Murray, 1920), 45. (Austen-Leigh 1920)
- 37.
The pioneers were Alistair Duckworth and Marilyn Butler. In The Improvement of the Estate (Duckworth 1971), Duckworth reads the estates in Austen’s novels as symptomatic of the characters’ moral and social values. In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Butler argues that Austen was reactionary and opposed the individualism of the sentimental novel. Both works are now credited with first introducing politics into scholarly readings of Austen’s oeuvre.
- 38.
Walkley, “Mr Shakespeare Disorderly”, in Pastiche and Prejudice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 12–17. (Walkley 1921)
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Cano, M. (2017). Jane Austen and the Theatre of War. In: Jane Austen and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43988-4_3
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