Introduction: Lady Susan’s Progeny

Abstract

This book offers a reading of Jane Austen’s examination of her own narrative authority, and, by implication, of the authority of all narrators of fiction. I argue that each of Austen’s finished novels interrogates the claims of authoritative narrators and that the Austen canon as a whole articulates a range of anxieties and strategies having to do with authorship and authority. The six novels experiment in different ways with possible sources and ultimate failures of authority, always returning to the compromised figure of the fallible narrator. At the same time, Austen’s novels are far more than artefacts of self-reflexivity: they challenge and enable readers to move beyond a deconstructive dismantling of her texts toward an effective theory of narrative interpretation. As readers encounter Austen’s careful exploration of authorial anxiety, they engage in a complex negotiation between narrator and audience; pressed to recognize ways in which texts both claim and disavow authority, readers begin to develop interpretative strategies that can account for narrators’ manipulations as well as their anxieties.