Abstract
In an essay which he left tantalizingly unfinished at his death in 1975, Lionel Trilling was prompted to speculate on “Why We Read Jane Austen.” He had been impressed by “a phenomenon of our contemporary high culture, the large and ever-growing admiration which Jane Austen’s work is being given.”1 The essay vibrates with a certain personal intensity for me. In my student days I read Trilling with great admiration; and when I was fairly launched in my academic career, and was organizing a Jane Austen Bicentennial conference at my university, it was a great triumph that Lionel Trilling agreed to be a speaker. Then came the disappointment and the sadness that he couldn’t come after all; that he had cancer. And before the bicentennial year was out he had died. His essay for the occasion, which he had nearly completed, was not available for the collection I edited from the conference;2 but it came out as a lead article in the Times Literary Supplement.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Lionel Trilling, The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965–75, ed. Diana Trilling (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 204. For subsequent quotations from this essay I supply page numbers in the text.
Jane Austen’s Achievement: Papers Deliveredat the Jane Austen Bicentennial Conference at the University of Alberta, ed. Juliet McMaster (London: Macmillan, 1976). Ian Jack kindly came at short notice to deliver a paper in Lionel Trilling’s place. Other papers were by Lloyd Brown, Barbara Hardy, A. Walton Litz, Norman Page, B.C. Southam, and George Whalley.
Henry James, “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefacestothe New York Edition, selected by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), p. 118.
Our Own Particular Jane is the title of a play by Joan Austen-Leigh which consists of scenes from the novels and responses to them. Compare Katherine Mansfield: “The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone — reading between the lines — has become the secret friend of the author.” Novels and Novelists, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London 1930; Boston: Beacon, 1959), p. 302.
For a fuller account of the battles between different camps, see Brian Southam’s “Janeites and Anti-Janeites,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz and Brian Southam (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 237–43.
Joan Austen-Leigh, “Editorial,” Persuasions (annual journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America), 4 (1982), p. 2.
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 1.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1760–67), II, xix.
Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites” (1926), in Debits and Credits (London: Macmillan, 1949), 147–76. I supply page references in the text.
Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen Among Women (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1992.
Presumption: An Entertainment, by Julia Barrett (actually Julia Brown Kessler and Gabrielle Donnelly) (New York: M. Evans, 1993);
Pemberley, or Pride and Prejudice Continued, by Emma Tennant (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993).
Mrs Goddard, Mistress of a School, by Joan Austen-Leigh (Victoria: Room of One’s Own Press, 1993).
Michael Londry, “Pug,” for English 455, University of Alberta, 1993.
Quoted by Joan Austen-Leigh, “The Founding of JASNA,” Persuasions, 15 (1993), p. 12. The current President of JASNA, however, Garnett Bass, in her report in the same volume, celebrates “the easy footing on which academic and amateur enthusiasts mingle and exchange ideas” in the Society (p. 15).
Copyright information
© 1996 Juliet McMaster
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McMaster, J. (1996). Jane Austen as a Cultural Phenomenon. In: Jane Austen the Novelist. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375468_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375468_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39165-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37546-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)