Book review: A Truth Universally Acknowledged

Published on Friday 28 May 2010 19:01

A Truth Universally Acknowledged Edited by Susannah Carson Particular Books, 298pp, £20

SOMETIMES it's a mistake to read a foreword. A single sentence can put you off. Here is one example, from the American critic, Harold Bloom: "After Shakespeare, no writer in the language does so well as Austen in giving us figures, central and peripheral, utterly consistent each on her (or his) own mode of speech and consciousness, and intensely different from each other."

Really? What about Scott and Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, George Eliot and Meredith, to restrict oneself only to 19th-century novelists? They may all be less fashionable than Jane Austen, but all succeed in giving us such figures. Austen is a very good novelist indeed, and Emma is surely one of the best dozen 19th-century novels, but there are times when I find myself in agreement with Charlotte Bront, who , in a letter to George Henry Lewes, wrote: "Miss Austen being, as you say, without 'sentiment', without poetry. Maybe is sensible, real (more real than true), but she cannot be great."

Susannah Carson would not agree. She has assembled 33 witnesses to Austen's greatness, some living and still writing, some dead. Actually, that statement is not quite accurate. There is one dissenting voice among the chosen. Kingsley Amis, discussing Mansfield Park deplores "the Austen habit of censoriousness where there ought to be indulgence and indulgence where there ought to be censure", and concludes that from being the critic of "conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous", "she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgement and her moral sense were corrupted".

Actually it is not quite the only dissenting voice. The younger Amis (Martin) in an otherwise warm and admiring, even loving, essay on Pride and Prejudice, gently chides the author for her abrupt dismissal of Lydia and Wickham after their marriage. "We expect artists to stand as critics not just of their milieu but of their society. They shouldn't lose sight of their creations at exactly the same point that 'respectability' – or the stock response – loses sight of them." This is nicely said.

In general, however, questioning voices are absent. Some of the essays are, though, very good indeed. There are fine pieces by critics Lionel Trilling and Louis Auchincloss, and a characteristically intelligent one from David Lodge. There is an agreeably kooky piece by Amy Heckerling who, deciding (quite reasonably) that Emma makes for "an ideal teen romance film", describes how she adapted it as Clueless, set in 1990s Beverly Hills. This is fun. She finds only one problem in transporting the characters to California: she can't decide what to do with Jane Fairfax. This is because she decides, rightly, that she is a bore. So she gets rid of her. This leaves her with another problem. Why then should Frank Churchill (Christian in the movie) still be unavailable to Emma (Cher)? He should be gay. "That way, we can easily see the extent of Cher's self-delusion. He seems so perfectly cast as her boyfriend, she can't see who he is."

This charming essay gives us one reason why Jane Austen is read with such enthusiasm and pleasure. She seems adaptable and comforting; this after all is why she translates so well to television. Actually, she isn't comforting at all, except inasmuch she always contrives to get her heroines satisfactorily married. Even so, this raises questions, chiefly: might not a more dramatic novel begin, rather than end, with these marriages? That speculation however is not one that Jane Austen could entertain. This surely is a limitation when you compare her with Dickens or Thackeray, Eliot or Trollope; that her novels, delightful as they are, characteristically stop short on the threshold of married life. We take leave of her heroines just at the point when their life is about to become more interesting and more demanding.

What she does, she does better than any 19th-century novelist who attempted that sort of thing. She does it well-nigh perfectly. But she also does less. Anthony Powell used to dismiss Anna Karenina as "a magazine story", a very well done one, certainly, but nevertheless a magazine story. Jane Austen's novels go deeper, and offer finer and more discriminating judgment than most, but essentially this is what they are too. We go on reading her because the novels are acute and perfectly formed. But comparisons with Shakespeare like that offered by the ineffable Harold Bloom seem to me absurd, and Charlotte Bront was surely right in accusing her of a lack of passion. She is too sensible for passion. No Austen character would think the world well lost for love, and if there was such a character one suspects that Miss Austen would think the less of her (or him).