A fascinating look into the myths that continue to shape our understanding and appreciation of Jane Austen.

Was Jane Austen the best-selling novelist of her time? Are all her novels romances? Did they depict the traditional world of the aristocracy? Is Austen's writing easy to understand? Well into the 21st century, Jane Austen continues to be one of the most compelling novelists in all English literature. Many of her ideas about class, family, history, intimacy, manners, love, desire, and society, have inspired "myths" that are often contradictory -- she was a Tory who was also a liberal feminist, or, her novels are at once sharply satirical and unapologetically romantic. Myths, like Austen's works, are dynamic, changing over time and impacting how we read and interpret literature.

30 Great Myths about Jane Austen examines the accepted beliefs -- both true and untrue --that have most influenced our readings of Austen. Rather than simply de-bunking, or validating, commonly-held views about Austen, authors Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite explore how these myths can be used to engage with the life, work, and reception of Jane Austen. Applying the most up-to-date scholarship to better understand how myths shape our appreciation of Jane Austen, this fascinating volume:

* Introduces readers to the history of Austen reception, both in academic scholarship and in the general public

* Examines Jane Austen's life and letters, her historical contexts, her texts, and their afterlives

* Discusses Austen's influence on the development of literary criticism as a discipline Explores each of Austen's main novels, as well as relatively obscure texts such as Sanditon and The Watsons

Offering engaging narrative and original insights, 30 Great Myths about Jane Austen is a must-read for scholars, instructors, and students of English and Romantic literature, as well as general readers with interest in the life and works of Jane Austen.

Claudia L. Johnson is the Murray Professor of English at Princeton University. She specializes in Eighteenth-Century and Nineteenth-Century British literature, and gender studies. Renowned for her works on Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, Johnson's books include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel; Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s; and Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures, which won the Christian Gauss Award.

Clara Tuite is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, a Co-Director of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her books include Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon and Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, which was awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize by the International Association of Byron Societies.

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30 GREAT MYTHS ABOUT JANE AUSTEN

We all know Jane Austen never mentions the war. It was only women who read her novels, after all. But what about all those men in uniform? Was there really no sex in Jane Austen's world? In a series of short essays, 30 Great Myths About Jane Austen examines myths like these that have shaped our reading of Jane Austen. For like Austen's novels themselves, myths about Austen can also claim greatness. Great myths about Austen have a powerful impact on how we read and re-read.

This volume takes 30 of the most powerful myths about Austen and explores their social, emotional, and imaginative livesshowing how they illuminate Austen's life, work and reception, and why they have the hold they do over our hearts and minds. Along the way, the authors apply the most up-to-date scholarship to questions that continue to shape our appreciation of Jane Austen and her writings and the changing historical contexts in which they continue to delight, intrigue and excite.

Offering engaging narrative and original insights, 30 Great Myths About Jane Austen is a must-read for scholars, instructors and students of English and Romantic literature, as well as general readers with interest in the life and works of Jane Austen.

Leseprobe
Myth 1
JANE AUSTEN HAD NO INTEREST IN FAME

This myth was hatched by Jane Austen's brother, Henry Austen, in the "Biographical Notice of the Author" that appeared with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion when they were posthumously published in 1818: "Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives."1 According to this myth, Austen took up novel-writing in secret, merely as a leisure pursuit; she had no intention of publishing, but her brothers found the manuscripts and brought them to life as published works, with little involvement or investment from Austen herself.

The trouble with this account of Austen's "motives" is that it assumes she was not interested in being a professional writer. But this is problematic. To be sure, Jane Austen's name did not appear on the title-pages of any of the lifetime editions of her novels; and it was not until Henry's obituary notice appeared that Austen's novels were attributed to her in print. But her letters make it clear that being a published author - not just a writer - was important to her.

How and why did the myth come about? The mythmaking can be understood partly as the Austen family's attempt to deal with the increasing public interest in Austen and her writing that developed after her death. Cultured but religiously orthodox and occupying the fringes of the gentry, the family managed Austen's growing reputation by ensuring she would be remembered as a model of modest and devout femininity. According to the traditional view, "proper" women did not put themselves out in public for money, and the elite were traditionally ambivalent about writing for money as a form of lowering oneself to "trade."

This is not to deny that large numbers of women took up writing for money in this period. They did. But when they did so, they had to contend with traditional understandings of proper femininity as incompatible with publicity and therefore of fame almost as a form of social impropriety. Despite these social obstacles, the early nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of women's writing. Austen was among a vast number of women at this time who were challenging these traditional understandings by publishing their writing. But her family was ambivalent.

We should also consider the motivations of Henry Austen himself. Having been declared bankrupt in 1816, he probably sought some measure of recognition as the enterprising agent who conducted his sister's business dealings. So, paradoxically, his declaration of modesty on Jane's part was a likely claim for vindication, vying for attention himself. Although Henry portrayed himself as Austen's enterprising agent, who was assumed to have done most of the negotiations on her behalf, Austen met with her first publisher, Thomas Egerton, about a second edition of Mansfield Park; and in her later negotiations with James Stanier Clarke and John Murray, she acted as an increasingly confident literary professional.2

In addition to these familial considerations, fame itself must be understood as a complex and changing social form. Jane Austen was writing at a time when fame was undergoing immense change as a result of the emergence of celebrity culture. The market necessitated new strategies for managing fame recognition and the enhanced aura of the author, who had become a newly intriguing and spectacular figure. During the Romantic period, the literary institution transitioned from a patronage system (where authors were known to their readers) into a fully fledged mar…