The Loiterer and Jane Austen’s Literary Identity
Li-Ping Geng, University of Toronto
Volume 13, no. 4, July 2001
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Jane Austen’s literary identity has been a problem for some time. Austen critics have been making, essentially, two conflicting claims about her identity as a novelist. She is called either a “conservative” novelist whose “morality is preconceived and inflexible” or a progressive feminist who like “Wollstonecraft and Hays defies every dictum about female propriety and deference propounded in the sermons and conduct books which have been thought to shape her opinions on all important matters.” Both claims, while shedding light on certain aspects of Austen’s literary identity, seem to miss the essential quality of Jane Austen’s narrative, which is intricate, complex, and dialectical. Insistent as they are, these claims seem to illustrate once again what Mary Waldron calls “the tendency to prioritise what we think was important over the perceptions of the author working within the cultural parameters of his/her time.” One recent book on Jane Austen purports to give a “systematic consideration to those social and psychological supports that made Austen’s writing possible and helped to enliven and extend her representational range”; however, the critic, as it turns out, is merely interested in the “impact of Cassandra Austen on the novelist’s career” and that of some other “contemporary female friendship.” Despite the fact that Jane Austen had six brothers and one sister, there is no mention of the vital nurturing and encouragement which the fledgling Jane had received from her father and these brothers.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
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