Category Archives: Nonfiction

I have begun reading Patricia Meyer Spacks’s new book on the 18C novel, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. The front flap declares that the book is intended for a general audience, and so far (I’ve read the introduction and part of the second chapter), this seems to be true. It’s got lots of good information that a specialist would be interested in, but it’s clearly written and engaging and gives all the background a general, non-academic reader would need.

She argues that while critics have focused on realism in the development of the 18C novel, what actually happens is much more complex, and she will look instead at deviations from realism, at the many experiments that authors undertook with narrative forms. She discusses what is for me one of the most exciting characteristics of the 18C novel: the fact that during the 18C there were no novelistic “rules.” 18C writers made up many of the rules we’re familiar with today, but at the time, they didn’t exist. So Spacks’s idea is to focus on the diversity of form, style, and content present in novels, rather than pointing out unities that existed then and that would later harden into rules.

One of the points she makes that particularly intrigues me is about narrative multiplicity versus unity. Many if not most or even almost all early 18C novels told multiple stories; they did not focus on a handful of main characters and develop them in detail, but instead had lots of sets of characters and lots of stories. These stories were often brief and told without much detail. The focus was not on character development, but instead on events, lots and lots of events:

Narrative multiplicity rather than detailed development marks many early-century fictions, apparently predicated on the assumption that readers will not long sustain interest in a single set of characters or predicaments.

Think, for example, of The Decameron where there is a frame narrative but within that frame narrative a hundred stories are embedded. Another example is Mary Delarivier Manley’s work The New Atalantis, which also has a frame narrative that never gets developed in depth, and then the characters tell each other stories, which make up the bulk of the book. Isn’t it interesting to think that readers might not have wanted to read about the same people at length?

What this focus on multiple plots does is to offer the reader a particular kind of pleasure:

… the reader is invited to take pleasure in a collection of happenings linked more by sequence than by logic and to register the excitement of sheer event.

Writing of the early 18C novelist Jane Barker, Spacks argues that

The vigorous, varied, lavishly multiplied narratives that compose her novels declare the power of fiction, not to make the reader suspend disbelief; rather, to make disbelief irrelevant. The pleasure these stories provide acknowledges invention, manipulation, ground-shifting, and the wide possibilities of the reader’s role. Above all, the stories acknowledge their own fictionality.

We are far from realism here. Instead, what we have is such a multiplicity of stories that the reader is not led to believe in any of them, but rather to enjoy the energy and power of them, to enjoy the author’s inventiveness.

Now I must say that none of this appeals to me particularly. I find it hard to understand how readers would find pleasure in all this diversity and multiplicity. I much prefer the unity of plot and the character development that begins to become the norm in the second part of the 18C. Reading story after story after story where the action zips by and the characters are never fleshed out strikes me as wearisome rather than exhilarating. But it’s interesting to think about how different readers’ tastes can be, and I wonder how much of this is a personal matter (perhaps some of you would disagree with me?) and how much of it is a cultural matter — i.e., perhaps we have been trained by the 19C and 20C novel to value depth of character development and unity of plot and that makes it harder to appreciate the fun of multiple narratives.

Spacks’s account does help explain my impatience with The Recess; although it was published in 1783 when the novel was moving away from the multiplicity characteristic of the earlier part of the century, it still is full of plot events and is rather short on character development. It has unity of plot in the sense that it focuses on two main characters, but it’s so full of events, unbelievably full of them that it’s clear it was influenced by earlier forms of the novel. Believability is not the point at all; rather, the point is to see just how much those two main characters can handle.

Now if you’re wondering where a novel like Clarissa fits into this scheme, a novel where practically nothing happens and we are with the same characters for 1,500 pages, it’s evidence, for Spacks, of the diversity of form in the 18C. You can find lots of extremes in the period — short novels and long novels, novels about few characters and novels about many, novels that have lots of detail and novels that don’t, novels with a fast pace and novels with a slow pace. Over the course of the century, many of these extremes began to disappear and novelists found a happy medium. This happy medium would turn into what we tend today to think of as “the novel.”

I recently finished Phyllis Rose’s book The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time, and I felt ambivalently about it the whole way through. Have you had the experience of enjoying not liking something, or going back and forth about it? I felt that way about this book. I considered quitting after the first couple of chapters, which didn’t work for me, but I stuck with it when the topics Rose was covering became more interesting, and from there on out, I found myself both moving quickly through it with a certain amount of pleasure and thinking the whole time about how mildly annoying the book is.

On the positive side, Rose is a good storyteller, and I liked the way she wrote about herself and her life honestly, sometimes telling things about herself that weren’t flattering. She’s a good personal essayist. She also knows tons of writers and has some good gossip about them; for example, she writes about her long-time friendship with Annie Dillard that’s full of complications and ups and downs. It’s quite fun to hear about, say, a dinner party she held for Salman Rushdie.

However, if you are picking this book up to read about Proust, you will most likely be disappointed. In fact, I don’t think I did this book justice, because I went into it thinking it was one thing and it took me a long time to figure out it’s actually something else. I like reading memoir/essay type books, however, so I adjusted my expectations and found some pleasure in it. In her first chapter, she describes her project of reading Proust in a year, discussing what the experience was like and giving her impressions of the novel. Subsequent chapters begin with a quotation from Proust and then tell a story from Rose’s experiences that relate to the quotation. She integrates brief discussions of Proust into the chapters to flesh out the point she’s making. Her chapters cover such things as her history with television, her passion for collecting, her first marriage, her struggles trying to write a novel, and battles with her neighbors over landscaping. She can frequently be entertaining, especially in the chapters on sex and relationships, and she captures her academic, literary world quite well.

But her descriptions of this world — a world where well-known writers hang out in Key West and Salman Rushdie drops in for dinner parties — annoyed me too, and my annoyance stems from class issues, I think. On the one hand, I’m fascinated by this story of a literary, academic, and social insider, someone who has lots of famous friends and what appears to be an enviable academic and economic position; she taught at Wesleyan for many years and moves back and forth between Connecticut and Florida, and she seems to have plenty of time with which to pursue her writing projects and personal interests. It sounds like a life many would envy. On the other hand, I wondered why I should care about the details of her life, about her struggles with this and that, about her fights with Annie Dillard, about her difficulty writing a novel. It’s not that I only want to read memoirs of people who have led particularly hard lives, but I wondered, sometimes, whether Rose had really done enough to make me care about her. Why devote my time to reading her story? Where, exactly, does the interest for a general reader lie?

I suppose, ultimately, the book felt a little self-indulgent to me. I feel harsh for saying this, and I’m struggling to find the right words to capture my reaction. I think that it’s a very personal reaction — I’m not sure I like Rose and therefore I’m not easily going to like her memoirs. Can you enjoy reading the memoirs of someone you don’t like? I suppose so, but it would take a different kind of writer than Rose.

So, if you are considering reading this book, please don’t take my negativity too seriously; you might like the book much better than I did.

Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel has an intriguing chapter on “The Fair Triumvirate of Wits” — Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood, all writers of the late 17C and early 18C who made their living from writing. None of them had particularly good reputations — and by that I mean their sexual reputations were suspect — and Spender makes the point that sexual reputation and writerly reputation get conflated when we’re talking about women writers of the time (and later times). The reputations of these women as writers have suffered, even though (or because?) their writings were very popular, in part because their behavior was “questionable”:

In trying to explain why it is that Aphra Behn’s novels have been ‘ignored’ and that pride of place has been accorded to Daniel Defoe, it emerges that there have been clear links between Aphra Behn’s ‘immorality’ and her expulsion from the literary mainstream. Her work has not been fit for study.

Spender devotes a lot of space to analyzing why these three women’s contributions to the novel have been ignored, and at times this can get a bit repetitive. Also, I’m reading the book from the perspective of 20 years later, when much critical writing has tried to give these women their place in literary history, so the book feels dated at times. But still, her account of what these women accomplished is interesting.

Of Aphra Behn, for example, she writes:

In her choice of subject matter, her commentary, and her style, she illustrates some of the differences in outlook between women and men; even her sense of humour — which frequently makes men the butt of the joke — contrasts markedly to the forms to which we are accustomed, and in which it is the humour of men that prevails.

Behn is important in the development of the novel because her writing moved the genre toward a new kind of realism; it is not that she’s writing the kind of realism that we are familiar with today, but that she “has a talent for minute observation, astute assessment, the portrayal of fine realistic detail.” She brought a new level of believability to older forms of writing such as the pastoral romance.

Delariviere Manley was famous for her “scandal chronicles” — works that were set in far-away, exotic places, but were clearly about local high-born people and their exploits. Spender argues that Manley’s writing furthered the novel by taking realism in yet another direction — this time instead of writing realistically about fantastical people and places as Aphra Behn did, Manley “introduced a fantastical rendition of real-life happenings.” In fact, she went to prison briefly for writing about the scandalous doings of powerful people in government. It’s in these various ways of mixing up fiction and reality, Spender argues, that a comfort with and acceptance of fiction — lies that are somehow true — as we know it today developed.

Eliza Haywood was hugely prolific and wrote in just about every genre available at the time — and in a number that weren’t:

The growth and development of the novel can be illustrated with reference to the writing of this one woman, who reveals an extraordinary creative ability, who freely experiments with form and style, and who produces an unprecedented and perhaps unparalleled range of novels. Every enduring and exemplary feature of the new genre is to be found in her writing, and yet she has never been given the credit for her contribution.

Spender argues that Haywood realized she had more and more potential readers among the middle classes and so began to write with their interests in mind. Interestingly, she claims Haywood anticipated Samuel Richardson’s “innovations” to the novel form in Pamela by writing about a middle-class heroine battling an aristocratic villain and thus introducing the kind of class warfare that would preoccupy many novelists after her. Here is how Spender sums up her achievement:

She was among the first to assert the validity of middle class experience, among the first to insist on the significance and the humanity of ‘ordinary people’ and among the first to explore the conflict of interest between the classes and sexes. And in so doing she helped to modify the very essence of a story and its meaning.

I haven’t read enough of the writings of these women! I like to think I’ve read a lot in the 18C, but reading Spender’s book makes me realize how much I’ve missed. I’ve read Behn’s Oroonoko, her play The Rover and some poems, and that’s it. I’ve read Haywood’s novel Love in Excess, but nothing else by her. And nothing at all by Manley. We’ll see what else I can add to the list.

I have begun Dale Spender’s book Mothers of the Novel, and I have the feeling I’ll be posting on it regularly, as it’s full of interesting information. The book looks at women’s novels in the time period before Jane Austen, arguing that while we tend to think of Jane Austen as the first great woman novelist, it’s really the case that Austen drew on a long tradition of women’s writing as she created her own work. Mothers of the Novel was published in 1986 and there’s been tons of critical work (tons!) done on women novelists of the 17C and 18C since then, but this book is still a valuable overview. I’ve already added a couple writers to my reading list, including Amelia Opie and Mary Brunton.

Here are some interesting things I learned:

• The majority of novels in the 18C were written by women, and the novel was so closely associated with women that some men used a female pseudonym when they published their books. This caused a backlash against women writers which was at least partly successful, so that by the 1840s, the situation was reversed and women were adopting male pseudonyms when they published. This backlash is partly why the “canonical” novelists of the 18C are Fielding, Richardson, Defoe, Smollett and Sterne, a list which, of course, doesn’t include any women.
• Scholars have concluded that women today constitute only 20% of published writers (I don’t know how dated this figure is), which makes the statistic about women writing a majority of 18C novels even more interesting. Spender says this is evidence that the publishing world wasn’t always so unfair to women. I’m fascinated by the fluctuations in women’s status and the quality of their lives over the years; it hasn’t been a steadily upward trend by any means.
• Spender argues that women were successful at and interested in writing novels because novel writing is “a logical extension of women’s role” — many novels of the time were epistolary, and letters were a form of writing women were encouraged to participate in. She says letters are a good form in which to explore emotional and familial concerns, both subjects of the novel.
• Spender says her research into the novel has turned up over 100 women novelists before Jane Austen and no more than 30 men. So to end up with 5 canonical novelists all of whom are men doesn’t make much sense, unless it could possibly be the case that those 5 are better than over 100 women writers, which seems highly unlikely (assuming we could establish what “better” means). This is a perfect example for thinking about how the canon is flawed.

I’m on to De Quincey’s third essay in my collection, “Suspiria de Profundis,” or “Sighs From the Depths.” This is such a rich essay that I find myself wanting to write a blog post about many sections from it — isn’t it a delight to find a good book that inspires many blog posts? I think of these books as “bloggable” ones, ones that will keep a regular poster going for quite a while.

Anyway, there’s a short section about halfway through called “The Palimpsest” that I found particularly fascinating; it spends five pages or so explaining what a palimpsest is — a manuscript written on multiple times and nearly erased after each use but leaving a trace of the previous text that is still readable. In his example, a Greek tragedy is written and then scraped away, a legend about a Christian monk replaces it, and a romance about knights replaces that. De Quincey gives no indication where he is going with the topic until he has explained it thoroughly, at which point he makes it all clear:

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished.

What a wonderful metaphor, is it not? The idea is that nothing we have experienced is lost; it’s simply been covered over by something else and by something else again. But traces remain:

Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or a light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness.

The more I read the more I realized how Proustian this whole metaphor is, but instead of involuntary memory — when a sensory experience triggers a memory of a long-forgotten moment — as the mechanism that reveals the forgotten layers in our minds, for De Quincey, it’s approaching death, severe illness, or opium that brings the memory back:

[Memories] are not dead but sleeping. In the illustration imagined by myself, from the case of some individual palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the knightly romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into its earliest elementary stage.

Perhaps De Quincey’s conception of memory allows for a more active role than Proust’s does — one can take opium to induce these memories, if one wishes. For Proust, involuntary memory simply happens, outside our control.

De Quincey also begins to found Freudian:

But the deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child’s hands were unlinked for ever from his mother’s neck, or his lips for ever from his sister’s kisses, these remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal impresses.

So the partially erased layers of the palimpsest are the unconscious, waiting for its chance to emerge — to be read. But this implies there is little more we can do but “read” the layers; they cannot be fully wiped away.

I have now read the second De Quincey essay in my collection; it’s called “On the Knocking At the Gate in Macbeth,” and it tries to explain why De Quincey finds the knocking that takes place after Duncan’s murder so eerie.  The essay is about five pages long, and it makes a fairly simple point about Macbeth (the knocking brings us back from the horror of murder to the everyday world — and returning to the everyday world deepens the horror of murder), but along the way it is full of digressions, taking in a philosophical point about the mind, the story of a real-life murder, what it’s like to witness someone fainting, and what it’s like to watch a state funeral procession.

Here is part of the philosophical digression:

Here I pause for one moment to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.  The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted: and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.

I love this philosophical digression that warns us against paying too much attention to our understanding!  He goes on to illustrate this point with an example: if you were to ask someone to draw a picture of a street, they probably wouldn’t do a very good job, unless they happened to know the rules of perspective.  Here is why:

The reason is — that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes.  His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line …

Even though we can see with our eyes the way a street actually looks, our understanding takes over when we try to draw it and it messes us up.  We’d be better off trusting our eyes and getting our mind out of the way.

The purpose of this digression?

But, to return from this digression, — my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect direct or reflected: in fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect.  But I knew better: I felt that it did: and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it.

That’s a long way around to make the point that reason only gets us so far and that the senses, emotion, and intuition can carry us farther, but I do like taking the long way around to get to one’s point, at least when it’s done as De Quincey does it, with something interesting along the way.

I have just finished the title essay from a collection of Thomas De Quincey’s work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; the book has three longish-essays (the title one was 80 pages) and one short one. I’m planning on reading them all, but Confessions was the reason I picked this book up. I’m not sure what attracted me to it, since confessions of drug addicts aren’t my usual thing, but I’ve heard this mentioned as an interesting essay and as an example of walking literature, and I’m fascinated by De Quincey’s time period (1785-1859), so that’s reason enough.

The essay, as you might guess from the title, tells the story of De Quincey’s addiction to opium, but it does so with lots of digressions and philosophical asides and glimpses of life in De Quincey’s time. After a brief introduction justifying his decision to write an essay that exposes his weakness, he tells of his boyhood school days and his decision to run away from school at the age of 17. He wanders through parts of Wales and ends up in London, where, he says, the seeds of his addiction were planted. He runs out of money and comes very close to starving to death, which causes him stomach problems that come back to haunt him — at which point he becomes an addict, taking opium every day to relieve the pain.

But De Quincey takes his time with the Wales and London episodes, and they are some of the most interesting sections. Particularly moving is the story of his friendship with the prostitute Anne; they offer each other companionship and aid — she saves him from starvation at one point. Tragically, De Quincey leaves London briefly to try to find some money, and when he returns he can’t find her. He mourns the loss of their friendship for the rest of his life.

De Quincey took opium regularly before he became addicted; he was careful to let enough days go by between indulgences so that the drug would maintain its potency. And he writes about the pleasures of opium quite beautifully; one of the things I like best about this essay is that De Quincey is fully honest about both the pleasures and the pains. He writes:

And, at that time, I often fell into these reveries upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer-night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I would overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of L—-, at about the same distance, that I have sate, from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move.

A bit later he goes into raptures over the drug:

Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium!

He goes on like that for a full paragraph. But he is also clear about the horrors of opium addiction:

[The opium-eater] lies under the weight of incubus and night-mare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love: — he curses the spells which chain him down from motion: — he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.

He does, you will be happy to know, overcome his addiction, but he is still haunted by one of the worst effects of addiction — horrible nightmares, some of which he describes in detail.

I am looking forward to seeing what the other essays are like; he’s got a style I enjoy — digressive, allusive, difficult to categorize.

Has anybody seen the movie Becoming Jane? It’s just come to our local theater, and I’d like to see it, although I also think it’s rubbish. It has very little relationship to Austen’s real life (I haven’t seen the movie, obviously, but I’ve read enough about it to know), but I suspect it might be fun to see, if I can keep the real Austen and the movie Austen completely separate in my mind (if such a thing is possible). By the way, there’s a good article on the movie here (thanks to Jenny D. for the link).

Much better than seeing Becoming Jane, most likely, is watching the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice, which I borrowed from the library for the weekend. I’ve seen it before, but it was a long time ago, and I can’t wait to see it again.

At this point, what with the Jane Austen in Context book and all, I’m in danger of getting sick of everything to do with Austen, but I don’t feel that way quite yet …

There were a couple fascinating bits from the book I thought I’d share (and by the way, I’m not giving away nearly all of the good stuff, so don’t think the book is spoiled because I’ve posted so much on it). In an essay on book production, the author notes that in the year Austen was born, 1775, 31 new novels were published in England. In 1811, when Sense and Sensibility was came out, 80 new novels were published. The author calls this “an expanding and competitive market for books,” but it seems quite small from our perspective, doesn’t it? If I lived then, I could plausibly attempt to read every novel published each year!

Also interesting to note is that three quarters of all novels published in 1776 were epistolary novels. It’s in that context that Austen’s complex third person point of view — her free indirect discourse — starts to look so very new and exciting.

Nearly three quarters of all novels published between 1770 and 1820 were published anonymously or pseudonymously, many of them saying only “By a Lady” or “By a Young Lady.” Also interesting is the numbers of men vs. women writing; as one critic notes about the 1810s, “The publication of Austen’s novels was achieved not against the grain but during a period of female ascendancy.” In the 1820s the balance shifted, and the men began to outnumber the women.

Also fascinating is the chapter on Austen in translation, which argues that Austen never got quite as popular on the continent as in England because continental translators didn’t know what to make of her — she didn’t fit in with their existing literary traditions and couldn’t be easily accommodated to them. Many of the early translations weren’t really translations at all, but were retellings of the stories with some dramatic changes, to tone down Elizabeth Bennett’s sauciness, for example. Some translators even omitted chapters and changed endings. Many of them lost the nuances of Austen’s third person point of view, which would make it harder to appreciate her genius. Modern-day translators would never get away with the changes Austen’s early translators made to her texts (at least I don’t think so!).

Interesting stuff, don’t you think?

You all know who I’m talking about in the post title, right? One of the essays in Jane Austen in Context talks about the “canonization” of “Jane” — no last name needed — as a kind of saint. It’s an essay on the “Cult of Jane Austen,” and what a cult it can be. I was amused to read that for some of the most devoted Jane fans (descendants of the late 19C “Janeites”), reading the novels is merely equal in importance, or maybe even less important, than participating in other activities such as visiting places Austen lived, having Jane Austen tea parties, dressing like Austen’s characters might, viewing Austen “relics” (she IS a saint, really), and even visiting sites where movies were made of Austen’s novels. This, as you can imagine, makes some Austen scholars unhappy, enough that they often begin articles trying to rescue Austen and her work from this industry that’s grown up around her. But the essay’s author, Deirdre Shauna Lynch, writes that this attempt to “rescue” her:

appears guided by an unattractive logic of exclusivity that runs like this: since she is my Jane Austen, she cannot be yours too.

Lynch talks about how Austen gets compared to Shakespeare in terms of her popularity and her cultural influence, but Austen’s fans have a characteristic that Shakespeare’s tend not to: they like to believe that they can see something in Austen others can’t, that they belong to a small, exclusive club of people who really get her. I’ll admit that I’ve felt this way now and then — surely no one else reading her novels feels quite like I do when I read them? This has to have something to do with genre; drama, even though it can be read alone, is public in its nature, while reading a novel is very private. So when reading novels it would be easy to feel that our private, personal experience is unique.

The funny thing about this phenomenon — and the related phenomenon of fantasizing that you know her like you know a close family member — is that it began right at the time Austen became popular and has increased all along as Austen gains more and more readers. Hundreds of thousands of people believe they have a special relationship with Austen and her works that no one else shares.

The essay on the early critical responses to Austen’s novels is fascinating too; it covers the reviews that appeared during Austen’s lifetime and shortly after her death. Early reviewers did not know what to make of her. Compared to other novels of the time — gothic novels and novels full of action and adventure — her work sometimes seemed bland. In the absence of anything better to say, they tended to comment on the moral lessons one could glean from them; of the sisters in Sense and Sensibility one reviewer says:

[Readers] may learn from them, if they please, many sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life.

Exactly how we read the book today, right? They also expressed the uncertainty about the value of novel reading that was very common at the time; one reviewer wrote that “a good Novel is now and then an agreeable relaxation from severer studies.” This uncertainty about novels is alive and well today — the condescension in that reviewer’s tone is not so different from the people we know who say they have more serious things to read than novels.

It was Walter Scott who finally began to get it; in a review of Emma, he describes how her work differs from other novels of the time. Austen is writing a new kind of novel, one that:

present[s] to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.

Jane Austen in Context is so interesting that I’m tempted to go on and on about all the fascinating things in it; rather than doing that, though, I’ll suggest that if you love Austen’s novels you will probably love this book.