Jane Austen, Queer Theory and the Return of the Author

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Mary Waldron, ‘Introduction’, Women's Writing 5/1, 1998, p. 5. See also Susan M. Korba, ‘“Improper and Dangerous Distinctions”: Female Relationships and Erotic Domination in Emma’, Studies in the Novel 29/2, 1997, pp. 139–63.

2. These include pieces on country dancing, class and boarding schools.

3. Claudia L. Johnson, ‘The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies’, in Deirdre Lynch (ed.), Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Johnson's work on Austen has influenced my approach; however, her work on Janeite culture emphasizes English as a discipline whereas I am more interested in reading protocols. Moreover, although we share several texts, my interpretations—notably of Kipling—differ from hers.

4. For an account of the production, which originated at the 1998 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, see Michael Billington, ‘Silky Irony Concealed’, Guardian, 30 September 1999.

5. Desson Howe, ‘“Mansfield Park”: Austen Dour’, Washington Post, ‘Weekend’, 26 November 1999.

6. Emma Tennant, Emma in Love, London: Fourth Estate, 1996, p. 219.

7. See Tennant, Emma in Love, pp. 182–3. Also see John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [1748–9], ed. Peter Wagner, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, pp. 193–6.

8. Weldon's endorsement on the cover of the paperback is significant given her invocations of Austen in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, London: Michael Joseph, 1984, and Darcy's Utopia, London: Collins, 1990. She also scripted the BBC's 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; Terry Castle, ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’, London Review of Books 17/15, 3 August 1995, reprinted in Terry Castle, Boss Ladies, Watch Out: Essays on Women, Sex and Writing, London: Routledge, 2002 (subsequent references to the essay are to the latter).

10. Castle, ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’, p. 128.

11. Castle, ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’, p. 128.

12. J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen [1870], London: Macmillan, 1906, p. 15.

13. Although meant to defend Austen against accusations of unnatural physical intimacy, this intervention goes beyond Castle who never portrays the sisters clinging together, for whatever reason.

14. Roland White, ‘A Gay Old Time’, The Sunday Times, 3 September 1995.

15. London Review of Books 17/16, 24 August 1995.

16. Harvey Porlock, ‘Critical List’, The Sunday Times, 5 September 1993.

17. Letters, The Sunday Times, 3 October 1993.

18. Lee Siegel, ‘The Gay Science: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Sexualization of Everything’, New Republic, 9 November 1998, pp. 30–42 (35).

19. See Vincent Quinn, ‘Loose Reading? Sedgwick, Austen and Critical Practice’, Textual Practice 14/2, 2000.

20. Siegel, ‘The Gay Science’, pp. 34, 39 and 42.

21. Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, p. 125.

22. Henry Austen, ‘The Biographical Notice of the Author’ [1817], in B. C. Southam (ed.), The Critical Heritage, 2 vols, London: Routledge, 1968–87, i.

23. Helen Denman, ‘The Portraits’, in J. David Grey (ed.), A Jane Austen Handbook, London: The Athlone Press, 1986, pp. 342–4. See also Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983, pp. 59–60.

24. While acknowledging that the portrait is unlikely to be of Austen, the Norton Critical Edition of Mansfield Park (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993) reproduces it, commenting that the sitter's dress recalls the one that Fanny wears to dinner at the Grants. Given my emphasis on the interpenetration between fiction and biography, it's telling that the painting shifts from representing Austen to representing one of her characters.

25. See Entertainment Weekly, 29 December 1995, and Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (eds), Jane Austen in Hollywood, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998.

26. George Moore, Avowals [1919], quoted in Southam (ed.), The Critical Heritage, ii.277.

27. On the subject of Austen and virginity, a 1999 analysis of the holdings of the Library of Congress declared Austen the third most written about woman in history: the Virgin Mary came first, with Joan of Arc only narrowly above Austen. For a different take on Austen and virginity, see Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, pp. 9–27.

28. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover’ [1930], quoted in Southam (ed.), The Critical Heritage, ii.107.

29. Mark Twain, 13 September 1898, quoted in Southam (ed.), The Critical Heritage, ii.232.

30. Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park,’ in Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self, London: Secker and Warburg, 1955, p. 209.

31. See Janet Todd, ‘Who's Afraid of Jane Austen?’, in Janet Todd, Gender, Art and Death, Cambridge: Polity, 1993, and Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ [1905], quoted in Southam (ed.), The Critical Heritage, ii.229–31.

32. Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, London: John Murray, 1920, pp. 57–8.

33. Castle's work is an exception: the first sentence of ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’ is a clear nod to the Janeites.

34. Johnson, ‘The Divine Miss Jane’, p. 30.

35. Johnson, ‘The Divine Miss Jane’, p. 30.

36. Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery [1952], Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968, p. 192.

37. See Edmund Wilson, ‘A Long Talk about Jane Austen’, The New Yorker 20, 24 June 1944, p. 69.

38. Mudrick, Jane Austen, p. 203.

39. Mudrick, Jane Austen, p. 206.

40. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 259.

41. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, in Rudyard Kipling, Debits and Credits [1926], ed. Sandra Kemp, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, p. 124. The story first appeared in the Story-Teller Magazine and Hearst's International Magazine in 1924.

42. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Jane's Marriage’ [1926], in Kipling,Debits and Credits, pp. 139–40.

43. D. W. Harding, ‘Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’, Scrutiny 8, March 1940.

44. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 125.

45. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 137.

46. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 126.

47. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto and Windus, 1993, pp. 95–116.

48. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 130.

49. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 136.

50. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, pp. 134–5.

51. Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 138.

52. ‘He's no more touched liquor than 'e 'as women since 'e was born’ (ibid., p. 138).

53. ‘Anthony glanced for an instant at me as he put the question’, ‘Anthony's quick eyes ran over the man’ (ibid., pp. 126 and 127).

54. ‘Anthony glanced for an instant at me as he put the question’, ‘Anthony's quick eyes ran over the man’ p. 138 (emphases in original).

55. Patricia Rozema, quoted in Kamal Al-Solaylee, ‘Womansfield Park,’ Xtra!, 18 November 1999.

56. More appealing to Rozema, that is; personally I find the lesbian scene less dynamic than the book's depiction of the emotional tension between Mary and Fanny.

57. Alan Sinfield, ‘Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Shakespeare Survey 56, 2003, p. 76.

58. Quinn, ‘Loose Reading?’, pp. 318–23.

59. Sinfield, ‘Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality’, p. 77.

60. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism [1924], London: Kegan Paul, 1930, p. 1.

61. For a paradigm of Romantic reading practices and literary celebrity, see Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Women (1798) in which Maria falls in love with Darnford after reading his marginalia in a copy of Rousseau's Julie. Wollstonecraft's widower, William Godwin, ratchets the process up by exposing his wife to public scrutiny in his Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1798), a title that explicitly imagines Wollstonecraft's life in relation to her authorship of the Vindications.

62. For a rewarding account of Stern and Kaye-Smith, see Katie Trumpener, ‘The Virago Jane Austen’, in Lynch, (ed.), Janeites.

63. Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, London: Cassell, 1943; Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern, More Talk of Jane Austen, London: Cassell, 1950.

64. Most notably the Republic of Pemberley, at www.pemberley.com (viewed 20 February 2007).

65. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 5.

66. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 1.

67. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, pp. 8–9.

68. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 9.

69. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 11.

70. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 13.

71. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 23.

72. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 14.

73. Kaye-Smith and Stern, Talking of Jane Austen, p. 11.

74. Kaye-Smith and Stern, More Talk of Jane Austen, p. 215.

75. Kaye-Smith and Stern, More Talk of Jane Austen, p. 208.

76. Kaye-Smith and Stern, More Talk of Jane Austen, pp. 215–16.