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Jane Austen Writing, Society, Politics
Tom Keymer
Oxford:University Press, 2020 Hardcover.
192 pages. ISBN 978-0198861904. £10.99
Reviewed by Joe
Bray University
of Sheffield
Tom Keymer’s Jane Austen :
Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020) is compact,
pocket-book size, the perfect companion for a lockdown walk. This is appropriate
for the study of an author whose popularity, as Keymer reminds us, ‘is often
strongest in times of crisis’ [30], and who famously described herself as
working on a ‘little bit (two inches wide) of ivory’ with ‘so fine a brush, as
produces little effect after much labour’. (Letter to James Edward Austen, 16
December, 1816). Like many of her other playfully self-deprecating comments on
her own work this is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. Keymer joins many
recent critics in arguing that her brush is oftener broader and more engaged
with the world around her than might first appear. Yet, as he also shows in
this succinct, finely-written (four and a half inches wide) appreciation of her
art, a great deal of hard labour did indeed lie behind what has sometimes been
put down to effortless genius. Following its subject in adopting a less-is-more
‘minimalist aesthetic’ [70], Jane Austen : Writing, Society, Politics meticulously
demonstrates throughout ‘just how strenuously she worked to achieve her
signature effect of spontaneous lightness’ [6]. The book takes the form of seven main
chapters (one on each of the completed novels, and one on the juvenilia), plus
Introduction and Afterword (which includes discussion of Sanditon). Each
of the six novels is connected to a broader, sensibly-chosen social or
political theme (so for example Northanger Abbey is discussed in
relation to the terrors of the French Revolution and the turmoil of the 1790s, Sense
and Sensibility to the precarious prospects for unmoneyed women at the time,
and Emma to the nation’s moral health and social wellbeing in 1815). Familiar
debates which have long preoccupied Austen scholars inevitably emerge: how
pressing and pervasive a context is the slave trade in Mansfield Park,
how suitable as a model for domestic life is the navy in Persuasion,
and, of course, just how much of a monster is General Tilney in Northanger
Abbey? In each case Keymer, having set out both sides of the argument, is
careful not to resolve it too neatly, emphasising instead the ‘multiple,
sometimes competing, points of view’ [10] of Austen’s prose, which complicate
any kind of easy answer. This stylistic complexity is illustrated most clearly
in Chapter 4, on ‘The Voices of Pride and Prejudice’, which discusses
her signature technique, free indirect discourse. As Keymer astutely argues,
this style allows Austen to ‘endlessly problematize the origin and authority of
her narrative statements’, while also creating ‘a remarkable narrative
impression of conversational fluidity’ [87] (superbly demonstrated through
analysis of ‘the bloviating Mr Collins’ in a passage describing his first visit
to Longbourn). Instead of narrative certainty then,
Austen presents her reader with what Keymer calls ‘puzzles and problems’ which
‘require them to exert their moral and intellectual faculties in thinking [them]
through’ [104]. He references twice her comment on Pride and Prejudice (which
in turn quotes Scott) that ‘I do not write for such dull Elves “As have not a
great deal of Ingenuity themselves”’ [81, 104], and the fact that ‘Austen’s
method is much more about showing than telling’ [67] is rightly emphasised
throughout. Her preference for implication over explication is highlighted
especially well in a thoughtful discussion of silences and gaps in Mansfield
Park, including the ‘dead silence’ which follows Fanny’s attempt to
initiate a discussion with her uncle about the slave trade shortly after his return
from Antigua. Here and elsewhere Keymer shows clearly how Austen ‘calls on
readers to navigate her prose with vigilance and discernment’ [87]. At times
this particular reader, while acknowledging the constraints of space, must
admit to wishing for more examples of such prose, and hence more opportunities
for Keymer to exercise his own sharply analytical discernment (as on the Mr
Collins at Longbourn passage, and also, equally perceptively, on the view from
Donwell Abbey passage in Emma [108-111]). Yet to wish this book longer is not to
cast any kind of shadow on what it does achieve. Writing with an economy and
lucidity of style befitting his subject, Keymer packs in the thought-provoking
insights, not just about Austen’s writing and the social and political world in
which it moved, but also about the way in which has subsequently been received.
He is especially good on her early to mid-twentieth-century reception, for
example starting Chapter 5 with a fascinating discussion of Nabokov’s Mansfield
Park lectures at Cornell. He returns frequently to Woolf, whom he describes
as ‘Austen’s most brilliant reader of the modernist era’ [144]. A passage in
the Afterword on Woolf’s essay “Jane Austen at Sixty” leads into a brief but
compelling section on ‘the twelve bravura chapters’ of Sanditon. Keymer
is surely right to identify a new scope and ambition here, not least in the
‘modern commercial energies of kinds that had previously lurked in the background
of her fiction’ [147]. A growing body of criticism on this unfinished fragment,
coinciding with the two hundredth anniversary of Austen’s death, has
highlighted just how new and exciting her writing in the last months of her
life frustratingly was (see for example Persuasions On-Line). Keymer’s style also embraces the
modern, with a playfulness that again pays tribute to its subject. I especially
enjoyed the descriptions of Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe as ‘undeclared
frenemies’ [44], Mr Knightley as ‘perhaps the most egregious mansplainer in any
of the novels’ [122], and Bath as ‘the Dubai or Las Vegas of her era’ [131].
Such ingenious contemporary touches might not be to the taste of all Austen’s
readers, elvish or otherwise, but to my mind they catch something of her
‘satirical energies’ [8] and ‘stylistic exuberance’ [29]. With another of her
self-effacing comments on her own work Austen rejected in 1816 a suggestion
from James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, to write a sweeping historical
romance, preferring instead to keep her focus on ‘domestic Life in Country
Villages’: ‘I must keep to my own style and go on in my own Way’ (Letter to
James Stanier Clarke, 1 April 1816). Yet as Keymer shows beyond doubt in this
engaging and witty study, Austen knew the importance of aligning this way with
the times.
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