Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood

"It’s hard to underestimate the importance of this book to re-envisioning Austen’s reputation. Sutherland herself went on to create the Jane Austen fiction manuscripts site which allows readers to compare manuscripts to the transcriptions, and to look at the ways that the surviving writings show marks of process or of stopping and starting. A negative stereotype of literary scholars is that we’re over-invested in every little comma and dash. The force of Sutherland’s book is in showing us that, especially with Austen, it’s not the right stereotype to have in mind. When you approach Austen from the level of each dash, comma, and crossing-out, and look for patterns, you might reach amazing insights. Sutherland’s book gave us new ways to use Austen’s text and texts that came after hers to make sense of her history and her reputation. Early on, Sutherland says: “my concern is with Jane Austen’s textual identities as a means to explore the wider issue of what text is and what it means to stabilise and destabilise particular definitions of text and particular texts”. So, this is a heavy book. It’s not the easiest reading. But it really repays close attention, helping us think about the ways that Austen’s own writings – and their reprintings – helped to manufacture her reputation and how we think of her as an author and as a person. Sutherland’s argument (and others have talked about this as well) is that R W Chapman, when he approached the editing of Austen in the 1920s, was giving us the first standard edition of the work of any novelist. You’ve got to bear in mind that textual studies had been more allied with classics, with ancient texts by men. The idea that Jane Austen could be worthy of this level of textual scrutiny represents an interesting moment in English scholarship and English studies. “Print Settles It” is one of the titles of Sutherland’s chapters and I love this idea of print as settling or unsettling for Austen. Sutherland has a whole section on Austen’s use of commas and what editors did (or what we suspected editors may have done) with some of her idiosyncratic textual practices. Yes, definitely. He was trying to make her an object of serious study, as opposed to twee dilettantism. One of the things that Sutherland mentions, though not at great length, is that Chapman’s wife – née Katharine Metcalfe – was actually quite involved in the editing of Austen’s works, before and after she married Chapman. She was a collaborator. So, Mr and Mrs Chapman worked together. And when she was Katharine Metcalfe in the early 1900s, she was the one who first published an edition of Austen that showed careful textual work. Returning that to the story is an interesting thing to do and Sutherland opened it up for us. (Janine Barchas has a fascinating essay on Katharine Metcalfe Chapman in a recent issue of Review of English Studies .) In my own work, I’ve been finding ways that I think the Chapmans, or Metcalfe-Chapmans, were themselves drawing on earlier textual editors as well. There’s a woman named Josephine Heermans in Kansas City, Missouri, who was doing some of the same kind of editorial finessing in school editions just before the Chapmans. The history of school editions in conjunction with the scholarly editions is one that we can tell better. We couldn’t have even started this avenue of exploration without what Sutherland offered us. Yes. Sutherland’s book has been very inspiring to me, too, because she defines “text” as principally manuscript, print, and then film. That emphasis made me think about other kinds of “text” that we might bring into the conversation, like illustrations, dramatizations, and things that we may not have records of. All of these things contributed to the shaping of Austen’s reputation. Again, I don’t think these are conversations we could even be having today without Sutherland showing us how important it is to attend to these seemingly miniscule elements, using them to chart out a bigger, deeper, fascinating picture of how Jane Austen has come to matter to us. Sutherland calls one chapter “Film as Textual Future”, and I love that. I think that’s spot on. Other textual futures have emerged in the years since she published this book, in 2005 — things we couldn’t have ever envisioned – like Jane Austen videogames. There is now a massive multiplayer online role-playing game called Ever, Jane . That’s not really something many people would have envisioned as a textual future! The woman who’s putting this game together – Judy Tyrer – has talked about how she’s struggled to meet the needs of those who are most attracted to the polite versus the impolite parts of Austen’s world. The result is a sort of ‘Jane Austen Second Life’. Tyrer has struggled, too, with what to do with the people out there with bad intentions: the pirates and others up to no good. So, I think she’s structuring the game in ways that will allow for people who come with these various impulses to all find in the game the thing that they’re looking for. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Of course, many parts of Austen’s wider appeal have to do with the polite manner-focussed interactions and dancing and things that we imagine that are very controlled and overlayered with meaning. They might be fraught in their own way, but largely they have very little risk of death! Exactly. I think it’s fabulous. I’ve heard Judy speak about the game, and I just think she’s doing really interesting and exciting things. Then you also have the Pemberley Digital vlog series and the ‘Welcome to Sanditon’ series of a few years ago, in which they asked viewers to make videos of themselves as characters and insert themselves into a contemporary retelling of the story. That’s another amazing textual future, which is also a kind of film future, if you will, for Austen and her devotees. We know about all the print continuations of Austen’s novels (known as JAFF: Jane Austen Fan Fiction), but ‘Welcome to Sanditon’ is a really innovative video-based continuation, where you upload an interview with yourself as part of the story. I like Pemberley Digital’s own stories better; I’m not sure ‘Welcome to Sanditon’ was 100 per cent successful as a gripping experiment in crowdsourcing Austen-based vlogs. What people uploaded varied in quality. ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ is a much more entertaining viewing experience, compared to some of the things that amateurs produced. But it’s all pretty cool. I’m hopeful that we will still care about her and her novels. I think that, if we do, that will say something great about the human future, because I think Jane Austen now and in the past has posed provocative questions about how to live a meaningful life in a world that can be deeply unfair. The beauty of her novels is that instead of giving us a lot of pat answers, and then hitting us over the head with some moral lessons, they present things in a way that is a bit more open-ended. The bad characters don’t necessarily all come to outrageously bad ends. Some of them get a slap on the wrist or the promise of living in a private hell of their own making. That we can look at the social structures she presents so minutely and see ways that a person can make choices and manoeuvre in them – even though they aren’t our structures any more – is why the novels still speak to us. So, in 200 more years, I think she’s still going to be with readers. I think that that is ensured as long as Austen continues to travel and engage with whatever new media emerge, as long as she morphs into whatever the next popular form or trend is. If that’s the case, then she’ll have ways to seem hip, fresh, and new, as well as admirably old and classic. Regardless of how she fares in new media and with popular audiences of the future, I would hope critics will continue to understand the value of what she produced – its beauty, its artistry and its craft. I’m less worried about that continuing, actually; any future scholars who are interested in the history of the novel will have to care about Jane Austen, if only because of the magnitude of the reputation she once enjoyed."