Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel

"I should say first that the stereotype of her being apolitical seems to be long gone. We’re no longer having that conversation, and I’m really grateful for that. How could she live through the French Revolution and Napoleonic Europe, with brothers who were serving in the military, without feeling very invested in what was going on in the world around her? Tomalin’s biography made us see that Austen wouldn’t have had to travel beyond England to understand world events and feel compelled by them. I think the novels show that implicitly. Obviously, then, the novels are quite political. Claudia Johnson’s book argues that in a way that remains compelling. Ultimately, Johnson sees Austen as a liberal who was interested in reform. The evidence Johnson brings to bear, by comparing Austen’s fiction to that of her fellow novelists, is very convincing to me. I’m sceptical of more recent arguments that Austen was a revolutionary, although I believe there are many moments in her fiction that demonstrate sympathy with revolution and change. Still, I don’t see Austen suggesting that we overthrow social structures, certainly not in a violent manner, which is how I understand the word “radical.” A lot of revolutionaries in her time would have seen overthrowing social structures as the best way forward. That’s not what Austen is going for in her writing. What Claudia Johnson says, in a really beautiful way, is that Austen sympathises with the philosophy of many of the revolutionary writers of her own time – Mary Wollstonecraft among them – but that instead of depoliticising their arguments in her fiction, Austen de-polemicises them. That is, she keeps their philosophical thrust but makes them seem palatable, almost second nature. Austen’s fiction works to makes us collude with her politics, wanting certain kinds of change, often without realising that that’s what we’re being asked to do. In that sense, I would see Austen as more invested in reform than in revolution. Her fiction brings readers gradually toward concluding that progressive change is desirable and reasonable. Her Northanger Abbey chapter is incredibly persuasive. Johnson says that we shouldn’t read Henry Tilney or Catherine Morland as author surrogates. She talks about how Northanger Abbey takes the gothic and gives it a progressive turn. Austen makes us see that the guardians of authority – General Tilney and some of the other adults: the national, domestic, and even religious authorities – are negative, destabilising figures. The way that she puts it is that Northanger Abbey considers “the authority of men and books, women’s books in particular, and suggests how the latter can illuminate and even resist the former.” Some Austen criticism — in an ungenerous mood I would call it lazy criticism – will just announce that ‘Austen is innovative’ or ‘Austen is a genius’ or ‘Austen is…’ – whatever political term they want to put there – ‘…progressive/conservative,’ without really showing us any evidence of what that means in a range of writings from her own time. What Johnson does is the opposite of lazy. It’s deep research, and it’s brilliant, hard work. She reads the conservative or what are called the anti-Jacobin novelists from that period, and the progressive novelists, too. Johnson not only weaves interpretations of their fiction with Jane Austen’s but helps us to read Austen against what others were doing. So the anti-Jacobin, conservative novelists like Jane West and Hannah More are read alongside the progressive novelists, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, William Godwin. Johnson has us look at Austen’s fiction alongside their writings and, in a comparative way, assess the politics, without just claiming Austen for a certain side. I think that’s beautifully done in her book, as well as brilliantly written. Johnson was one of the first to do that kind of work for Austen, coming to the conclusion that Austen was interested in progressive reform. Johnson’s conclusions are persuasive and compelling and remain so."