#the feminist depreciation of jane austen

[anghraine]

Do you have any favorite/interesting short essays? I'm in between semesters and not wanting to fall totally out of practice reading academic writing.

I do! It seems like you're specifically thinking of academic essays, which for me are generally specialized enough that it's a bit difficult to recommend them without knowing what topics someone is interested in.

That said, some academic essays worth reading, which are available on JSTOR:

Julia Prewitt Brown's 1990 review "The Feminist Depreciation of Jane Austen" articulated a lot of my frustration with feminist critics' often rather narrow readings of Austen (it's not anti-feminist, but rather pointing out the short-sighted form of feminism and bizarre hot takes in what was then the established feminist literature on Austen specifically). 11 pages long.

Elizabeth McGrath's 1992 article "The Black Andromeda" about the whitewashing of Andromeda (especially in reference to Ovid's Andromeda) in art and general discourse around her. 16 pages long.

Jacqueline Jones Royster's 1996 essay "When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own." I have a lot of gripes with composition studies, but this one's good. 11 pages long.

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's 1946 "The Intentional Fallacy" is very dated, but also very worth reading in terms of the history of anti-intentionalism, especially given how important anti-intentionalism is to modern fandom (usually in reference to Barthes's "Death of the Author" but the basic concept long predates it). 19 pages long.

It belatedly occurred to me that you might be looking for shorter or more casual essays than these, or on less directly academic topics (though maybe not!). For instance, if you're more "here" for SF/F than my other interests, there are some great essays in Uncanny Magazine and Reactor among others (I find Reactor a bit hit and miss, but when it hits, it hits hard). For instance, I recently read and enjoyed "Seven of Nine is a Third-Culture Kid" by Dawn Xiana Moon and "On Learning to Read Generously" by Molly Templeton.

I could also give you some recommendations for essays more directly about history or psychology in some area that I find interesting, but that's likely to be less accessible and I assumed not what a follower of mine was likely looking for.

[anghraine]

Do you have any book recommendations for the Jane Austen fan who's read every one of her books?

DO I EVER.

Okay, it really depends on your preferences and what you're looking for. If you want to read things that were part of the background noise when Austen started writing and have similar concerns, you might look at things like Frances Burney's Evelina, Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, The Italian or (more famously) The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, or going a little further afield, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria (or, for non-fiction, "Vindication of the Rights of Woman"), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, or various novels of Henry Fielding (I like Jonathan Wild, though it's quite different).

If you want to go nineteenth rather than eighteenth century, you can look at someone like Maria Edgeworth (also mentioned in NA!). Jumping ahead, Emily Eden is clearly an Austen fan (she gives P&P a shout-out in The Semi-Attached Couple, which is significantly different but obviously influenced by Austen). Frances Trollope's One Fault gives a very clear idea of why Elizabeth Bennet was so concerned about good nature as well as basic virtue (it's essentially about psychological abuse). There are the big names like George Eliot and the Brontës (Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is my personal favorite and probably the most akin to Austen of any of them).

If you want to read on Jane Austen, some faves:

Jane Austen and the Fabric of Dialogue by Howard S. Babb is from the 60s, so you may want to take some of it with a grain of salt, but I've always found it really interesting and engaging.

Even earlier, there's Fields of Light by Reuben A. Brower (1951), which I had to save to track down years ago, but which apparently has been republished since. There's a chapter on Austen that's really good IMO.

I like most of Julia Prewitt Brown's work on Austen, though I have a particular fondness for "The Feminist Depreciation of Jane Austen," which is basically a 90s-era guided tour through (and breakdown of) bad takes that had been filtered through a narrow sort of feminism.

I'm really fond of some of John Wiltshire's interpretations in Recreating Jane Austen. This is also from the 90s, iirc, so it doesn't address later adaptations, but he also was a co-author of the later (2009) The Cinematic Jane Austen, in which he expanded his essay on Darcy's smile and its minimization in adaptations (not where I got my gripe over it, but validating to see someone talk about it!).

Persuasions (Jane Austen literary journal): it's a bit hit and miss, but there are some very good articles that can only really be found there. I own a few volumes of it and have used them repeatedly.

The Gentleman's Daughter by Amanda Vickery: this gives more of a historical context leading up to Austen's time that periodically references Austen, but can be useful!

[anghraine]

Julia Prewitt Brown, again:

What more need be said, one could ask, of a mind that could prefer Little Women to Pride and Prejudice or fail to see the intellectual power of Austen's novels beside anything Charlotte Brontë ever wrote? 

omg

One has to be reading with both eyes shut, for example, not to see how much colder to male authority Austen is than Brontë, how much less attracted to it, how disinclined to sentimentalize and make excuses for it. Is any portrait of male power in Brontë more repellent than that of the polite General Tilney, with his maniacally organized house and his terrible temper? The primary emotion evoked for Mr. Rochester throughout Jane Eyre is pity, recalling Virginia Woolf's answer to the question: what do men want from women? "Pity!," she reiterates in To the Lighthouse.

MARRY ME

[anghraine]

“[M]any works of allegedly feminist criticism take for granted the political authority of their feminism, and yet offer us works that are politically unintelligible. The Madwoman in the Attic is an example. By grounding femininity upon being, rather than upon social, economic, and historical conditions—forces in which Gilbert and Gubar appear to take little interest—The Madwoman in the Attic does not countenance any political solution at all for the situation of women.”

—Julia Prewitt Brown, “The Feminist Depreciation of Jane Austen”

*draws hearts*

I’ve cordially disliked The Madwoman in the Attic for years, and I recalled liking Brown’s criticism of it years ago, but this is even better than I remembered :D

(tbh it reminds me of the bell hooks quote I posted that’s making the rounds)