Poor, trivial Jane
The Capitol Times (Madison, Wisconsin) has an interview with Emily Auerbach, the author of Searching for Jane Austen. Ms. Auerbach is distressed by the trivialization of Jane’s work and what she perceives as a misogynistic attitude in academe. From the book description at Amazon.com:
Searching for Jane Austen demolishes with wit and vivacity the often-held view of “Jane,” a decorous maiden aunt writing her small drawing-room stories of teas and balls.
Oh, dear. Hasn’t this been done before, and as Mr. Knightley might say, badly so?
I’m afraid that Austen movies have made the problem worse in that many of them are so-called “chick flicks.” They take the romance, but do away with the biting social satire and the wit. She was much more politically aware than people give her credit for. So you end up instead with these period pieces with women in long flowing gowns.
A tragedy indeed, because no one in Jane Austen’s novels wore long flowing gowns.
For the book, I interviewed Dave Barry and Andy Rooney, and they both dismissed her and made fun of her.
As Cub Reporter Julie B. pointed out, they do that to everyone!
In literature, Emily Dickinson is a parallel. In images of her, they added ruffles and ringlets to make her look more feminine, just like they did with Austen. The physical image you see is not the real one.
For Austen, they also added a cross around her neck and made her waist smaller.
The cross is most likely a reference to the topaz crosses Jane and Cassandra received from their sailor brother Charles, which are on display today at Jane Austen’s House at Chawton. Also, there is an extant pelisse that is believed to have been worn by Jane, which we are reliably informed was made for a very small-waisted lady. So there you go. (We admit that some of the posthumous illustrations give Jane more generous proportions in the bust.)
Even though she is everywhere, she is hard to find in terms of the real novelist. We get a lot of movie adaptations and TV shows and kitsch.
Not to mention weblogs. 
We suspect our male readers might be prepared to speak in defense of Men Who Love Jane. Oh, boys?
Moving on, the article also says that Ms. Auerbach will be signing copies of the book tomorrow at the University Book Store in Madison. We are interested in reading it, because we know that writers are sometimes misrepresented.
December 8th, 2004 at 5:25 pm
Eh. I mean, yeah, she does have a point, but like you said, it’s been made before, and probably better (Andy Rooney???).
When it comes to JA and chick-flicks, I so don’t have the energy to go there right now. But it’s a pretty intriguing connection; I mean if she were writing today, they’d plaster her in pink and shove her on the chick-lit shelf…
December 8th, 2004 at 5:28 pm
I don’t know! When Karen Joy Fowler and Susanna Clarke and Patrick O’Brian are getting pretty respectful literary reviews, I think it’s possible that reviewers would see past the romantic trappings of Jane’s novels.
December 9th, 2004 at 10:12 am
“We suspect our male readers might be prepared to speak in defense of Men Who Love Jane. Oh, boys?”
SPEAK in defense? I’ll thrash ‘em to within an inch of their lives! Come on out, Rooney, Barry, Mark Twain or whatever your name is.. come on out and fight! Are you men, or mice?
December 9th, 2004 at 12:44 pm
HARD TO FIND???? Harumph. One need only consult the works of Jane Austen to find the “real novelist”. And as for all those pesky adaptations, look only as far as William Shakespeare for kitsch thank you very much. “The Ten Things I Hate About You”? Please.
December 10th, 2004 at 10:14 am
I agree with Shannon that “one need only consult the works of Jane Austen to find the ‘real novelist’”: in fact, that’s the major point of my new book, Searching for Jane Austen. My book explores two centuries of distortion and censorship, as when relatives or editors changed words in Austen’s letters. For example, “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow” became “I was as civil to them as circumstances would allow.” Relatives cut out Austen’s references to politics, literature, money, medicine, etc. and then said she wasn’t interested in those topics, a perfect Catch-22. Anyway, I hope your blog readers will respond not to a silly article in a local paper but to my book itself, as I’d love to have feedback. I’ve already found a typo, and I’m sure Austen readers everywhere will tell me all my other mistakes, big and small! Let me know what you think of the cartoons and illustrations I include, too.
Emily Auerbach
December 10th, 2004 at 11:30 am
Oh, there’s no doubt that Jane’s younger relatives made an attempt at sweetening and gentling her, according to their Victorian sensibilities. And there is certainly an element, even among the fandom (as considered separate from academe), of Dear Auntie Jane.
I was speaking with a young lady at a JASNA AGM a few years back. She told me a story about a prominent Austenian scholar at her university who had some problems getting tenure because her chosen subject of study was not considered sufficiently serious; so I do understand that there is a problem with perception of Jane’s work in academe.
However, I tend to be suspicious of black and white generalizations (and Emily, I’m not suggesting that your book contains such generalizations, as I have not read it) of Austenian scholarship and the larger Janeite fandom. I learned to be suspicious from reading Jane’s work, which rarely deals in strict archetypes or generalizations in characters. For the lazy and/or clueless, it’s easy to generalize about both Jane and her work, but the generalizations never hold up, which I think is the genesis of the reaction we and our readers have had to the article. Just the four-person staff of AustenBlog displays a variety of ages, backgrounds, social attitudes and philosophies; it is a variety that extends to the fandom at large. The one thing we have in common is our affection for Jane and her work. There is a variety of scholarship available as well, covering all spectrums; but as Shannon said above, I feel that the best way to get to know Jane is through the work itself.
I’ve read the stuff Twain said about Jane and I don’t really get a feeling of misogyny from it. He just didn’t like Jane’s books. He’s allowed.
Every freaking modern lit class I took in university made me read Norman Mailer. I don’t like Norman Mailer’s work. I find it stultifyingly boring (I sometimes refer to his work as the world’s finest non-narcotic sleep inducer). Does that mean I hate men? Of course not! It doesn’t even mean I hate Norman Mailer! I just don’t like his books!
And frankly, I feel sorry for those who put her down, but there’s no point in beating them about the head with it either. Do we really want such dull elves in our august company?
December 10th, 2004 at 3:53 pm
I loved reading Mark Twain’s unpublished essay called “Jane Austen” when I located the fragment in the Mark Twain library/project at UC-Berkeley. It’s in the appendix of my book along with a reprint of an article I wrote called “Did Mark Twain really hate Jane Austen?” (my answer: no) I think Twain was a closet Janeite who thought it was “macho” to put her down but actually appreciated her work. You get suspicious when you hear Twain saying he likes to reread her novels so he can hate her all over again. Plus he steals a scene from Sense and Sensibility and puts it into Huck Finn. I think Catherine Morland would have loved rolling down a hill and getting away from “civilization” with Huck Finn. So despite the fact that Twain said he’d like to dig Austen up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone, I think Twain and Austen were kindred spirits.