Essay on Jane Austen included in new Bayley collection
Oxford professor John Bayley, perhaps best known as the author of Elegy for Iris, has published a new collection of essays, including one on Jane Austen. The collection is called The Power of Delight: A Lifetime of Literature.
The professionalization of academic life has meant that professors tend more and more to write for each other, not for us. John Bayley is one of a dwindling band of holdouts: a man whose passion for literature is matched by the gracefulness of his style.
Bayley has a few sharp words for the new barbarisms that congregate under rubrics like structuralism, deconstruction, and post-colonialism. But mostly what he offers are commendations and connections: how George Eliot illuminates Henry James who illuminates Proust who has something to say about Pushkin.
