Alert Janeite Rob Hardy sent us a link to an article in the Virginia Quarterly Review in which author and Austen scholar Emily Auerbach examines whether Mark Twain really disliked Jane Austen as much as we have been told. It’s not a new article, but certainly interesting!

Here suspicion turns to surmise. Although Twain had boasted earlier in “Jane Austen” that he was doing “the first third” of Sense and Sensibility and not for the first time, he quotes here from the final third of her three-volume novel.

Was Mark Twain a closet Janeite, a fake who read and appreciated far more of Jane Austen than he admitted?

Twain shows his understanding of Austen through his apt description of Lucy Steele as “coarse, ignorant, vicious, brainless, heartless, a flatterer, and a sneak.” Despite his usual admiration for down-to-earth speech and manners, Twain clearly does not prefer the uneducated, “ignorant and illiterate” Lucy with her bad grammar and “want of real elegance” to the well-bred Dashwood sisters. Lucy’s “insincerity” and “artfulness” make her vicious—for both Austen and Twain.

Twain clearly shows an appreciation for Austen’s work–though almost in spite of himself. We know there is a school of thought that Twain was mostly tweaking his friend William Dean Howells, a dedicated Janeite; but if he set out to write an essay lambasting her work, there does seem to be some enmity there–but as Prof. Auerbach points out, it doesn’t quite work out.

Twain and Austen would have been hard pressed to decide who was the more irreverent of the two. Both took on clergymen, aristocrats, and “superiors” of all sorts, skewering them in just a few ironic words. Austen observed of some tedious neighbors, “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow” and pronounced her clergyman Mr. Collins “favoured” with stupidity. Twain noted of a clergyman, “He charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it too,” and he quipped that doctors need but two things: ignorance and confidence.

Despite their pose as “mere” comic writers, both believed deeply in the power of their humor to reveal deeper truths about human behavior. Austen argued in Northanger Abbey that a work dismissed as “only a novel” was in fact “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

Do read the whole article, it’s very good.