Reception history of Jane Austen

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A watercolour sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra (c. 1804)

The reception history of Jane Austen's work follows a path from modest fame to wild popularity. Jane Austen, an early 19th-century British novelist, authored works such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815), which have become some of the best-known and well-loved novels in the English language.

During her own lifetime, Austen's novels brought her little personal fame, because she chose to publish anonymously and her works received only a few positive reviews. By the mid-19th century, her novels were admired by a literary elite who viewed their appreciation of her works as a mark of cultivation. The publication of her nephew's biographical Memoir of the Life of Jane Austen (1870) introduced Austen to a wider public as an appealing personality—"dear quiet aunt Jane"—and her works were republished in popular editions. By the turn of the 20th century, competing Janeite cults had sprung up: some to worship her and some to defend her from the vulgar masses. Early in the 20th century, scholars produced an edited, scholarly edition of her complete works—the first for any British novelist.

By the 1940s, Austen was firmly ensconced in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored every aspect of her works: artistic, ideological, and historical. Currently, Austen's works are one of the most written-about and debated oeuvres in the academy, despite constituting only six complete novels. With the advent of university English departments, criticism of Austen became an increasingly esoteric function and appreciation of Austen as a writer branched into several directions. Fans, often disparaged by academics, have founded Jane Austen societies and clubs to celebrate Austen, her time, and her works.

[edit] 1812–1821: Individual reactions and contemporary reviews

In 1816, the editors of the New Monthly Magazine noted Emma's publication but did not see it as important enough to review.

Austen's novels quickly became fashionable among "opinion-makers". Lady Bessborough wrote that her friends were "full of it [Sense and Sensibility] at Althorp" and Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of the Prince Regent and then fifteen, compared herself to one of the heroines, Marianne: "I think Marianne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &tc".^[1] After reading Pride and Prejudice, playwright Richard Sheridan advised a friend to "[b]uy it immediately" for it "was one of the cleverest things" he had ever read.^[2] Anne Milbanke, future wife of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, wrote that "I have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior work." She commented that that novel "is the most probable fiction I have ever read" and had become "at present the fashionable novel".^[3] The Dowager Lady Vernon told a friend that Mansfield Park was "[n]ot much of a novel, more the history of a family party in the country, very natural" as if, comments Honan, "Lady Vernon's parties mostly featured adultery."^[4] Lady Anne Romilly told her friend, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, that "[i]t [Mansfield Park] has been pretty generally admired here" and Edgeworth commented later that "we have been much entertained with Mansfield Park".^[5]

Despite these positive reactions from the elite, Austen's novels received relatively few reviews during her lifetime: two for Sense and Sensibility, three for Pride and Prejudice, none for Mansfield Park, and seven for Emma. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious.^[6] They most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.^[7] Asked by publisher John Murray to review Emma, famed historical novelist Walter Scott wrote the longest and most thoughtful of these reviews, which was published anonymously in the March 1816 issue of the Quarterly Review. Using the review as a platform from which to defend the then disreputable genre of the novel, he praised Austen's works, celebrating her ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader...a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him".^[8] Modern Austen scholar William Galperin has noted that "unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence from realistic practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence".^[9] In what would become a famously quoted passage, Scott wrote in his private journal in 1826:

Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!^[10]

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published together in December 1817 after Austen's death, were reviewed in the British Critic in March 1818 and in the Edinburgh Review and Literary Miscellany in May 1818. The reviewer for the British Critic felt that Austen's exclusive dependence on experience (i.e., her realism) was evidence of a deficient imagination. The reviewer for the Edinburgh Review disagreed, praising Austen for her "exhaustless invention" and the combination of the familiar and the surprising in her plots.^[11] Overall, these early reviewers did not know what to make of Austen's novels—they missed her irony, for example.^[12]

In the Quarterly Review in 1821, Richard Whately published the most serious and enthusiastic early posthumous review of Austen's work. Whately drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, praising the dramatic qualities of her narrative. He also affirmed the seriousness and legitimacy of the novel as a genre, arguing that imaginative literature, especially narrative, was more valuable than history or biography. When it was properly done, Whately said, imaginative literature concerned itself with generalized human experience from which the reader could gain important insights into human nature; in other words, it was moral. Whately also addressed Austen's position as a female writer, writing that: "we suspect one of Miss Austin's [sic] great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us into the peculiarities of female characters....Her heroines are what one knows women must be, though one never can get them to acknowledge it."^[13] No more serious Austen criticism was published until the late 19th century: Whately and Scott had set the tone for the Victorian era.^[14]

[edit] 1821–1870: Discriminating readers

George Henry Lewes, partner of George Eliot, compared Austen to Shakespeare

Austen had many admiring readers in the 19th century, who, according to critic Ian Watt, appreciated her "scrupulous and initiated fidelity to ordinary social experience".^[15] However, Austen's novels failed to conform to certain strong Romantic and Victorian British preferences, which required that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and color in the writing".^[16] Victorian critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, next to which Austen's novels looked provincial and narrow.^[17] Although Austen's novels were republished beginning in late 1832 or early 1833 by Richard Bentley in the Standard Novels series and remained in print thereafter, they were not bestsellers.^[18] Brian Southam, who has made a study of the reception of Austen, describes her "reading public between 1821 and 1870" as "minute beside the known audience for Dickens and his contemporaries".^[19]

However, those who did read Austen saw themselves as discriminating readers—they were a cultured few. This became a common theme of literary criticism of Austen's works during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes carried this theme forward in a series of enthusiastic articles published in the 1840s and 1850s. In "The Novels of Jane Austen", published anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, Lewes praised Austen's novels for "the economy of art ... the easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid from superfluous elements" and compared her to Shakespeare.^[20] Arguing that Austen lacked the ability to construct plot, he celebrated her dramatization: "The reader's pulse never throbs, his curiosity is never intense; but his interest never wanes for a moment. The action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors are well as spectators of the little drama."^[21]

Reacting against Lewes's essays and her personal communications with him, novelist Charlotte Brontë admired Austen's fidelity to everyday life but described her as "only shrewd and observant" and criticized the absence of visible passion in her work.^[22] To Brontë, Austen's work appeared formal and constrained, "a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck".^[23]

[edit] 19th-century European translations

The first translation of Austen’s works appeared in 1813 with the French translation of Pride and Prejudice, quickly followed by others in German, Danish, and Swedish.^[24] However, the first Russian translation did not appear until 1967.^[25] Despite the fact that Austen’s novels were translated into many European languages, she did not become a recognized part of the perceived English novel tradition on the Continent. While the translations of her works, which often injected sentimentalism and eliminated Austen’s humor and irony, contributed to this, so too did the "marginalization of women writers" and the dominant association between Walter Scott and the "English novel" in European readers' minds.^[26] As Valérie Cossy and Diego Saglia write in their essay on translations of Jane Austen’s novels, "[i]n Europe Jane Austen was simply one of the many writers whose works satisfied continental readers’ demand for prose fiction."^[27] Because of the significant changes made to Austen’s works by her translators, she was received as a very different novelist on the Continent. For example, the French novelist Isabelle de Montolieu translated several of Austen novels into a genre she herself wrote in: the French sentimental novel. In Pride and Prejudice, the vivacious conversations between Elizabeth and Darcy were replaced by decorous ones.^[28] Because Austen’s works were seen as part of a sentimental tradition, they were overshadowed by the works of French writers such as Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, who emphasized realism.^[29] German translations and reviews of those translations also placed Austen in a line of sentimental writers, particularly late Romantic women writers.^[30]

[edit] 1870–1930: Janeites and Anti-Janeites

[edit] Family biographies

James Edward Austen-Leigh had an idealized portrait of Austen painted for the Memoir; this engraving of it softens her image even further, making her presentable to the Victorian public.^[31]

Until the publication in 1870 of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, the first significant biography of Austen, Scott's and Whately's reviews were the primary received opinions on Austen and few read her novels. However, with the publication of the biography, Austen's popularity and her critical standing increased dramatically.^[32] Readers of the Memoir were presented with the myth of the amateur novelist who wrote masterpieces: the Memoir fixed in the public mind a sentimental picture of Austen as a quiet, middle-aged maiden aunt and reassured the public that her work was suitable for a respectable Victorian family. However, critics continued to assert that her works were sophisticated and only appropriate for those who could truly plumb their depths.^[33] After the publication of the Memoir, more criticism was published on Austen in two years than had appeared in the previous fifty.^[34] The publication of the Memoir also spurred the reissue of the Austen's novels. The first popular editions were released in 1883—a sixpenny series by Routledge. This was followed by fancy illustrated editions, collectors' sets, and scholarly editions.^[35]

William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh published the definitive family biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters—A Family Record, in 1913. The book was based primarily on family papers and letters and is described by Austen scholar Park Honan as "accurate, staid, reliable, and at times vivid and suggestive".^[36] Although the authors moved away from the sentimental tone of the Memoir, they made little effort to go beyond the family records and traditions immediately available to them. Their book is therefore highly factual and offers little in the way of interpretation.^[37]

[edit] Criticism

During the last quarter of the 19th century, the first books of criticism on Austen were published, and in 1890, Godwin Smith published the Life of Jane Austen, which has been called the beginning of formal criticism on Austen.^[38] However, according to Southam, while Austen criticism increased in amount and, to some degree, in quality after 1870, "a certain uniformity" pervaded it:

We see the novels praised for their elegance of form and their surface 'finish'; for the realism of their fictional world, the variety and vitality of their characters; for their pervasive humour; and for their gentle and undogmatic morality and its unsermonising delivery. The novels are prized for their 'perfection'. Yet it is seen to be a narrow perfection, achieved within the bounds of domestic comedy.^[39]

Among the most astute of these critics, however, were Richard Simpson, Margaret Oliphant, and Leslie Stephen. In a review of the Memoir, Simpson described Austen as a serious yet ironic critic of English society. He introduced two interpretative themes which later became the basis for modern literary criticism of Austen: humour as social critique and irony as a means of moral evaluation. Continuing Lewes's comparison to Shakespeare, Simpson wrote that Austen:

began by being an ironical critic; she manifested her judgment ... not by direct censure, but by the indirect method of imitating and exaggerating the faults of her models....Criticism, humor, irony, the judgment not of one that gives sentence but of the mimic who quizzes while he mocks, are her characteristics.^[40]

Mark Twain was one of Austen's most vocal American critics (c. 1907).

However, Simpson's essay was not well-known and did not become influential until Lionel Trilling quoted it in 1957.^[41] Another well-known writer but ignored Austen critic of the period, novelist Margaret Oliphant, described Austen in almost proto-feminist terms, as "armed with a 'fine vein of feminine cynicism,' 'full of subtle power, keenness, finesse, and self-restraint,' blessed with an 'exquisite sense' of the 'ridiculous,' 'a fine stinging yet soft-voiced contempt,' whose novels are 'so calm and cold and keen'".^[42] However, this line of criticism would not be fully explored until the 1970s.

Although Austen's novels had been published in the United States since 1832, often in bowdlerized editions, it was not until after 1870 that there was a distinctive American response to Austen.^[43] As Southam explains, "for American literary nationalists Jane Austen's cultivated scene was too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic".^[44] Austen was not democratic enough for American tastes and her canvas did not explore the frontier themes that had come to define American literature.^[45] By the turn of the century, the American response was represented by the debate between the British critic William Dean Howells and the writer and humorist Mark Twain.^[46] In his book Following the Equator, Twain described the library on his ship: "Jane Austen's books...are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."^[47]

[edit] Janeites

Main article: Janeite

The Encyclopedia Britannica's changing entries on Austen illustrate her increasing popularity and status. The eighth edition (1854) described her as “an elegant novelist” while the ninth edition (1875) described her as “one of the most distinguished modern British novelists”.^[49] Austen novels were studied at universities and appeared in histories of the English novel.^[50] However, the image of her that dominated the popular imagination was that first presented in the Memoir and made popular by William Dean Howells in his series of essays in Harper's Magazine, that of "dear aunt Jane".^[51] Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as “Austenolatry”.^[52] It is only after the publication of the Memoir that readers started to develop a personal identification with Austen; one can even call it a "cult", according to scholars.^[53] However, around the turn of the century, members of the literary elite, who had claimed an appreciation of Austen as a mark of culture, reacted against this popularization of Austen. They referred to themselves as Janeites in order to distinguish themselves from the masses who did not properly understand Austen. As Nicola Trott writes, "[t]he great fault line in nineteenth-century Austen commentary was between Janeites and anti-Janeites".^[54]

One member of this literary elite was Henry James, who referred to Austen several times with approval and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life". However, James thought Austen an "unconscious" artist whom he described as "instinctive and charming". In 1905, James responded negatively to what he described as "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest". James attributed this rise principally to "the stiff breeze of the commercial,...the special bookselling spirits....the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their 'dear,' our dear, everybody's dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be salable, form."^[55]

In an effort to abandon the sentimental image of the "Aunt Jane" tradition and approach Austen's fiction from a fresh perspective, Reginald Farrer published a lengthy essay in the Quarterly Review which Austen scholar A. Walton Litz has called the best single introduction to her fiction.^[56] Southam has described it as a "Janeite" piece without the worship.^[57] Farrer denied that Austen's artistry was unconscious (contradicting James) and described her as a writer of intense concentration and a severe critic of her society, "radiant and remorseless", "dispassionate yet pitiless", with "the steely quality, the incurable rigor of her judgment". Farrer was one of the first critics who viewed Austen as a subversive writer.^[58]

[edit] 1930–the present: Modern scholarship

Modern scholars emphasized Austen's intellectual and artistic ties to important eighteenth-century figures such as Samuel Johnson.

While there were glimmers of brilliant Austen scholarship early in the 20th century, it was not until the 1930s that Austen became solidly entrenched within academia. Several important early works paved the way for this to happen. The first was R. W. Chapman's magisterial edition of Austen's collected works. Not only was it the first scholarly edition of Austen's works, it was also the first scholarly edition of the collected works of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.^[59] The second was Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley's 1911 essay, "generally regarded as the starting-point for the serious academic approach to Jane Austen".^[60] Bradley emphasized Austen's ties to Samuel Johnson, arguing that she was a moralist as well as humorist; in this he was "totally original", according to Southam.^[61] Bradley established the groupings of Austen's "early" and "late" novels, which are still used by scholars today.^[62]

The 1920s saw a boom in Austen scholarship, with E. M. Forster using Austen as the primary example of an author whose characters were "round", but it was not until the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art—"the first full-scale historical and scholarly study" of Austen—that the academic study of Austen really took hold.^[63] Lascelles included a short biographical essay, an innovative analysis of the books Jane Austen read and the effect of her reading on her work, and an extended analysis of Austen's style and her "narrative art". Lascelles felt that prior critics had all worked on a scale "so small that the reader does not see how they have reached their conclusions until he has patiently found his own way to them". She wished to examine Austen on a large scale (i.e., all of Austen's works considered together) and to subject her style and techniques to a methodical analysis. Subsequent critics agree that she succeeded. Like Bradley earlier, she emphasized Austen's connection to Samuel Johnson and her desire to discuss morality through fiction. However, at the time concern arose over the fact that academics were taking over Austen criticism and it was becoming increasingly esoteric—a debate that has continued to the beginning of the 21st century.^[64]

In an outpouring of revisionist views, scholars approached Austen more sceptically. D. W. Harding, following and expanding upon Farrer, argued in his essay "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen" that Austen's attitudes were not supportive of the status quo but subversive. Her irony was not humorous but caustic and intended to undermine the assumptions of the society she portrayed. Through her use of irony, Austen attempted to protect her integrity as an artist and a person in the face of attitudes and practices she rejected.^[65] Almost simultaneously, Q. D. Leavis argued in "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing", published in Scrutiny in the early 1940s, that Austen was a professional, not an amateur, writer.^[66] Harding's and Leavis's articles were followed by another revisionist treatment by Marvin Mudrick in Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952). Mudrick portrayed Austen as isolated, defensive, and critical of her society, and described in detail the relationship he saw between Austen's attitude toward contemporary literature and her use of irony as a technique to contrast the realities of her society with what she felt should be.^[67]

These revisionist views together with F. R. Leavis's pronouncement in The Great Tradition (1948) that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction, a view shared by Ian Watt, did much to cement Austen's reputation amongst academics.^[68] They agreed that she "combined [Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's] qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".^[69]

The period since the Second World War saw a flowering of scholarship on Austen as well as a diversity of critical approaches. One of the most fruitful and contentious has been the consideration of Austen as a political writer. As Gary Kelly explains, "Some see her as a political 'conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order. Others see her as sympathetic to 'radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the form of patriarchy . . . some critics see Austen's novels as neither conservative nor subversive, but complex, criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting stability and an open class hierarchy."^[70] In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), perhaps the most important of these works, Marilyn Butler demonstrated that Austen was steeped in, and not insulated from, the principal moral and political controversies of her time and espoused a partisan, fundamentally conservative and Christian position in these controversies. Alistair M. Duckworth adopted an anti-revisionist stance in The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (1971), in which he argued that Austen used the concept of the "estate" to symbolize all that was important about contemporary English society, which should be conserved, improved and passed down to future generations.^[71] However, as Rajeswari Rajan explains, "the idea of a political Austen is no longer seriously challenged". The questions investigated now involve: "the Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class, 'improvement', the clergy, town versus country, abolition, the professions, female emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied a reformist position between these extremes".^[72]

Edward Said provoked great debate with his description of Mansfield Park as colonialist.

In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist criticism of Austen was influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal The Madwoman in the Attic, Margaret Kirkham's Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988). Johnson argued that in the face of the threat from revolutionary France, the English novel became politicized, with the representation of the well-ordered English family standing for a rejection of revolutionary ideology.^[73]

In the late-1980s, 1990s, and 2000s ideological, postcolonial, and Marxist criticism has dominated Austen studies^[74] Edward Said devoted a chapter of his book Culture and Imperialism (1993) to Austen and Mansfield Park, arguing that the peripheral position of "Antigua" and the issue of slavery in that novel was evidence of the fact that slavery and colonial oppression were "givens" of English society of this period. In Jane Austen and the Body: 'The Picture of Health', John Wiltshire explored the preoccupation with illness and health of Austen's characters and the various meanings this yields. Wiltshire addressed current theories of "the body as sexuality", and more broadly how culture is "inscribed" on the representation of the body. The historian Irene Collins addressed some of the religious issues in Austen's works in Jane Austen and the Clergy (1994).^[75] There has also been a return to considerations of aesthetics with D. A. Miller's Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style which connects artistic concerns with the issues of queer theory.

[edit] Austen in the modern imagination

[edit] Modern Janeites

Main article: Janeite

The Jane Austen Centre in Bath, a place of pilgrimage for Janeites

According to Johnson, Janeitism is "the self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for 'Jane' and every detail relative to her".^[76] She describes the "the ludic enthusiasm of...amateur reading clubs, whose 'performances' include teas, costume balls, games, readings, and dramatic representations, staged with a campy anglophilia in North America, and a brisker antiquarian meticulousness in England, and whose interests range from Austenian dramatizations, to fabrics, to genealogies, and to weekend study trips".^[77] Lynch has commented that "cult" is an apt term for committed Janeites. She compares the practices of religious pilgrims with those of Janeites, who travel to Austen's birthplace or locations associated with her novels and the filmic adaptations of them. She speculates that this is "a kind of time-travel to the past, because they preserve an all but vanished Englishness or set of 'traditional' values....This may demonstrate the influence of a sentimental account of Austen's novels that presents them as means by which readers might go home again — to a comfortable, soothingly normal world."^[78] The disconnect between the popular appreciation of Austen and the academic appreciation of Austen that began with Lascelles has widened considerably. Johnson explains that "the process by which academic critics deprecate Austenian admirers outside the academy is very similar to the way . .. trekkies, fans, and mass media enthusiasts are derided and marginalized by dominant cultural institutions bent on legitimizing their own objects and protocols of expertise."^[79] However, the fact that scholars such as Johnson and Lynch are taking an active and serious interest in these activities suggests that such attitudes may be changing.

[edit] Adaptations

The 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice sparked an explosion in the publication of printed Austen adaptations.

Main article: Jane Austen in popular culture

Sequels, prequels, and adaptations of almost every sort have been based on the novels of Jane Austen, from the soft-core pornographic novel Virtues and Vices (1981) by Grania Beckford to the S. N. Dyer's fantasy novel Resolve and Resistance (1996).^[80] Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, Austen family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, but it was not until the late 1990s that the industry exploded with the 1995 broadcast of the BBC Pride and Prejudice.^[81] Just five years later, there were over a hundred printed adaptations.^[82] According to Lynch, "her works appear to have proven more hospitable to sequelisation than those of almost any other novelist".^[83] Relying on the categories laid out by Betty A. Schellenberg and Paul Budra, Lynch describes two different kinds of Austen sequels: those that continue the story and those that return to "the world of Jane Austen".^[84] The texts that continue the story are "generally regarded as dubious enterprises, as reviews attest" and "often feel like throwbacks to the Gothic and sentimental novels that Austen loved to burlesque".^[85] Those that emphasize nostalgia are "defined not only be retrograde longing but also by a kind of postmodern playfulness and predilection for insider joking", relying on the reader to see the web of Austenian allusions.^[86]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

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• Gilson, David. "Later Publishing History, with Illustrations". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
• Honan, Park. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-01451-1.
• Honan, Park. "Biographies". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-52-545540-0.
• Johnson, Claudia L. "Austen cults and cultures". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-49867-8.
• Kelly, Gary. "Religion and politics". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-49867-8.
• Kirkham, Margaret. "Portraits". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
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• Litz, A. Walton. Jane Austen: A Study of Her Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
• Lynch, Deidre. "Cult of Jane Austen". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
• Lynch, Deidre. "Sequels". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
• MacDonagh, Oliver. Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-300-05084-4.
• Macdonald, Gina and Andrew Macdonald, eds. Jane Austen on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521793254.
• Rajan, Rajeswari. "Critical Responses, Recent". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
• Southam, B. C., ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812-1870. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X.
• Southam, B. C., ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870-1940. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. ISBN 0-7102-0189-3.
• Southam, B. C. "Janeites and Anti-Janeites". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-52-545540-0.
• Southam, B. C. "Criticism, 1870-1940". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-52-545540-0.
• Stovel, Bruce. "Further Reading". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-49867-8.
• Todd, Janet. The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-521-67469-7.
• Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0-679-44628-1.
• Troost, Linda and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood. 2nd ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. ISBN 0813190061.
• Trott, Nicola. "Critical Responses, 1830-1970". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
• Waldron, Mary. "Critical Responses, early". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.
• Watt, Ian. "Introduction". Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. ISBN 0-130-53769-0.

v • d • e Jane Austen General: Timeline of Jane Austen · Reception history of Jane Austen · Jane Austen in popular culture · Janeite · Jane Austen Centre · Jane Austen's House Museum People: Catherine Hubback · Francis Austen · Cassandra Austen · Thomas Langlois Lefroy Published novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811) · Pride and Prejudice (1813) · Mansfield Park (1814) · Emma (1815) · Northanger Abbey (1817) · Persuasion (1817) Incomplete novels: Lady Susan · Sanditon · The Watsons Juvenilia: Love and Freindship · The Beautifull Cassandra Characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy · Elizabeth Bennet · Elinor Dashwood · Anne Elliot