Culture Watch
In this issue:
Books
Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees
Edited by Deidre Lynch; Princeton
University Press; 233 pages; $17.95
She is an industry, Jane Austen is. The author and her works are memorialized on film and on souvenirs with her image, and she inspires scholarly conferences and dozens of dissertations yearly.
The phenomenon itself--the Janeite culture--gets a going-over in this collection of essays. Some of the subjects spring from contemporary concerns--Was Austen gay? To what degree was she a feminist? How much does colonialism figure in her writing--and a number of them are so academic as to have little appeal for the general reader. But for anyone who admires her books and reads them free of the tea-and-crumpet heritage myth that surrounds her, there are riches to be mined.
A professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain, Roger Sales, points out how closely servants are to the events of Austen's books, especially seen in the film version of Persuasion. They can be merely period decoration, but they can also be a threat because they are often privy to their masters' and mistresses' deepest secrets.
Barbara Benedict, who chairs the English department at Trinity College in Connecticut, is persuasive in her view of Austen as less an elitist littérateur than a practical writer keenly aware of who her readers were, and someone who freely borrowed from the conventions of the circulating novels of her day.