Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Review by Jean Graham,The College of New Jersey.
As in his Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels and an
Experiment in Method (1987), Burrows replaces impressionistic descriptions of
Austen's style with the rigor of statistical analysis, rendered in elegant English for
those who find numbers as mundane as Austen's epistolary descriptions
of clothing purchases. The results are rather more discriminating and illuminating
than the usual references to the little brush and the ivory versus the big Bow-wow
style.
In "Jane Austen and Literary Traditions, " Isobel Grundy discloses the self-taught writer's
extensive reading, tracing its effects on her fiction. Despite Austen's evident dislike of the
pedantic, Grundy finds her attentive to facts, respectful of true scholarship, and even possessing
"a good smattering of classical learning" (194). In "Austen's Cult and Cultures," Claudia L. Johnson
takes the other side of the influence question, covering popular reactions to "dear Aunt Jane"
from Henry James's criticism of Janeites to today's peddlers of T-shirts and mugs. Of particular
interest is Johnson's take on the uneasy relationship between academics and associations like the
Jane Austen Society of North America.
Fulfilling its claim to offer food for the more subversive reader, the volume contained references
to topics of recent controversy. Kelly's fine "Religion and Politics" includes a paragraph on post
-colonial readings of Austen. Johnson discusses the debate over Emma Woodhouse's sexual
orientation (same-sex, according to Edmund Wilson and Marvin Mudrick; clearly heterosexual,
for Wayne Booth), and also speculates about the early twentieth-century Janeites, men who adored
their "divine Jane" alone among women, and who were presumed by many of their contemporaries
to be homosexual.
Bruce Stovel concludes the Companion with suggestions for "Further Reading." This is indeed a
challenging task, as space limitations prevent an exhaustive bibliography. Yet Stovel claims to offer
"a quick survey of all the critical books published on Austen's novels," a rather misleading assertion
(232, my emphasis). For one thing, his list of feminist approaches to Austen ends in 1990, omitting such
works as Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser (1995). Feminist books
published after 1990 are included under other topics (for instance, Claudia L. Johnson's 1995 Equivocal Beings:
Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s), but dispersing them in this manner is misleading to
those readers most in need of Stovel's guidance.
To point out that the book ends with a useful index is a dull although accurate conclusion, so I will return
to Brownstein's definition of "uncommon" as meaning "implausible" or "rare" (41). This collection in
"uncommon" in the second sense only: never implausible, the essays included here are consistently
sensitive in content and style, as befits their subject.
Jean Graham is Assistant Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. In addition to articles
on Milton and Jonson, she has an article forthcoming in Persuasions on "Austen and the Advantage of Height."
Email Professor Graham at graham@tcnj.edu
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