Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith

Jacqueline M. Labbe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030388287
• eBook ISBN: 9783030388294
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores what it means to read the six major works of Jane Austen, in

light of the ten major works of fiction by Charlotte Smith. It proposes that Smith

had a deep and lasting impact on Austen, but this is not an influence study. Instead,

it argues for the possibility that two authors who never met could between them

write something into being, both responding to and creating a novelistic zeitgeist.

This, the book argues, can be called co-writing. This book will appeal to students

and scholars of the novel, of women's writing, and of Smith and Austen specifically.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. M. LabbeReading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smithhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jacqueline M. Labbe¹

(1)

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Jacqueline M. Labbe

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The Introduction lays out for the reader a summary of the critical consensus that Jane Austen wrote her novels with very little reference to her contemporaries, and begins the counter-argument that Charlotte Smith is pivotal in Austen’s development as a writer. It rejects the notion of influence and explores ideas of coincidence, forethought, and intertextuality. It invites readers to consider how two writers who never met could nonetheless be seen to be mutually interested in writing in the same model, mode, manner, and mood.

Keywords

CoincidenceForethoughtIntertextualityInfluenceWriting

End Abstract

Once upon a time, a novelist began to write. Over twelve years she produces ten works, each inflected by thoughtful and sometimes provocative approaches to the concerns of the day: the position of women and men within the law; how the privileged and the underprivileged react to war and oppression; social attitudes to adultery, illegitimacy, and enforced and consensual sex; and relationships. Most of her novels feature a female protagonist (though not all). Marriage is the main denouement, but it’s not always the reward. Another novelist reads the works and writes her own. Is there a happy ending?

Two novelists walk down a road. One leaves home in 1788, the other in 1811, although the later novelist begins plotting her trip in the late 1780s as well. Each novelist makes several stops: the first halts some ten times, the second six. Although their progress overlaps, the two do not meet, and the second’s first stop occurs after the first’s last one. Are they on the same road?

There is a novelist who writes very popular novels but whose popularity wanes and whose critical reception is lukewarm. She falls victim to under-reading, preconception, and inaccessibility. There is another novelist whose work catches critical as well as popular attention, who seems particularly well-suited to reflecting the zeitgeist at any one time. Her novels are constantly read, often preconceived, and readily available. Which is the better novelist?

***

How does an author signal indebtedness? In the period in which original genius and individual artistry became established as marking legitimate authorship, how and why does a writer like Jane Austen signal community? When the model is Charlotte Smith, who is not as yet canonized, what do we learn about emulation and imitation in a period in which the canon itself is not stable?

When thinking about how two writers interact, a critical impulse is towards the instrumental (influence: one is indebted to the other and reacts to her debt accordingly). This book is not an influence study because influence itself is a tool by which one writer is elevated over another. The influencer can never be lived up to—or the influenced surpasses the master. Influence figures itself in criticism as hostile no matter the veneration that began it. There is a battle enjoined: a writer gives into or escapes from influence.¹ This is Bloomian but not entirely so, as the Bloomian model requires a flavour of hand-to-hand combat, and influence-as-takeover can express itself without physical imagery. Nonetheless, within influence studies there is a winner and a loser, a dominant and a subordinated partner.

Instead, I am interested in how Smith and Austen come to be important in light of each other.² This is a greater challenge than that involved in exploring the manifest and manifold overlaps between Smith and William Wordsworth—there, at least, we had a meeting and diary and letter references, ownership of the other’s texts and a more coterminous publication history.³ In this pairing we have two mentions in Austen’s Juvenilia (of Emmeline and Ethelinde) and nothing at all from Smith, which is not surprising since they occupied very different social circles and Smith was dead by the time Austen began to publish. Instead, we have plot similarities, thematic echoes, character doubling, and shadows (and see below for the critical notice these have attracted). And we have critics’ metaphors: spectrality, kinship, partnership, conversation, assimilation, allusion, evocation, invocation, imitation, emulation, layering, ventriloquizing, covering.⁴ These coalesce around junctions, which can tell us how to get ‘there’ when ‘there’ is premised on mutuality.

***

Smith has been noted in connection with Austen at least since Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art (1939); for Lascelles, Smith’s Emmeline provides an ironic reversal of type for Austen’s Catherine Morland (60). Critics have mapped links between Mansfield Park and Emmeline; between Smith’s early novels of sensibility and Northanger Abbey; between The Old Manor House and Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility; between Desmond and Northanger Abbey; between Smith’s poetry and Persuasion. William H. Magee, by concentrating mainly on diction and plot echoes, makes the case for many more associations, including Celestina and Sense and Sensibility as well as The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park.⁵ Magee calls Smith’s influence ‘profound’ and ‘pervasive’ (121, 127); despite this, ‘she offered Jane Austen no useful example in displaying everyday life, dramatizing inner conflict, or even developing the emotions of her heroines of sensibility’; she is ‘a vital source of situations, characters and themes to borrow, work up, and perfect’ (128, 131, emphasis added). Smith is not, in other words, in the same league, unable to depict the social or psychological realism associated with Austen. Magee’s is probably the most sympathetic comparison. For Bradbrook, Austen is ‘indebted’ for the ‘odd phrase’ or ‘vulgarism’; Smith’s ‘lack of fastidiousness’ means her ‘fiction was only of negative use’ for Austen (104, 105). For Steeves, Smith is ‘not without invention, but in every aspect of her performance there was a novelist or two who could do better’ (317); although he accepts that Smith was central to Austen’s reading, his conception of Smith’s work is such that, like Bradbrook, he can see her influence as no more than negative, something for Austen to react against. For most readers, it comes down to this: no matter how many situations, phrasings, or character traits Austen may owe to Smith, she inevitably improves on them; this is the ‘normative’ position described by Claudia Johnson, where ‘nothing at all is wrong with Jane Austen, ever’ (59), here expressed in conclusions that, while Smith may lead to Austen, she can never direct her. Hence, ‘where Jane Austen differs from a writer like Charlotte Smith is in her unwillingness to stick by tidy dichotomies, or, indeed, to leave an earlier position unexamined’; or, to use another tone, where Smith’s attempts at dialect are ‘crude’, Austen’s are ‘unstrained’.⁶ The desire to present Austen as the epitome that characterizes much of even the most recent criticism means that Smith can only ever be an inferior.

Given, then, the critical consensus that Smith’s work had some kind of effect on Austen’s, no matter how trivial, it is telling that for some, she still does not feature at all. For a critic like Christopher Gillie, Smith simply did not exist: Austen was ‘extraordinarily isolated from contemporary writers’ (all male), and was the ‘first English novelist to discern [the genre’s] true potentiality and its limitations’ (for Gillie, all other important writers of the time were poets and essayists).⁷ For Patricia Meyer Spacks, Smith is conspicuous by her absence in a list of forerunners to Austen.⁸ For Isobel Grundy, Austen’s ‘best loved authors’ and her fertile influences are Crabbe, Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, and Burney, a strikingly male-dominated field; Smith does not even make the long list.⁹ That neither Spacks nor Grundy, specialists in women’s writing, recognize Smith as part of Austen’s ‘tradition’ suggests that the job of placing Austen as a late eighteenth-century novelist, a contemporary of Smith’s (not to mention Burney, Edgeworth, Radcliffe, and others), is not yet complete. Indeed, the sheer frequency of allusion and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Model: Emmeline
• 3. Mode: Women and Men/Type and Stereotype
• 4. Manner: Codes and Outcomes
• 5. Mood: (In)Sensibility
• 6. Conclusion: Co-writing, or, Who Wrote Jane Austen’s Novels?
• Back Matter