Half a bookshelf?

The women writers who shaped the 'legend' of Jane Austen, according to Rebecca Romney

By her epigraphs will you know her. Rebecca Romney begins Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: The women writers who shaped a legend with a line from Sherlock Holmes (“You see, but you do not observe”), setting the scene for the detective work that is to follow. Romney, a rare book dealer and co-founder of Washington DC’s Type Punch Matrix, for whom she compiled an attractive catalogue of romance novels, has been collecting the works of eight women writers read by Jane Austen, and here offers the tale of their collective descent into obscurity and why they deserve better.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, moreover, tells the story of a bookshelf of Romney’s own, on which sit pertinent copies of the books in question.

Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Maria Edgeworth: as Romney knows, these aren’t writers who have fallen into absolute neglect. My impression is that, over the past fifty years or so, even if none of them has reached the Austen level of fame, all have had significant attention. They have been discussed and reassessed by literary scholars. Many of their books have been republished as classics by Oxford University Press, Norton, Penguin et al. Goodreads offers the customary range of commentary, positive or negative, considered or casual, on Smith’s poetry (“an acquired taste”) and Burney’s fiction (“overlong but wonderfully bittersweet”). Austen serves as an occasional point of comparison on Goodreads — an inevitable tendency, perhaps, but one on which Romney’s book is likewise founded.

Conan Doyle aside, the epigraphs to later chapters in Jane Austen’s Bookshelf tell a story of connections between Austen and her literary sisters (or distant cousins, at least). The first chapter, on Frances Burney, opens with a line from her second novel, Cecilia (1782): “if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination”. (Spot the Austen connection.) The second chapter, on Ann Radcliffe, begins with Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1817) confessing her love of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radcliffe’s trend-setting Gothic beast of a book: “while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable”. And so on, through to a letter in which Austen tells her niece Anna that “I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth’s, Yours & my own”. A conclusion (no epigraph required) reaffirms the challenge to the canon that reconsidering these eight women writers supposedly represents, while making an Aunt Sally of Frank W. Bradbrook, the author of Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (1966), whom she accuses of not even bothering to read some of the books he discusses.

Romney may well be right when she says Bradbrook overstates the influence of canonical male writers on Austen at the expense of the women writers she champions, but her suggestion he hasn’t read Charlotte Smith’s novel The Old Manor House (1793) because he idenfifies the wrong character as its heroine (Isabella rather than the more memorably named Monimia) isn’t entirely persuasive. As Bradbrook notes, Isabella has an “elderly admirer”, a General Tracy who is her father’s age, and there may be something in comparing their relationship with that of Marianne and Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. (My memory is that Smith doesn’t treat the age gap in the satirical spirit Austen does, by having Marianne naively dismiss the thirty-something Brandon as more or less senescent.) Bradbrook’s point is really suggest that Austen had a more “complicated” relationship with Ann Radcliffe than she did with Smith, and that seems more difficult to contradict.

In any case, Smith receives much love and attention from Romney, who expresses pity for the hard life this poet and novelist endured, while also offering a fair-minded reassessment of her works. She also spots the phrase “pride and prejudice” crops up in The Old Manor House (in relation to Isabella, in fact, not that she mentions this). Did Austen take the phrase from Burney, as is usually supposed, or Smith? (Again, this isn’t explicitly suggested here, but couldn’t it be both — or neither?)

As eclectic as Romney’s eight writers are, in fact, she treats them all with serious interest and defends them against whatever charges literary history has thrown at them. Her accounts of Burney and Edgeworth brim with inspirational enthusiasm; the latter’s Belinda (1801) thoroughly deserves the attention it receives here, I think, from a book dealer who happens to have handled the copy of Emma that Austen had sent to Edgeworth herself. And on Radcliffe, she offers wise advice about reading Udolpho et al: the trick is to relax, enjoy the scenery (of which there is superabundance), don’t rush it. The atmosphere is everything.

This is, by the way, my favourite feature of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf — that the shelf isn’t merely metaphorical, but material. Romney can write about everything from reaching down a first-edition copy of Johnson’s Dictionary (and the difficulties of womanhandling the blasted thing) to online auctions and selecting books that best fit a particular collection (should she keep A Simple Story by Inchbald, 1791, or see that it gets to the Lilly Library in Indiana?) An appendix gives bibliographical descriptions of a selection of Romney’s copies of the relevant books: A Victorian Pride and Prejudice with Art Nouveau endpapers; a volume of poems from 1810 that erroneously suggests Radcliffe died of “the horrors”; a copy of The Thrales of Streatham Park (1977) by Mary Hyde, inscribed by the author as a Christmas present.

Less persuasive to me are some of the critical opinions expressed here. Romney can’t get over the wit and boldness of Charlotte Lennox, somewhat conflating life and work as she reiterates her admiration for those twin qualities, and claims that with The Female Quixote (1752), Lennox wrote a book that is wittier (and probably bolder, too) than any of Austen’s. A matter of taste, you might think, but still a matter of taste that depends on whether you think what is essentially a brilliant burlesque (with, as Romney admits, a rushed ending) outstrips, say, Northanger Abbey (which substitutes a quixotic devotee of Gothic fiction for Lennox’s quixotic lover of romance, but also turns the burlesque on its head by eventually vindicating Catherine Morland’s supposedly askew view of the world). The Female Quixote seems to me mostly enjoyable, often convoluted, and nowhere near as considered, as subtle a work of art.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf should make for good reading for anyone who just wants to keep company with these writers (as well as an authoritative guide to tracking down the books themselves). Other books about the relationship between Austen and her predecessors are available, though, and offer a more balanced account of the reading that shaped the “legend”. (A further bookshelf suggests itself: Jane Austen and Her Art by Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory by Jocelyn Harris, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters by Norma Clarke, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets by William Deresiewicz, etc . . .) The Austen family story has it, of course that

Her reading was very extensive in history and belles lettres; and her memory extremely tenacious. Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse.

That tenacious memory is evident, meanwhile, in Austen’s passing reference in a letter to being “alone in the Library” at Godmersham. Here she is “Mistress of all survey” — a nod to a poem by William Cowper (“I am monarch of all I survey”) that she expects to be received as such and understood (“at least I may say so”, she adds, “& repeat the whole poem if I like, without offence to anybody”). Without playing down the individual achievements and significance of any of Romney’s eight writers, I think their connections to Austen should be set in the content of a literature-steeped family, who read books by women and even men sometimes — that family of “great Novel-readers” who were “not ashamed of being so”. Affluent compared to Lennox or Smith, Austen also enjoyed this great advantage: that she belonged to a community of readers, for whom her earliest, most openly mischievous writings (“Love and Freindship” and the rest of her youthful forays) were written.

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ICYMI: Staying with the eighteenth century, Type Punch Matrix has a “near fine” copy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters written during her travels, as published early in Jane Austen’s lifetime. And what’s in a name? This may be a good time to reconsider, courtesy of Daniel Crouch, the vexed history of hydronyms.