Searching for Jane Austen by Emily Auerbach
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I added this book to my required reading list for my research while preparing to write my graduate thesis on Jane Austen and her works. I just closed the book and I am half agony, half frustrated for having read it.
The first chapter takes a great stab at Jane’s nephew’s biography on his aunt titled Memoir, attempting to dispel the image of “dear Aunt Jane”; a timid, sweet-tempered little woman, whose main calling in life was the keeping of her house.
The tone of this first chapter is that of anger with more than a hint of feminism, which is good, yet I grew exhausted reading about the constant descriptions of Jane’s false character and the author’s continuous argument that this was not the true Jane and only a fabrication of her relatives.
The author draws countless example, comparing male writers of roughly the same time period and how they were described and represented in the public eye to really emphasize the injustice that was committed on Jane.
She also makes a very important point to call Jane Austen “Austen” and not “Jane”, because Charles Dickens is referred to as “Dickens” and not “Charles” and Henry Thoreau as “Thoreau” and not “Henry” etc.
In the grand scheme is things, I thought this was a minute detail that felt blown out of proportion. Truthfully, most of the points the author makes in the first chapter feel exasperatedly over-inflated in order to create a mood in the reader that would explain the majority of this book.
Jane Austen’s misrepresentation has, for all I can see, decreased and afforded her a rightful place among the great literary authors of English literature. When Jane is mentioned, most people may not know much about her, but at least that image of a little spinster woman has mostly ceased to exist and more focus is now placed on her genius as a writer and sharp wit.
I found the book to be boringly repetitive in all its arguments. Each paragraph began with an original sentence composed by the author, followed by numerous quotes of Jane’s writings, critics or other biographers, and the paragraph usually ended with another short original sentence or a question.
Too many references to other works clouded the overall message the author tried to convey. I found her claims over-confident and not backed by appropriate research. For example, how does she know Jane was “laughing at the dialogue she read in the fiction and drama of her day because she knew it failed to capture the way human beings actually spoke to each other,” (62)?
I also wondered why the author felt it necessary to keep mentioning her students (it appears the author teaches at a university) when sharing anecdotes. Moreover, there was a certain patronizing tone to the writing that communicated the author’s attitude that the reader might be rather uninformed. On the other hand, the author had no problem listing literary devices without so much as a hint of an explanation: “…Austen presents characters speaking in contorted sentences, using polysyllabic expression, arcane literary allusions, and a superabundance of exclamations,” (62).
Overall, this book felt more like a very long, not very well cited footnote that didn’t really add anything new to the ongoing research done on Jane Austen’s writing and life, except for imposing assumptions and comparisons that seemed out of place and vague, such as the mentioning of Pinocchio when discussing Catherine Morland. I have to give this one a pass.
