It’s at least arguable that central to the novels of Jane Austen is status anxiety. The concept usually seeks to explain why people buy the most expensive houses, cars or concert tickets when often these items at half the price are just as good. It’s not the house, car or concert they’re really interested in, but displaying what economic class they belong to. Crucial to the syndrome is that if you’re really confident of your worth you won’t bother with such things. You only do it if fundamentally you feel somehow insecure — often the only person around to be impressed by your behavior is you yourself.
This mode of living used to be called “conspicuous consumption,” but in the case of Jane Austen the situation is slightly different. Here the issue is that she belonged to a middling social class — not poor, but by no means very rich. A large majority of English classic writers came from a similar background, but in Jane Austen’s case her social position — or so the argument goes — became the mainspring of her work. All the girls of marriageable age who are at the center of her novels — with one possible exception — belong to this class. Success is judged by how they manage to marry men with a respectable, or better, amount of money without compromising their creator’s ideas of integrity and pureness of heart.
This is most happily achieved by Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, the author’s first major success. She manages to marry a minor aristocrat while at the same time preserving her witty skepticism and general joie de vivre, qualities she very much shares with the author herself.
But Jane Austen doesn’t make things as easy for her subsequent heroines. Emma Woodhouse in Emma is deliberately made a less attractive figure, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is possibly the author’s attempt at looking at what happens when a girl with almost no money is placed in a similar situation to that of her other heroines, and Anne Elliot in Persuasion is getting on in years and is forced to re-evaluate issues of romantic love versus economic self-interest.
A Truth Universally Acknowledged is a smart piece of publishing by Particular Books (a division of Penguin). It looks as if it’s going to be 33 literary luminaries saying why they love the great writer, but in actuality it’s a collection of critical articles that in some cases go back 70 years. It’s more like, in other words, an academic compilation put together for the benefit of students, but it’s being marketed as a popular book aimed at the general reader. Looked at either way, however, it makes for compulsive reading.
The malaise of status anxiety, it can be argued, particularly afflicts the middle classes. The truly rich don’t need to display their wealth because it’s obvious to all, whereas the poor have no hope of competing in the status stakes, so for the most part don’t bother to try. But for Jane Austen and her heroines it’s crucial. What makes her so fascinating, and generally so admirable, indeed for many readers lovable, is that she refuses to acquiesce to the naked demands of class and social betterment. To get her approval, her characters must display the virtues of honesty, compassion and goodness of heart, while at the same time not neglecting their duty to assist their family by making a “good marriage.” Endless gradations on this difficult problem of balance, from outright failures to narrow misses, can be observed in the author’s six major novels.
A contribution to this book that pinpoints the issue comes from the US novelist Louis Auchincloss. What constitutes the good life to Jane Austen? he asks. It should avoid the worldliness of the rich, he posits, and the crowdedness that accompanies poverty. Good taste, simple elegance, compatibility as well as love in marriage, enough money without coveting it, these constitute the golden mean.
For the rest, there are many amusing and witty contributions here in Jane Austen’s own style. One of these comes from the UK novelist Fay Weldon who actually wrote an excellent book on her novel-writing predecessor in letterform, a form Austen herself considered but abandoned as being too old-fashioned. Weldon’s chapter is in fact an extract from her own longer book, as are not a few of the other contributions — notably that of the great US critic Harold Bloom.
Among the more modern contributors are Jay McInerney, Martin Amis and Alain de Botton, among the older, Virginia Woolf and Somerset Maugham. There’s a classic essay by C.S. Lewis, but he characteristically blots his copybook with a barbed chauvinistic remark — that the concept of “mattering” is “so necessary even to the humblest women.”
The eminent Jane Austen scholar Brian Southam contributes an affectionate chapter where he remembers being shown, and allowed to copy, some of the author’s manuscript juvenilia in an old house in Kent, manuscripts to which his eminent predecessor R.W. Chapman had been denied access. It was Southam who, in the Times Literary Supplement of Feb. 17, 1995, effectively debunked fashionable claims that Mansfield Park was seriously concerned with issues of the slave trade, an approach from which the 1998 film of that novel, starring among others Harold Pinter, was not immune.
It’s hardly surprising that Jane Austen remains as popular as she is — especially in the UK, where the overwhelming majority of the population is said to consider itself middle class. Her readers are able to console themselves with her novels, and consider that their failure to enter the ranks of the truly rich is because they’ve remained true to the virtues the author held necessary for genuine self-respect. Whether this is in fact always, or even often, the case is, of course, very much another matter.
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