Persuasion was not of course a book whose reputation I was able to assess myself. I completed it well before my early death in 1817, and got quite well on with a new one, the unfinished Sanditon. Publication of Persuasion was held up by the failure of brother Henry’s bank and perhaps the fairly slow-going sales of Mansfield Park, and even Emma, and the novel was published (on inexpensive paper, etc.), by my devoted sister Cassandra--together with the early Northanger Abbey--in 1818.

I was still quite popular in 1833, apparently, when brother Henry wrote a brief memoir to a new edition. For contemporary responses, anything published by the eminent Austen scholar B.C. Southam would be helpful, and there is some interesting information about this book and its production circumstances in The Cambridge Companion [review] to Jane Austen (e.g. the essay by Jan Fergus), and in the recent biographies by David Nokes and Claire Tomalin [review] (use the indexes if required).

Persuasion was the basis of a much-praised film in 1995, and the reputation of the novel has held up quite well as the story of a lady who cultivated prudence in youth and learned romance as she grew older, and a study in feeling modulated by reason, and in the relations between men and women, but also as a rebuke to snobbery and the false values it foments. Note how the film traduces Anne’s silent subjective awareness by giving disclosures to Admiral Croft which Anne had earlier apprehended and was ironic about.

Persuasion also seems to be related to romanticism and romantic poetry of the day, mediating Keatsian themes like the ‘Ode to Autumn’—conceived in Winchester, I think, where I breathed my last--but refusing a self-indulgent romanticism, possibly associated with Byron. But does sentimentality about me overlook the weaknesses of the novel? Does the plot line involving William Walter Elliot remain clear and coherent? Doesn’t the snobbery castigated with reference to Sir Walter (a sort of apology for the snobberies of Emma?) make something of a return towards the end of the novel?

With best wishes,

Jane Austen.

On the one hand your name, even as assumed, inspires immediate sense of contact and affection—you immediately bring to mind my dashing elder brother Henry, who helped me publish my work(s). On the other hand, you also remind me of the hero of Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney, who prattles magisterially by the side of the ingenuous Catherine Morland, condemning her for condemning herself for reading Gothic novels, then condemning her for taking them too seriously anyway. The last thing Henry will learn is that he himself has something to learn, apparently. You also ask rather a lot of questions in one go. One at a time, please, as the speak-your-weight machine said to the overweight man. I have made this joke before, but if you had read it you it should have taught you to moderate your wishes and (ideally) restrict yourself to one question, my dear Henry.

It looks as if Northanger Abbey is indeed partly about the role of reading as intellectual and emotional (de-) formation, and how this varies with the characters, isn’t it? For example, John Thorpe is too much of a chump to get through Camilla or to make much of what he does read, despite being up at Oxford (not open to ladies at this time, be it noted, even brilliant ones like myself). Isabella Thorpe reads Gothic fictions of the day as B-movies avant la lettre, Henry reads for entertainment and instruction, but brings cast-iron assumptions with him which inhibit his responses, whereas Catherine, while reading for thrills, also seems to intuit, correctly, that they encode something about the nature of reality which she is barely beginning to read (her home village of Fullerton, as Henry wryly notes, doesn’t encourage intellectual sophistication).

Only she reads a little literally, as it were. The General does not have ‘the air of a Montoni’, the keynote villain of Mysteries of Udolpho, perhaps, but is, in his English, northern European way, a clue to modern forms of villainy—‘greedy speculation’, appropriation, rapacity, conspicuous consumption, whole parishes slaving away in his hot-houses, snobbery, false values all round. Henry may be ironically aware of reading The Mysteries of Udolpho with ‘his hair standing on end’—a hyperbole which entails ironic glancing at the kind of experience communicated by the novel, perhaps; but Northanger Abbey, and Northanger Abbey may also cause hairs to rise, in its different idiom, despite being of the middle, or middling counties of modern England.

The Ann Radcliffe novel was a popular work, and I showed some temerity in attacking it: its fantastical world of impenetrable castles, gloomy convents, and bloodthirsty banditti, with a sensational account of the suffering of the innocent Emily St Aubert at the hands of the villainous Montoni, satisfied the taste of the day, but also belonged in a controversial class of political romances with radical over or undertones intended to shatter Augustan consensus and the little ethics of the rectory parlour. It was a feminised version of the gothic in which the impressions received by a female consciousness become significant, a sophisticated variation on the genre initiated by Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in the 1760s. Northanger Abbey, apparently a sturdy ‘Johnsonian’ counterblast, actually asserts something of a parallel between Emily and Catherine, Montoni and General Tilney, which forms its own rebuke to Henry’s patronage of the Fullerton Innocent, the significantly feminine Candide of the English counties. Catherine: its official punch-line, ‘the visions of romance were over’, finds its truer echo in the realisation, for Catherine, however happily affianced to a Henry who has proved his worth after all by showing defiance to his tyrannical father on Catherine’s behalf, that she had scarcely ‘magnified his cruelty’ in placing a Udolphian interpretative grid over the modernity and Englishness of The Northanger experience.

The feminism of the book partly arises from the fact that Catherine’s education, unlike Henry’s, has been decidedly patchy; hence the Udolpho book looms too largely in her attempts to make sense of the world-- but Henry’s privileged upbringing has itself brought some paradoxical disadvantages in the form of a somewhat inflexible and ideologically skewed way of responding to the world. Behind Catherine and her over-literary responses, incidentally, also lies Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), which in turn reminds us of Don Quixote slightly crazed by his romantic reading--but in some respects a sympathetic creation, like Catherine herself, despite her innocent foolishness. I hope this starts you thinking in relation to your project anyway. I would need a team of research assistants to do justice to your volley of lively queries.

With best wishes,

Jane Austen.

‘It has to be arguable and researchable’. My dear, would I send you off on a wild goose chase or fob you off with something that could be neither?! Not me, surely! A possibility which might suggest several critical directions is the often-aired, but not always intelligently-responded-to point I made when I said that in choosing Emma as a heroine I had chosen one whom ‘nobody but myself would much like’. This suggests, though I m putting it in my informal way, a sophisticated approach to artistic production, leaving the reader leeway to feel alienated, if she so chooses, with what my imagination handled sympathetically: and tensions between possible ways of responding to Emma seem to have social registers and consequences as well as personal ones. I was also implying it was generous of me to like Emma, given that my social level was closer to that of Miss Bates, even if my artistic attainments entitled me to a comparison with the gifted (but now socially exposed and vulnerable) Jane Fairfax.

It sounds as if part of what makes Emma a ‘new creation’, to take a phrase from Persuasion, lies in the power given to the reader to adjudicate on the wisdom or unwisdom of Emma’s assumptions and actions, repertoire of choices and practices, predilections and aversions while at the same time we are very close to her, enter her subjective condition(s) wholeheartedly and almost continuously. You might wish to assess, or re-assess Emma and Emma in the light of these ideas.

Is her misinterpretation of what is going on to her credit or discredit? Or is it of a piece with her social judgements or misjudgements? Why is such an ostensibly well-set-up young lady so insecure? Does Knightley’s rebuke to her at Box Hill put her other attitudes ‘under erasure’? Is her ferocious ‘judgementalism’ wrong in itself, or simply misdirected? Is her capacity for reverence and respect or savage disdain commendable, correctable, or simply odious? Can we accept what seem to be her social or ideological assumptions? As Emma is between Mansfield Park and Persuasion, is her difference from Fanny Price (heroine of the former) and Ann Elliot (heroine of the latter) instructive in the ‘dialectic progression’ of my ‘new creations’?

Meanwhile a surprisingly large cast of Highburians, Donwellians and Hartfieldians-- the Coles and Eltons, Knightleys and Bateses, Martins and Westons (and a couple more Woodhouses) file past us, reviewed by an Emma who will hardly review herself, though we and the narrator may do so. Might the reader still end by concluding with the journalist A.A. Gill that ‘Emma is horrible, and still stalks the earth’? Or is this slightly beside the point in view of her late access of self-knowledge and consequent self-reproach, given her youth? Or, in general, do we have to go ‘up one level’ to find out why things are as they are in order to assess Emma, as opposed to Emma? Is the novel about ethics, about politics (an examination of the social order), or do we do best in studying (celebrating?) its formal achievement in bringing the narrator so close to the central character that the former achieves a kind of ‘disappearing act’? Hope some of this helps to get your thinking kick-started anyway. Good luck with the paper.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Your question is interesting, but although Lady Susan was written in the 1790s and I myself died in 1817, this work was not published until 1871, I believe. I think Vanity Fair dates roughly 1847-8, so unless Thackeray had some unusual form of access to my manuscript(s) the kind of ‘influence’ you so well imagine would be impossible. However, this would not, in my opinion, preclude the kind of comparative study which would be, in its way, equally valid and interesting, perhaps? (‘You know I always speak my mind’—Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice [1813].)

The idea of an anarchic, amoral, destructive force or energy (feminine) which is disturbingly ‘congenial’ through its very force or energy is perhaps close to what you wish to pursue here with reference to our respective texts? (I can’t comment on Thackeray as I’m under the slab here in Winchester for the most part, and it’s difficult for me to get out and about as much as I would like.) It is said that a kind of anarchic and even destructive energy in some of my earlier writings doesn’t carry over into my mature works, perhaps to their detriment.

And, come to think of it, the sight of Becky Sharp hurling the unprized prize of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary in Vanity Fair, which I did hear of thanks to my voluntary spies, seems wrong for aspects of the ‘later me’ as Dr. Johnson’s most brilliant pupil, as someone calls me somewhere, but not wholly inaccurate to the ‘me’ of the early writings, with their more rompish, ‘irrecuperable’ tone. Does this help at all? I hope so, anyway. Try the relevant essay(s) in McMaster and Copeland, Cambridge Companion [reviewed here]. I heard about that, too.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.