You might also consider the implications of some aspects of the presentation -- Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s quite winning version of Sense and Sensibility makes it a post-romantic work, which focussed partly on “the world of the child”. This was rather against the spirit of the original (my work tended to emphasise how easy it was to idealise children falsely, and to spoil them!) Or you might use notions of how even sophisticated treatments like the Andrew Davies “adaptation” of Emma fail to provide a correct rendition of secondary characters like Mr. Weston, disturbing the complex interrelationship of theme, character and (gulp!) “ideology”. None of this might interest you, of course. Presentation and representation are interesting issues; or the way the characters express antithetical attitudes to life, the universe and everything. Or what about questions of style – mine was very much indebted to eighteenth century practice -- Dr. Johnson’s, for example: you might argue that my novels are not particularly “realistic” by Victorian or post-Victorian standards, picking various features and instances. The main thing, in the end, is to develop a critical argument of your own and make all the details you adduce in your discussion minister to it – easier said than done, tho’. Isn’t advice annoying? Have fun, my dear.

In general, I certainly lend myself to some forms of discussion of women’s position – for example, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice deal centrally with talented, meritorious young women, sister-pairs like Elinor and Marianne and Jane and Elizabeth, corresponding somewhat to real-life me and my elder sister Cassandra ourselves, perhaps -- under economic pressure and aware of the social forces which threaten to govern their life-choices in particularly constraining ways. But the novels don’t necessarily repeat themselves in this respect, or others.

You might like to consider the importance of thinking of me as a sort of “moving target” (“’Jane Austen’ describes variety rather than uniformity” as a theme: one novel may even in some measure to correct or “contradict” another, as Mansfield Park does Pride and Prejudice (cf., e.g., the heroines), and Persuasion does Emma (cf., e.g., the attitude to the country gentry and class). You might wish to develop such ideas of development to give a different view of a couple of the novels. Or you might wish to focus on close-reading of a particular novel rather than the movement from novel to novel, throwing new light on its significance – is a novel in fact best described as merely a story, or an impression of how things are, or positively as a kind of argument, possibly a political one? . With best wishes, Jane Austen.

You have probably also noted my conscription for notions of “Heritage”, a word which already carries a political charge in England and America, bearer of overtones of nostalgic conservatism for those good old days which may indeed have something to be said for them. This attitude to me probably also inhibits the sorts of intellectual interest which cultural criticism fosters and caused your present frustration, perhaps? For an approach within Austen studies “proper” which lies closer to critique, see Edward Neill’s The Politics of Jane Austen (Macmillan, 1999).

For me (Austen) considered as part of the “Heritage” process and product generally, see Raphael Samuel’s not unsympathetic Theatres of Memory, I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (Verso, 1994). As culturally refracted by others, then, I’m mostly, not always, and not in all ways, at the service of Conservatism. Reacting against this is a wholesale expression of irritation with the effects of what Gideon Maxwell Polya rather unkindly calls “the Austenizing of history” (by which he seems to mean the whole process which keeps the world safe for what Edmund Burke called a “base plutocracy”): see Polya’s Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History: Colonial Rapacity, Holocaust Denial and the Crisis in Biological Sustainability (Melbourne, privately printed, 1998). This is cultural criticism, but at a mostly empirical (no pun intended) level you might not find wholly useful. But it’s certainly a version of the idea of culture as barbarism (collapsing Matthew Arnold’s antithesis), and so is on all fours with the problematics of culture announced by Adorno, and thus is practising an implicit version of cultural criticism. This Polya reference is rather obscure, though: it might be better to emphasize that there is a location of a cultural critique of sorts within Austen studies as we have got to know them: for example, in the Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen [see book reviews on this site].

Claudia Johnson’s essay deals with the cultural refractions and ricochets of non-academic uses of me which extend a welcome, if a somewhat vinegary one, to various manifestations of fan-ship, and enthusiastic cult-ists, forever symbolised by Kipling’s “Janeites”, a fictional (indeed, highly implausible) platoon of fanatics in the First World War whose first allegiance is overwhelmingly to me. (This was a short story included in his Debits and Credits [1926].) In general, the point the Johnson essay wants to reinforce seems to be not to succumb to the academic orthodoxies of the “New Critics” and the straitjacketing of disciplinary identity, which promulgates a certain patriarchy at the point of reception. Indeed, other essays in the Cambridge collection, on “Class” and “Money”, though largely untheorised, are necessarily sociological and non-canonic in presentational emphasis, so might also help to launch you on your interesting quest. But more helpful might be the by contrast quite theoretical (with frequent explicit or implicit references to such as Barthes, Foucault, Freud and Marx) Judy Simons’ edited collection on Mansfield Park and Persuasion in the Macmillan New Casebooks series [see, initially, again, book reviews on this site]. On the other hand, it is possible to feel that the exciting concepts washing around in cultural critique have not, or been directly applied to Jane Austen, or not so often, which makes the prospect of doing so exciting. Why not take some of your own reading in cultural criticism to my so visibly ideological texts yourself? Anyway, good hunting!

So my wretched illness was particularly unlucky. Now, though I felt the symptoms, it was undiagnosed in my day. No one is exactly sure, but the ruling theory was that I contracted “Addison’s disease”, a form of tuberculosis which attacks the adrenal glands, so that my final journey to Winchester to be looked after by a Mr. Lyford was actually quite futile. However, a more recent study has been made which suggests that I was more likely to have been suffering from a lymphoma, a form of cancer -- given the name of “Hodgkin’s disease”. Either way, given the state of medical science in my time I had no chance of coming through either illness.

Yours – with best wishes –
Jane Austen.