How Glorifying Austen by Shifting the Baseline Demeans the Women Who Enabled her to Write in the First Place

In the 1965 article “Regulated sympathy in Northanger Abbey,” A. Walton Litz glorifies Austen for her bold and heroic defense of the novel, i.e., the famous narratorial offshoot/rant:

“I cannot approve of it …. ‘And what are you reading, Miss—’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ Replies the young lady;… ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language” (Austen 22-23).

Indeed, Litz is correct that Austen’s predecessors/role models–not least of which being Frances Burney, author of Cecilia and Camilla alluded to in this famous passage–held more defensive, less offensive stances for their literary form. What Litz leaves out throughout this article–which casts Austen in a superior light to Burney et. al.–is that Burney paved the way for Austen to even write Northanger Abbey, let alone mount a bold defense of novels as a woman. I grant that this article was published in 1965, yet I still feel the need to defend Burney (and by extension also Radcliffe) because the perspective still lingers that Austen was a lone genius who “perfected” the novel. Firstly, a parody and tribute is of course only possible due to the works that it parodies and celebrates. In much the same way as Northanger Abbey builds upon (1) the ideas and (2) the reputations of Evelina and Udolpho, Fielding, whom Litz cites as the main pre-Austen champion of the novel, capitalized upon Richardson’s Pamela in Joseph Andrews and for his stage career, in the form of Shamela. (Burney wanted to write plays, and did, but her father forbade and sabotaged their ever being staged.) Second, Fielding, a man, and Austen, writing after Burney and her excruciatingly crafted reputation that allowed her to even write at all, let alone publish, had more kinetic energy to mount an offense. Austen built upon the respectability that Burney and Radcliffe worked hard to cultivate via (1) their talent, (2) ideas slid into the public discourse under the guise of “fiction”, and (3) the ways they worked around the fraught public attitude toward female intellectuals which Austen’s Henry Tilney so thoroughly embodies.

Litz states: “From the very first Jane Austen stood free of this defensive attitude” (267)–”this defensive attitude” being Frances Burney’s way of breaking out as a female writer in a fraught time, which Litz calls a “lame defense” in that she “refers to herself as merely the ‘editor’ of Evelina” (267). This was not a “lame defense,” and to call it that discounts the strong public opposition and trauma that female writers faced for daring to make their voice heard. Burney’s “lame defense” was not limited to calling herself the “editor” of Evelina. She had to go to extreme measures to publish Evelina in the first place. She had to hide this from her father, a patriarchal figure that Austen, as scholars such as Joseph Livtak, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Patricia Spacks have shown, criticizes as unfit to usher females “into the world” (i.e., Mr. Allen, Catherine’s absent/too-busy-with-10-children father, Mr. Bennett, to name a few). Before Burney could even write Evelina, she had to negotiate for the right to write in a journal. In her early diaries, Burney records a dialogue with her father’s servant, after her father finds her journal, mistakenly left on a piano: “I have been having a long conversation with Miss Young on journals. She has very seriously and earnestly advised me to give mine up.” She writes that she tells Young, “Why, dear ma’am, papa never prohibited my writing, and he knows that I do write, and what I do write”; “I question that,” Young responds. Further, Burney worked as her father’s secretary, hand-writing his History of Music, so to hide the fact that she was the author of Evelina, she wrote the entire book in disguised handwriting so that people at the publishing house would not recognize her manuscript from her father’s.

In contrast to Burney’s having to defend herself for even keeping a personal journal, Austen was able to publish her books, and not anonymously. However, we can see that she was still writing against the current of sexist public opinion, due to the fact that Northanger Abbey, which scholars have called her most political work, was not published until (1) after she died (2) her brother wrote a ridiculous forward to it insinuating how reserved she was, etc.

As Tilney puts it, “Man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal” (Austen 51). Claudia Johnson calls Tilney “the self-appointed monitor of Catherine’s language” (321), and in passages such as the following, we see that this trait was likely passed down unto him by his abusive father: “The imposing effect of this last argument was equal to his wishes. The silence of the lady [Catherine] proved it to be unanswerable” (Austen 121). Throughout Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s very legitimate opinions and feelings are laughed off or silenced by her various educators, not least of which being Tilney, who Austen uses to encapsulate the language relegation and derision female authors were up against:

“During the 1790s, in particular, privileged classes felt their hegemony on language, and with that power, seriously challenged by radical social critics—some of the women …—from below … conservatives met this challenge by asserting that the superiority of their language rendered them alone fit for participation in public life” (Johnson 315).

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Norton, 2004.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. “Shut up in Prose.”

Hopkins, Robert. “General Tilley and Affairs of State.”

Johnson, Claudia. “The Juvenilia and Northanger Abbey.” Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman, Norton, 2004.

Litz, A. Walton. “Regulated Sympathy in Northanger Abbey.”

Livtak, Joseph. “The Most Charming Young Man in the World.”

Spacks, Patricia. “Muted Discord: Generational Conflict in Jane Austen”