Rachel Brownstein, _Why Jane Austen?_

A BIT LIKE the Devoney Looser book I wrote about a couple of months ago, Why Jane Austen? is less about Austen's novels than it is about the broadly-based and still-expanding fascination with those novels and with the person who wrote them, or the person we imagine wrote them.

Brownstein's is the earlier book (2011) and focuses on the Austen-philia of the last twenty years (Looser spends more time on material from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th). Brownstein's is a bit bolder--less pedestrian, too, I would say. Brownstein writes with more brio, with some short flights into memoir.

Brownstein is generally wry rather than grumpy about the Colin Firth/Chawton Cottage/totebag side of Austen-philia, but also willing to draw a line in the sand. "Contrary to the main current of popular opinion today," she declares a few pages from the end, "Jane Austen's novels are not first of all and most importantly about pretty girls in long dresses waiting for love and marriage; and they are not most importantly English and Heritage, small and decorous and mannerly and pleasant."

She spends some time on "Why We Read Jane Austen," the essay Lionel Trilling was working on at the time of his death, and notes of the "we" of the title, "In  his final essay, Trilling made a last gasp at securing Jane Austen for his masculinist party: his magisterial 'we' separates (as that pronoun always does) 'us' from 'them.'" Maybe...but I had to think of Edward Mendelson's analysis of the Trilling "we" in Moral Agents. According to Mendelson, Trilling's usual strategy was to set up the "we" as well-informed, bien-pensant types, of whom he was deeply suspicious, and whose stock position on x or y or z he would go on to undermine. Trilling may have been headed for an argument that an awful lot of Austen's admirers read her for the wrong reasons. That's not too far from where Brownstein ends up, really.