1 - Becoming England's Jane, 1811–1917

Summary

IT MAY SEEM UNUSUAL to be covering an entire century of criticism in a single chapter, but I think there are good reasons for this approach. First, until after the First World War, much of what was published about Austen's fiction was more along the lines of appreciation rather than critical commentary. Some of this material is important, of course, in that opinions formed during the nineteenth century influenced judgments made by critics in the twentieth, especially those writing before the rise of New Criticism as a dominant critical methodology. Second, and perhaps even more important, this field has been plowed before. Rather than repeat the excellent work of Brian Southam, I would simply like to refer readers to the lengthy introductions to his Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (1968), which covers Austen's reception to 1870, and Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940, which examines works published before the advent of the Second World War. Additionally, Claire Harman's recent reception study, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2009) is also quite useful in describing how Austen remained a popular novelist throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and Joanne Wilkes's Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010) presents a thorough critique of nineteenth-century reviews of Austen's work by women, supplementing and extending Southam's work considerably.

Nevertheless, a brief summary of critical commentary on Austen during the first century after the publication of Sense and Sensibility, her initial foray into print, seems appropriate to set the stage for a more extensive examination of what followed, and why.