2 - ‘Vain are these speculations’: Jane Austen and Female Perfection

Summary

In ‘Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen’, Virginia Woolf recalls that her father ‘read Miss Austen through’ as part of his nightly reading aloud to his children. Unlike Thackeray’s ‘too terrible’ Vanity Fair, Austen passed muster as drawing room entertainment suitable for the entire family: from the first, Woolf’s engagement with Jane Austen (1775–1817) is therefore mediated by paternal(istic) approval, making her a model of female writing but also threatening a reductive and outmoded ideal of femininity.

Although few would contest Pam Morris’s assertion that ‘[i]f Woolf has a literary mother it must surely be Jane Austen’, most critics also note that Austen occupies an ambivalent position in Woolf’s work. Austen’s legacies, the courtship narrative and the domestic novel, are prominent but not always uncontested influences on The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). Thus, Jane de Gay notes that Woolf’s textual references to Austen ‘[raise] concerns about the patriarchal custodianship of literature’, and seek to move beyond the didactic constraints of Austen’s novels, while Kathryn Simpson traces how Woolf’s revised Austenian romance narrative explores ‘the unsaid and unspecified of women’s desire’. Woolf’s ambivalence is also evident in A Room of One’s Own as well as the first Common Reader essay, as Janet Todd and Jean Long have noted. However, with the exception of de Gay, who briefly touches upon Austen’s biographical baggage, the majority of critical engagements with Woolf’s Austen are intertextual studies that focus on her literary legacy. Reading them, one would be forgiven for thinking that Austen, although without a doubt ‘thumbed, scored, annotated, magnified’ through her novels, persisted in personal anonymity:

living almost within the memory of man, she flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun? (‘Personalities’, E 6.439–40)

Yet Woolf’s insistence on Austen’s ability to deflect her audience’s gaze in ‘Personalities’ (undated) is evidence of her own persistent search for an authentic persona at the core of the Austen mythology. Todd notes that ‘She is said to have written a female sentence, and to have created a universal, perfect prose, but there is no analysis’.