Such grotesqueries are one thing, but the excesses of critics are quite another. That lecture-room favourite, Eve Sedgwick’s essay ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, quickly followed by ludicrous essays speculating on Austen and Cassandra as incestuous lesbians, put the icing on the cake of half a century of terrible critical speculation. Mansfield Park, within the academy, is now quite simply ‘about’ slavery, just as Emma is about something called ‘heteronormativity’.

One such scholar, Claudia Johnson, has whined about how badly she and her colleagues do in Jane Austen Society quizzes (‘we rarely recollect the colour of this character’s dress or that servant’s name’), and complained about a general lack of respect in the fraternity.

Our own papers becoming yet another relatively undifferentiated, unhierarchalised item in the great repository of Austeniana assiduously collected by Janeites and compiled in newsletters and reports, printed somewhere between recipes for white soup and the latest word jumble.

I hate to break this to Claudia Johnson, but a good recipe for the white soup that Bingley’s cook Nicholls makes would be of much wider and more permanent interest than any number of fanciful articles about post-colonialism in Persuasion.

No doubt the wild enthusiasm for Austen in the late 1990s and early 2000s had something to do with property pornography and the mercantile imagination. Auden said it made him uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle-class

Describe the amorous effects of brass.

That scruple had long gone by the 1990s, to be replaced by a frankly Regency shamelessness. We’ve been through a succession of Jane Austens, ably chronicled by Claire Harman. Just at this moment, I think we are waiting for the next one. It might be a film now in pre-production, according to the internet movie database, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I hope not, though.

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