Jane Austen’s pompous heroes

Jane Austen has become the most revered and probably the most popular of the great English novelists. Not even the vulgarisation of her novels by those who have adapted them for television has impaired the esteem in which she is held. She is not only deemed amusing, which she is, but a wonderfully fair and judicious moralist. Walter Scott praised her ‘exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace  things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment’; and this judgment is probably one with which we may all agree. Many of course go further and come close to canonising her.    

There have always been a few dissenters, Charlotte Bronte for instance, and J. M. Coetzee, who tells us that because she finds ‘sex demonic’, she ‘locks it out’. I am not sure that he is right. Emma Woodhouse is a very sexy girl, while the man-hunting misses of Pride and Prejudice are surely sexually avid. It’s not that Austen locks sex away, but that she feels no need to spell it out.

Another dissenter has now stuck his head above the parapet. In an article in the National Post, Robert Fulford says that Jane Austen so dislikes some of her characters that ‘she expresses herself by chopping them to pieces for our amusement. She does it so often that she acquires the characteristics not of a moralist but of a vicious gossip.’ This is good stuff, though ‘vicious gossip’ is perhaps coming it a bit strong. Still, I see what he means: the character assassination indulged in by the tabloids in full moralistic mode, or perhaps Private Eye.

Fulford objects to Austen’s treatment of four characters: Sir Walter Elliot and his eldest daughter Elizabeth in Persuasion and Lady Catherine de Burgh and Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice.