The Columbia History of the British Novel

autonomy, her revealed energy. But Miss Milner's presence in the background provides a graphic reminder of the loss entailed.The two-part pattern that enables this ironic conjunction reinforces the narrative's impact and dramatizes the harsh alternatives that delimit every female prospect. Like the tight plotting of Caleb Williams, the apparently more diffuse structural arrangement of A Simple Story precisely suits the fable it contains. When Godwin, in the same preface that reported his mode of plotting, revealed his hope that his novel would constitute an epoch in the reader's mind, he suggested no necessary connection between the plotting and the grand effect of which he dreamed. Yet the relentless logic of his plot contributes to the moral disturbance the novel creates, as does the bipartite division of Inchbald's work. Both novelists demonstrated the possible interplay of form and function in ideological fiction. Inchbald, unlike Godwin, makes no ideological claims for her accomplishment, presenting it as only 'a simple story.' But her novel, too, arguably constitutes an epoch in the mind: a work that significantly shifts our perception of moral possibility.

Patricia Meyer Spacks

Selected Bibliography

Butler Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

Butler Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Castle Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth- Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Johnson Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Kelly Gary. The English Jacobin Novel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

Paulson Ronald. Representations of Revolution 1789–1820. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983.

Schofield Mary Anne, and Cecilia Macheski, eds. Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986.

Spacks Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Tompkins J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

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Jane Austen

JANE AUSTEN lived from 1775 to 1817 and wrote six novels. They were composed in a slightly different order, but completed and published as follows: Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Mansfield Park, 1814; and Emma, 1816. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818, though the former was written long before and only slightly revised for publication. Austen also left in manuscript several volumes of short fiction-juvenilia-brief, highly ironic sketches that satirize various forms of popular fiction, especially sentimental fiction. Also left were several unfinished works, including an early novella, Lady Susan, a dark fragment from her middle years, The Watsons, and the beginnings of a very different style of novel that she was working on when she died, Sanditon. Though she never married, Austen was very close to her elder sister Cassandra, to whom she wrote hundreds of letters, which have been collected and published; what we know about her life comes largely from these letters.

For a number of reasons, Jane Austen's novels occupy a crucial place in literary history. Her writing has remained well loved for a remarkably long time. She has a following inside and outside of academia, as indicated by the many inexpensive paperback editions of her books that are available, the global membership of the Jane Austen Society, and the steady stream of articles and books that continue to appear about her novels, which themselves have remained in print ever since they were first published. If, as Roland Barthes remarked some time ago, literature is what gets taught, Austen's works are among the few that belong -275- on both sides of the fence. Her novels would be read even if they were not taught; like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice is a novel that many people would read anyway.

To literary historians, Austen's novels occupy an important place in literary history not simply because of the presumption of intrinsic quality but for their innovations in narrative form. As early as 1815, Sir Walter Scott recognized in his review of Emma that this novel was distinctively different-a new species of writing about common life. The most influential discussion of Jane Austen's technological innovations in narrative is Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, where he argues, in effect, that after the many fits and starts of eighteenth-century novelistic form-the various experiments in first- and third-person narratives, epistolary novels, and other clumsy devices-with her 'technical genius' Austen finally got it right. In his epistolary novels, Richardson mastered a realism of presentation, and so was able to achieve a high degree of verisimilitude in conveying the minutiae of daily life. In his turn, Fielding, with his omniscient and judgmental narrators who see directly into the hearts of characters, achieved a mastery of realism of assessment. Jane Austen, however, was the first novelist capable of conveying both the interior and exterior of human life, in her «reconciliation» or synthesis of Richardson's psychological skills and Fielding's sociological scope. By the use of a nonintrusive but still omniscient narrator, Austen developed the means of representing the totality of human life.

In two pages, Watt brilliantly sums up the conventional literary historical view of Austen's 'successful resolution' of the eighteenth-century novel. Austen followed Burney and Richardson 'in their minute presentation of daily life,' but unlike them, Austen could also stand far enough away to display everyday life objectively and comically because hers were not first-person narratives in which the autobiographer or letter writer was the main actor. Like Fielding's, her third-person narrators were free to judge the action, but hers were more judicious and less interfering. In sum, Austen achieved the best of both worlds:

Her analyses of her characters and their states of mind, and her ironical juxtapositions of motive and situation are as pointed as anything in Fielding, but they do not seem to come from an intrusive author but rather from some august and impersonal spirit of social and psychological understanding. At the same time, Jane Austen varied her narrative point of view sufficiently to give us, not only editorial comment, but much of Defoe's and Richardson's psy-276- chological closeness to the subjective world of the characters. In her novels there is usually only one character whose consciousness is tacitly accorded a privileged status, and whose mental life is rendered more completely than that of the other characters… Jane Austen's novels, in short, must be seen as the most successful solution of the two general narrative problems for which Richardson and Fielding had provided only partial answers.

The function that Austen's work serves here, or the problem it is asked to solve, is not merely technical, because almost inevitably in discussions such as this, technical issues or issues of narrative form modulate into moral or ideological questions that turn on the truth of her vision. Watt continues: 'She was able to combine into a harmonious unity the advantages both of realism of presentation and realism of assessment, of the internal and of the external approaches to character; her novels have authenticity without diffuseness or trickery, wisdom of social comment without a garrulous essayist, and a sense of the social order which is not achieved at the expense of the individuality and autonomy of the characters.' What is at stake here is no longer technical prowess but harmonious authenticity, not the way she conveys life stories but what she conveys, which is another matter entirely.

Austen described her purview in a letter as 'pictures of domestic life in country villages,' a scale that is condensed even further in another selfdeprecating and trivializing description of her own novels, 'the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush.' But despite this small scale, Austen found the means of displaying the inside and the outside of human life, how her characters think and feel, along with how they interact with others. Inaugurating the Great Tradition of the English novel, as F. R. Leavis puts it, Jane Austen 'makes possible' George Eliot. In sum, Austen's novels have been valued so highly and she has been accorded such an important place in the history of the novel for formal as well as substantive reasons. Both views, however, turn on assumptions about the value of realism and presuppose that the purpose of the novel is to represent human life stories accurately or truthfully and convincingly; whether for her improvements in the way lives are shown or in what aspects of human life are shown, Austen has long been celebrated as a masterful innovator as well as a