A Message in Writing

    Alright Austen Lovers, brace yourselves because this may be my longest post yet. At long last, we finally make our return to Jane Austen to discuss the ways in which she exhibits and challenges the Regency expectations for women as readers and authors. As expressed in the first post detailing Jane Austen’s background, Austen was situated in the fortunate position of having a scholarly family who supported her talent for writing. At home, Austen seems to have had ample access to reading material. As Meredith Hindley, a senior writer for the National Endowment for the Humanities magazine wrote, “George Austen kept a sizable library—one bookcase reportedly covered sixty-four square feet of wall—which his children were encouraged to explore,” (Hindley). Along with encouraging his children to explore the library, George Austen is also said to have been a major supporter of Jane’s. According to Hindley, “When young Jane showed a spark of talent for writing, her father encouraged his budding author, buying her journals and writing paper,” (Hindley). This exposure to literature and support provided by her family helped to create and fan the spark that eventually became the great novels we know today. 

    Aside from creating and fanning that spark within Jane, this childhood also gave her a platform on which she could voice her opinions. Like many female authors of the time, Jane Austen’s novels are so much more than entertainment. They are a social commentary that has sparked discussions among scholars and readers alike. As Erica Oliver asserts, “Female authors like Austen appropriated the novel as a means to voice their discontent within a politically rigid system,” (Oliver). Deeper than this, and more important to our discussion, Austen’s novels provide a commentary specifically on female readership and authorship and the role women as readers and writers play in this system. 

    To do this, Austen employs the quixotic form we've discussed previously in her novels. Jodi Wyett, an English Professor at Xavier University, wrote about the role of quixotism in Jane Austen’s works saying, “For Austen, quixotism models how engaged fiction reading initiates socialization and subsequently functions both to enable and emancipate the increasingly overdetermined and intertwined categories of women’s reading and women’s writing,” (Wyett 262). To see the quixotic model at work, we need look no further than her novel Northanger Abbey. For a quick refresher to those of you who are unfamiliar, the main heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, is a rather bookish girl who, throughout the novel, explores several pieces of literature that Jane Austen’s readers were probably familiar with or had at least heard of. For Morland, as a rather naive girl, much of what she expects or hopes to experience in life is based around the fictional stories she is so immersed in. For instance, upon her move from bath to the Abbey, Catherine became very excited to explore the passages, rooms, and hidden crevices of the Abbey in hopes of encountering one of the traditional legends she had discovered in the Gothic Literature she read, and upon her arrival at the Abbey, she describes it saying, “Is not it a fine old place, just like what one reads about?” (Kinsley 114). However, as much of what happens in a fictional story isn’t real, Catherine doesn’t encounter any horrors or legends while staying in the Abbey. Throughout the novel, Catherine does seem to almost confuse the fictional worlds of her books with the reality in which she lives. Despite all this, by the end of the novel, Jane Austen has essentially rebelled against the idea of the quixotic form she had employed. As Jodi Wyett wrote, “By the end of Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s interpretive instincts have been honed and her engaged reading put to good use,” (Wyett 269). In completing Catherine’s character arc in this way, Jane Austen effectively rejects the element of the quixotic form that presents literature as a device that leads a person to a deluded view of the world, and instead, she promotes literature as something to be engaged with and used.

    The other important aspect of Jane Austen’s writing is the connection she makes between readership and authorship. As part of her discussion, Wyett points out, “Austen “identif[ies] the influential role in constructing literary history played by professional women readers— that is women readers who are themselves publishing writers—who name or deny the texts they read.”42” (Wyett 269) In a sense, Jane Austen’s writing functions not only as social commentary, but also as a call to action.  In discussing Northanger Abbey, Erica Oliver wrote, “Austen constructs a model of reading that combines education, experience, and contemplation to empower women to form a self that functions outside the dominant discourse,” (Oliver). Austen’s writing almost directly calls out women, both authors and readers, as the people with the potential to change history. Female readers who also write have the chance to use the education and experience of their reading to build on literary history in a way that will allow women to eventually overcome the, as Oliver puts it, “deficient nature of domestic education,” (Oliver). Through her writing like Northanger Abbey, Austen provides a model of how educated women can function outside of the dominant discourse, and she places the responsibility on both female readers and female writers to use this model to continue the argument.