‘Jane Austen was very professional’
A new book dealing with satire, celebrity and politics might be expected to be about Donald Trump – but its celebrated subject died 200 years ago.
A new book dealing with satire, celebrity and politics might be expected to be about Donald Trump – but its celebrated subject died 200 years ago.
Jocelyn Harris has spent the better part of 30 years studying the genius of Jane Austen: her soon-to-be-published book Satire, Celebrity and Politics in Jane Austen will be her third about the English novelist. Austen, who wrote six novels – two of them published after her death, at 41, in 1817 – continues to fascinate readers. She has legions of fans and hundreds of books and papers are devoted to analysis of her work.
Harris, a professor emerita of English literature at the University of Otago, grew up in an academic family: her mother Margot, a history graduate from Otago, was widowed during World War II, when Harris was a toddler. She later married Professor Angus Ross (“a wonderful stepfather”), and Harris’ stepbrother Bruce went on to become the vice-chancellor of Lincoln University.
The Dunedin-based mother and grandmother travels widely in pursuit of her scholarship and enjoyment of Jane Austen.
It sounds like you had a very stimulating childhood.
I was an only child and I was lucky to be swept up into the family of my Aunt Nina. That was wonderful. My cousins had a box of comics, which I was not allowed to read at home, such as Enid Blyton; they were considered not the thing for children to read. But I thoroughly enjoyed them at the relatives’ and I don’t think I suffered any ill effects.
Was it inevitable you would follow an academic path?
I just went with what I loved, which was English. Otago Girls’ High School was a fine nurturing ground for young women at the time. We had some magnificent teachers and I can still pretty well chant by heart some of the things they told us. Then I went to university and loved it. I was fortunate to have equally marvellous teachers. The interest in reading and writing was there in the family and I was bound to follow that, I suppose, but I didn’t know where it would lead me.
It’s led to your becoming an expert on Austen. Was she always a favourite?
How I started to write about Jane Austen was that I got a scholarship to London, where I did my PhD. I was looking at the letters of Samuel Richardson at the Victoria and Albert and I saw that they held a story. He had written this huge tragic novel, Clarissa, in which the heroine dies at the end after being raped and locked up in a brothel by Lovelace, who is very much a Don Juan character – you half-admire and half-detest him.
It is brilliantly done, but then everybody wrote to Richardson and said, “Can’t you give us a good man? You’ve given us a good woman but this terrible thing happened to her.” So I traced the writing of his third novel, Sir Charles Grandison. It was fascinating, because it soon became clear that it was a novel written almost by committee. He’d send bits out to people and they’d write back and say, “No, we don’t like that; this isn’t right. He’s got to do this or that.” Later, I was given the job of editing Grandison for the Oxford University Press. My edition was the first time anyone had done a thorough job of annotation and textual context and treated a work of fiction so seriously. When I found out it was Jane Austen’s favourite novel in the world, I thought, “Goodness, what is she doing with it in all her novels?”
That is where it all started – she would pick up an element of character or an event, play with it, pop it in a different context and make something new and wonderful out of it. That is what got me thinking about how writers’ minds work, and that has always been my concern.
“Thinking about how writers’ minds work has always been my concern.”
Did you reach a broad conclusion about that?
I think the idea that creation has to always be original is quite untrue, and also quite damaging. You only need to think of music, where composers do variations on a theme, or Picasso doing variations on
Velázquez. You realise that, again and again, artists are picking up on something, turning it around, changing it and coming up with something different, until it becomes their own. The first book I did about Jane Austen was called Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. I looked at the
books she read and at what she took from them, and what she did with that material. But the most extraordinary example of seeing how her mind works is in relation to Persuasion, the last novel of hers to be published. She left behind the last two draft chapters she had written for Persuasion. I was delighted, because I am a great reviser, [to see] the extent to which she revised them. She crossed things out, put things in with a little arrow. She interlineated and then interlineated her interlineations, she wrote up the margins and around the top, because paper was very expensive, and she even added on a couple of patches of paper with a wax wafer – again, bits that were crossed and interlineated.
You could actually follow her mind from moment to moment as she changed her ideas, thinking, “No, that sentence isn’t working” – all the things we do like, “Heavens, I used that word a paragraph ago, I can’t use it again, that would be repetition.”
Also towards the end, building up [the protagonist] Anne Elliot and making her stronger and less dithery, and pulling down Captain Wentworth a little bit to balance them up. Then, when she had done all that, she threw it out and, in eight days, wrote the two perfect final chapters we have now. It didn’t just come out of her head this great, original stream of consciousness; it was worked over and over again. She was very professional. Any writer would be fascinated to see how much work she put into it. Virginia Woolf said that “of all the great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness”, and I have found that challenge, too. I have been trying to catch her in the act of greatness ever since I wrote that book. I just want to know how she did it – a small task!
She had an interest in politics and celebrity?
Think about the times she was writing: the golden age of Regency satire when the caricaturists were having an extraordinary time attacking particularly the Prince of Wales – this man not fit to be King. They were terrified he was going to bring the country down. He was lewd, he was lascivious, he was vulgar and he was drinking too much and taking too much opium. He was building palaces and having parties like there was no tomorrow. The cult of celebrity was in full swing – think of Byron – and she was very intrigued with people, some of whom deserved their celebrity and some of whom were just famous for being famous.
She was also very interested in the politics of the whole thing, but she couldn’t say that outright or she would have been put in prison, so she has these little oblique ways of commenting on the political affairs of the time and on celebrities.
What would she make of Donald Trump?
How prescient she was, seeing this type of person who, when given a bit of power, can rise to the top. In several of her novels she creates characters who are very like that Prince of Wales and very like Donald Trump. There is clearly getting to be a backlash from the Trump camp with the closing down of journalists and cartoonists. Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist who is in New Zealand on a University of Auckland Hood Fellowship and whose technique is very like that of the leading cartoonist of the 18th century, James Gillray, did a copy of a wicked Gillray cartoon to show the relationship between Trump and Teresa May. It is fascinating to me that these techniques of satire are going on, the distortions, the puns and the jokes, and lewdness in some cases, that still carry a hefty punch.
If you could ask Jane Austen one question, what would it be?
Great question. She left an unfinished piece called Sanditon which is quite remarkable in many ways. First of all, she was dying, maybe of tuberculosis or maybe Addison’s disease, we don’t know for sure. Although she was very ill, she wrote this extraordinary fragment, full of zest, spirit and wicked caricatures of hypochondria, perhaps connected to her mother. It was about consumerism, the new seaside resorts, and it feels very satirical.
One of the characters is very pleased to have seen some blue nankin boots in a shop window. He declares, “This is the beginning of civilisation”, so it is also about greed and entrepreneurs. It feels so fresh and modern and I would love to know what she was going to do with that. I’d ask her, “Where were you going to take Sanditon?”
And what about your travels with Jane Austen?
Every year, I go to the Jane Austen Society of North America meetings. These are extraordinary gatherings of 850 people – that is the limit, although there are many more members of the society as a whole. It is a combination of scholarly presentations; people who’ve had a brilliant idea but are not academics; and then there is hatmaking, and sessions where you can learn dancing because there is a ball at the end.
But the most delightful thing about it is that everyone wanders around in 18thcentury costume. The men who come, and there aren’t a lot, love dressing up as admirals of the fleet or colonels in scarlet uniforms and often we have gone out to promenade on the streets. I remember walking down the Golden Mile in Chicago and this parade of people in 18th-century costume just stopping the traffic.
The society members all know their Austen off by heart. If you get a preposition wrong in a quotation, you hear this intake of breath. But they are very good company and it is an act of homage to a writer they all love. It makes me wonder how did Jane Austen make so many people feel as if they are her intimate friend? If I knew that, I could sell the recipe and make a great fortune.
“If you get a preposition wrong in a quotation, you hear this intake of breath.”