What happens at the party : Jane Austen converses with Charlotte Smith

Abstract

IN JANE AUSTEN’S ART OF MEMORY, Jocelyn Harris concludes that “in memory [Austen] found origins for art,” following the eighteenth-century vogue for imitation in her synthesizing of what she had read: “her practice often looks to me like ‘imitation’ . . . which, says Howard Weinbrot, ‘fosters literary borrowing and encourages modernization’” (221, 219). Harris bases her book on Austen’s “tenacious” memory, a trait also discussed by most of the critics who investigate how Austen made use of what she read (Harris x), and is generous is allowing for how much she may have overlooked. For Harris, “Austen’s recollections of books gave her languages to speak with” (218), a telling phrase, conjuring up a mute, or at least tongue-tied Austen for whom reading performed its highest function of instruction, enabling a layering of meaning and event, filling the blank page. What is striking, however, is the reluctance readers show to compromise on what is often presented as Austen’s superiority, despite her debts. Thus she “better[s] the novel” (Siskin 137); she “almost single-handedly . . . has made most of her contemporaries seem excessive, artificial, or absurd” (Todd 18); she “created a new kind of novel which put all her predecessors and contemporaries more or less in the shade and ensured her work outlived theirs” (Waldron 3). These encomiums, and others, derive from scholars who are willing to admit that Austen read her contemporaries and that this reading is visible in her work. Others insist that Austen’s unique genius is untainted by such associations; hence, “she is little given to direct imitation” (Grundy 191, in an article on “Jane Austen and Literary Traditions”); she is “extraordinarily isolated from contemporary writers” (Gillie 55). As Austen sets about perfecting the novel, she is somehow also isolated from the novelistic world, always doing better, always going furthe