I've noticed that they ("they" being a collection of the sort of people I would like rounded up and executed without trial) have released some new editions of Austen's novels.



I don't think I need to comment further; just look at them!

I'm not saying that I believe classical literature should printed on toilet paper and covered with a brown paper bag to ensure that only Serious Readers touch it but I can't believe they're candy-coating fluffifying my beloved Austen. Yes, books, regardless of provenance, should be inviting, aesthetic objects (I remember the groans some of our school editions would elicit) but these new editions aren't about making the books more appealing to readers, they're about reducing Austen from proper' literature to historical examples of the romance genre. Classic romance, my bonnet.

There's nothing wrong with romantic fiction (I adore the stuff, the tighter the breeches the better, as far as I'm concerned) but there will always be a disparity in the way people perceive genre fiction compared to literary ("real" "proper") fiction. I'm not John Carey (alas), I'm not going to try and evaluate if this is fair or not, I'm just going to accept it exists. And, therefore, the act of genre-ising' Austen cannot be viewed as a marketing exercise designed to widen her appeal. It's not like anyone is re-marketing 1984 as fantastic sci-fi adventure. Nobody is shelving War and Peace next to Black Hawk Down and Chimera Books aren't producing an imprint of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Although they probably should. </snide>

There seems to be some kind of prevalent assumption -- and not just by men -- that Jane Austen was writing 18th century chick-lit. And the only thing that these new classic romance' covers will do for Austen is place her ever more securely in the "girly fiction about balls and gowns" category. This is not aided by the blurbs of these new editions, which seemed to have been designed to bear only the vaguest passing resemblance to the plot as I would recognise it. Let's take a look at Northanger Abbey:

With its loveable, impressionable heroine and its themes of growing up and learning to live in the real world, "Northanger Abbey" remains one of Jane Austen's most irresistible and up-to-date novels. Catherine Morland is the very ideal of a nice girl from a happy family, but she is blessed with an overactive imagination. She is also obsessed with lurid Gothic novels, where terrible things happen to the heroine, which gets her into all sorts of trouble... When Catherine meets funny, sharp Henry Tilney, she's instantly taken with him. But when she is invited to his home, the sinister Northanger Abbey, her preoccupation with fantasy starts to get in the way of reality. Will she learn to separate out the two in time?

Catherine Morland, the ideal of a nice girl? Well, yes if "a good looking girl with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind" is the ideal of a nice girl. In fact, by pointing out that a girl, pretty and ill-educated by the society in which she has been raised, "cannot fail of attracting a clever young man" Austen is asking her readers to question why it is that young women were not only expected, but encouraged, to be ignorant. There is a bitter irony of the type I'm sure Austen might have appreciated (if she's not too busy turning in her grave) in the realisation that poor, hopeless Catherine is still being presented as an ideal without any understanding of the assumptions and attitudes that the concept of such ideals support.

And as for "funny, sharp" Henry Tilney, yes he is quite witty, but he's also patronising, arrogant and cynical to the point of misogyny. Even Catherine, who is as sweet as pie throughout, notices: "[she] feared ... he indulged himself a little too much with the foibles of others." He loves Catherine (if love it can be called) for the ignorance of her mind because it allows him to glory in his own masculine superiority. In fact, I think it wouldn't be over-stating the case so suggest he's blatantly getting off on instructing her, while continuing to hold no regard for her intellect. When Austen writes that "he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste" the implication is that he thinks that because she is incapable of disagreeing with him. Natural taste is code for female admiration of male accomplishment. To quote the big A directly:

To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid.

And Catherine administers to Henry's vanity, oh how she administers:

I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.

Although Austen leaves us in less doubt as to the potential happiness of the couple as she does with some of her marriages (Marianne and the flannel waistcoat sporting Colonel Brandon, for example) it will never be an equal partnership. I can readily picture it. She will adore him and he will adore being adored, although his clever mind will occasionally chafe against the ignorance and naivete he finds so attractively reassuring to his masculinity, just as he does when he discovers the nature of his speculations at Northanger Abbey. Perhaps, as her beauty fades, his patience will not or, perhaps, in twenty years time we shall find ourselves once more with Mr and Mrs Bennett.

Something of a tangent, but I always find Catherine's tomboyish inclinations particularly poignant.

She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush.

I wonder if Austen is hinting that, as a child, Catherine understood something of the restraints and limitations that would placed upon her as a woman. Heck, in her world I would want to be a boy too. And it is telling that the "heroic enjoyments" of female infancy are presented as precursors to the roles in which a wife will very likely find herself, nursing, feeding and watering male consequence.

In my passion, I've allowed myself to wander slightly from the point but I can see little resemblance in the novel I read and the novel the blurb describes. Doesn't that count as false advertising? And it's curious that the blurb speaks of Catherine's inability to separate reality from fantasy (the blurb writer obviously couldn't) but Catherine's gothic imaginings, although silly, do very little harm beyond annoying Henry Tilney; the foolishness and pride that allows John Thorpe to deceive him of Catherine's real position (and, for that matter, the foolishness and pride that induce Thorpe to exaggerate it) show that it is self-aggrandising male fantasies that are prevalent and perilous. Furthermore, it is not Catherine's "preoccupation with fantasy" that is the problem; it's her imperfect education and the prevailing contradictions of a society that simultaneously demands and derides her ignorance. An irresistible and up-to-date' novel indeed!

I'm not saying that you can't read Austen as the sort of light comedies ideally suited to Sunday teatime BBC adaptations but to do so -- and to present the books as only being such -- seems to me to be doing a great writer a great disservice. Female writers were still in a precarious position at the beginning of the eighteen century and, although less likely to condemn women outright for writing immodest books and leading wicked lives, men were still resentful of the competition. Austen's books may seem, on the surface, to be reasonably conventional romances, but I would argue that this is mainly an act of self-protection lest she was accused of writing unsuitable material for a mere woman. And it doesn't mean we should take them at face value.

In the frankly quite cool revisionist reading of Austen, Regulated Hatred, D.H Harding writes about "unexpected astringencies" in the text which reveal Austen's true bitterness and despair. He claimed that her satire is far from gentle or didactic in aim, but is all about finding some mode of existence and expression for her critical attitudes. Mr Collins is a prime example of this for although he seems to be, in the main, a comic masterpiece, he poses a real threat to Elizabeth's happiness because, in the mercenary terms of society, he is an eligible bachelor and a good match for her. Although he is foolish and sycophantic, he is also cruel and narrow-minded, displaying none of the Christian virtues he is supposed to espouse as a clergyman. Even though he is presented as if to amuse a reader, he raises more complex questions about the terrible irony at work in a society that commends Mr Collins at the expense of such excellent women as Elizabeth Bennett and Charlotte Lucas.

Similarly, Mrs Bennett is often considered an amusingly foolish caricature of a desperate mother but there is nothing funny in Austen's devastating description of her as "a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper." Readers are invited to mock Miss Bates, who is neither "young nor handsome nor rich nor married" but the description Austen provides turns very quickly from expected satire at the expense of spinsters to something more disturbing, for Miss Bates possesses nothing that might "frighten those who might hate her" into outward respect. The surprisingly strong terms used (frighten and hate) draw attention to the utter and humiliating powerlessness of Miss Bates's position in a society that despises her. And, it must remembered that, at the time of writing, Austen, too, was as confirmed a spinster as Miss Bates, and very often considered, as her letters reveal, that she was what Emma would call the proper sport' of her more socially acceptable friends and neighbours, and terrified to go into company because of her shabby clothes and the contemptible nature of her dependent status.

Harding, however, seems to retreat from the conclusions these astringencies might lead one towards (I can say something this snotty because he's dead), asserting that Austen did ultimately have a great deal of respect for some aspects of her society and shared many of its values. However, it seems to me that although Austen is capable of recognising virtue (and many of her virtues are quite typically nineteenth century virtues, like modesty, restraint and compassion) I think her relationship with her society was far from comfortable. Specifically, although her delightful heroines often do better than they could reasonably be expected to do in the matrimonial sweepstakes, it is hard to finish any of Austen's books without a pang of regret that this is the only happy ending they could ever hope to get. Elizabeth Bennett is, perhaps, an exception (but then again maybe only because Mr Darcy looks like Colin Firth in everybody's imagination), Pride and Prejudice, despite its darker undertones, being the most uncomplicatedly romantic of her books. But what of, for example, Emma?

Poor Emma, "beautiful, clever and rich" and possessing every advantage a woman could be presumed to need, she is still utterly helpless to control her destiny in any way. Emma has her flaws " she makes several quite disastrous errors in judgement " but much of what tends to be dismissed as foolish and arrogant attempts to manipulate the lives of others springs from her increasing sense of helplessness as the novel progresses. The picnic at Box Hill in which Emma insults Miss Bates and draws Mr Knightley's condemnation is, indeed, a pivotal realisation for Emma, not so much that her pride and self consequence have led to her lashing out at the vulnerable and undeserving but that she has no more control over her own fate than she does over Harriet's marriage or Mr and Mrs Elton. Miss Bates, Mr Knightley reminds us, once enjoyed the same sort of status Emma does now, and there is no guarantee that Emma's wealth and consequence will garner her any more respect than that accorded to Miss Bates (i.e. none) if she does not marry.

As a portrait of English country life, Emma is truly devastating. It is indeed the neighbourhood of "voluntary spies" Henry Tilney rails against in Northanger Abbey. The wealth of trivial detail with which Austen presents Highbury and its inhabitants soon leads to an immensely claustrophobic atmosphere. The concentration is on gossip, repetition and inconsequentialities ("For a few days, every morning visit in Highbury included some mention of the handsome letter Mrs. Weston had received...") and although often uses such matters for comic effect it is hard to imagine that living in such a hothouse of inanity could be anything other than hellish. Emma can often be very funny, but it's funny in the way The Office is funny, not the gentle, harmless way The Good Life is funny. Jane Fairfax is described as "belonging" to Highbury; it's the Village of the Damned, once you get in, you never get out again.

Emma's implicit loneliness is one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the novel. There is no-one in Highbury who is her equal, with the possibly exception of Mr Knightley if he wasn't so unhealthily obsessed with controlling her. He always speaks of her in terms of submission and domination: "She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. [emphasis mine]" and it soon becomes obvious that he sees marriage in these terms also: "but you were receiving a very good education from her on the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will and doing as you were bid." He wants to see Emma humbled: "I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good." And he's fancied her since she was thirteen. Eighteenth century or not, that's just a little bit creepy.

Given the dross available to her in Dullsville, Mr Knightley is a good match for Emma. But it still breaks my heart:

Her many beginnings were displayed. Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours had been all tried in turn. She had always wanted to do every thing...

The girl who wanted to do everything has grown into a woman who will do nothing. She will never leave Highbury, doting on her selfish father (one of the most tyrannical pseudo-invalids to ever whinge his way through literature, he has to be coaxed into allowing his daughter to go on her honeymoon, for heaven's sake) who cannot countenance dinners of more than eight people or journeys of more than eight miles and then, presumably, doing the same sort of thing for Mr Knightley who clearly has no interest in the larger world outside the narrow limitations of Highbury and, for all his grace on the dance floor, is not a young man in eighteen century terms.

If that's classic romance, I'm Fanny Price.