There must be few avid readers who encountered Jane Austen in their youth who fail to remain constant readers to old age. Austen valued the readers who were most receptive to her novels, and for these readers Susan Allen Ford’s historical investigation will be illuminating and at times even transformative. With selective but needle-sharp unpicking of the conventional opinions of her time, Jane Austen continues to write for us all in our time, and Susan Allen Ford is writing literary criticism in a similar forensic tradition. Austen’s sharp gaze was directed at the society of her day and so is Ford’s.

Austen read widely, deeply and analytically, her access to the gentleman’s libraries of father and brother Edward supplementing burgeoning book societies and circulating libraries. Ford examines the literature Austen was familiar with, much of it confined since to the realms of academia, though now available to anyone with basic keyboard skills. The ‘Works Cited’ is a treasure trove. Ford pinpoints passing references and unravels threads which coloured her characters and plots. Austen’s literary usages, rarely obscure at the time, have frequently become so over the 200 or so years since her death. An example from Pride and Prejudice, the scene in which Mr Collins chooses to read aloud from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women is not simply an amusing episode at Mr Collins’ pompous expense. Fordyce’s Sermons is woven as deeply into the novel as it was into the society of its day. A self-help book, it was one of many ‘conduct books’ and the Bennet females are exemplars of the cleric’s and the novelist’s coinciding, or wildly diverging, views. Elizabeth would not be a Fordyce heroine. She delights in humanity’s foibles and inconsistencies, displaying wit and irony whereas Fordyce views them dimly and as no laughing matter. Yet Elizabeth’s and Mary’s reactions to Lydia’s loss of reputation are straight out of Fordyce, as is their wise Aunt Gardiner.

Ford provides something that is often sadly lacking, a sense of literary history. Catherine Morland may be introduced as the antithesis of the Gothic heroine, but Northanger Abbey plays out within that tradition. As integral to Emma as Fordyce is to Pride and Prejudice is Madame de Genlis’s Adelaide and Theodore, a widely read collection of ‘letters on education’. Again, Austen used elements from plots and themes and again imbued her novel with an irony quite foreign to her source. So much that 21st century readers find problematic in Mansfield Park, reading it through a fog of modernity, is lifted by a deepened understanding of Fanny’s character in its intricate connection with her reading (ditto the Crawfords). Persuasion is suffused with Byronic romance, but Austen moved far beyond stylised men of action and distressed damsels.

Don’t be put off by the cumbersome title. Ford’s book is much more than a crash-course in Regency reading. I doubt that I’ll be the only one to take a set of Austen from the shelves to re-read in the light of this sympathetic, scholarly volume.

Reviewed by Judith Crabb

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Allen Ford is Professor of English Emerita, Delta State University, USA. and has been editor of Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal and Persuasions On-Line since 2006.