In the letter to the
London Evening Standard linked to, above, Melanie Mcdonagh begs
every possible question about how we (by which I gather she means, modern,
well-informed, intelligent, close readers) ought to read Jane Austen’s novels.
And, in particular, she reveals her own readerly pride and prejudice, and
prodigious ignorance of biographical and literary facts, in ways that are highly
ironic, and would have made JA smile a wry smile, as I will now briefly elaborate:
First, it’s no accident
that McDonagh’s article leads with a huge image of the famous, ubiquitous, Bowdlerized portrait of a placid, cow-faced
Jane Austen that JEAL commissioned in 1870, to replace Cassandra’s authentic
1810 sketch of the real Jane Austen, a hard-edged, strong woman. So, right off
the bat, McDonagh reveals either her ignorance of the existence of the
authentic portrait (which of course is prominently displayed in the National
Portrait Gallery in London), or her prejudice in choosing to present,
unannotated, the fake image that JEAL used as the springboard for his whitewash
of JA’s life and writing. But as you will see, below, McDonagh’s understanding
is more or less that of JEAL, 145 years old and as false as it was the day he
wrote the Memoir!
Second, McDonagh
conflates the majority of modern Austen fanfics and spinoffs with modern
scholarly discoveries of a truer version of JA’s novels and life story via
literary sleuthing like Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Colleen Sheehan, Janine Barchas, Jocelyn Harris, Linda Walker, and Barbara Mann already
published, as well as mine, Diane Reynolds’s, and Anielka Briggs’s, etc.
I.e., it is very true
that most modern fanfic Darcys, Elizabeths, Emmas and Knightleys bear little
resemblance to JA’s actual characters, and only a minority (like our own Diana Birchall’s
nuanced spinoffs), shed any interesting light on JA’s novels. But, McDonagh
throws a very large baby out with the bathwater, by convincing herself that
David Cecil (a truly benighted Austen biographer if ever there was one) knew
all there was to know about Jane Austen a half century ago, and that anything
that has been discovered about JA in the past 50 years is a distortion of the
truth, when actually, the opposite is the case.
But then McDonagh goes
off the charts of absurdity when she then writes:
“She was an unaffected Anglican;
she wasn’t a feminist; she didn’t give a toss about the inequality of the
sexes; she was extraordinarily modest — “few so gifted were so unpretending,”
said her nephew. So, really not 21st century at all.”
Wow.
So, McDonagh quotes JEAL as if he told the Gospel truth 145 years ago, when I
and others have shown a hundred or more ways that his Memoir was as big a fraud
as you will ever find in the realm of literary biography. Plus, McDonagh caps
it off with her biggest whopper—her assertion that JA was not a feminist, and did
not care about gender inequality—even though nothing shines through more
clearly to the discerning and well informed reader of JA’s novels and student of
her letters and biography that JA’s largest and most persistent hobby horse was
the pernicious oppression of women in her world. McDonagh really could not be
more wrong.
And
the worst part about McDonagh’s article is that even the comment I will shortly
post there linking to my blog post will probably not be read by more than a very
readers of that article, and most of the rest will come away believing that
McDonagh actually knew what she was talking about!
Such
is the way that the Myth of Jane Austen continues to survive, in the face of an
ever growing mountain of debunking evidence.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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