Emma, Twelfth Night & Jane Austen's Letters 125(D), 132(D) & 138(D): James Stanier Clarke as Malvolio

We have almost reached the final spiral of JA's brief correspondence with James Stanier Clarke between November 1815 and March 1816, which will consist of Letters 138(A) and Letters 138(D) to be addressed by us next week. However, as JA's attitude toward Clarke in these letters has again been mentioned by several in Austen L and Janeites this week as being sympathetic and sincere, I will again take this quick opportunity to summarize my unqualified claims....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/01/mr-knightleys-spiked-spruce-beer.html

...that Jane Austen, in her 1815-1816 correspondence with James Stanier Clarke, in every possible way she could devise with her great satirical ingenuity, was insincerely mocking the Prince’s toady. In some ways, as I crystallize my thought s about this today, this might even be the pinnacle of her satirical genius. Let’s see if I win any converts today.

To wit: in her three flattering, faux-confessional letters to Clarke, JA has, to a tee, in several key particulars, emulated Shakespeare's arch-satirist Maria, in Twelfth Night, as Maria is cheered on by her madcap allies Sir Toby, & Aguecheek, in the Box Tree scene.

Recall first that Maria entraps Malvolio…

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/twelfth_night.2.5.html

… with a single pseudo-flattering letter, but JA ups the ante threefold. As if fulfilling Frank Churchill’s request for not one, not two, but  “THREE things very dull indeed, and [Emma] engages to laugh heartily at them all.",  JA sends Clarke not one, not two, but THREE pseudo-flattering letters -- 125(D), 132(D) & 138(D)!  This epistolary triptych, culminating  on April Fool’s Day, 1816, collectively spark in Clarke, the Prince's pretentious literary "steward", a massive narcissistic ecstasy of absurd ambition and deep delusions of grandeur. Is this not, with uncannily precise parallelism, exactly what Malvolio experiences?

The only possible response, along with hearty laughter, must be acknowledgment of the genius who orchestrated all of this—Miss Bates----or her alter ego, Jane Austen! And I have no doubt, in particular, that part of the explanation of JA’s giddy pleasure which oozes out from every pore of her correspondence about her brief  relationship with the apothecary Haden which occurs during that same exact time period as her correspondence with Clarke, is that she clued Haden into this ongoing joke on Clarke. Perhaps, in celebration of JA’s success in gulling Clarke, she and Haden might even have enjoyed staging an impromptu reading of the Box Tree scene from Twelfth Night, maybe even enlisting Fanny Knight’s participation (but of course without clueing her clueless niece in on the scandalous joke).

But that’s only the beginning. The Box Hill resonance of JA’s correspondence with Clarke is omnipresent. E.g.,as a special wink toward this outrageously daring prank, note that JA chooses for the title of the novel which she dedicates to the Prince Regent as per Clarke's instructions during this very same, brief  correspondence—of  course, that title  is the name "Emma", which, as Mr. Weston takes pain to point out (where else but at BOX Hill?), is a homophone of the initials "M.A.":

"Ah! you will never guess. You, (to Emma), I am certain, will never guess.—I will tell you.—M. and A.—Em-ma.—Do you understand?" 

And why, you ask, is this title, as glossed by Mr. Weston, a special wink at Malvolio? Anyone familiar with the BOX Tree scene in Twelfth Night could answer that question in a heartbeat. Look at what Malvolio says at one point in his attempts to decode the forged letter that Maria, like a wicked fairy, drops for Malvolio to find:

M, O, A, I, doth sway my life.

And as Malvolio tries to solve this riddle, he says to himself:

“M, O, A, I; this simulation is not as the former: and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name”

Just as M.A. not only is a homophone for “Emma”, these  two letters  are of course also 3 of the 4 letters contained in the name “Emma”,  and therefore are easily “crushed” into it!

But that’s only the half of JA’s quadrophonic satire of James Stanier Clarke and his boss.

As my above linked recent blog post also spelled out in rich detail, behind this layer of real life epistolary satire are (1) the fictional satires of Clarke in the character of Mr. Elton the pretentious gull of Highbury, and also (2) the real life enacted satire of Clarke by his aristocratic tormentors at Petworth in 1814, both of which inhabit the subtext of Emma, the very novel which the Prince (via Clarke) has demanded dedication of to himself.

So when you step back far enough, and look at the big picture, as I've summarized it, above, you have  the wide  perspective required in order to see that JA has, like J.S. Bach writing six part harmony, seamlessly woven together a rich tapestry of satire, moving  seamlessly between real life and fiction, all in the service of her majestic comic  vision of the follies and flaws of clownish men like James Stanier Clarke and the Prince Regent.

Which, as I reflect on it now, is indeed the final Twelfth Night twist in all of this. I.e. this twist subsumes all of JA’s satirical superstructure in Emma and the accompanying correspondence about the publication of Emma.

What JA is saying, in so many words, and in deadly seriousness beneath all the surface laughter, is that everything is topsy turvy in Regency Era England. I.e., it is the clowns, the fools, the monsters—men like Clarke and the Prince Regent, who are in charge 364 days of the year, and who get to practice “courtship”  (in all its meanings) in the most misogynistic, inept, narcissistic ways imaginable, with impunity, and nobody having the power to stop them.

It’s only during the single day of the topsy-turvy festival Twelfth Night, of which Emma, the novel, is really a fictional embodiment, that the gifted and good people of the world, the “lovely women” like Miss Bates and Jane Austen, the ones who really deserved good fortune, would reign:

  But ah! united, what reverse we have!

      Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown;

    Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,

      And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.

Tragically, after Emma was published in early 1816: (1) JA was dead in her crypt at Winchester Cathedral a scant 18 months later, and (2) the Prince of Whales rose to the throne of England 2 ½ years  after that tragic event.

And, in 2014, when one looks around at the likes of the selfish, cruel, narcissistic, reactionary, misogynistic men abusing the privileges of power around the world---the Tea Party in the US, Putin in Russia, the Ayatollah in Iran, Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, the Army in Egypt, Assad in Syria, Al Qaeda, the leaders of China, etc. etc., JA would have no doubt been torn between ironic laughter and bitter tears to note that the modern day Malvolios, Clarkes, Prince Regents, and other male fools and clowns are still running things 364 days of the year.

She’d have laughed, and she’d have cried, but I don’t think she’d have been surprised. She learned early in life that the good, powerless people have to be content with small, often secret victories, as they use guile to provoke the strong to turn the controls in less destructive ways, allowing some happiness to trickle down, notwithstanding the Fanny Dashwoods of the elite.

In Time After Time, Jack the Ripper disillusions the idealist H.G. Wells about the “Utopia” Wells imagined would prevail by the latter part of the 20^th century, as he flips TV channels depicting unspeakable violence:

“...I belong here completely and utterly. I'm home. It's you who do not belong here. You, with your absurd notions of a perfect and harmonious society. Drivel. The world has caught up and surpassed me. Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today, I'm an amateur. You go back. The future isn't what you thought. It's what I am.”

JA was no H.G. Wells, as W.H. Auden well understood, and so she’d have predicted that the One Percenters would always be contemptuous of the Forty Seven Percenters:

You could not shock her more than she shocks me,
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass,’
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Games Jane Austen Played in Pride & Prejudice: A Vindication of the Right (Questions) of Chwe

At the heart of William Deresiewicz’s ill-advised, reactionary attack on Michael Chwe’s 2013 book Jane Austen Game Theorist is the assertion that Chwe’s game theory approach adds no value to our collective understanding of Jane Austen’s novels, which we didn’t already garner from “normal” literary criticism. I will in this post give significant additional evidence to rebut Deresiewicz’s assertion, and also to extend Michael’s theorizing into a new realm, simply by paying close attention to JA’s wordplay while keeping Chwe’s arguments in mind.

In one section of Chapter 6 of his book, Chwe discusses the theme of “choice” in JA’s six novels (treated as a whole). I will now give you quotes from those half dozen pages, stripped of examples, to give you a glimpse of his organized, insightful approach to this topic:

CHWE: “For Austen, choice is a central concern, even obsession. The single most important choice is a woman’s choice of whether and whom to marry, and Austen’s heroines adamantly defend this choice against any presumption otherwise.…Thoughtful men are aware that women can make choices…. Idiotic men are not aware…Being able to make a choice is almost always a good thing for Austen; it is “a great deal better to chuse than to be chosen” (E, p. 15).

There is power in being able to make a choice…. Even when it seems better to not have to make a choice, Austen shows that another choice can make things better still. Correspondingly, for Austen, people who cannot make choices deserve ridicule or worse. …For Austen, choices bind. You can’t have it both ways. Once you make a choice, you cannot pretend you did not make it. …Austen hates encumbered choices. …being empowered and unencumbered improves both choice and result. Austen explains that to make a choice thoughtfully, you must understand the counterfactual of what would have happened had you chosen otherwise (in economics, this is the concept of “opportunity cost”). …Understanding the proper counterfactual, imagining all aspects of what would have happened had you chosen differently, is not always easy.” END QUOTE FROM CHWE’S BOOK

Any group of knowledgeable Janeites who read that section of Chwe’s book, including the examples he provides, along with other examples which might occur to them, could spend intellectually fruitful hours discussing the novels through this lens of the theme of choice. Chwe is correct---choice IS an obsession of JA’s, and it is a wide portal leading directly into the core of JA’s complex moralism—the infinite variety of how people make difficult choices.

And so the example Chwe mentioned in his rebuttal to Deresiewicz (Mrs. Weston analyzing Jane Fairfax’s choices in game theory-like terms, which Emma had not considered) was perfectly chosen—it illustrates that an author who put such words in a character’s mouth must, of necessity, have first thought in those terms herself.

And it’s doesn’t require arcane scientific knowledge in order to think intelligently about the overarching theme of choice in JA’s novels. It’s just that, generally speaking, as Chwe also pointed out, it simply doesn’t occur to most readers to actually decide to take this approach and then follow through on it! As I’ve asserted countless times, so much of the most interesting stuff in JA’s fiction is accessible only after it first occurs to us to take a fresh perspective on texts we’ve read dozens of times before.

As I wrote in my last post about Michael’s book, JA is NOT the kind of heavy-handed writer who provides appendices, waving her hands frantically in order to get readers to engage with her deeper subtextual themes. Rather, JA provides countless light winks, hints and nods, small textual smiles which alert the sensitive reader to pay closer attention to a particular theme.

And I have found that one key aspect of the Jane Austen Code is the satirical nature of so much of her winking and hinting, and her pervasive use of wordplay in that process.

The perfect textual example of this is the one I brought forward yesterday, Mr. Bennet’s witty catechism of Lizzy’s UNHAPPY ALTERNATIVE  in her choice as to whether to accept Mr. Collins’s proposal:

"Come here, child," cried her father as she appeared. "I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?" Elizabeth replied that it was. "Very well—and this offer of marriage you have REFUSED?"

"I have, sir."

"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your ACCEPTING  it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?"

"Yes, or I will never see her again."

"An UNHAPPY ALTERNATIVE  is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

Elizabeth could not but SMILE at such a conclusion of such a beginning, but Mrs. Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.

"What do you mean, Mr. Bennet, in talking this way? You promised me to insist upon her marrying him."

… Mr. Collins, meanwhile, was meditating in solitude on what had passed. He thought too well of himself to comprehend on what motives his cousin could REFUSE him…

Mr. Bennet parodically assumes the role of a pedantic schoolmaster teaching logic to a student, and brilliantly reduces Lizzy’s choice to its essential absurdity. And one of the Top Five comic moments in all of literature was thereby created.

But here’s my meta-point. It was only after I read Chwe’s rebuttal to Deresiewicz, in which Chwe included the example of Mrs. Weston alerting Emma to Jane Fairfax’s choices, that it occurred to me to see Mr. Bennet’s famous bon mot in the fresh light of a parody of logical choice-making, or what we today call game theory.

And, once the seed was planted to look at P&P from this fresh perspective, I soon noticed, also for the first time, that Mr. Bennet’s parody of a logical theorem was only the BEGINNING of JA’s further parodic treatment of this theme in P&P!

There are (at least) two more passages later in P&P which are part and parcel of this motif, textual interconnections which  have been hiding in plain sight in this most popular and reread of novels for 2 centuries.

Mr. Bennet’s logical exercise occurs near the end of Chapter 20 of P&P.  Now look at the interaction of Lizzy and Jane less than a chapter later, in Chapter 21: 

"But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in ACCEPTING a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to marry elsewhere?"

"You must DECIDE for yourself," said Elizabeth; "and if, upon MATURE DELIBERATION, you find that the misery of disobliging his two sisters is MORE THAN EQUIVALENT to the happiness of being his wife, I advise you by all means to REFUSE him."

"How can you talk so?" said Jane, FAINTLY SMILING. "You must know that though I should be exceedingly grieved at their disapprobation, I could not hesitate."

"I did not think you would; and that being the case, I cannot consider your situation with much compassion."

"But if he returns no more this winter, my CHOICE will never be required.

A thousand things may arise in six months!"

The idea of his returning no more Elizabeth treated with the utmost contempt.”

Isn’t it obvious that Lizzy so enjoyed her father’s witty parody of cost benefit analysis of the Collins proposal, that she translated it at her first opportunity to her sister’s hypothetical response to Bingley’s hypothetical proposal?  Elizabeth “could not but smile” at her father’s joke at her mother’s expense, and Jane, in turn “faintly smil[es]” at Lizzy’s admirable emulation of Dear Old Dad. The rhetorical apple has indeed not fallen far from the paternal tree.

And there’s yet a further iteration of this motif, as JA milks the joke for all it’s worth, but, as always, with  the lightest, most subtle touch, and the deepest concealed meaning—there’s an echo of the proposal refusal parody five chapters later, when Charlotte “proposes” to Elizabeth that Lizzy visit her  in Kent:

"I am not likely to leave Kent for some time. Promise me, therefore, to come to Hunsford."

ELIZABETH COULD NOT REFUSE , though she foresaw little pleasure in the visit.

"My father and Maria are coming to me in March," added Charlotte, "and I hope you will consent to be of the party. Indeed, Eliza, you will be as welcome as either of them."

I put ”proposal” in quotes, because I have suggested many times that Charlotte is a closeted lesbian who  has secretly and unrequitedly loved Elizabeth for years. Therefore her request that Lizzy promise to visit in March has the veiled connotation, from Charlotte’s point of view, of a romantic proposal—so how lovely that, unlike her negative responses to both Collins and (in the first go-round, at least) Darcy, “Elizabeth could NOT refuse” Charlotte’s proposal! It does suggest, with exquisite subtlety, that Elizabeth does, however unconsciously, reciprocate Charlotte’s secret love.

And, again, I saw all of this only because that one short section of Chwe’s book got me thinking about choice in JA’s novels. I believe this is a vindication of the right questions posed by Chwe in his book, which provoked me to find these answers.

Whereas, I’ve read entire books about Jane Austen by respected, conventional literary critics which did not in any way inspire me to see something new and interesting in JA’s writing.

So Chwe’s book is, again, a breath of very fresh air in the world of Austen scholarship, and I for one will continue to take deep breaths and dance up a rhetorical storm, despite Deresiewicz’s very Mr. Wooohouse-like abhorrence of literary critical dancing with open windows!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The HAPPY Alternative Before All Janeites: Acknowledge her Novels as Quintessentially Scientific & Philosophical; or Underestimate them…as the Clueless James Stanier Clarke did

During the latest round of the lively exchange between Mssrs. Chwe and Deresiewicz in the LA Review of Books….

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116346/debate-can-you-apply-game-theory-jane-austen

…., in which Michael Chwe (author of Jane Austen Game Theorist) impressively rebutted William Deresiewicz’s over the top and personal attack, the glassy composition of the intellectual house that Deresiewicz’s ideas inhabit also suddenly came into clear focus for me. So now it’s time to turn the intellectual tables.   

Specifically, in the same breath as he condemned Chwe for the intellectual sin of forcing Jane Austen’s writing through a so-called game theory sausage grinder, Deresiewicz revealed his own sandy foundation, when he begged the hugest of questions in the following two paragraphs:

“Though really, of course, [Shakespeare] was none of these. He was a dramatist, just as Austen was a novelist. She didn’t write textbooks, she had no use for concepts, and she wasn’t interested in making arguments. If she had a research program, as Chwe insists, it was into the techniques of fiction and the possibilities of the English language. She was no more a social theorist than Marx or Weber was a novelist….The fact that some other writer, in some other century, may be interested in scientific concepts tells us precisely nothing. Austen is conspicuous, among the great novelists, in almost never making general assertions—and when she does, as in the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, in seating them upon an abyss of irony. They are literary statements, in other words, not conceptual ones. To speak of her novels as “game theory textbooks” (or any other kind), even in a metaphorical sense, is to get them exactly wrong.”  END QUOTE

In my post, below, I will show that, ironically, it is Deresiewicz who is exactly wrong in these assertions! I.e., Deresiewicz extrapolates from the (indisputable) absence of explicit, unironic intellectual pronouncements in JA’s writing, to the wholly unfoundedly and unwittingly clueless further assumption that there was therefore also an absence of implicit unironic intellectual meaning in JA’s writing.

In that crucial latter assumption, I claim Deresiewicz could not possibly have been more wrong, because a decade of my own research, painstakingly excavating bone after bone of allusion to all manner of scientific and philosophic wisdom from JA’s novels, has enabled me to document that pretty much every page of her writing is filled with nothing but implicit intellectual meaning. In this sense, her novels are much better textbooks than ordinary textbooks, because they don’t just tell readers what they mean, they show them what they mean, a manner of education which is infinitely more meaningful to readers who understand the Jane Austen Code, and who understand the koanic wisdom of Lizzy Bennet’s quasi-Buddhist aphorism:  “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.” JA found a way to teach what was worth knowing, by not teaching, but allowing her readers to teach themselves, using her novels as assistants in that self-educative process!

In short, the joke is on Deresiewicz---not only has he wrongly accused Chwe of overreaching claims which Chwe (as he so meticulously documented in his rebuttal) did NOT make, he has himself been guilty of the very same sin he accused Michael of committing, which is making unfounded, overreaching claims about JA’s writing!

In this, Deresiewicz has unwittingly walked in the footsteps of none other than James Stanier Clarke, in drinking the intellectual Kool-Aid JA so wickedly offered to all her readers. Clarke was certain that JA was being sincerely modest and realistic when she wrote her numerous faux-modest self-deprecations in her famous letters to him. And she played him for an April Fool par excellence in a dozen ways in her replies to his literary “advice”.  

But JA has played Deresiewicz for an April Fool as well, but in an even more virtuosic way. The not very intelligent Clarke just plain underestimated JA’s writing, but the clearly highly intelligent Deresiewicz on the surface appears to do the opposite, as he (accurately) refers to JA as being among the greatest of novelists. But where he has walked right into JA’s special trap for overzealous intelligent elves is in his conception of what it is to be a novelist—which is revealed to be painfully and woefully inaccurate in the case of JA. He fails to understand that he has been caught at a different level of the serpentine literary garden path which JA laid out for her readers.

In this regard, take a second look at Jane Austen’s last laugh on readers like Deresiwicz in Northanger Abbey—Catherine dislikes “real solemn history”, preferring to read novels instead. Even many conventional readers of the novel have come to realize that Catherine is not stupid or ignorant in this opinion, she is actually the mouthpiece for JA herself, and this is actually the implied addendum to JA’s famous defence of the novel in NA.

What Catherine does not elaborate, but which is, I suggest, JA’s plain meaning, is that Catherine is spot on in her preference for novels, because in her novels, Jane Austen invented a kind of Herstory told through the medium of fiction rather than nonfiction, a herstory which not only told the previously untold story of women, but which was also much more faithful to the social worlds depicted in them than any real solemn nonfiction history written in her (or any other) era. And that is precisely why all those “great” nonfiction histories now serve principally as gatherers of dust on library shelves, read only by a handful of scholars of esoterica, while JA’s “ histories” enlighten millions  as to what life was really like in her world.

And I repeat—at the foundation of JA’s fictional artistry was the omnipresence of veiled allusion to all the great intellectual works known to the most learned of Oxford and Cambridge dons two centuries ago—works which, I can demonstrate, were all read, understood, and, in many cases, superseded and/or lampooned by JA!

Re Diane’s  Reynolds's Response to Michael Chwe in Janeites:  Diane, if I’ve understood you correctly, in your latest post responding to Michael, you suggested that sausage grinding is the universal norm in literary criticism, so why single him out. I think it much preferable to use JA’s own metaphor/symbol for describing different intellectual ways of looking at her writing, from different perspectives—Mrs. Bates’s spectacles.  I’ve been arguing for 9 years that JA wrote her novels to be amenable to multiple interpretations, depending on what interpretive lenses you view them through. She expected the sharpest elves among her readers to be ingenious and imaginative enough to discern, upon rereadings, what sorts of lenses she had in mind for each novel, and then to be patient enough to keep going back over her text, rereading repeatedly, to see what could be seen in them through each of these lenses. Only then, after a number of seemingly incompatible images had been generated by viewings through multiple lenses, would it be possible for those sharp elves to bring them all to bear on each novel, and obtain thereby the deepest, broadest, and more nuanced understanding of the novel as a whole.

In short, I suggest that there couldn’t be a more scientific/philosopher fiction writer than Jane Austen, given that I’ve lost count already of the number of lenses I have, over time, learned to use in order to see all the images concealed in her novels. Feminism, abolitionism, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, history, theology, the list of –ologies tucked away in JA’s novels goes on forever.

But unlike those heavy-handed modern novelists (Chwe mentioned one) who provide appendices to explain their arcane scientific subtexts to their passive readers, Jane Austen demanded the maximum of ingenuity and proactivity in her readers—in fact, she did everything in her power, on the surface, to lull unsuspecting readers (James Stanier Clarke being the poster child) into thinking “Of course this uneducated, uninformed, country spinster couldn’t possibly have been having fun lampooning all the “great” male minds of intellectual history; she couldn’t possibly have actually imagined that she knew better than most of them, and was not afraid to express her better answers to eternal questions about human nature and society.

In short, Chwe’s book is a lens, and while there can be legitimate quibbling as to whether Chwe used his lens successfully in all cases to see what could be seen through a game-theory lens, only a James Stanier Clarke would just assume that JA would never have applied such a lens to her novels.

Conclusion:  I conclude by pointing to what I realized today, as I was composing this post, is far and away the most famous and obvious textual example in all of JA’s novels, where game theory analysis is made explicit in JA’s novels, as I so broadly hinted at in my Subject Line:

"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?"

"Yes, or I will never see her again."

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning,

I guess that the reason why Chwe failed to identify this example in his book is that, unlike Mrs. Weston’s delineation of the choice facing Jane Fairfax, Lizzy’s choice as to how to respond to Mr. Collins’s proposal was presented by the inimitable Mr. Bennet in such a droll, absurdist, satirical way, as a parody of what we’d call game theory. So, I give you Mr. Bennet, the Game Theorist at a Twelfth Night masquerade, who speaks like a blend of John (Beautiful Mind) Nash channeling Samuel (Godot) Beckett!

And I cannot help but smile at this conclusion to my rebuttal to Deresiewicz, because there really is a happy alternative to Deresiewicz’s absurdly narrow view of JA’s novelizing—read books like Chwe’s (and, one day, mine as well) in which JA’s sophisticated multilayered novelistic vision is brought into ever increasing clarity, such that one day not too far in the future, it will be clear even to mainstream Janeism that JA was indeed the most scientific and philosophic of novelists, precisely because she had the good taste and the tact to hide it all in plain sight, where it would not disturb the James Stanier Clarkes of the Janeite world.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter