John Mullan - What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

I would like to thank all those who have given me advice and information used in the preparation of this book: Ann Channon at the Jane Austens House Museum, Susan Allen Ford, Juliet McMaster, Sophie Missing, Charlotte Mitchell, the late Brian Southam, Elizabeth Steele, John Sutherland, Amanda Vickery and Henry Woudhuysen.

Julian Hoppit gave me guidance about money in the early nineteenth century; I owe Malthusian reflections in chapter 5 to Karen OBrien; Deirdre Le Faye advised me on mourning habits and on money, again. I have also relied a good deal on her wonderful Chronology of Jane Austen .

Students whom I have taught in classes on Jane Austens fiction at University College London over the years may well recognise their own insights in these pages. If so, I hope they will not be displeased, these classes having been my most dependable source of inspiration.

I have tested parts of this book out at talks I have given to members of the Jane Austen Society and the Jane Austen Society of North America. I would like to thank all my friends in these societies for their suggestions and unfailingly accurate corrections. Particular thanks are due to Marilyn Joyce and Jill Webster for their comments on draft chapters. It is a great sadness to me that Vera Quin, doyenne of the Jane Austen Society, died as this book was nearing completion. Vera had a knowledge of Austen and her predecessors unrivalled by most academics; I only wish she were here to read what I have written and gently put me right where necessary.

I am grateful to all those at Bloomsbury who have nudged me over the finishing line: Nick Humphrey, Emily Sweet, Catherine Best and above all my patient yet galvanising editor, Bill Swainson. I owe a special debt to my agent, Derek Johns, who gave me confidence in what I was doing from the very beginning.

I hope that my familys interest in Jane Austen will have survived what must have seemed my obsession with her writing and am grateful for their tolerance. I could never have finished the book without my wife Harriets support and encouragement.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Tony Tanner, whose Penguin introductions to Jane Austens novels first showed me how exciting they were. He later became my teacher at university and then a colleague; I hope that this book preserves some memories of the many conversations about Jane Austen that we had over the years.

Quotations from Jane Austens fiction are taken from the Oxford University Press edition of The Novels of Jane Austen , edited by R. W. Chapman, 3rd edition (19656). References are given within the text, by volume and chapter number. References to Lady Susan and Sanditon are given by chapter number. The aim has been to enable readers easily to locate passages, irrespective of the editions they might be using.

Quotations from Jane Austens letters are taken from the Oxford University Press edition, edited by Deirdre Le Faye. As pagination differs between the third (1995) and fourth (2011) editions, references are given within the text by letter number.

Adburgham, Alison . Shops and Shopping 18001914 . 1964; rpt. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981

Amis, Martin. The Pregnant Widow . London: Jonathan Cape, 2010

Ashelford, Jane. The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 15001914 . London: The National Trust, 1996

Auden, W. H. The English Auden , ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber & Faber, 1978

Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen , ed. R. W. Chapman. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19656

. Minor Works , ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. B. C. Southam, The Works of Jane Austen , Vol. VI. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987

. Persuasion , ed. Linda Bree. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998

. Persuasion , ed. Gillian Beer. London: Penguin, 1998

. Catherine and Other Writings , ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1993

. Sense and Sensibility , ed. Edward Copeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006

. Jane Austens Letters , ed. Deirdre Le Faye. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995

Austen-Leigh, J. E. A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections , ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Worlds Classics, 2002

Austen-Leigh, Richard Arthur, ed. Austen Papers 17041856 , intro. David Gilson. London, 1995

Austen-Leigh, William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen. A Family Record , rev. Deirdre Le Faye. London: The British Library, 1989

Bannet, Eve Tavor (ed.). British and American Letter Manuals, 16801810 . London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008

Brodie, Allan, Colin Ellis, David Stuart and Gary Winter. Weymouths Seaside Heritage . Swindon: English Heritage, 2006

Brunton, Mary. Self-Control , 2nd ed. Edinburgh, 1811

Buck, Anne. Dress in Eighteenth-Century England . London: B. T. Batsford, 1979

Burney, Fanny. Evelina , ed. Edward A. Bloom. Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1982

. Cecilia , ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1988

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas . 1975; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987

Byron, Lord. The Giaour. A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813), in Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works , ed. Jerome McGann, Vol. III. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981

Chisholm, Kate. Fanny Burney. Her Life . London: Chatto & Windus, 1998

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction . 1983; rpt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978

Copeland, Edward. Women Writing about Money: Womens Fiction in England, 17901820 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 17501840 . 1994; rpt. London: Penguin, 1995

Crozier, W. Ray. Blushing and the Social Emotions: The Self Unmasked . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Cunnington, Phillis, and Catherine Lucas. Costume for Births, Marriages and Deaths . London: A & C Black, 1972

Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby , ed. Michael Slater. 1978; rpt. London: Penguin, 1986.

Edgeworth, Maria. Patronage . London, 1814

Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones , ed. John Bender and Simon Stern. Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1996

Fordyce, David . The New and Complete British Letter-Writer . London, 1800

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . London: Yale University Press, 1979

Halsey, Katie, The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austens Blushes. Forum for Modern Language Studies (2006), 42, No. 3, 22638

Hecht, J. J. The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956

Hill, Bridget. Women Alone: Spinsters in England 16601850 . London: Yale University Press, 2001

Horn, Pamela. Flunkeys and Scullions : Life Below Stairs in Georgian England . Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004

Jane Austen Society Collected Reports , 6 vols

Johnson, Claudia L., and Clara Tuite (eds). A Companion to Jane Austen . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson , Vol. IV, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968

Jones, Hazel. Jane Austen and Marriage . London: Continuum, 2009

Jonson, Ben. Timber, or Discoveries Made upon men and matter , in Ben Jonson , ed. Ian Donaldson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985