[fantasyfan]

I suppose that when it comes to literary criticism one is always (happily) going to experience a wide variety of opinions. I think that AnotherCat's interesting post does deserve a response. I stand by my remark that Kathryn Sutherland has written a brilliant--if occasionally tendentious--introduction to the Memoir.

I think that it is worth mentioning that she is a highly respected academic, a Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism and a Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford.

Yes, her style is dense and certainly academic but always lucid and I had no problems following her ideas and the patterns of her arguments. She makes excellent points regarding the social context and the specific problems involved in understanding exactly what type of work the Memoir is, how it differs from the approaches we expect in biographies--especially those in our time, and how and possibly why Austen-Leigh took the approach of creating a kind of domestic hagiography. She also refers to the contrasting modern approaches to Jane Austen and the Tomalin Biography in particular. And from a certain perspective the method used by Austen-Leigh is described as more "principled".

It is true that she certainly does take some strips off Jane's nephew! I think she was unnecessarily harsh in some sections--particularly here:

"Austen-Leigh's snobbish streak runs fairly wide through the Memoir, a recognizable if unattractive nervousness which at times descends into massive condescension and complacency--when confronting the absence of improvements in in domestic arrangements, furniture, meals, and general living conditions during Jane Austen's lifetime. At such moments he comes perilously close to her own Mr Collins."

But she immediately continues to put this "nervousness" into a social context:

" . . . the social anxiety his biography registers offers a valuable insight into a family who were, much like the fictional society of the novels, insecurely positioned in what has been described as 'pseudo-gentry'--in some cases upwardly mobile and with growing incomes and social prestige, and in others in straightened circumstances, but, in either case, aspiring to the lifestyle of the traditional rural gentry." (She then cites an article which substantiates and develops this idea}.

Sutherland goes on to discuss the continuing effect of the Memoir on later attitudes towards the novels.

"Austen-Leigh's complacent presentation of his aunt had an incalculable influence on the popularization and critical reading of her novels far into the twentieth century. It was not seriously disturbed until 1940 when D.W.Harding, a psychologist rather than a literary critic, detected beneath the cosy domesticity a 'regulated hatred' declaring that her 'books are . . . read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked.'" (The Harding essay is still well worth reading.)

What I find in Sutherland's Introduction are quite significant insights, well-reasoned arguments and a depth of detail that makes one's reading of the Memoir a much deeper experience. I am very glad that I have read it.