Hello and welcome back. Today, for Jane Austen July 2024, I bring you a short reception history of Jane Austen. I will leave the quotations and books I mention here in the description. I hope you enjoy!
Sir Walter Scott:
‘we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners and sentiments, greatly above our own’
Richard Whately:
‘Miss Austen has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive. She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels, (as Coelebs [Hannah More’s novel] was designated, we will not say altogether without reason,) a ‘dramatic sermon.’ The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon. In fact she is more sparing of it than would be thought desirable by some persons; perhaps even by herself, had she consulted merely her own sentiments; but she probably introduced it as far as she thought would be generally acceptable and profitable: for when the purpose of inculcating a religious principle is made too palpably prominent, many readers, if they do not throw aside the book with disgust, are apt to fortify themselves with that respectful kind of apathy with which they undergo a regular sermon, and prepare themselves as they do to swallow a dose of medicine, endeavouring to get it down in large gulps, without tasting more than is necessary.’
A. C. Bradley calls her ‘a moralist’ and ‘a humorist’
Other novelists and literary critics mentioned:
Charles Dickens
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Hannah More
George Henry Lewes
Charlotte Bronte
Virginia Woolf
Lionel Trilling
Gilbert and Gubar
Alasdair Macintyre