Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. But it was revolutionary in its form and technique. It was certainly not revolutionary because of any intellectual or political content. McEwan alerts the reader to the fact that his own novel learns its tricks – about a character who turns fictional imaginings into disastrous fact – from the genteel and supposedly conservative Austen.Įmma, published 200 years ago this month, was revolutionary not because of its subject matter: Austen’s jesting description to Anna of the perfect subject for a novel – “Three or four families in a country village” – fits it well.
Janeites felt a frisson of satisfaction to see that the most formally ingenious British postmodern novel of recent years, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, opens with a lengthy epigraph from Northanger Abbey.
I think she has much to teach me.” (One looks forward to the scholarly tome on the influence of Jane Austen on Samuel Beckett.) Contemporary novelists have been readier to acknowledge her genius and influence. The year after he published More Pricks Than Kicks, the young Samuel Beckett told his friend Thomas McGreevy, “Now I am reading the divine Jane. “For signal examples of what composition, distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify the life of a work of art, we have to go elsewhere.” She hardly knew what she was doing, so, implicitly, the innovative novelist like James has nothing to learn from her. This has made it easy for novelists and critics to follow Henry James’s idea of her as “instinctive and charming”. “What is there in her? What is it all about?” “I dislike Jane … Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice,” Vladimir Nabokov told the critic Edmund Wilson.Īusten left behind no artistic manifesto, no account of her narrative methods beyond a few playful remarks in letters to her niece, Anna. “What is all this about Jane Austen?” Joseph Conrad asked HG Wells. Some of the great modernists were perplexed. From Charlotte Brontë, who found only “neat borders” and elegant confinement in her fiction, to DH Lawrence, who called her “English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense of the word”, many thought her limited to the small world and small concerns of her characters. Perhaps it seems odd to call Austen “revolutionary” – certainly few of the other great pioneers in the history of the English novel have thought so. Emma, the book she composed over the next year, was to change the shape of what is possible in fiction. I n January 1814, Jane Austen sat down to write a revolutionary novel.
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