13. ‘Farmer George’ had been the butt of English satirists since the 1780s – see V. Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens and London, 1990).
14. Two of Austen’s brothers had highly successful naval careers and the elder, Frank, was knighted as a result. See J. H. and E. C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (London, 1906). Austen’s knowledge of the navy has been researched exhaustively by Brian Southam, whose Jane Austen and the Navy is essential reading for anyone interested in Austen’s work.
15. On land enclosure, see M. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750 – 1830 (London, 1984) and for representations of the rural poor in this period, J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge, 1980). The long years of warfare had made the efficient production of food a matter of national importance, and social observers such as Thomas Malthus had expressed serious concerns about the problems of feeding a growing population in his popular Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
16. See, e.g., W. Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, pp. 40–41; B. Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, pp. 239–56.
17. M. Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, pp. 139–40. Austen lived in Bath between 1801 and 1806. For details of her immediate family, see P. Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life.
18. G. Holly, ‘Emmagrammatology’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989), 39–51, 49–50.
19. The limitations of Mr Weston’s understanding are further demonstrated by Mark Loveridge’s discovery that the riddle appears to be an in-joke for readers of moral theory, since it derives from Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), which states that ‘that must be the Perfection of Virtue where M = A’ (M being the ‘Moment of Good’, A the Ability or Agent), ‘Francis Hutcheson and Mr Weston’s Conundrum in Emma’, Notes and Queries, ns 228 (1983), pp. 214–16.
20. 29 January, 1813, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, p. 202.
21. See also Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787); Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790).
22. For Austen’s clerical background and representations of clergymen, see I. Collins, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London, 1994).
23. Descriptions of the heroine’s eyes are a standard feature of novels of the period, while eye portraits had come into fashion in the 1790s. Shawls became fashionable after 1802, when the shortlived Peace of Amiens enabled English travellers to visit Paris and see the craze for Indian shawls brought back by Napoleon’s army from the Middle East.
24. See, e.g., W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753); W. Gilpin, Three Essays (1792); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1769– 90). The question was also addressed by a host of literary aestheticians.
25. 16 December, 1816 (Letters, p. 323).
26. Readers who have equated Austen’s art with miniature painting and therefore realism are taken to task by L. Bertelsen in ‘Jane Austen’s miniatures: painting, drawing and the novels’, MLQ 45 (1984), 350–72.
27. Compare Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the emergence of the novel as a genre, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1981).
28. On Austen’s debts to dramatic writers see M. Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art; Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 69–75; Paula Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London, 2002). The dramatic qualities of Austen’s texts have been demonstrated in the numerous film and television adaptations; for critical discussion of some of these, see Andrew Wright, ‘Dramatizations of the Novels’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 120–30, and for more recent versions, L. Troost and S. Greenfield (eds.), Jane Austen in Hollywood.
29. See MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds.
30. Margaret Ann Doody points out that the charade appears in A New Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Transpositions, &c, 2 vols. (London, 1791), II, 15 (‘Jane Austen’s Reading’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 347–63, 362).
31. From Fable L, ‘The Hare and Many Friends’, in John Gay’s Fables (London, 1727), p. 172.
Further Reading
LETTERS
Le Faye, Deirdre (ed.), Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford, 1995)
Modert, Jo (ed.), Jane Austen’s Manuscript Letters in Facsimile (Carbondale, IL, 1990)
BIOGRAPHY
Austen, Caroline, My Aunt Jane: A Memoir (Alton, 1952)
Austen-Leigh, J. E., A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870; rev. 1871) ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1926, repr. 1951)
Austen-Leigh, W. and Austen-Leigh, R. A., Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record (London, 1913); rev. by Deirdre Le Faye (London, 1989)
Cecil, Lord David, A Portrait of Jane Austen (London, 1978)
Chapman, R. W., Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1948; repr. 1961)
Collins, Irene, Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter (London and Rio Grande, 1998)
Honan, P., Jane Austen: Her Life (London, 1987)
Nokes, David, Jane Austen (London, 1997)
Tomalin, Claire, Jane Austen: A Life (1997), rev. edn (London, 2000)
Tucker, George Holbert, A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen’s Family (London, 1983)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chapman, R.W., Jane Austen: A Critical Bibliography(Oxford, 1953)
Gilson, David, A Bibliography of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1982) Jane Austen Society, Reports, 1940–
Roth, Barry, An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984–1994 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996)
——,An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1973–1983 (Charlottesville, VA, 1985)
——, and Weinsheimer, Joel, An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1952–1972 (Charlottesville, VA, 1973)
Stafford, Fiona, ‘Jane Austen’, Michael O’Neill (ed.), Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford, 1998), pp. 246–68
CRITICISM
Batey, Mavis, Jane Austen and the English Landscape (London, 1996)
Bayley, John, ‘Emma and her Critics’, Jane Austen Society Report for the Year 1967, 16–29
Bradbrook, F. W., Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge, 1966)