’seldom Safely Enjoyed by Those Who Enjoyed it Completely’: Byron’s Poetry, Austen’s Prose and Forms of Narrative Irony

Abstract

In his 1983 polemic against Romanticists’ ‘uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations’, Jerome McGann selected as illlustration a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle on Jane Austen. Rather than recognising that not all great Romantic-period liter- ature is necessarily ‘Romantic’, the contributors had attempted to rectify Austen’s marginalisation from the canon simply by identifying ‘Romantic’ aspects of her novels.³ Persuasion drew particular notice, for scholars have often commented on its lyrical and melancholy tone.⁴ Such readings, however, had the effect of qualifying without really displacing the orthodox view of Austen as a Johnsonian moralist. Marilyn Butler’s political reading of Austen as an Anti-Jacobin writer also left in place this impression of Augustan rather than Romantic ideo- logical and aesthetic affiliations.⁵ However, recent scholarship shows Austen was far from an anomaly. A whole spectrum of writers of the period continued to produce topical literary parodies, comedy and satire.⁶ The question of how to relate irony such as Austen’s to ‘Romantic’ writing is therefore rendered all the more pertinent.

The writer is a person who knows how to work language while remaining outside of it; he has the gift of indirect speech. (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle)¹

Irony, however, has no purpose [...] If, for example, the ironist appears as someone other than he actually is, his purpose might indeed seem to be to get others to believe this; but his actual purpose still is to feel free. (Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates)²