Abstract
‘I will not allow books to prove anything’,1 says Anne Elliot to Captain Harville in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818). In the teeth of this statement, I will argue here that the appearance of a book in Austen’s novels is, in fact, always important. Examining Austen’s use of books and literary references in Mansfield Park within the context of late eighteenth-century conduct-book assumptions about reading (represented here by the works of Hannah More) I argue throughout that Austen’s use of other texts and authors is never ideologically neutral or artistically unimportant. Of particular interest are ‘spectral texts’ — literary works that hover in the margins of the novel, not always directly acknowledged, but always reflecting or refracting some of Mansfield Park’s central concerns about ethics and morality — and the ways in which those texts enrich and complicate the relationship between narrative voice, heroine and reader. Under consideration throughout is reading matter, but more importantly, how Jane Austen makes reading matter.
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Notes
Jane Austen, Persuasion(1818), ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 221.
Jocelyn Harris’s analysis of the links between Sir Charles Grandison and Mansfield Park in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Bharat Tandon’s discussion of Austen’s ‘conversations’ with literary figures in Jane Austen and the Art of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003).
Lionel Trilling’s ‘Mansfield Park’, in The Opposing Self Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), pp. 206–30;
Avrom Fleishman’s A Reading ofMansfield Park:An Essay of Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967);
A. Walton Litz’s Jane Austen: A Study of her Artistic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967);
Douglas Bush’s Jane Austen (New York: Macmillan, 1975);
Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);
Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987);
Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1974), II, p. 2.
Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, ed. Mary Waldron (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 218.
Jane Austen to James Stanier Clarke, Monday, 11 December 1815, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 306.
Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 43.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 145).
Mary Russell Mitford to Mrs Hofland (undated, but between February 1819 and October 1820), in Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. Henry Chorley, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley … Son, 1872), I, p. 73.
James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: Folio Society, 1989), p. 79.
Isobel Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 191.
George Crabbe, Preface to Tales (London: J. Hatchard, 1813).
George Crabbe, ‘The Confidant’ (Tale XVI) in Tales (London: J. Harchard, 1813), pp. 285–6.
William Cowper, The Task in The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London and New York: Longman, 1994),
William Cowper, The Correspondence of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright, 4 vols (London: Hodder … Stoughton, 1904), II, p. 252.
Butler, Jane Austen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 232–6.
E.M. Butler, ‘Mansfield Park and Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows’, MLR, 28 (1933), 326–37.
Dvora Zelicovici, The Inefficacy of Lovers’ Vows’, ELH, 50 (1983), 532.
Brian Wilkie, ‘Structural Layering in Jane Austen’s Problem Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 46 (1992), 519.
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© 2005 Katie Halsey
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Halsey, K. (2005). Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park. In: Batchelor, J., Kaplan, C. (eds) British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_4
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