It's a Hardback Life

(Review from re-read Feb. 2014)

This year celebrates the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mansfield Park, arguably Jane Austen’s most contentious work, and the one likeliest to provoke questions from even the most complacent reader. Who could possibly like Fanny Price? How could the creator of Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse create such a creature? What kind of masochistic reader would choose Mansfield as their favorite of The Six (major novels)?  These are, in fact, not the questions posed by What Matters in Jane Austen.  However, Mullan’s game of literary twenty questions does help us-perhaps obliquely- examine the very foundations of such mysteries. (I actually like Fanny Price just fine, and while I don't consider it my favorite, I do prefer Mansfield Park to Northanger Abbey).

At first glance, the questions posed seem simultaneously specific and tangential, but of course these are the very questions that critics and readers should consider most valuable. “Why is the weather important?” “What makes characters blush?” and “How much money is enough?” are all very important considerations, though by the reader who is looking solely for the marriage plot and the happy ending, they may receive very little attention. But these are matters that get to the very heart of Austen’s work, not to mention her personal worldview as reflected by the novels.  

For example, the question of money:  anyone who has read any of the novels knows that money is important, but with figures like “ten thousand a year” and “100 per annum” thrown around with 19th century abandon, it can be challenging to adjust our modern perspective. Mullen focuses on the textual evidence, but also provides some helpful historical data for comparison, minus the tedium of an attempt at direct conversion. When Tom Bertram offhandedly says the amateur theatricals at Mansfield will cost about twenty pounds, he’s throwing around annual salary of a laborer, which says a lot about his extravagance in very few words. Not only do we get useful internal perspective from something like this, but we are also given a glimpse at the impeccable structure of Austen’s fictional framework.

Some questions seem downright strange at first: “Why is it risky to go to the seaside?”  It’s a deceptive question, which makes it ideal for analysis. At first glance, it doesn’t seem that the characters spend much time by the sea, with brief visits to Bath in Northanger Abbey and Lyme Regis in Persuasion being the first instances that come to mind, and yet seaside resorts play an important role in both the plots and moral framework of many of the novels. Lydia Bennett throws away her future in Brighton, Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill likewise determine their fates at Weymouth, and Emma and Mr. Knightley honeymoon by the sea. The shore is a place of romance and danger; it’s there that Catharine Moreland becomes entangled in the poisonous friendship with Isabella Thorpe, as well as where Louisa Musgrove suffers her near-fatal head injury. In her world, morals are looser by the sea, and Austen used this to her narrative advantage.

This sort of analysis has the potential to be tedious, but Mullen saves it by striking the perfect balance between academic rigor and readable prose.  There are as many different ways to approach a book about Austen’s work as there are readers to read them, but I find they tend to fall somewhere along a spectrum whose extremes are defined on one end by pop culture handbooks (likely with a pink cover and a Regency woman holding a cell phone) and on the other by indecipherable academic studies (whose covers are so dull I can’t recall them). This one falls nicely in the middle, readable but smart, and even the cover is less obnoxious than most.