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 William H. Galperin
The
Historical Austen
University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2003
Jane Austen, arguably the most beloved of all
English novelists, has been regarded both as
a feminist ahead of her time and as a social
conservative whose satiric comedies work to regulate
rather than to liberate. Neither of these viewpoints,
however, takes sufficient stock of the historical
Austen, whose writings, as Professor William
H. Galperin shows, were more properly oppositional
rather than either disciplinary or subversive.
Reading the history
of her novels’ reception
through other histories—literary, aesthetic,
and social—Professor Galperin offers a major
reassessment of Jane Austen’s achievement
as well as a corrective to the historical Austen
that abides in literary scholarship. In contrast
to interpretations that stress the conservative
aspects of the realistic tradition that Austen
helped to codify, Professor Galperin takes his
lead from Austen’s contemporaries, who were
struck by her detailed attention to the dynamism
of everyday life. Noting how the very act of reading
demarcates a horizon of possibility at variance
with the imperatives of plot and narrative authority,
Professor Galperin sees Austen’s development
as operating in two registers. Although her writings
appear to serve the interests of probability in
representing “things as they are,” they
remain, as her contemporaries dubbed them, histories
of the present, where reality and the prospect
of change are continually intertwined. In a series
of readings of the six completed novels, in addition
to the epistolary Lady Susan and the uncompleted Sanditon,
Professor Galperin offers startling new interpretations
of these texts, demonstrating the extraordinary
awareness that Austen maintained with respect to
not only her narrative practice—notably,
free indirect discourse—but also the novel’s
function as a social and political instrument.
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