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Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism edited by Devoney Looser. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, Pp. x + 197. $39.95.
Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, is a collection of original essays designed to take the measure of current feminist thinking about Austen and to establish, as it were, a kind of feminist context for that thinking. In "Privacy, Privilege, and 'Poaching' in Mansfield Park," the penultimate essay, Ellen Gardiner observes that "One of the reasons that Jane Austen has remained part of the twentieth-century canon is . . . [that], as omniscient narrator in various novels, she continues to convince scholars that she is not merely a writer but also a critic" (151). Indeed, a central element in each of the articles in this volume, as well as in the book as a whole, is to find the reason for Austen's perseverance in the canon in the face of a conceivable recalcitrance to twentieth-century concerns on the part of a late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century opus, to say nothing of the mission among those very scholars to justify as unique and necessary their own contributions to the profusion of Austen commentary. They and it must answer the question, What more remains to be said? And yet the fact remains that there are large and significant divergences and diversities of opinion about the author; despite all the ink that has been spilled, in large measure there is still a knotty stubbornness in her works that seems ultimately, and like the works themselves, courteously and quietly, to resist all attempts to penetrate and lay bare forever what she was about. On the one hand, the feminist context seems as if it would be exactly hospitable to studies of Austen; on the other hand, there is something inescapable and indefinable, which leads to conflict and controversy among the critics.
For instance, in "Consolidated Communities: Masculine and Feminine Values in Jane Austen's Fiction," Glenda Hudson takes an unexpectedly resolute exception to the claims made by Claudia Johnson and others about the ending of Mansfield Park. Johnson is one of the two presiding, albeit absent, formative geniuses of the critical approaches in this collection; the other is Alison Sulloway, whose presence is more directly...