Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality.
Clark, Robert
Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality. By Christopher Brooke.
Cambridge: Brewer. 1999. xii + 224 pp. 25 [pounds sterling]; $45.
The subtitle of this study would seem to imply an entire innocence
of those critical debates that have troubled the old dichotomies of
illusion and reality, fiction and truth, in the years since Lionel
Trilling and D. J. Harvey talked about the novel as a repository of
moral truth. Indeed, whilst Christopher Brooke is aware that `historians
who regard [Austen's] novels as transcripts of real life deceive themselves' (p. 9) he also has an unabashed conviction that not
only is Austen concerned to represent the real world but that she is
capable of writing `real conversation' which is also `high
art' (p. 13). The complexity of this antinomy is not even
superficially considered and as Brooke's writing is incapable of
tearing itself away from an epistemology more naive than that of Austen
herself, so it is unable to make any critical headway. The best one can
say to palliate this harsh judgement is that even to begin to raise
these concerns may be to ask more of the book than it ever intends since
it is largely ignorant of Austen scholarship and reads as a hotch-potch
of occasional observations that appear to have been drafted at various
times across many years (Marilyn Butler, much admired, is still, rather
stiffly, Dr Butler and not apparently a professor) and without the
benefit of a unifying vision. The general impression is of a series of
evening chats offered to devoted Janeites. Indeed on my count no less
than a hundred pages are devoted to readings of the novels that are
little more than plot synopses. Christopher Brooke is, however, the
brother of Nicholas Brooke, the distinguished Shakespearean scholar, and
comes to Jane Austen after a long career as editor of the Oxford
Medieval Texts. He is also an historian of medieval marriages and the
eighteenth-century church. With these skills he is able to offer some
half-way interesting speculations on the dating of Austen's
compositions (although his awareness of the work of other scholars seems
confined to Brian Southam in 1964 and `Mrs. Q. D. Leavis' in 1983)
and a chapter on the `Church and Clergy' which, whilst much
indebted to Irene Collins's Austen and the Clergy (London:
Hambledon, 1994), provides some interesting perspectives on
Austen's relationship with the Evangelical movement. These moments
of relief aside, there can be little doubt that were this collection of
jottings devoted to any other author, it would never have caused trees
to be felled. Only the magic spell `Jane Austen', a dust jacket reproducing Regency-stripe wall-paper on the front, and a misty
Godmersham Park on the back, provides its publisher with any hope of a
return on expenses.
ROBERT CLARK
UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
