Chapter 9 - Emotional Regulation: Jane Austen, Jane West and Mary Brunton
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2023
Summary
I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the House; – And how good Mrs West cd have written such Books & collected so many hard words, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb. Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 8–9 September 1816
I am looking over [Mary Brunton’s] Self Control again, & my opinion is confirmed of its’ being an excellently-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it. I declare I do not know whether Laura’s passage down the American River, is not the most natural, possible, every-day thing she ever does. Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 11–12 October 1813
Jane Austen’s remarks about her contemporaries Mary Brunton and Jane West are characteristically double-edged, and in both cases tinged with admiration and professional jealousy. Self Control, not Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, was, as Anthony Mandal reminds us, the runaway success of 1811, while ‘good Mrs. West’s’ Letters to a Young Lady, published in the same year, immediately went through four editions in 1811 alone. In the competitive literary marketplace of the 1810s, Austen’s success was much more modest. Perhaps the more overtly didactic work of West and Brunton had a more immediate and obvious appeal to the readership; perhaps their publishers simply did a better job at marketing their works. In West’s case, of course, she was already a known name by 1811, in the genres of both conduct literature and the novel, and that, in itself, might have been enough to guarantee greater success than could be expected for the debut novel of an anonymous Hampshire lady. But the key point to note is that all three writers were competing for a share of the same market and readership, and that they were benefiting from a particular kind of anti-Jacobin public feeling that, by the 1810s, had come to associate sensibility and emotional freedom with the French Revolution and its terrifying aftermath, and reason, sense and emotional regulation with its opposition.
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- Women's Literary Education, 1690-1850 , pp. 215 - 235Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023