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Overview
Tony Tanner's classic text on Jane Austen addresses the issues that have always occupied the author's most perceptive critics and offers a stimulating analysis of Austen's novels which is now regarded as one of the finest introductions to the author. This revised edition features a new Preface by leading Romantic scholar Marilyn Gaull who examines Tanner's background and places the original work in context, explaining why a reissue of this highly influential text is timely.
Synopsis
Devoted fans and scholars of Jane Austen—as well as skeptics—will rejoice at Tony Tanner's superb book on the incomparable novelist. Distilling twenty years of thinking and writing about Austen, Tanner treats in fresh and illuminating ways the questions that have always occupied her most perceptive critics. How can we reconcile the limited social world of her novels with the largeness of her vision? How does she deal with depicting a once-stable society that was changing alarmingly during her lifetime? How does she express and control the sexuality and violence beneath the well-mannered surface of her milieu? How does she resolve the problems of communication among characters pinioned by social reticences?
Tanner guides us through Austen's novels from relatively sunny early works to the darker, more pessimistic Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon—a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection. In showing her progress from a parochial optimism to an ability to encompass her whole society, Tanner renews our sense of Jane Austen as one of the great novelists, confirming both her local and abiding relevance.
David Bromwich - New Republic
This is the sort of intelligent study of a single author's oeuvre that has become uncommon in recent criticism. It is genuinely introductory as well as genuinely searching.
Editorials
Library Journal
Cambridge scholar Tanner sums up two decades of close reading in a series of cogent essays describing Austen's novels in relation to ``society, education, and language.'' Included are revisions of his excellent introductions (for Penguin Books) to Mansfield Park , Sense and Sensibility , and Pride and Prejudice. Much of the commentary is grounded convincingly in traditional interpretation, but Tanner's most intriguing perceptions relate to recent critical speculation, especially in his chapter on Emma Woodhouse as socially ``ec-centric'' and hence in need of community. Recommended for both scholarly and general readers interested in Jane Austen. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.Times Literary Supplement
In a comprehensive volume embracing a lengthy chapter on each of Austen's six novels, as well as the unfinished fragment Sanditon, and a massive introduction focusing on the works 'in the relation to problems concerned with society, education, and language', Tanner reveals a Jane Austen far more subtle, experimental, politically engaged, philosophically aware, and psychoanalytically sophisticated than has hitherto been supposed. On almost every page there is an expected disclosure of meaning.
— Norman Fruman
London Review of Books
One of the most readable books yet to appear on Jane Austen, as well as the most interesting in itself...It is continuously sensitive to the feel of fictive domesticity, and the potential of a situation in terms of what goes on in modern life, and has gone on in other novels.
— John Bayley
New Republic
This is the sort of intelligent study of a single author's oeuvre that has become uncommon in recent criticism. It is genuinely introductory as well as genuinely searching.
— David Bromwich