University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 388
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-61148-839-5 • Hardback • August 2017 • $136.00 • (£105.00)
978-1-61148-844-9 • Paperback • May 2018 • $60.99 • (£47.00)
978-1-61148-843-2 • eBook • August 2017 • $57.50 • (£44.00)
Jocelyn Harris is professor emerita at University of Otago in Dunedin.
Introduction
Chapter 1: “Ungossiping authority”: Fanny Burney, Cassandra Cooke, and Jane Austen
Chapter 2: “He swore and he drank”: Lieutenant Price and Lieutenant Phillips
Chapter 3: “Everybody is cross and teasing”: The MansfieldTheatricals
Chapter 4: “Censure in common use”: Women, Satire, and Politics
Chapter 5: “Carried home, dead drunk”: Satires on the Royal Family
Chapter 6: “Hair so untidy, so blowsy!” Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothy Jordan, and the Duke of
Clarence
Chapter 7: “Half Mulatto, chilly & tender”: Sanditon, the Duke of Clarence, and Sara Baartman,
the “Hottentot Venus”
Conclusion Jane Austen’s Belated Celebrity
Appendix A: Mr. Joseph Nutting, Army Button Maker of Covent-Garden
Appendix B: The Woman of Colour and “Wowski”
Appendix C: Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
The energy and insight in all three volumes demonstrate just how exciting Austen remains. Eighteenth centuryists should give thanks every day that she wrote in our era, for she is currently the gateway drug to the Long Eighteenth-Century, as also to classic British literature. These writers and these publications inspire me to go back to texts, renovate my ideas, and get busy writing more books and articles. I predict that they will do the same for you.
— Eighteenth-Century Studies
The book aims to expand our ideas of the nature and bounds of the society Austen knew. The web of acquaintance, coincidence and proximity conjured by Harris is a marvel, and the surprising juxtapositions it produces will certainly inspire fresh thinking about the novels.— Times Literary Supplement
Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen examines how public figures, such as the Prince Regent, were subtly lampooned in Austen's novels. This monograph firmly positions Austen as a writer of political import.
Powerful book!
— Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Harris's monograph represents the crowning achievement of a career devoted to placing Austen's novels in rich historical context. So varied are three books in content, style and approach that one can hardly sum them up collectively, except to observe that Austen studies is now growing healthily in many directions.
— European Romantic Review
Many readers will initially be skeptical of Harris's claims about Austen as a "celebrity-watcher" who frequently based characters on famous figures, and many will be put off by the frequency of usages such as may have, could have, if, and perhaps. But Harris's astonishingly rich knowledge of the newspapers, cartoons, and personal correspondence of Austen's time really does permit her to present a new Austen. In Harris's showing, Fanny and Susan Price of Mansfield Park owe much to Fanny Burney and her sister Susan, and that novel's Lieutenant Price channels Susan Burney's coarse, brutal husband, also a marine lieutenant. The Bertram sisters owe something to George III's daughters, and the theatricals owe a great deal to similar scenes in Maria Edgeworth's novels Vivian and especially Patronage. Most all of Austen's less-than-admirable male characters, from Northanger Abbey's John Thorpe and General Tilney onward, convey oblique jabs at the regent himself…. [T]his is a wonderfully rich and convincing presentation of much new material. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.— Choice Reviews
The book aims to expand our ideas of the nature and bounds of the society Austen knew. The web of acquaintance, coincidence and proximity conjured by Harris is a marvel, and the surprising juxtapositions it produces will certainly inspire fresh thinking about the novels.— Times Literary Supplement
Harris’s impressive new book, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (2017), builds on the work of her pioneering 1989 study, deepening our sense of what Austen may have been up to in crafting her novels.... For readers willing to engage with the possible, and to consider links that do not, at first glance, seem probable, Harris’s well-written, deeply researched, and timely book has a great deal to offer.... The tour de force sections of the book are certainly the sections on Sara Baartman (the ‘Hottentot Venus’), the Duke of Clarence, issues of race, abolition, and slavery, and Mansfield Park and Sanditon.... For years to come, readers and critics will be weighing the massive number of new insights in this book, troubling through their implications for our future readings of Austen, politics, history, and popular culture.— The Review of English Studies
This book is an enjoyable one for anyone who has read Austen’s novels or watched productions of them on television.... Jocelyn Harris is an excellent writer. For an academic study, the usual jargon and allusions to various post-modern theories are happily absent in this book. It is packed with detail and citations. It’s is valuable for Cook enthusiasts because of its chapter on Molesworth Phillips, and the broader considerations surrounding the death of Captain Cook. — Cook's Log
Satire, Celebrity and Politics is unfailingly fascinating in its dissection of Jane Austen, the satirist, and the text is enhanced by a well-chosen selection of contemporary portraits and gloriously scurrilous cartoons. The “stories behind the stories” always make for an interesting read and Harris has produced a book that will be read with great pleasure by academics and devoted readers alike.— Jane Austen's Regency World
Jocelyn Harris's book. . . is a pleasant and accessible read. . . . I would emphasise the thorough research into the socio-historical context that has gone into this book, and which makes it of interest to anyone who would like to know more of current events during Austen's lifetime.— Newsletter Of The Jane Austen Society Of North America
Burney scholars will find Jocelyn Harris’s latest book Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen an enriching read. . . . [the book]testifies to the wit and ingenuity of a novelist who “both plunder[ed] and swerve[d] away from” her contemporaries, thereby both honouring and surpassing them (106). Addressing a variety of topics discussed in Austen studies, Harris reinforces the image of Austen as a well-informed and sharp-minded woman who was seriously engaged with the socio-political issues of the day. Most of all, however, the book gives shape to an Austen who was an avid and grateful consumer of the latest gossip, scandals and satirical prints about those from whom she was never far removed: famous writers, intellectuals and actresses, big naval figures, the royal family. With a keen eye for detail, Harris exposes the subtle connections between the unrestrained, public laughter surrounding such figures and the more restricted, oblique laughter in the novels, thereby deepening our understanding of Austen’s skill for satire in the process. — The Burney Letter
Last year’s bicentenary commemoration of the death of Jane Austen has given her readers many reasons for celebration. This book is one of them. . . Jocelyn Harris in this careful, enthusiastic and learned book shows how Jane Austen achieves vision through observation and creates a new and distinctive world from a recognisable world.— Sensibilities
Although primarily an academic text, Satire, Celebrity and Politics has much of interest here for the lay reader too. The glimpses it offers into regency England and diversions into topics as diverse as the disputed accounts of Cook’s death and the misbehaviour of the Prince Regent are as interesting as the primary analysis. While I am in no position to pass judgement on the intellectual aspects of Harris’s formidable thesis, early reviews suggest it is standing its ground in the fierce world of Austen scholarship. I am off to reread her novels from a fresh perspective.— Otago Daily Times
Throughout Satire, Celebrity, and Politics, we are thoroughly persuaded of Harris’s main argument that Austen “was a politician, in the former sense of a person keenly interested in practical politics". . . . Harris shows the inherent political nature of Austen’s satire by smartly linking her with the Hogarthian tradition of caricature—a connection usually reserved for other nineteenth-century authors like William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens.— Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Jane Austen has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. Not many scholars (and hopefully fewer and fewer readers) attach much credence to the image of the retired spinster, marooned in villages and rectories in the backwaters of Hampshire, but equally not many have tried to alter our perception of Austen quite as dramatically as Jocelyn Harris does in this remarkable book. Harris places Austen at the centre of the Regency communications hub, weaving information from letters, gossip, newspapers, city visits, stage performances, and satirical prints into her fiction, and evincing a fascination with celebrity culture that makes her as connected to the contemporary moment as any devotee of 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians' or Twitter. In the spectrum of Austen studies, the book stands at the opposite end to the restricted, censored, and official family view of the author as the polite, neutral observer of the domestic world. — The Cambridge Quarterly
Extensively researched, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen uses the letters and journals of Fanny Burney, historical accounts of celebrities, and contemporary satire in Austen's England to suggest that the novels engage in a covert dialogue with their cultural environment. I use the word "suggest" consciously; Harris doesn't necessarily convince us of her many bold assertion. But, she doesn't have to convince. The suggestions are enough to change the way we read the novels.— Jasna News
This last monograph examines how Austen takes the literary and political celebrities and the scandals and controversies of her time and reworks them into the characters and situations in her novels to create a subtle satire or to improve on the published work of another author. — The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer
Harris’s monograph represents the crowning achievement of a career devoted to placing Austen’s novels in rich historical context. . . To re-encounter Austen’s works through the eyes of a scholar as knowledgeable as Harris is a bracing experience. She establishes with admirable thoroughness the degree of likelihood of every possible influence and parallel that she delineates. And she acknowledges scrupulously how her ideas intersect with and build on those of fellow scholars. The result is a master class in scholarly thinking and research.— European Romantic Review
Ultimately, this book has much to teach Austen enthusiasts and scholars, as well as general readers interested in British literature, European history, and women’s studies. . . Harris’s study provides a fascinating comparative narrative that illuminates Austen’s works in light of the events and lives of famous people from her time. Harris’ book fully captures the gamut of Austen’s life as well as her works, for it offers us an opportunity to expand our thinking on all of Austen’s writings — from her juvenilia up to her last piece of writing, her verses on Winchester. The result is a fresh way of seeing Austen as a flexible writer, editor, and reviser who taps into current events and furtively — and satirically — tucks them into her tales.
— Early Modern Women
Harris' book offers a fascinating study of Austen's engagement with the cult of celebrity of her time. Harris provides fresh insights about Austen's awareness of the danger she faced in even appearing to criticize the government or the royal family in the reactionary environment of post-1790s England. Harris also fully demonstrates Austen's adoration of the theatre, and her appreciation for the work produced by her contemporaries, Burney and Edgeworth. Harris' book is well-researched, detailed, engaging, and meticulous in its assessment of other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, including plays, novels, poems, and visual tests, and their importance to Austen's work. Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen enriches our understanding of Austen the author, allowing us to think more carefully about what she did in her writing and how she did it. — Jennifer Golightly, Colorado College