Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places

by Margaret Doody

In Jane Austen’s works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey , is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a “big cheese”―the moon’s reflection on the water’s surface. It worked.

In Jane Austen’s Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places―real and imaginary―in Austen’s fiction. Austen’s creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen’s names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen’s technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism―in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency.

Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen’s Names will revolutionize how we read Austen’s fiction.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, Literature, Regency, Literary Criticism, Classics

438 pages, Hardcover

First published March 23, 2015

About the author

Aka Margaret Anne Doody

Margaret Anne Doody (born 1939) is a professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, and helped found the PhD in Literature Program at Notre Dame (http://www.nd.edu/~litprog). She served as its director from 2001-2007. Joseph Buttigieg has since become director.

Although historical detective stories are now a flourishing genre, with Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis being particularly prominent in the field of detective stories set in classical antiquity, back in 1978, when Aristotle Detective was first published, Doody was something of a pioneer in the genre. Recently she has added four more to the series featuring Aristotle as a 4th Century B.C. detective.There is also a novella, Anello di bronzo (Ring of Bronze), currently available only in Italian.

Doody's "Aristotle" books and are published in Italy by Sellerio editore, which also produced a translation of The Alchemists. In France the mystery novels are published by 10/18. They are also available in Spanish, Portuguese and Greek; individual novels have recently been appeared in Polish and Russian.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished book 1 of #24in48readathon! (Whee, academic writing makes for slow reading - BUT it was a good pick for Readathon since I was making time for long stretches of reading, which is what this book needed.) I ❤❤ this book a lot - the minutiae of place names and personal names and etymology and how that commented on Austen's characterizations was so great. Recommended for Austen fans and people super-into English history.

(Dropped 1 star down from a 5 because there's a huge late digression during a discussion of place names in Mansfield Park - it's an interesting premise but much longer that discussion of the other novels so feels out of place - and a strange statement about Erotic love in the Conclusion that seems to come out of nowhere)

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 out of 5. Might write a longer review later, might not.

[Heather Moll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative yet so very, very dry.

[Penny Poppleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know those nonfiction books which are really interesting, but not TOO interesting, so you can actually read a little bit every night and pace yourself and absorb it all in bite sized pieces instead of just horking down the entire book in a single sitting? This was one of those books. I really enjoyed meandering though it. I’m no Austen scholar but I enjoyed this as an Austen fan with more than a passing interest in the scholarly side of things. Also I’m a huge fan of the origin of names and etymology of words so this appealed greatly.

[Dallin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific book by one of my dissertation advisors. If only all academic books had such engaging prose (she is also a novelist)

[Mary Foxe · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I better start by saying this is an excellent, informative, incredibly detailed book. Incredibly. Detailed. If you are not interested in the minutest minutiae related to names, this probably isn't the book for you. But if you are, then here is holy grail. It is so thoroughly done. I honestly can't imagine researching Austen without it, now that I've read it.

That being said, I want to also add that it's a very maddening book, too. Doody e runs some of Austen's characters through the wringer. There were times when the commentary made me SO MAD as it shot holes through characters I am (still) inclined to love. I have a lot of angry notes scribbled in the margins.

But all that subjectivity aside: the names are presented with all their rich historical background, and I found Doody's analysis really enlightening and informative.

To me the biggest shortcoming (aside from the maddening-ness of it) is the index. I feel like this would be a good book to use for research (and general curiosity), but there is no index of the characters/place names Doody covers. So if you are curious as to all the places Austen uses the name Elizabeth, you are out of luck. You could look up where Doody talks about Queen Elizabeth, but not the name Elizabeth in and of itself.

[Candy Wood]

Margaret Doody draws on all of Jane Austen's writing--early stories, an unfinished novel, and letters as well as the six famous novels--to argue for the significance of personal and place names. Both kinds of names can evoke history, and Doody provides many examples of people and events that would have been remembered by Austen's original readers but are less familiar now. She usefully distinguishes between real and invented place names, arguing different kinds of significance for both. Warning that she does not see the novels as allegory, she still asserts that there is more going on than precise realism. The chapter organization, looking at people in each novel and then places, requires some repetition but is clear. Analogies to current phenomena like the popularity of Downton Abbey help, as do several black and white illustrations. The best thing: now I'm ready to reread the novels.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful deep research into many layers of historical context for Austenian characters, locations, and themes.

[Ellen]

To Read Notes: Margaret Doody was a professor of mine during my undergrad years, and I was a lucky duck to get to study under her. Professor Doody was an academic for sure, but she had a real fondness for making Austen, Austen's contemporary authors, and the history of the period accessible to her students. To this day, I'll be reading Austen and be dying to raise my hand and ask her to explain something I don't understand.

When I took her class (around 2011-2012) she was working on a book on the history and significance of abbeys and other great houses in Britain. (She was inspired by Downton Abbey!) I came to her Goodreads page to check if it had been published. Either she's still working on it, or the project was abandoned, but I did see that she had published this book since I graduated.

This book is on my TBR for sure!