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Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style
What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer's unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen's style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.
For no Jane Austen could ever appear in Jane Austen. Amid happy wives and pathetic old maids, we see no successfully unmarried woman, and, despite the multitude of girls seeking to acquire "accomplishments," no artist either. What does appear is a ghostly No One, a narrative voice unmarked by age, gender, marital status, all the particulars that make a person--and might make a person peculiar. The Austen heroine must suppress her wit to become the one and not the other, to become, that is, a person fit to be tied in a conjugal knot. But for herself, Austen refuses personhood, with all its constraints and needs, and disappears into the sourceless anonymity of her style. Though often treasured for its universality, that style marks the specific impasse of a writer whose self-representation is impossible without the prospect of shame.
D.A. Miller argues this case not only through the close reading that Austen's style always demands, but also through the close writing, the slavish imitation, that it sometimes inspires.
For no Jane Austen could ever appear in Jane Austen. Amid happy wives and pathetic old maids, we see no successfully unmarried woman, and, despite the multitude of girls seeking to acquire "accomplishments," no artist either. What does appear is a ghostly No One, a narrative voice unmarked by age, gender, marital status, all the particulars that make a person--and might make a person peculiar. The Austen heroine must suppress her wit to become the one and not the other, to become, that is, a person fit to be tied in a conjugal knot. But for herself, Austen refuses personhood, with all its constraints and needs, and disappears into the sourceless anonymity of her style. Though often treasured for its universality, that style marks the specific impasse of a writer whose self-representation is impossible without the prospect of shame.
D.A. Miller argues this case not only through the close reading that Austen's style always demands, but also through the close writing, the slavish imitation, that it sometimes inspires.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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August 10, 2011This is a very short book, extremely well written, dense with fascinating thought. Disquieting thought, even, as I find myself wanting to explain, excuse, make everything nice when he discusses the comfortable het world’s assumptions about Austen's books from a non-het POV. Like his analysis of the Famous First Sentence in P&P.
Like this bit Miller brings up: (When Mr. Knightley pronounces Frank Churckill’s script “like a woman’s writing” even the women he is addressing, Emma and Mrs. Weston, leap to vindicate it against what they consider a “base aspersion.”
Whoa. We don't want Frank being thought one of "those" kind of men, do we!
Miller opens with a description of those who discover Austen at a very early age. Then comes this provocative statement:
Yet sooner or later, this experience of reading Jane Austen found itself contradicted--felt itself disabled--by the quite different experience of being read reading her. If the one moment, private and elective, united us all in common ecstacy, the other, public and compulsory, brought alienation into our midst, the mutual alienation of “girls and “boys.” For eventually--whether the “event” followed on our raptures, or occurred even before they had commenced (with trauma, who can be certain of sequence?)--popular opinion let us know that what should have sundered us from all identifying labels had in fact glued onto us one in particular: in short, that what we took for Style, everyone else took for Woman.
And, later on, But the same discovery that, sometimes even despite herself, made a good girl good, made the boy all wrong. Plied with a Style whose unknown strength went straight to his head, he had fancied himself conquering the world with his swank Excalibur; now he woke to sobering sounds of derision and found that, during his intoxication, just as Lydia Bennet had done to another would-be soldier in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had put him in a dress.
Gender politics and Austen, eh? I don’t know that men--whether gay or straight--now get castigated for a taste in Austen the way Miller describes, but his following observations about the gay man reading Austen and finding all the jabs and prickles of the het world’s view of Austen’s place in literature jabbing him back into his closet make one take a good hard look not just at Austen but at the experience of reading, and how ‘one is being read.’
Here’s the opening blurb on the back of the book:
“What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer’s unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen’s style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.
That encapsulates the failure of Millar's central point, which (I think, anyway) overlooks the rational detachment of late Enlightenment writers. Austen and her family were not romantics, they did not succumb to effusions of emotion. Irony and wit kept a quill's distance from unpalatable subjects, but that was balanced by her bewitching sympathy for women, and her insight into character.
I don't see any sign in any of her works that she was ashamed of her spinsterhood. On the contrary, there is just the smallest sign of evidence in the later books, and in the few letters that Cassandra left us, that she may well (at least later in her life) have considered spinsterhood a lucky escape, in particular in phrases like her comment about her sister in law (pregnant yet again), "Poor animal." She certainly saw plenty of the mortality of childbirth, and the constant fatigue and worry of motherhood, and how there was basically no escape if you were married.
That aside, Millar's book is intelligent and thought-provoking, which far too many books about Austen aren't.
Like this bit Miller brings up: (When Mr. Knightley pronounces Frank Churckill’s script “like a woman’s writing” even the women he is addressing, Emma and Mrs. Weston, leap to vindicate it against what they consider a “base aspersion.”
Whoa. We don't want Frank being thought one of "those" kind of men, do we!
Miller opens with a description of those who discover Austen at a very early age. Then comes this provocative statement:
Yet sooner or later, this experience of reading Jane Austen found itself contradicted--felt itself disabled--by the quite different experience of being read reading her. If the one moment, private and elective, united us all in common ecstacy, the other, public and compulsory, brought alienation into our midst, the mutual alienation of “girls and “boys.” For eventually--whether the “event” followed on our raptures, or occurred even before they had commenced (with trauma, who can be certain of sequence?)--popular opinion let us know that what should have sundered us from all identifying labels had in fact glued onto us one in particular: in short, that what we took for Style, everyone else took for Woman.
And, later on, But the same discovery that, sometimes even despite herself, made a good girl good, made the boy all wrong. Plied with a Style whose unknown strength went straight to his head, he had fancied himself conquering the world with his swank Excalibur; now he woke to sobering sounds of derision and found that, during his intoxication, just as Lydia Bennet had done to another would-be soldier in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had put him in a dress.
Gender politics and Austen, eh? I don’t know that men--whether gay or straight--now get castigated for a taste in Austen the way Miller describes, but his following observations about the gay man reading Austen and finding all the jabs and prickles of the het world’s view of Austen’s place in literature jabbing him back into his closet make one take a good hard look not just at Austen but at the experience of reading, and how ‘one is being read.’
Here’s the opening blurb on the back of the book:
“What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer’s unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen’s style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.
That encapsulates the failure of Millar's central point, which (I think, anyway) overlooks the rational detachment of late Enlightenment writers. Austen and her family were not romantics, they did not succumb to effusions of emotion. Irony and wit kept a quill's distance from unpalatable subjects, but that was balanced by her bewitching sympathy for women, and her insight into character.
I don't see any sign in any of her works that she was ashamed of her spinsterhood. On the contrary, there is just the smallest sign of evidence in the later books, and in the few letters that Cassandra left us, that she may well (at least later in her life) have considered spinsterhood a lucky escape, in particular in phrases like her comment about her sister in law (pregnant yet again), "Poor animal." She certainly saw plenty of the mortality of childbirth, and the constant fatigue and worry of motherhood, and how there was basically no escape if you were married.
That aside, Millar's book is intelligent and thought-provoking, which far too many books about Austen aren't.
March 28, 2026
A highly personally motivated critical piece on Austen. Miller likens Austen’s impenetrable, unknowable God-like authorial voice and her simultaneous denigrated social status as a spinster to his experience as a gay male academic, Style compensating for the already abject Person. This move is no doubt intellectually suspect. Yet Miller’s academic “faux-pas”—his identification, perhaps over-identification, with the subject of his criticism—is matched and recovered by his intellectual honesty, self-awareness, and willingness to disclose, at the knowing risk of humiliation and social disgrace, his own anxiety about being discovered—no more as a homosexual than as a “bad writer.”
Stretched my assumptions of what literary criticism can be; I have intentionally stopped giving ratings to the books I read that are non-fiction, but Miller’s long essay on Austen and “style” as a whole deserves my superficial mark of five stars.
Stretched my assumptions of what literary criticism can be; I have intentionally stopped giving ratings to the books I read that are non-fiction, but Miller’s long essay on Austen and “style” as a whole deserves my superficial mark of five stars.
October 15, 2023
jane austen predicted the taylor swift / harry styles car crash
April 21, 2026
quite densely written, with astonishing fervour and, dare I say, style. even when miller reaches a little too far into supposition, i found that i still liked reading how he came up with his conclusions. can’t stop thinking about how he described close reading as an act of wanting to write both over and in the language you are analysing, coming as close to possible as merging with the “mother-text” whilst refraining from actual plagiarism. very interesting, and worth the hours i spent deciphering it.
maybe i’ll actually read that copy of emma that’s been languishing on a shelf somewhere.
maybe i’ll actually read that copy of emma that’s been languishing on a shelf somewhere.
December 13, 2021
Interesting once we discussed in class. Sheer waffle before that.
October 11, 2023
A qualidade da escrita simplesmente me faz desencanar de quaisquer ressalvas teóricas que eu pudesse ter. É crítica literária de primeira - e de dar inveja.
June 25, 2019
"The beauty of Style, I have claimed, lies in the way it shuts out the world that would otherwise shut out the stylothete."
Miller presents complex and confusing arguments, and definitely aren't undoubtable.
Miller presents complex and confusing arguments, and definitely aren't undoubtable.
August 10, 2017
Yes, still as turgid and self satisfied as when I previously waded through this.
Must actually get rid of it this time and remind self not to re-read things you have rated two stars...
Must actually get rid of it this time and remind self not to re-read things you have rated two stars...
November 23, 2025
Trite and self-masturbatory drivel. I had zero fucks for this work and read it only as a requirement for my theory class. I've read Austen's main novels and I'm fairly familiar with her work. Miller here seeks to only reinterpret her words and to paint himself as some visionary for perceiving these works in some bullshit narrative that nobody cares about.
December 23, 2023
The author starts by analysing a passage I never gave much thought to and relating it to Austen's Style and life. It seemed mostly sound to me -- though it can take some time to seem so. Miller's own writing style is delectable, it made me quite envious regularly.
February 22, 2019
Unexpectedly great !
April 28, 2020
I’m not sure I got the point of this essay. I’ll revisit after seminar tonight.
April 8, 2021
word. i need to read more jane austen
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March 23, 2023denne var eigentleg veldig bra skriven til å vere ei analysebok? det gjer jo meining i forhold til kva ho handla om, men likevel
March 24, 2009
Miller's book-length essay is a delightful and thought-provoking read. Its thesis is that the heart of Austen's style lies in "a failed, or refused, but in any case shameful relation to the conjugal imperative." To obliterate the signs of a shameful spinsterhood, she adopts a style that polishes all human particularities from the narrator's voice, and achieves a kind of impersonal, ironic, universal objectivity. But the escape into style, Miller contends, will still leave traces of the personal.
The first part of the essay, "Secret Love," supports the thesis by reading allegorically an episode from Sense and Sensibility. Miller acknowledges that allegory is rare in Austen, but argues persuasively for the usefulness of such a reading of the Dashwoods' visit to Gray's, the London jewelry shop, where they see Robert Ferrars selecting a toothpick case. Jewelry, pervasive in Austen, is always either given by a relative or lover, in token of union through marriage or common blood. The jeweled case, so fussily selected by the "unheterosexual" Ferrars, does not signify any attachment to marriage or family; it is style for style's sake. The spinster, like the homosexual, does not possess social signification of the sort granted to married men and women. Or as Miller puts it:
Miller points out that the realism of Austen's works allows no one like Jane Austen to appear in them. There are happy wives and pathetic old maids, but there are no successfully unmarried woman. The second part of the essay "No One Is Alone" argues that Austen's style presupposes and enforces its author's own "under-representability." It looks at the insufficient Neuter of a narrator in Northanger Abbey, and then the accomplished Neuter in Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. In the mature novels, the heroines employ their wit, or style, to court men's attention, and their fall, accompanied by self-lacerations about their excessive wit, is rewarded by getting the man they want, as well as the marriage state, and estate; they become recognized by society as Persons. The plot is saved from cynicism by the heroines' naivete and good faith.
"Austen Style not only knew whereof it spoke, but also spoke without any apparent experiential implication in such knowledge," writes Miller. It is a paradox of divine omniscience, but it is also a paradox of divine melancholy, in which "an impersonal deity unceasingly contemplates the Person that is its own absolutely foregone possibility." In the third and final part of the essay, Miller expands on this divine melancholy by examining the free indirect style in Emma. He finds the eponymous character the most fully realized in Austen's oeuvre. The chapter "Broken Art" also judges Persuasion a failure of Style as constituted in the earlier books, since, there, Style becomes personifiable, idiosyncratic, instead of objective. Sanditon, written when Austen was dying, is read as a crumbling of the Style when wit deteriorates into mere wordplay and alliteration.
The first part of the essay, "Secret Love," supports the thesis by reading allegorically an episode from Sense and Sensibility. Miller acknowledges that allegory is rare in Austen, but argues persuasively for the usefulness of such a reading of the Dashwoods' visit to Gray's, the London jewelry shop, where they see Robert Ferrars selecting a toothpick case. Jewelry, pervasive in Austen, is always either given by a relative or lover, in token of union through marriage or common blood. The jeweled case, so fussily selected by the "unheterosexual" Ferrars, does not signify any attachment to marriage or family; it is style for style's sake. The spinster, like the homosexual, does not possess social signification of the sort granted to married men and women. Or as Miller puts it:
Behind the glory of style's willed evacuation of substance lies the ignominy of a subject's hopelessly insufficient social realization, just as behind style's ahistorical impersonality lies the historical impasse of someone whose social representation doubles for social humiliation.
Miller points out that the realism of Austen's works allows no one like Jane Austen to appear in them. There are happy wives and pathetic old maids, but there are no successfully unmarried woman. The second part of the essay "No One Is Alone" argues that Austen's style presupposes and enforces its author's own "under-representability." It looks at the insufficient Neuter of a narrator in Northanger Abbey, and then the accomplished Neuter in Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. In the mature novels, the heroines employ their wit, or style, to court men's attention, and their fall, accompanied by self-lacerations about their excessive wit, is rewarded by getting the man they want, as well as the marriage state, and estate; they become recognized by society as Persons. The plot is saved from cynicism by the heroines' naivete and good faith.
"Austen Style not only knew whereof it spoke, but also spoke without any apparent experiential implication in such knowledge," writes Miller. It is a paradox of divine omniscience, but it is also a paradox of divine melancholy, in which "an impersonal deity unceasingly contemplates the Person that is its own absolutely foregone possibility." In the third and final part of the essay, Miller expands on this divine melancholy by examining the free indirect style in Emma. He finds the eponymous character the most fully realized in Austen's oeuvre. The chapter "Broken Art" also judges Persuasion a failure of Style as constituted in the earlier books, since, there, Style becomes personifiable, idiosyncratic, instead of objective. Sanditon, written when Austen was dying, is read as a crumbling of the Style when wit deteriorates into mere wordplay and alliteration.
Emma allows us to envision the utopia of a double perfection, the perfection of Style matched by that of Person; Sanditon reaches towards the perhaps more feasible state of their double, their simultaneous annihilation.
June 22, 2015
I think it's possible to give a book five stars without necessarily agreeing with all of its conclusions/premises. Some might see this as an insensitive portrayal of Austen-the-spinster-narrator; however, I think there is more to the essay than that, and if you read it, you'll see why. Intriguing, provocative, and painfully well-written, you can tell that "Style" is an object close to Miller's heart, that he has sensed it in Austen, and this essay is his desperate attempt to comprehend it. (Especially the opening of the essay reads more like a love letter to Austen-Style than a piece of criticism.) Miller obviously takes a cue from Barthes to the effect that I found reading this to be pleasure itself. Even if Austen is *not* close to your heart, read this as an example of literary criticism that takes risks and creates something magnificent in itself in the process.
December 20, 2009
Many of Miller's claims were sound to me, but I had some issues with his habit of relating Jane Austen's authorial voice with her biographical position as an unmarried woman.
January 3, 2016
I've had the pleasure of reviewing this book: Looser, Devoney. Rev. of Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, by D. A. Miller. JASNA News 20.2 (2004): 16–17. Print.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews