jacob’s Reviews > What Matters in Jane Austen? > Status Update

". . . [W]e cannot think of the Romantic period without thinking of the networks of friendship among its leading writers. Jane Austen knew not a single notable author, even distantly . . . Though her books sold well in her lifetime, [she] was utterly unknown to her great literary contemporaries . . .

[Her] obscurity . . . is all the more striking when one considers her technical audacity. There was nothing so surprising about the fact that she wrote novels. There was something miraculous about the fact that she wrote novels whose narrative sophistication and brilliance of dialogue were unprecedented in English fiction . . . She managed all this with extraordinary self-confidence and apparently without the advice or expert engagement of any other accomplished writer . . . It might be a wrench to think of Austen, the conservative literary genius in a revolutionary age, as an experimental writer, but such she was. This has nothing to do with her subject matter: indeed, provide some bare plot summaries of her novels, and they can be made to sound rather less daring than those of contemporaries . . . Her brilliance is in the style, not the content. Even when it comes to her characters, her success is a matter of formal daring as much as psychological insight . . .

Virginia Woolf, a reader completely alive to Austen's fictional intelligence, said that 'of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.' Woolf meant that it was nearly impossible to take a single scene, or a single paragraph, as an epitome of that greatness. The apparent modesty of Austen's dramas is, though, only apparent. Look closely, and the minute interconnectedness of her novels is a bravura achievement."