210 years ago today, on April 1, 1816, Jane Austen wrote what is one of my favourite of all of her surviving letters. It is a response to James Stanier Clarke, who was the Prince Regent (the future King George IV)'s Librarian and secured the dedication to him which can be found in Emma.
It was written in response to a previous letter she had received from Clarke, which suggested that she should consider writing a historical romance centred on the Prince Regent's ancestors, the Saxe-Coburg family. Not only is it oozing in sarcasm, with plenty of her characteristic wit, but it contains a fascinating excerpt which gives us an insight into how she viewed her writing. One that I wish everyone who believes that Jane Austen was primarily an author of sentimental romances would read and internalise:
But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
Straight from the horse's mouth. Even in her lifetime, Austen was somewhat averse to being pigeonholed as a romance author. But most of all, she wished to remain true to herself and write what she wanted to write. I really respect her integrity!
I'll include the entire letter of only two paragraphs just below the cut. If you're familiar with Austen's writing style, I'm sure you'll find it as hilarious as I do!:
Except that "romance" here does not mean "genre romance," which did not exist at the time. Modern genres are a modern invention, by publishers and booksellers, intended to organize bookstores and catalogs in a way convenient for reader tastes so readers can find their preferred kinds of books. Austen and her contemporaries organized literature in a different way.
"Romance" here should be read in light of the contemporary "Romantic movement," the artistic philosophy of Byron, the Shelleys, Coleridge, etc., which emphasized emotion over reason, wild nature over tame civilization, and the fantastic over the mundane. Marianne over Elinor, in fact! Her own attitude toward Romanticism is tolerably well expressed in Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey: it's fun and it can be beautiful, but you can't really live like that. (And she has a point. The lives of the most prominent Romantics were hot messes.)
This is also about the time that the distinction between the Romance and the Novel began to appear in literary criticism. The Romance in this sense is the (traditional, old-fashioned) story of incident and action, essentially the plot-driven story, as opposed to the (modern, up-to-date) Novel or character-driven story, involving the interior life of the protagonist and what we would now call their psychological development.
Under either use of the term, the idea of a Romance about a modern civil servant was ridiculous. This man is putting himself forward as a figure of high drama and passion and/or action and incident worthy to be enshrined in fiction to the author who gave us such first-class pompous asses as Mr. Collins and Sir Walter Elliot; he is setting himself up as a target and Austen's sitting there quivering and chewing her lip because she can't not take her shot but due to his position she also can't afford to offend him. This is her walking the thin line of Letting Him Down Easy while also Laughing in His Face. And yes, it's brilliant and it's hilarious, but the degree to which it expresses her attitude, both toward her own writing and toward its position in regard to modern genres that didn't exist then, has to be judged with this in mind.
Jane Austen did not write genre romance, first and foremost, because genre romance wasn't a Thing at the time she wrote. Her work is related to modern genre romance in the same way that it is related to modern genre literary, realistic, and mainstream works (and don't let anyone kid you: "realism" and "mainstream" are genres, they're just genres that aren't ghettoized in the same way as "romance"). She was a literary pioneer who achieved mass popularity, and literature today would look very different without her.
Lesser writers have imitated her to the point that many superficial and incidental features of her work have hardened into tropes and stereotypes within the genres, which is one of the perils of being a pioneer. The Brontes are in a similar position in relation to modern Gothic romance and Tolkien in relation to modern high fantasy. They all can be sorted into the genres they have influenced, because people who find what they like in those sections of the bookstores will probably like what they find in the works of those authors, but to read them the same way as one reads a formulaic Regency Romance, Gothic Romance, or Quest Fantasy does them, and you, a disservice.
And to dismiss any genre out of hand, by defining it by the most most formulaic and bland examples within it, and making special exemptions for the good stuff within it, is a snobbery worthy of Mrs. Elton.
This is very interesting, thank you so much for writing such a thoughtful addition! I always do my best to keep at the forefront of my mind how different Jane Austen's world was to ours, and not to project my modern biases onto historical sources but it obviously can happen, even despite one's best efforts!
This letter was highlighted in a book of critical essays which I recently read. I went back and looked at it to see if any context was given and I'd misread it, but it was only introduced as an example of Austen's 'classic self-appraisal of her scope and capacities as a writer.'
Of course, that's the peril of reading lit crit outside of an academic setting. Students would have at the forefront of their mind what romance was defined as at this time and know not to use it as a gotcha quote for criticising how Austen is pigeonholed... oops. My bad. I definitely projected what I wanted to read onto this excerpt, rather than considering the context of the letter. Lesson learnt, and thanks for the peer review :)
‘I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.’
This is truly great advice for a writer in any age, however, and something I will remind myself of when feeling pressured or pigeonholed.
