Trilling on Austen

About this antagonism a word must be said. Few writers have been the object of an admiration so fervent as that which 1s given to Jane Austen. At the same time, she has been the object of great dislike. Lord David Cecil has said that the people who do not like Jane Austen are the kind of people “who do not like sunshine and unselfishness,” and Dr. Chapman, the distinguished editor of Jane Austen’s novels and letters, al. though dissenting from Lord David’s opinion, has speculated that perhaps “a certain lack of charity” plays a part in the dislike. But Mark Twain, to take but one example, manifestly did not lack charity or dislike sunshine and unselfishness, and Mark Twain said of Jane Austen that she inspired in him an “animal repugnance.” The personal intensity of both parties to the dispute will serve to suggest how momentous, how elemental, is the issue that Jane Austen presents. 

The animality of Mark Twain’s repugnance is probably to be taken as the male’s revulsion from a society in which women seem to be at the center of interest and power, as a man’s panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and Necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose essay “Jane Austen, A Depreciation” ts a summa of all the reasons for disliking Jane Austen, expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain’s; he implies that a direct sexual insult is being offered to men by a woman author who “describes everything in the youth of women which does not matter” in such a way as to appeal to “that age in men when they have begun to ask themselves whether anything matters.” The sexual protest is not only masculine—Charlotte Bronté despised Jane Austen for representing men and women as nothing but ladies and gentlemen.