Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Jane Austen's Hatred

In 1939, psychologist Denys Harding explained to the Literary Society of Manchester that English “gentleman of an older generation” had completely misread Jane Austen.  The novelist, he announced and subsequently argued in the pages of F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny, was no delicate satirist. Instead, she was a “regulated hater,” who managed and finessed the subtle “eruption of fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life.” Harding’s essay changed the current of Austen studies, permanently replacing the Victorians’ gentle Jane with an author of fierce social vision, in possession of an impeccable, if not pathological, linguistic control. This talk traces a misanthropic Austen in literary studies, from critics’ portrayal of a sadistic, commitment-phobic man-hater, to its ample compensations in Janeite culture as a wistful bride-never-to-be or as the magical match of her own romantic hero. Driving the preoccupation with Jane Austen’s feelings, I argue, is an abiding and unsettling sense of her distinctive dispassion—what Charlotte Brontë condemned as her “insensibility” and the critic Reginald Farrer praised as her “aloofness.” The novelist’s unfeeling is therefore part of that enduring enigma of Austenian irony, a form of distance from character as well as reader that makes both Janeites and literary critics long for intimacy.

Wendy Lee, a writer in residence in the Wertheim Study, is an assistant professor of English at Yale University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. Her book-in-progress, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel, tracks the philosophical problem of unfeeling in the history of the novel. Recent publications include essays about Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and Locke’s theory of indifference.