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But the fact that Pride and Prejudice is more single-minded,
that the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and D'Arcy is not only
of the book but is the book (whereas the love story of Emma and
Mr Knightley and Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram have parallel
streams), has given Pride and Prejudice its popularity above
the others among readers who are more interested by the course
of romance than by the exposition of character. Entirely
satisfactory as is Pride and Prejudice so far as it goes, it
is, however, thin beside the niceness of analysis of motives in
Emma and the wonderful management of two housefuls of young
lovers that is exhibited in Mansfield Park. It has been
generally agreed by the best critics that Miss Austen has never
been approached in her own domain. No one indeed has attempted
any close rivalry. No other novelist has so concerned herself
or himself with the trivial daily comedy of small provincial
family life, disdaining equally the assistance offered by
passion, crime and religion.
Whatever Miss Austen may have thought
privately of these favourite ingredients of fiction, she
disregarded all alike when she took her pen in hand. Her
interest was in life's little perplexities of emotion and
con-duct; her gaze was steadily ironical. The most untoward
event in any of her books is Louisa's fall from the Cobb at
Lyme Regis, in Persuasion; the most abandoned, Maria's
elopement with Crawford, in Mansfield Park. In pure ironical
humour Miss Austen's only peer among novelists is George
Meredith, and indeed Emma may be said to be her Egoist, or the
Egoist his Emma.
But irony and fidelity to the fact alone would not have
carried her down the ages. To these gifts she allied a perfect
sense of dramatic progression and an admirably lucid and
flowing prose style which makes her stories the easiest
reading.
Recognition came to Miss Austen slowly. It was not until
quite recent times that to read her became a necessity of
culture. But she is now firmly established as an English
classic, standing far above Miss Burney (Madame d'Arblay) and
Miss Edgeworth, who in her day were the popular women novelists
of real life, while Mrs Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, whose
supernatural fancies Northanger Abbey was written in part to
ridicule, are no longer anything but names. Although, however,
she has become only lately a household word, Miss Austen had
always her panegyrists among the best intellects such as
Coleridge, Tennyson, Macaulay, Scott, Sydney Smith, Disraeli
and Archbishop Whately, the last of whom may be said to have
been her discoverer. Macaulay, whose adoration of Miss Austen's
genius was almost idolatrous, considered Mansfield Park her
greatest feat; but many critics give the palm to Emma. Disraeli
read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times.
Scott's testimony is often quoted: "That young lady had a
talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters
of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever
met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going;
but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and
characters interesting from the truth of the description and
the sentiment is denied to me."
Based on an article in the public-domain
1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
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