Since popular interest in Jane Austen revived in the 1990s with a spate of BBC and film adaptations, biographies and works of literary and historical criticism have proliferated. Unfortunately our enthusiasm for every detail of Austen's life and work does not always translate into meaningful research. Paula Byrne's Jane Austen and the theatre and Maggie Lane's Jane Austen and food are both part of the Hambledon Press series of critical studies on Austen. Byrne's work is a thought-provoking challenge to prevailing images of Austen as a parochial, class-bound, or reactionary novelist. As soon as Lane launches into her introduction, however, the reader suspects her of dwelling on trifles. She argues that the economy of Austen's prose makes even minor references significant. Undoubtedly, understanding the contemporary implications of apparently trivial details – whether thespian or gastronomical – can bring the Regency society of the novels more thoroughly to life. The reader will also be able to spot jokes and nuances in Austen's social commentary which might otherwise pass her by. But critics who wheel out such platitudes often do so to justify hanging ingenious arguments on scant material, and by Lane's own admission Austen mentions food ‘sparingly’ (p. xv).
Paula Byrne divides her work into two parts: the first consists of three chapters which highlight the major role played by the public theatre and amateur acting in the life of the novelist, redefining her as an individual who enjoyed theatre as part of the pleasures of urban life. The second part has eight chronologically structured chapters. The first two discuss the influence of the theatre on Austen's juvenilia and demonstrate her transition from play to novel. The remaining five chapters contain critical analyses of Sense and sensibility, Pride and prejudice, and Emma, with two chapters devoted to the most overtly theatrical novel, Mansfield Park. In Jane Austen and food, the first three chapters are devoted to historical contextualization. They offer a detailed account of the food available in early nineteenth-century Britain and the social mores, domestic arrangements, and etiquette associated with its consumption. Chapters 4–6 deal with ‘Greed and gender’, ‘The sweets of housekeeping’, and ‘Town and country hospitality’. They show that in her portrayals of idiosyncratic housekeepers and faddy eaters, Austen was not only concerned with verisimilitude, but also with the class hierarchy, national stereotypes, and gender bias. The final two chapters are ‘Food as symbol’, which turns on the banal idea that food, like any mundane detail in literature, can carry biblical, classical, or contemporary significance; and ‘The significance of food in Emma’, which by and large offers a sensitive reading of one of Austen's most understated texts.
In their eagerness to prove the importance of their chosen topic, both writers make improbable claims. Byrne fails, for instance, to support the link drawn between Laura's dialogue in Love and friendship and Joseph Surface's hypocritical speeches in Sheridan's School for scandal. For the most part, however, Byrne highlights salient themes in the novels. When it comes to fruitless observations, Lane is the guiltier party. Austen's remark that the Crown rooms in Emma did not at first offer supper is indeed a ‘mystery’, but one it hardly seems productive to solve (p. 54). Her claim that the pyramids of fruit at Pemberley represent the social pyramid shaken by Darcy and Elizabeth's marriage is equally redolent of an indiscriminate pursuit of evidence (p. 146). Snippets of information about the social status of white soup and whipped syllabub or the fashion for hot chocolate might be better placed as footnotes to a critical edition: the reader sometimes feels that Austen is merely a convenient vehicle for an (albeit fascinating) social and cultural history of food. Lane is more convincing, however, in her argument that the conventions attached to food consumption are imbued with significance for the proper regulation of human life. In fact Lane's book is as much about manner as it is about food. Chapters 4–6 are by far the strongest, drawing on a range of material from the juvenilia through the major works to the last incomplete novel, Sanditon. Each chapter lapses on occasion into redundant observations which, while irrefutable, merely support existing scholarship rather than offering fresh perspectives. Be that as it may, Lane's work is in this respect well researched and intermittently insightful.
Both Byrne and Lane discuss Austen's transition from the burlesque to the novel in terms of theatre and food respectively. Byrne shows not only that the early spoofs were influenced by contemporary drama, but also that elements of theatrical parody persist in the mature works. Lane lights on some intriguing extracts from the juvenilia which show Austen's passage from parody to psychologically realistic portrayals of food consumption. She is equally credible when she demonstrates the function of hospitality in characterization, which typifies Austen's integration of moral self and social conduct.
Chapter Five of Austen and the theatre charts Austen's transition from dramatic and epistolary forms to third-person narrative. Byrne proves, surprisingly, that the shift results from the influence of contemporary playwrights, particularly Henry Fielding and Elizabeth Inchbald, who also made the leap from play to novel. The chapter argues persuasively that Austen reworks inherited conventions to incorporate quasi-dramatic techniques and features from the comedy of manners into her developing narrative voice. In the ensuing chapters Byrne uses this model to draw links between theatrical conventions or specific plays on the one hand, and the events, themes, and characters of the major novels on the other. She finds the inspiration for Elizabeth Bennet's refusal to marry Mr Collins and his subsequent union with Charlotte Lucas in Hannah Cowley's Who's the dupe?. George Colman and David Garrick's Clandestine marriage, meanwhile, provides the model for Austen's rejection of the ‘reformed rake’ narrative in Henry Crawford's unsuccessful pursuit of Fanny Price. The tension between town and country values evident in Austen's satires on class prejudice emerges as a staple of Restoration and eighteenth-century stage comedy. Her narrative style, which relies on simple but intelligible signs that invalidate elaborate description, is also indebted to theatrical forms.
Byrne's claims are well supported, enabling a profounder understanding of apparently extraneous detail and a richer image of the Regency society Austen inhabited. Her portrayal of Tom Bertram, for instance, acquires an extra dimension if we know that when he wishes to play Lord Duberley in The heir at law, he imagines himself as a profligate son reluctant to commit to his social responsibilities. Other more speculative points, like the possible link between Yates and Crawford and the popular actresses Mary Ann Yates and Ann Crawford, are little more than trivia, but they do offer a window into the comical asides and in-jokes woven into the fabric of Austen's most sober texts. Byrne also emphasizes the stylization of such episodes as the garden scene in Mansfield Park, in which Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford slip through the bars of a gate to elude Mr Rushworth. With these observations she stages a dramatic break from previous criticism, which tends to consider Austen a realist. The theatrical set pieces temper her realism, contributing to an overall effect of near-but-imperfect verisimilitude crucial to Austen's comedy. What makes Byrne's work so compelling, however, are not her accounts of direct literary influence, but the many incidences she finds of Austen expanding, convoluting, or ironizing theatrical models and stage types.
Lane's most compelling chapter for this reader was ‘Greed and gender’, which taps into Austen's satirical response to the absurdities of female conduct literature and the excesses found in contemporary novels, particularly the anorexic tendencies associated with Sensibility. The chapter shows how the culture of Sensibility encouraged delicate appetites in women as part of a process of false deification. Lane highlights intriguing patterns in the distribution of divine and sensual attributes in the characterization of Austen's heroines and anti-heroines, showing how she both nourished and critiqued the nineteenth-century fantasy of an ‘angel in the house’. The young women in the juvenilia can be divided into those who will not eat at all, and those who eat too much, and Lane shows how that preoccupation persists into the subtler fabric of the novels. She offers persuasive examples of Marianne Dashwood and other disempowered women seeking refuge in disordered eating, so that food consumption reflects both psychological and social disorder.
Jane Austen and food offers one more example of Austen's ability to exploit the narrow framework of domestic arrangements to comment on a range of themes. Lane's frequent lapses into pure speculation make her work read, at times, like the unsuccessful amalgamation of two hobby-horses: Jane Austen, on the one hand, and the history of food on the other. Nonetheless there are oases of absorbing critical analysis and the whole is coloured by detailed research into the practical issues and social implications surrounding food in eighteenth-century Britain. Literary critics will be disappointed but, as Lane might put it, social and cultural historians will find material here to whet their appetite. Byrne, on the other hand, contests a raft of previous criticism. Those who suppose that Austen disliked the insincerity associated with acting will be forced to think again. Similarly debunked is the belief that the moral development of her heroines depends on their progress to authentic knowledge of the inner self. Exploring performance as a trope that pervades the novels, Byrne argues that Austen's assessment of ethical life actually incorporates a degree of social and personal role-playing. Using her solid historical framework to support her claims, she refers to Georgian debates about the art of the actor to contextualize Austen's interest in performance. The result is a fascinating analysis that marries meticulous historical research with critical imagination and flair. Clearly critics have not exhausted the possibilities for critical analysis in Austen's multi-layered novels, but as the comparison of Jane Austen and the theatre and Jane Austen and food shows, it behooves the enthusiast to choose her topic carefully.
