Critical Readings

This section of Jane Austen in Context includes new and classic critical readings of Austen—including interpretations of her whole body of work and of each of her six completed novels. To access these readings please select from the links below.

On Austen

Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen” [from The Common Reader]

D.W. Harding, “‘Regulated Hatred’: An Aspect in the Work of Jane Austen”

Marilyn Butler, from “Sentimentalism: The Radical Inheritance” [from Jane Austen and the War of Ideas]

Raymond Williams, from “Three Around Farnham” [from The Country and the City]

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Jane Austen’s Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents)” [from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination]

David Lodge, “Jane Austen’s Novels: Form and Structure”

Franco Moretti, from Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900

Brian Southam, “The Novelist and the Navy” [from Jane Austen and the Navy]

E.J. Clery, from “Austen and Masculinity”

Edward Copeland, “Money” [from The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen]

Sense and Sensibility

Mary Poovey, from “Ideological Contradictions and the Consolations of Form” [from The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer]

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”

Gene W. Ruoff, “Wills” [from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility]

Patricia Meyer Spacks, from “Privacy, Dissimulation, and Propriety: Frances Burney and Jane Austen”

Shawn Lisa Maurer, “At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility”

Pride and Prejudice

E.M. Halliday, “Narrative Perspective in Pride and Prejudice”

Claudia Johnson, from “Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness” [from Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel]

Alex Woloch, from “Narrative Asymmetry in Pride and Prejudice” [from The One vs. the Many]

Amy Baker, “Caught in the Act of Greatness: Jane Austen’s Characterization of Elizabeth and Darcy by Sentence Structure in Pride and Prejudice”

Sheryl Craig, from “Pride and Prejudice: The Speenhamland System” [from Jane Austen and the State of the Nation]

Mansfield Park

Lionel Trilling, “In Mansfield Park”

Alastair Duckworth, “Mansfield Park and Estate Improvements: Jane Austen’s Grounds of Being”

Edward Said, from “Jane Austen and Empire” [from Culture and Imperialism]

Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism”

Brian Southam, “The Silence of the Bertrams”

Daniel O’Quinn, “Jane Austen and Performance: Theater, Memory, and Enculturation”

Emma

Lionel Trilling, “Emma” 

Wayne C. Booth, “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma”

Patricia Meyer Spacks, from “The Talent of Ready Utterance” [from Gossip]

John Wiltshire, “Health, Comfort, and Creativity: A Reading of Emma”

Catherine Ingrassia, “Emma, Slavery, and Cultures of Captivity”

Northanger Abbey

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Shut Up in Prose: Austen’s Juvenilia” [from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination]

Devoney Looser, from “Reading Jane Austen and Rewriting ‘Herstory’” [from British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820]

Susan Zlotnick, “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in Northanger Abbey”

Lauren Miskin, “‘True Indian Muslin’ and the Politics of Consumption in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey”

Toby R. Benis, “The Neighborhoods of Northanger Abbey”

Persuasion

Adela Pinch, “Lost in a Book: Jane Austen’s Persuasion”

Brian Southam, from “Persuasion: The Righting and Re-Writing of History” [from ‪Jane Austen and the Navy]

Melissa Sodeman, from “Domestic Mobility in Persuasion and Sandition”

Jocelyn Harris, from “The Reviser at Work: MS Chapter 10 to Chapters X–XI (1818)” [from A Revolution Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion]

Katie Gemmill, “Jane Austen as Editor: Letters on Fiction and the Canceled Chapters of Persuasion”

Taylor Walle, from “‘He looked quite red’: Persuasion and Austen’s New Man of Feeling”

Permissions Acknowledgements

Permissions Acknowledgements are available at this link.