Was Jane Austen a Lesbian?
• Amorous Scholarship
To think that I let my subscription to the London Review of Books lapse (well, I still have the coffee mug).
I don’t know which is sillier: the conversion of literary biography and criticism into celebrity culture or the expectations that artists - who are nothing more than gifted manipulators of materials - dwell on a finer or more high-minded plane than the rest of us ambulatory bipeds.
“Proposing that Jane Austen was a lesbian or Sophocles a cross-dresser,” writes the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, “is one way for those who have nothing especially stunning to say about irony or tragic fate to muscle in on the literary scene. It is rather like being praised as an eminent geographer for finding your way to the bathroom.” Literature, in other words, is too big, too independent, too important to be caged in the confines of life. Anyway, what, exactly, is so important about life? The poet John Ashbery once told me he had never wanted to write about any of the normal stuff of life because “much the same things happen to everybody”. There is a disconnection between art and life that should warn us against moral or psychological invasions. Orwell wondered if we’d feel any differently about Shakespeare if it turned out he was in the habit of assaulting little girls. Well, would we? The answer, it seems, is yes. The high aesthetic position that the art and the life are utterly different has seldom been observed. …
Comments
Back in the day, critics had something to say about the book, and who gives a shit whether Austen was gay, straight or asexual?
Posted by: tom paine | November 21, 2006 06:13 PM