For a very long time, I have always thought there was something slightly strange about the contemporary appeal of Jane Austen’s novels. For all the silent reading that goes on undetected, there are the many television versions and films, and a degree of comforting satisfaction in the consumption of them for which it would be hard to find a parallel. What is odd is twofold: firstly, that Austen is writing for the most part about the gentry rather than the peerage, and secondly that the novels are unquestionably seen in the twentieth century as a kind of endorsement of middle-class lives and feelings.
To be able to love Jane Austen’s writing today, through print or the audio-visual, is to be able to seal oneself off from the harsher and more tawdry aspects of life. To be sure, literature of this kind, as it developed away from Samuel Richardson’s novels, might glance or stare relentlessly with dismay at the fall from grace that could happen to young gentlewomen at the instigation of scoundrels. But there can be no doubt where the reader’s feet stand, or where their posterior is seated, which is in some kind of security from this catastrophe.
Romance in itself in the novels is anodyne, after many tears, and for the young women it looks across or up a little: but it is neither middle class, nor upper class, precisely. Mouths may water over Fitzgerald Darcy, yet there is no apparent title there, despite his aunt, and Bingley is suspected by modern critical thinking of being a gentrified product, of unknown origin. Peers are really a class apart (Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount and Baron, as Jennifer Kloester so ably details), and in that respect it is intriguing to speculate on what the appeal of Austen’s novels to the Prince Regent may have been. He was undoubtedly looking down, since his own tastes and patronage were elevated far above the quiet, rural life that Austen favoured.
Yet it is clear that the lives of the gentry, and their aspirations as expressed in the mothers and at times the daughters, have somehow been translated into bourgeois currency which can thrive in modern society. The actual middle classes of the Regency and beyond do not provide much symbolic stimulation of the same kind, certainly not in romantic fiction. Earning a living – rather than having one as a clergyman, who would participate according to his choice in the lives of the gentry – was no basis for captivating romance.
If that strange translation in itself is enigmatic, then it becomes more puzzling when placed against the appeal of the novels of Georgette Heyer. Heyer’s taste is undoubtedly for the peerage, and her willingness to disport with Dukes is the forerunner of the veritable plague of those with that highest of peerage titles across contemporary regency romance. Her heroes are quite evidently a class apart, and will express contempt for those beneath them, or for the ‘vulgar’ in any form, as those around him observe of the saturnine and supposedly ‘satanic’ Duke of Avon.
There is something distinctly different about the appeal of these novels. My sense is that it is rooted in the lack of apology in the conduct, manners and attitudes of the class of heroes in particular, although a good number of the women bear the same mark. How attractive and amusing it must be to be classified as one who can look down on others. While there may be social mobility involved – A Civil Contract has that explicit theme – it is driven by an unashamedly acknowledged need to shore up the aristocratic finances. Heyer’s favoured class is dicing with debt in many cases, which makes the maintenance of their glamour and elegance all the more exciting. A contemporary society of middle-class readers can enjoy a day out in a virtual world, while accepting the fragility of something so witty, beautiful and spoilt.
Which all says a lot about impermanence. The late Georgian and Regency periods straddled the earthquake of the French revolution. In and after the first World War society was shaken by another class revolution, after which the sardonic and increasingly reckless confidence of the English country house and its offspring began to fall apart. The characters remain fascinating performers from a time that escapes the tedious grasp of the everyday – or, as Heyer has it, ‘old shades’, whose loss we can ultimately endure.
Graham Ley 