Inquiring readers: This post is a follow up to my review of Dr. Jessica Volz’s book, Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney. I mainly reviewed Chapter 1, which concentrated on Austen’s visuality. For this post, I asked the author about Radcliffe’s, Edgeworth’s, and Burney’s contributions and why she began her interesting observations with Austen.
Vic: Your book’s title is Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney. Jane Austen was younger than the last three women and not as famed during her lifetime. Why did you choose to place her “story” first in your book? Is it because she emerges as the best known, most popular author today – the genius?
Volz: Jane Austen was indeed born after the other women authors whose novels I discuss. She was born on December 16, 1775 – roughly 8 years after Maria Edgeworth, 12 years after Ann Radcliffe and 24 years after Frances Burney (Madame d’Arblay). Nonetheless, she was outlived by these illustrious contemporaries, departing from this world in 1817 at the age of 41, leaving her last work – Sanditon – (distressingly) unfinished. While Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney were geniuses of their times in their own respective ways, I believe Austen is a genius for our era as well. The novel coronavirus pandemic has made some of the dynamics that her novels expose all the more relatable. After William Shakespeare (whose fame as an indivisible person is still a question of heated debate), many would argue that Austen is the most universally acclaimed literary figure in history. For a writer whose name was not initially attached to any of her published works, that’s quite the surge to branded stardom. When I set out to turn my doctoral research into a book that would bridge the divide between academic and non-academic audiences, I wanted its discussion to open with an author whose appeal continues to grow across the globe and whose brilliant use of language has inspired other luminaries, from Sir Winston Churchill to J.K. Rowling. It’s not for nothing that Austen is the only woman apart from the Queen to appear on a UK bank note. I am also very grateful that Caroline Jane Knight, Jane Austen’s fifth great niece and the founder and chair of the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation (which I cannot encourage you enough to support!), supplied the foreword to my book.
Jessica Volz at Chawton House. Image courtesy of Dr. Volz
As Anna Laetitia Barbauld once exclaimed, “Next to the Balloon, Miss Burney is the object of public curiosity.” The celebrity status that Frances Burney – novelist, playwright, diarist and Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte – had attained upon being acknowledged as the Authoress of Evelina, the book that everyone was reading in 1778, is no longer. From an anonymous literary “incognita,” who had relied on writing both furtively and in a feigned hand, Burney had metamorphosed into a highly visible household name. (Perhaps only Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, exceeded her standing in this regard.) Edmund Burke found in Evelina a page-turner, while Sir Joshua Reynolds reputedly offered £50 in exchange for the author’s identity. As today’s bookshelves can attest, Burney’s fame has curiously waned; in her afterlife, Austen has usurped Burney’s place on the podium of visibility.
While each of the novelists I examine in my book relied on visuality – a methodology empowering the continuum linking visual and verbal communication – its forms and functions varied in scale and in style. In addition, Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney experimented with and contributed to different approaches to the novel: Austen modernized narration through her introduction of free indirect discourse; Radcliffe reinterpreted the Gothic novel and removed her plots to temporally and geographically disparate settings (picture a scene painted by Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain); Edgeworth imbued her narratives with political undertones that conveyed the situation in Ireland and was innovative in her theatrical experimentation with male narrators and cross-dressing; Burney’s comparative visibility in society, from Samuel Johnson’s circle to the Court of Queen Charlotte, shaped her treatment of the courtship novel and influenced her transition from an epistolary to a third-person perspective, which was, in my humble opinion, nothing short of Revolutionary.
One of the rooms at the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton. You can see Austen’s writing desk on the far right, where she wrote in private. Image courtesy of Dr. Volz
My book moves from novels empowering the role of projections of character exterior to the self (think portraiture and architectural metaphors) to the drama of reflections, fashion and the minutiae of self-display (as in color codes of emotions and eyes that “speak”). This calculated progression shows how visuality “liberated” women novelists at a time when self-expression was particularly constrained for their sex, arming them with a means by which they could freely direct the reader’s attention to otherwise “indescribable” aspects of the era: its gender politics, socio-economic constraints and patriarchal abuses.
Vic: Please summarize the contributions to visuality that Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney made that influenced Austen or were parallel to Austen’s influences, and that were readily known to 18th- and 19th-century readers.
Volz: Given that writers cannot help but be influenced by what they read, the forms and functions of visuality that I describe in my book were trending to varying degrees when Austen was penning her novels. For instance, she would have been well-acquainted with Burney’s manipulation of ocular dialogue and color codes of emotion. However, Austen’s approach to directing the female gaze is more complex, especially when combined with free indirect discourse. She often challenges her protagonists and, in turn, readers of her fiction to make judgments about true character through portraiture and architectural metaphors – approaches to visuality that were also employed by Radcliffe and Edgeworth. The fact that visuality was not an esoteric means of communicating the otherwise difficult/impossible to express was what gave it power. The language that women novelists had to employ (to preserve their reputations as respectable women) reveals the self-consciousness that resonated between the author and her fictional women. Women novelists were, like women readers of novels, seen as threats to a patriarchal regime of knowledge where men had power over women’s perceptions of their surroundings and themselves. Today, gender equality remains a call to action, an unfortunate truth which UN Secretary-General António Guterres has also reiterated. In addition to appealing to those similarly infatuated with British literature, my book would serve as a uniquely valuable resource for diplomats, politicians and lawyers, as visuality remains an efficient and effective means of strategic and diplomatic communication that should not be overlooked.
Vic: My third question is a minor one: Burney and Austen never met, but their lives in terms of acquaintances and places they visited and lived in were close. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Volz: Yes, I think it’s fascinating to consider that Austen and Burney would have been directly or indirectly acquainted with a number of the same sights and social contexts on British shores. The views of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney were culturally representative, making them and their novels choice case studies in my book.
(Gentle reader: please read more about the intersection between Frances Burney and Jane Austen in the link below along with accompanying images.)
Vic: Why did you not include more information about Austen’s ‘Persuasion?’
Volz: It was admittedly difficult to narrow the scope of my book. I ultimately opted to confine my discussion to novels published in Britain between 1778, which coincided with the start of the Anglo-French War, and 1815, the year that witnessed the Battle of Waterloo. (Burney was actually in Brussels at the time.) As my book explores cross-Channel tensions and manifestations of cultural identity, this period was of particular interest. Nonetheless, Austen’s use of visuality in her other works, including Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, would be fascinating subjects of future exploration. Like Burney’s approach to visuality, Austen’s penchant for architectural metaphors and portraiture remained largely unchanged during her lifetime. It was a hallmark of her artful construction of language and, like her penmanship, held strong right up until the end.
Additional information about the Burney-Austen connection:
“Jane Austen and Great Bookham,” a post on Deborah Barnum’s blog, Jane Austen in Vermont, and written by guest contributor Tony Grant (accompanied by his usual informative photographs), discusses how Frances Burney’s and Jane Austen’s lives intersected. Below find a slide show of a few of the images in that post.
Fanny Burney’s tomb rests in the cemetery of St Swithins Church in Bath. George Austen is buried in the same churchyard. St. Swithins is the church where Jane Austen’s parents– George Austen and Cassandra Leigh–were married.
Email comment from Jessica Volz regarding the Jane Austen–Frances Burney connection: The Burney-Austen link is fascinating. I made it to King’s Lynn after speaking at the Pride an Prejudice bicentenary conference at the University of Cambridge and quested for her birthplace, which was marked by a Clarks footwear shop (as of 2013). What a shame! Burney led a fascinating life, and her journals and letters are the stuff of which novels were/are made.
Inquiring readers,
Jane Austen's World 