I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
In the period in which Jane Austen was writing, there was a fierce debate surrounding what was considered literature, and what was merely a novel. Austen herself explored the social stigma around female readers of fiction in her work, Northanger Abbey. In this gothic satirical novel we see Catherine Moorland, a naive young girl with a penchant for reading novels that leads to her grandiose expectations for the real life around her and the experiences she has involving friendship, love, and family bonds. Austen playfully criticizes the popularity of the gothic novel through the character of Catherine, yet in her other works, reading is not something that divides, but instead brings together her characters. As with Willoughby’s copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets that Marriane so adores, it is the small pocket-sized volume that is passed between these two characters as a token of their affection for one another. Austen wrote to both sides of the argument, by choosing to include works of writing in her own novels, she placed herself within the conversation of her time that was actively questioning what merited literary capital.
While all of Austen’s novels were written prior to the popularity of the gift book and the annual, yet another form of literary distribution that even further convoluted the lines between literature and the novel, what was high art and “low” art. In 1829 The Keepsake was published and quickly became the best-selling annual which included both silver plated illustrations and literary contributions. In addition to challenging the conceptions of literary capital, the annual physically moved the readership to a new environment. The Keepsake brought with it the popularity of parlor room readings. There was a shift in both location and discussion surrounding literature. While Austen’s novels were circulating fiction in Regency libraries they were, as Benedict points out, “designed for rapid read” (64).
The annual was an event, it was meant to be shared with others in an intimate environment, to be shown and to be seen with. Poet William Wordsworth pushed back at this idea, as he famously wrote in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that, as Benedict describes, “a new literary language was required in order to reach the neglected, common audience” (64). Yet Austen and The Keepsake both defied this notion. Austen was able to write popular novels that were, on surface level, not “serious literature” yet challenged the division Wordsworth was attempting to put into place through her diverse audience. As Benedict writes, Austen’s novels were able to defy category as “not the product of a formula but of an individual sensibility” (74). The period between Austen’s writing and the emergence of annuals was marked by a shift in the way books were encountered. In Austen’s time, books were a private matter. Like Catherine Moorland proved when suggesting novels to her social companions only to be turned down and ridiculed, they were read in solitude. The act of reading was inherently individual. The reader was free to choose their own preference between literature or novels.
It was through the popularity of public lending libraries in Austen’s time, such as those written about by Barbara M. Benedict in her 2000 essay “Sensibility by the Numbers: Jane Austen’s Work as Popular Fiction.” Benedict states that a shift occurred in the public perception of high and low forms of literature, writing that the circulating public reading libraries “elided the emerging distinction between literature as a class commodity and as a popular entertainment” (65). This was partly due to the organizational method of the libraries—books were arranged “by format and size” (65) instead of by author or genre. Yet the popularity of Austen’s novels still managed to slip between the two distinctions, as Benedict writes, “by combining qualities currently successful in circulating novels” (65). The topics that were considered high literature included education, social etiquette, marriage, etc, and it was largely up to the reader who selected the book to decide whether or not the circulating book was a work of literature or merely a novel. Yet these conclusions were largely shared by the general public.
Charlotte Brontë famously penned a scathing opinion on Pride and Prejudice, calling it “An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden” (63), yet it was the period in which Brontë would have been coming of age and herself writing her novels that saw the rise of the annual, a publication that would even further divide the public opinion on literary capital. Of the literary annuals that appeared following the popularity of the circulating library, The Keepsake, published in 1829 was by far the most popular. Paula Feldman begins her 2006 introduction to The Keepsake for 1829 with an epigraph from Burchard: “An annual is an offering at the shrine of friendship—a token of hallowed reminiscences” (1). Despite the connection to the annual, this sentiment echoes the gift giving seen in Austen’s own work. There is a clear influence between the ambiguous category Austen’s work falls into and the sudden mass popularity of the annual. This was sparked not only by the change in physical publication, but the intent of the reader.
In Austen’s novels and with Austen’s novels, literature is referenced and shared in a unique way. Literature in every form represents the shrine of friendship Burchard suggests. In Mansfield Park, a large section of the novel is dedicated to the storyline of the characters preparing to and performing the 1798 play by Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers’ Vows. It is this act that brings together the characters in both friendship and adversary. And more importantly, it is a sharing of a piece of writing. The annual was just this, it was a publication to be shared. As Brontë criticizes Austen on her “cultivated garden” of literary work, the immense popularity of The Keepsake suggests that Austen was merely paving the way for a publication like a literary annual with both her style and content that, as Benedict writes, offered a “stylistic compatibility between high literature and popular fiction” (64). The Keepsake was the definition of a highly cultivated publication, with its attention and inclusion of both art and writing, with intricate binding, expensive cloth, silver plated illustrations, and carefully printed text. It was an object of beauty, one that–unlike the circulating library books–was meant to be looked at, not merely read.
The Keepsake was itself a cultivated garden of both art and writing. Katherine Harris writes in her 2009 article “Feminizing the Textual Body: Female Readers Consuming the Literary Annual” that “the annuals’ predominant separation from other genres comes from its preparation, production, and packaging of the literary, artistic, and beautiful in such a way that it is transported and translated away from daily life” (575). This is what Austen’s novels did to her readers who flocked to Regency Era lending libraries to read her literary works. The Regency library of Austen’s time contributed to the changing opinions of what “high” literature was, allowing for the later popularity of the annual. Benedict writes of this as the “emerging distinction between literature as a class commodity and as a popular entertainment” (65). Yet Austen did not fail to pick up on the downfalls of the Regency library and the rise of the novel. Lee Erickson speaks to yet another instance of Austen including the opinions of the public in her work. Austen directly references the circulating library in Pride and Prejudice with the character of Mr. Collins. “Mr .Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it, (for every thing announced it to be from a circulating library,) he stated back, and begging a pardon, protested that he never read novels” (Vol. 1 Ch. XIV). It was the mere appearance of a circulating book that prompted Mr. Collins to defend himself from being a novel reader, suggesting that the popularity of the novels was so rampant that they could be quickly spotted by the mere binding.
In addition to the changing opinions on what high literature was, the physicality of literature was quickly shifting. In many ways, the annual was similar to the books found in the Regency libraries. Harris writes, “The annuals were so prolific that reviewer Jane Wilde declared the genre an ‘epidemic … Wilde refers both to the early proliferation of titles and the “sickness” that caused readers to overwhelmingly desire, own, read, and receive annuals” (576). There was a similar madness seen in the Regency library, yet a more public one. Benedict writes on how novels were actually read, “proprietors urged patrons to read quickly … readers competed for new publications … The more customers paid, the sooner they got to borrow fresh books” (78-79). Austen incorporated this in her own novels.
Gary Kelly writes in “Reading Aloud in Mansfield Park” that “In Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, novels still closely bound to literary parody, Catherine Morland and Marianne Dashwood make embarrassing mistakes in judgment and action because they have read the wrong books, or read them too uncritically” (29). Austen is subtly both poking fun at the genre of the novel by suggesting too much indulgence in fiction can have negative impacts, yet she is also putting such opinions in a novel to be read by the general public, largely consisting of fiction readers.
The Regency library was a large-scale version of the later annual. Austen’s works, had they been published nearly ten years later, would have been prime material to be printed in The Keepsake. Yet in either form, Austen would likely not have been a household name. Annuals frequently omitted the names of authors, including the very first publication of The Keepsake. Authors were not named, yet “readers evidently proved unenthusiastic about having to guess the identities of contributors” (17). If novels had been serialized in publications such as The Keepsake as short stories were1—and had Austen’s work been included in such a publication—her keen awareness to the opinions surrounding literary capital would have supplied a layer of irony to the act of purchasing an annual. While she herself, as Benedict writes, doubless wished her readers to buy her books, they were as well adapted to the circulating as to the private library, for she wrote in a practical spirit as a sometime author, rather than as an ideologue” (82). Had her work been moved to the opposite side of the literary market it would have had just as an impactful and lasting influence on the discussion of literary capital as it did belonging in the circulating libraries of her time.
Still, there is something to be said about the commonplace popularity of Austen’s work that contributed to the later popularity of the annual and to the distinctions between “fiction” and “literature” that go beyond the novel and sink deep within the proposition posed by Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads. It is the literary language that reaches the common audience. Austen, as Benedict writes, had “authenticity of her elitism” (80) which perhaps was comforting to her readers. Yet in the annual, the question that many poets who contributed or were asked to contribute were faced with was whether or not their poems deserved a “higher” form of publication. The Regency circulating library offered readership of Austen’s novels to a large audience, not merely to commoners. She did not question whether or not she deserved something more. Authors longed to be included in these libraries, unlike the poets who hesitated to include their work in an annual. What distinguished Austen’s work from the two binaries of literature and the novel is that she attempted neither. She was not writing a new literary language, nor attempting to reach a common audience. Her works were, as Benedict eloquently says, framed “as both fiction and literature—depending on the reader’s own context” (82) this is what set Austen apart from her contemporaries and the reason why she is still so widely read today. Her books are an anomaly, they themselves discuss the complexities of literary capital while defying definition.
Works Cited:
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Penguin Classics. 1995.
Benedict, Barbara M. “Sensibility by the Numbers: Jane Austen’s Work as Popular Fiction. 2000.
Feldman, Paula R. The Keepsake for 1829. Broadview Encore Editions. 2006.
Erickson, Lee. “The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 30, no. 4, 1990, pp. 573–90. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/450560.
Harris, Katherine D. “Feminizing the Textual Body: Female Readers Consuming the Literary Annual.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 99, no. 4, 2005, pp. 573–622. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24296076.
Kelly, Gary. “Reading Aloud in Mansfield Park.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 37, no. 1, 1982, pp. 29–49. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044668.
Novelists such as Mary Shelley commonly published short stories in The Keepsake but it is not recorded than any full length fiction was ever published.