Reading for England: Austen, taste, and female patriotism

ISSN： 1050-9585

Source： European Romantic Review, Vol.16, Iss.2, 2005-04, pp. : 221-230

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Abstract

This article focuses on the contexts and political implications of two letters from early 1813, which offer rare surviving examples of Austen commenting—albeit with her usual elusive irony—on her reading of non-fictional works. In these letters, Austen compares her unexpected enthusiasm for Charles William Pasley's controversial text of military expansionism, An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810) with her “love” for Thomas Clarkson's The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808) and Claudius Buchanan's proselytising Christian Researches in Asia (1811); she expresses a preference for their evangelically-inflected reformism over popular but largely descriptive texts such as John Bigland's Geographical and Historical View of the World (1810), John Carr's Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain (1811), Lord Macartney's Travels in China (1804), and Sir George Steuart Mackenzie's Travels in the Island of Iceland (1812). Through a reading of Austen's reading in relation to forms of female patriotism, to what Nigel Leask has called “the new liberal imperialism,” and to gendered, war-inspired reading tastes as manifest in, for example, The Lady's Magazine, the paper addresses the question of the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Austen's thought.