ONE FOR THE MONEY, TWO FOR THE SHOW: THREE NEW AUSTEN STUDIES

Julia Prewitt Brown has written a rewarding book on Austen, one solid and fresh enough that it just about makes it up to the reader ofthe three books under consideration here for having to read the other two. In Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form she treats "the nature and meaning of feminine life" as Austen conceived them. She argues brilliantly against the stereotypical charges that the novels lack a sense of history and picture the trivial aspects of day-to-day life. Rather than being of small or restricted concern, the domestic and social in Austen, Brown shows, possess in themselves, and without any need for justification, profound ethical and cultural significance. In this illuminating view we misread the novels if we concentrate on their implications for masculine destiny or the political destiny of her society. Austen's "deference to local, civilized history constitutes a conception of history, not an evasion of it." And ac? cording to this conception, the everyday existence Austen takes as her subject is not a "corner" of the universe some critics have seen it as, but at the center of a full, valid world. Domesticity and marriage, then, play crucial roles in social and moral change, and so, of course, do women. Brown's first and last chapters, which focus on generalities, provide a good frame for the readings of the individual novels. The first chapter offers a firm, sure introduction to Austen's subject, style, and structure, an introduction that should prove valuable to the beginning student of Austen as well as to the person who has read and studied her for years. Though Brown speaks here of the com? monest topics in Austen criticism?marriage, irony, and the like?she still re? mains continuously interesting. She examines, for example, how consequential for the continuing moral life ofthe society is the marriage of ordinary persons. It is "the nexus of generational change." In the course of her discussion she pays at? tention to such issues as the public significance of sex roles; the relation between passion and the struggle for identity in women; and the problematic nature ofthe marriages that end the novels. Brown treats style in a similarly intriguing way. She begins by observing, that "Just as the experience of marriage mediates