HEART OF DARKNESS: RECENT READINGS OF JANE AUSTEN

In addition to over sixty doctoral dissertations, the years 1990 to 1993 saw the appearance of more than 300 books, essays, and articles devoted to Jane Austen. Of the fifty books on her published in these years, some of course need not detain us long. But if we except items designed for the coffee table, various Janeite effusions, and the many continuations and adaptations of the novels, the overall figure still left of thirty to forty full-length works produced in such a short span of time remains impressive. Nevertheless, quantity, though it may daunt, does not necessarily convert readily to quality, and we may conse? quently wonder how many among these recent offerings truly add to our knowledge of their chosen subject and may live to influence future work. The three books under consideration in the present review may stand as a repre? sentative sampling of what some critics have of late been saying about Austen and of the value of their remarks. Although better books on Austen than any of these three came out in the first four years of the decade, none worse than Kuldip Kaur Kuwahara's did. Her Jane Austen at Play: Self-Consciousness, Beginnings, Endings, which began as a 1991 dissertation with the same title at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, cannot have received much if any revision, given its mix of the unintelligible, unilluminating, and clich?d. It clearly signals its origins in applying to Austen an external authority of little or no relevance to her, an application attended by a long series of extended quotations that make up the bulk of the book and that speak only to the student's reading patterns: they certainly tell us nothing about the creative author nominally under discussion. Of these quotations, many derive from the novels themselves and help only to retell plot. Nor does Kuwahara use the ones from other writers on Austen to add to what we previously knew; she does not use them, that is, for