‘Gossip’ and ‘Twaddle’: Nineteenth-century Common Readers Make Sense of Jane Austen

In one of her essays on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf suggested that much of our knowledge of Austen’s life and works was dependent on ‘a little gossip, a few letters, and her books’,1 while Henry James dismissed early twentieth-century writing about Austen as the ‘pleasant twaddle of magazines’.2 I have used their terms – ‘gossip’ and ‘twaddle’ – to signal that I will be using material that has historically been ignored by literary critics, in the belief that the responses of ‘common readers’ of Austen have something to tell us about Austen’s works that we cannot discover through traditional pure literary-critical analysis alone.