ABSTRACT
The impression of Jane Austen which has filtered through to the reading public, down from the first-hand critics, through histories of literature, university courses, literary journalism, and polite allusion, deters many who might be her best readers from bothering with her at all. How can this popular impression be described? In my experience the first idea to be absorbed from the atmosphere surrounding her work was that she offered exceptionally favourable openings to the exponents of urbanity. Gentlemen of an older generation than mine spoke of their intention of rereading her on their deathbeds; Eric Linklater's cultured Prime Minister in The Impregnable Women passes from surreptitious to abandoned reading of her novels as a national crisis deepens. With this there also came the impression that she provided a refuge for the sensitive when the contemporary world grew too much for them. So Beatrice Kean Seymour writes (Jane Austen): 'In a society which has enthroned the machine-gun and carried it aloft even into the quiet heavens, there will always be men and women-Escapist or not, as you please-who will turn to her novels with an unending sense of relief and thankfulness.'
