Long life
Power of Persuasion
Nigel Nicolson
It was a sweet view — sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being offensive.
Thus did Emma describe the setting of Donwell Abbey, Mr Knightley's house, of which she was soon to become chatelaine. Jane Austen might have had her eye on Chawton House, which belonged to her brother, half a mile from the cottage where she wrote those words, and it was there, last Saturday, that the Jane Austen Society held their annual meeting, on the very day of her death 175 years ago.
She was devoted to the English country- side, and it could never have looked more beautiful than in her lifetime. Walking between her cottage and the house one passes many of the buildings that she knew and looks over the fence at woods and meadows altered more by the season than
by the century. She would have noticed lit- tle change until she turned into the drive and spotted a vast marquee. What she could not have guessed was that it was erected in her memory.
The Jane Austen Society is not very old. Its constitution dates from 1950. It is curi- ous that none existed before (the Bronte Society will celebrate its centenary next year), since no novels have delighted suc- cessive generations more than hers, mainly because they are love stories, describing with unequalled skill the little moves that young people make towards or away from each other, unvaryingly. But the audience last Saturday was mostly middle-aged, dressed as if for a garden-party, attentive to Hugh Cecil's lecture on Northanger Abbey and ready to accept unchallenged the soothing words of the president, the chair- man, the secretary and the treasurer, reporting in turn satisfactory progress on all fronts.
But is it satisfactory? Our most popular novelist should have mothered our most successful literary society. In England she hasn't; in north America she has. There the Jane Austen Society has 37 branches; ours has two. They hold many seminars and a major annual conference; hitherto we have held none. They publish every year a book of scholarly essays and periodic newsletters about her life and work; our Society issues only a thin Annual Report. The Americans organise expeditions to this country to tour sites connected with her; we do not. Our Jane has become their Austen. It is time that we retrieved her, or at least demon- strated to them that our enthusiasm equals theirs.
Until recently the chairman of our Soci- ety was an affable baronet, Sir Hugh Smi- ley. I often heard him assert that he had never read a Jane Austen novel and didn't intend to. I liked the man and never dared ask him the reason for this strange declara- tion, but it struck me as an extreme exam- ple of the English disease, the fear of being thought clever. Members of the society to which he devoted 37 years of his life needn't actually read Jane Austen in order to appreciate her. What they must under- stand is that she stood for everything that was nicest about England.
Now that we have a better-read and more dynamic chairman, Brian Southam, things will change. It was encouraging to hear the surge of approval that greeted the suggestion that we might have something to learn from our American sister-society. Indeed, we should go further. We should create in this country a Centre for Jane Austen Studies, located perhaps in Chaw- ton House itself or in the house which the Austens rented for four years in Bath. Both proposals are being actively studied. What better aim could the Society have than to adopt one of them, raise the necessary funds and bring together under this head the three bodies that currently honour her memory?
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