Old Q in the Corner: Jane West, Late Life, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Jane West's late life and writings show a self-consciousness about authorship and a strong perspective on literary value and fame in old age. This essay shows how such a consciousness is revealed in a private letter, her last novel, Ringrove (1827), and her detail-filled will. West's late-life self-conception in a private letter as an ‘old Q in the corner’ deserves to be examined as a metaphor for the ageing female author. Taken together, these three texts demonstrate how West tries to shape readers' responses to old women as writers, using self-deprecating humour as a response to perceived neglect. The results are hardly comic, but they give us the opportunity to examine how a self-consciously older woman puts her words before a mass readership that was not necessarily well disposed to receive them.

The One and the Manor

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.

Conserving Histories: Chivalry, Science and Liberty

Chapter Four explores how, in the years leading up to the publication of Waverley, historical novelists recuperate the radical and reformist readings of history that had emerged during the post-French Revolution debate. Two overlapping strategies of reclamation emerge. First, as in the works of Anna Maria Porter, Jane Porter and Sarah Green, the radical emphasis on (non-chivalric) sensibility becomes an emphasis on chivalric morality. Second, the radical emphasis on rational historiography is co-opted, as seen, for all their differences in political perspective, in works by Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane West, which gesture towards scientific history. This absorption of reformist and radical energies into more conservative or cautious historical fictions facilitated a myth of modern gradualism against a background of secure commerciality; this myth would be problematized by Walter Scott.