Jane Austen, anti-Jacobin.(Women novelists)

In a well-known essay first published in 1948 ("Manners, Morals, and The Novel"), Lionel Trilling wrote memorably of "the buzz of implication" which belongs to each time and each culture, and which it is very difficult for those of later times and other cultures to perceive. "The buzz of implication" means

 
   that part of a culture which is made up of 
   half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions 
   of value. They are hinted at by small 
   actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or 
   decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, 
   or rhythm, sometimes by the words 
   that are used with a special frequency, or a 
   special meaning. 

For in the works of an author as beloved, and as written about, as Jane Austen, one might expect that the "buzz of implication" had been thoroughly identified and analyzed. Yet this is not the case. For many modern writers, the implications of Austen's work are all about our own preoccupations ("gender" is, of course, chief among these), not those of the late eighteenth century. Yet Jane Austen herself possessed one of the most sensitive cultural ears of all time, and was mistress of the understatement. Her implications, therefore, contain much of her meaning.

What is astonishing is that her keen ear for the absurd and the obnoxious in society was developed so young. Love and Friendship, which Jane Austen wrote between the ages of eleven and fourteen, finishing it in 1790, is not only very funny. It is also a conservative polemic of considerable power. It does not take a Jane Austen to point out the absurdity of the sensibility cult of the second half of the eighteenth century: the excessive tears, fainting on sofas, etc. In Love and Friendship, Austen satirized this fashion, which she was later to treat in her more mature novels (particularly, of course, Sense and Sensibility), but she also attacked the radical selfishness which went along with the sensibility cult, from its very inception in the work of Rousseau and Goethe, and which was largely identified at the time with revolutionary politics.

This is often missed. The excellent 1997 biography by Claire Tomalin, for example, gets it 180 degrees wrong:

 
   [Love and Friendship] is black comedy, absurd 
   and riotous, rejecting domestic virtue and 
   decorum with elan and authority. 

In fact, Jane Austen used the novel as a vehicle to ridicule the radical rejection of domestic virtue. Marilyn Butler perceived the book's thrust: