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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Brian Southam. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000. xv + 384 pages.
When, in Austen's Persuasion, Anne Elliot learns of the engagement contracted between Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick, she conjectures that, despite their differences of temperament, it will be a happy match, thanks in part to Louisa's "fine naval fervour." Brian Southam's Jane Austen and the Navy--originally conceived, we learn, as a "Nelson Birthday Lecture"--represents an exercise in retailoring literary history to suit a readership who share that naval fervor (ix).
Austen, the parson's daughter who, her brother Henry wrote, never led a "life of event," appears to have little in common with Admiral Horatio Nelson--the brilliant tactician, the tragic hero of Trafalgar, the savior of his nation. Jane Austen and the Navy complicates this premise, although perhaps not sufficiently. Southam rereads Austen's novels to reveal an author who might legitimately be considered an annalist of the Golden Age of Sail. At the same time, by reconstructing the networks of patronage and commercial dealings that connected rural parsonages to the Admiralty Office and to the officers' quarters of ships stationed across the seven seas, he shows that in some real sense the woman we think of as a chronicler of private life and the man we cast as a public figure inhabited a common world. These revelations and reconstructions come in two parts (whose overlap makes for some regrettable redundancy). Part 1, "Naval Lives and the Austen Family," traces how, over their long careers, Francis and Charles Austen, Jane's brothers, advanced from their boyhood schooling at Portsmouth's Naval Academy to postings as, respectively, Admiral of the Fleet, the Navy's highest office, and Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies and...
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