Tea at Trianon: Jane Austen at 250

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 11, 2025

Jane Austen at 250

A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy | The Morgan Library & Museum

Jane Austen was not a radical. She was a brilliant storyteller but she was not Mary Shelley. From The Conversation:

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius follows the 2023 BBC series Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius. Through the show’s titling and packaging, and by combining scholarly with popular commentary, the series promotes Austen as an authorial standard of modern literature.

It also sometimes presents her as socially subversive and a breaker of barriers, amplifying arguments that she was a “radical.”

The meaning of the word radical is to uproot and dismantle fundamental structures. Austen’s novels, skilful and absorbing as they are, offer no social or political revolutions: rather, they reform and realign Regency Britain, using the romance plot and its Cinderella template.

From my perspective as a professor of global pre-1800 literature who has studied narratives around the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, what the series perhaps overlooks is that, in today’s context of Brexit, the politics of canon and tradition affirm a nationalist and neoimperial culture. (Read more.)