Content area
Full Text
I. THE HATRED OF "GENTLE JANE"
On Friday, 3 March 1939, before the Literary Society of Manchester University, thirty-two-year-old psychology lecturer Denys Clement Wyatt Harding, an admittedly nervous public speaker, stepped up to the podium and announced that "gentleman of an older generation" had totally misread Jane Austen. Harding, supervised at Cambridge by both I. A. Richards, the father of "practical criticism," and F. R. Leavis, the author of The Great Tradition of the British novel, was not a literary critic. Nonetheless, as Nazis marched through Europe, Harding declared it wrong to consider Jane Austen's novels as escapist fiction, as any "refuge for the sensitive when the contemporary world grew too much for them." Austen was not "a sensitive person of culture" who "reveal[ed] with inimitable lightness of touch the comic foibles and amiable weaknesses of the people whom she lived amongst and liked."1 She was a regulated hater, reflecting and managing the "eruption of fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life" ("RH," 350).
It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Harding's ideas, which appeared under the title "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen" in the March 1940 issue of the Cambridge polemical quarterly Scrutiny, almost instantly changing the current of Austen criticism. The novelist's less congenial tendencies had been observed by earlier commentators, including Alice Meynell who dubbed her a "mistress of derision" (1894) and Reginald Farrer who described her as "the most merciless, though calmest, of iconoclasts" (1917).2 While Harding failed to acknowledge such contributions, "Regulated Hatred" comprehended and intensified their readings to such an extent that their views became not only hard to ignore but almost impossible to controvert. In Harding's view, Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice is not just a buffoon, he is a serious evil-"real enough to Mrs. Bennet, [who] is real enough to Elizabeth to create a situation of real misery for her when she refuses" ("RH," 353). Where others read social comedy, Harding read alarming realism.
Jane Austen, as Harding presented her that day in Manchester and one year later in the pages of Scrutiny, marred the portrait of "Dear Aunt Jane" popularized long before in the 1871 memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh.3 Harding's Austen wrote...