Precarious Austen: A Shabby Genteel Story

Abstract

My essay works backward from today’s incontrovertibly immortal Austen to consider a precarious Austen – an Austen on the verge of sinking ‘too low’, as her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, labelled the heroine of Austen’s novel fragment, The Watsons. This Austen is not the spinster redux of today’s global domination, but the Austen of 1817, an unmarried middle-aged woman living off the charity of her brothers at Chawton Cottage. ‘At the height of her powers’ (according to Virginia Woolf), she was also fragile, fugitive, shabby genteel. The category of precarity, I argue, helps us to trace Austen’s unique calibrations of social rank, genre, tone and stylistics, and to consider the economic, social, emotional and stylistic forms that shape the prehistory of Austenian fame.