Histories of the Present and the Historicity of the Present
Histories of the Present and the Historicity of the Present
Mansfield Park, Emma, Jane Austen’s Letters
In the approximately fifteen years during which her first three novels were revisited and revised, Jane Austen achieved an appreciative perspective on her milieu that would have been impossible had that interval been less protracted and less consequential. By process of revision and reflection, a world and milieu that had been written out of history was provisionally restored in a practice inimitably Austenian. This restoration is especially evident in the two novels composed just after the period of revision—Mansfield Park and Emma—whose worlds remained both an unprecedented representation of “real life” to contemporary readers and a resuscitation of a present lost to time. Similarly, the letters that Austen wrote her sister over the course of her life make clear that the “real natural every day” world that she brought vividly to the published page was the only “prospect” when there was increasingly no future for her.
Keywords: history, present, retrospect, Emma, rereading, Mansfield Park, Austen, style, everyday, sublime
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