Abstract
This study examines the social and symbolic significance of ownership, exchange and loss of objects in the novels of Jane Austen. It uses definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary in order to distinguish between an object and a thing, though in some of the sources cited these terms are used interchangeably. The OED defines an object as, originally, ‘something placed before or presented to the eyes or other senses’ and now more generally, ‘a material thing that can be seen and touched’, whereas a thing is that which ‘exists individually (in the most general sense, in fact or in idea); that which is or may be in any way an object of perception, knowledge, or thought; an entity, a being. (Including persons, in contexts where personality is not significant.)’
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Notes
Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in The Future of the Novel (New York: Vintage, 1956), p. 14.
Henry James, ‘The Future of the Novel’ (1899), in The Future of the Novel (New York: Vintage, 1956), p. 33.
Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.
Sutherland continues by saying that these ‘coexist comfortably with a high critical appreciation of the modernist import of her technical innovations as a novelist’. Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. v.
Margaret Lane, ‘Jane Austen’s Sleight of Hand’, in Margaret Lane, Purely for Pleasure (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), p. 97. [Revised version of Lane’s Address, The Jane Austen Society Report for the Year 1962 (Alton: Jane Austen Society, 1963)].
Unsigned review, Quarterly Review XIV (dated October 1815, issued March 1816), 188–201; in B.C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 58–69.
Neither Burney nor Edgeworth used the term ‘novel’ for Camilla, Cecilia or Belinda. Camilla is presented on its title page as a ‘Picture of Youth’ and in its Advertisement as ‘a little Work’; Cecilia is presented as the Memoirs of an Heiress; Belinda’s Advertisement offers it as a ‘Moral Tale’. The preface to Evelina, however, enlists Burney in the rank of ‘humble Novelist’, and while it suggests that perhaps ‘the total extirpation of novels’ might be a good thing, adds that contributing one that can safely be read without injury must surely be allowable. Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9.
Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 161.
Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), pp. 110–48, p. 130.
Duckworth sees Mansfield Park as a metonym of other social structures, for example. Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. ix.
Freedman introduces her study of things in the Victorian novel by asserting that it ‘describes, catalogs, quantifies, and in general showers us with things: post chaises, handkerchiefs, moonstones, wills, riding crops, ships’ instruments of all kinds, dresses of muslin, merino, and silk coffee, claret, cutlets’. Elaine Freedman, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 1.
Helmuth Berking, Sociology of Giving, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1999), pp. viii–ix.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Selections from the Logic of Practice’, in Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 190–230, p. 198.
Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen (London: Peter Owen, 1975).
Barbara M. Benedict, ‘The Trouble with Things’, in Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, eds, A Companion to Jane Austen, 2nd edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 343–54.
Janet Todd, ed., Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (London: Harper, 2013).
For example, Lyn Pykett, ‘The Material Turn in Victorian Studies’, Literature Compass 1 (2004), 1–5,
and Clare Pettitt, ‘On Stuff’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (April 2008), 1–12, 3.
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© 2014 Sandie Byrne
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Byrne, S. (2014). Introduction. In: Jane Austen’s Possessions and Dispossessions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406316_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406316_1
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