​​     Many of Jane Austen’s devoted readers feel surprise and consternation over the passages in Persuasion about "troublesome, hopeless" Dick, the deceased son of the Musgrove family, along with the mocking depiction of his sorrowful mother. Austen doesn’t pull her punches in describing Dick as “stupid and unmanageable" and as someone who "had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved.” His death far from home was “scarcely at all regretted.”
​   Some scholars have surmised that, had Austen not been in the throes of her final illness, she would have revised her callous descriptions or excised them altogether. Others have speculated about why Austen inserted these harsh passages in a novel famous for its gentle heroine and its wistful tone.
   Could it be that these strongly-worded passages hint at something Austen felt strongly about? Her seemingly out-of-place attack on the Musgroves is intended to catch the reader’s attention, to provoke them to pause and probe beyond the liminal space of the Musgrove's drawing room and to confront the costs of empire which supports their way of life. Indeed, we were mistaken in taking these passages at face value.
​    Dick Musgrove may well have been a satiric, inverted portrait of a real-life Richard who served in the Navy—Richard Parker, infamous in Austen’s time but forgotten today.

   Dear Readers:
​   I recently received a flurry of emails from a well-known (if controversial) Jane Austen researcher asking to rebut my "completely misguided" comments about Jane Austen's novel Emma. He said I was "blissfully unaware" of the real reason that Emma Woodhouse prevented Harriet Smith from marrying Robert Martin. His theory is that Emma contains several hidden plots, all of which indicate Austen's truly radical beliefs.
   In a gesture of good faith, I have agreed to share his theory that a dramatic “subterranean story” (one of many) lurks beneath the placid surface of Emma. What follows are his insights, not mine:

    ​As many scholars of Austen have long pointed out, Jane Austen intended to use Sanditon to explore the social and moral consequences of capitalism. Sadly, Austen laid the manuscript aside during her final illness. Interrogating Austen through a critical lens reveals that she was a committed anti-capitalist who was determined to fight back in the only way she could--through her pen.
    I am not referring to Austen's well-known portrayals of the landed gentry and the lesser nobility, but rather, her subtle attacks on the pernicious influence of consumerism. To a startling extent, the buying and selling of things and the rise of the urban bourgeoisie forms a backdrop to her so-called marriage plot novels. Scholar David Daiches called Austen "a Marxist before Marx." 
      It is no exaggeration to say that Austen shows us whether a character is good or bad by their reaction to consumerism. Two of Austen’s heroines never step inside a store--Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price. And, significantly, the heroines who do go shopping always live to regret the experience. It is only the fops and fools who like to shop, as we will see. Austen’s message could not be clearer: Capitalism is the root of all evil. Let’s critically take the novels one by one...

    Since I started Clutching My Pearls, I’ve read a lot of Austen scholarship, some of which I've found informative and thought-provoking, but some of it I've found to be agenda-driven and influenced by presentism.
    Granted, I'm not an academic. My eyes glaze over at mentions of Derrida and Foucault—all that stuff is just beyond me. I'd like to know more about Austen's contributions to the development of the novel, but modern scholars have moved beyond that. Or rather, they seem to take it for granted that Austen was writing at such an advanced level of subtlety and symbolism that the merest object or reference—an apricot, a shawl, a hedge, a surname—can unlock the key to a hidden level of meaning that exists underneath and often in contradiction to the narrative. I'm unconvinced: would an author of her time, even an author of genius, write novels about happy marriages that aren't really about happy marriages at all?
    I have no quarrel with individual reactions to Austen, or with what people draw out of Austen. But I do differ with those who ascribe improbable opinions to Austen, hence the following rebuttal.
   For my 100th blog post, I offer six simple questions which I think academics might profitably ask themselves when formulating their theories about who Jane Austen was, and what she believed...