The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Chapter 4 examines Jane Austen’s early work and her authorial decision to focus on her characters’ methods of escaping social and literary conventions rather than the conventions themselves. For example, Austen’s own “personal obscurity” and her documented self-deprecating attitude towards her work are not indications of polite decorum; rather, they reveal Austen’s strategic way of rejecting her surrounding world. Many male critics misread the fact that Austen’s characters live according to the dull social conventions of their time, trivializing her work with a vitriol that suggests insecurity; Henry James’s criticism, for example, barely conceals his fear that, as a novelist himself, he is actually in Austen’s debt.

In Austen’s 1790 novel Love and Freindship [sic], the characters of Laura and Sophia parody literary conventions of the day. They immerse themselves, for example, in stories of romance that “create absurd misconceptions” about love and relationships (115). By adhering to the rules of popular fiction that encourages such banal narratives, Austen demonstrates how “bankrupt that fiction is” (115). Austen’s sense of alienation from the society in which she lives and writes is clear in her mockery of conventions like romantic plotlines.  

The Watsons, an unfinished novel by Austen, concerns the life of a widowed father of two sons and four daughters.