Listen to co-curator Juliette Wells discuss two of Jane Austen’s passionate readers.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) proclaimed Austen’s greatness far and wide in his editor’s columns for The Atlantic Monthly. Having first read Austen in midlife, he shared his enthusiasm with his entire family, much as the Quincys did in the mid-nineteenth century. Mildred Howells (1873–1966), a poet and visual artist, traveled with her father to England in 1904. Their Austen-inspired tourism to Bath and Winchester subsequently featured in Howells’s columns and books.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907)
Mildred and William Dean Howells, 1898
Bronze relief
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, transfer from the National Gallery of Art, gift of Mildred Howells, 1949; NPG 65.65
During his lifetime, William Dean Howells was as famous as his good friend Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). The two enjoyed teasing each other about their very different views on Jane Austen. “My dear Clemens,” Howells wrote in 1903, “Now you’re sick, I have a great mind to have it out with [you] about Jane Austen. If you say much more I’ll come out and read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to you.” In 1909, discussing a recent article of Howells’s on Edgar Allan Poe, Twain joked, “To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin’s [sic]. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.” It’s important to remember that this was personal correspondence, not a public utterance by Twain. Nevertheless, the bantering reminds us that at the turn of the twentieth century, Austen’s enthusiastic readers included many men, as had been true since her lifetime, and remained true well after Howells’s death.
The now-prevailing notion that Austen fans are overwhelmingly women results in large part from the great popularity of television and film adaptations of her novels in our own time. Four of the most beloved, originally released in 1995, are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary this year: Clueless, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility.