A little over two centuries ago, Jane Austen famously recorded her acquaintances’ opinions, pro and con, of Emma and Mansfield Park. So perhaps she would have enjoyed browsing the catalogue of an auction held this week to benefit Britain’s Royal Society of Literature, a charity that runs literary events, gives grants and prizes to authors, and engages in outreach to students in disadvantaged public schools.
In keeping with the All Jane Austen All The Time theme of this bicentenary year, the RSL’s online and live auctions, which wrapped up on Tuesday, featured nothing but Austen-related items -- eighteen of them, including drawings, annotated film scripts, and special offers, such as a book-club visit from an Austen expert or tea with a recent Austen biographer.
Among the most covetable items were handwritten comments on Austen by famous authors – Kazuo Ishiguro on Mansfield Park; Margaret Atwood and British children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson on Pride and Prejudice; Ian McEwan on Northanger Abbey. Some of the comments were adoring (“I’ve learnt so much from this supreme novelist”-- Ishiguro) and some were impish (“Were underage readers of this book, such as myself, doomed to a series of hopeless liaisons in which unpleasant men turned out to be simply unpleasant?”— Atwood). And one commenter was as harsh as Austen’s young acquaintance Fanny Cage, whose response to Mansfield Park was “did not much like it. . . nothing interesting in the Characters––– Language poor”: Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin said he finds Austen “a bit stuffy and dull.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, bidding on the worshipful Ishiguro item closed at £1,899 (about $2,433), whereas the carping Rankin went for a mere £150 ($192).
Were I richer than I'm ever likely to be, I wouldn't have minded bidding on that Atwood letter. But my personal favorite among the items was the cartoon by British artist Posy Simmonds, who imagined Jane Austen weighing whether to return from the afterlife to enjoy the accolades now heaped upon her. Simmonds’ Austen envisions what awaits her – impertinent prying into her sex life, stultifying feminist lit-crit jargon, fans prattling about Colin Firth and calling her “Jane” – and decides to stay put.