Jane Austen and Walter Scott: Not Quite Love and Friendship: Weekend Reading
Catherine Hokin: The History Girls: Jane Austen and Walter Scott: Not Quite Love and Friendship by : “'Walter Scott has no business writing novels, especially good ones – it is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths'”...
...No one can deny, however, how well Austen can mix admiration into rivalry or the elegant dryness of her tone. This archness runs through her letters as much as her novels although the above comment (written to her niece Anna in 1814) does continue in a rather blunter vein: "I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it-but fear I must." It's hard not to hear the gritted teeth grinding just a little.
Walter Scott was, of course, a very different writer [from] Austen... but he was generous in his appreciation of Austen's style. His [possible] review of Emma, published in The Quarterly Review in 1816, is widely credited with bringing her work to a wider audience... stating that it showed “a knowledge of the human heart, with the power and resolution to bring that knowledge to the service of honour and virtue,” unlike the “ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries.”... Her response that the authoress “has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it, except in the total omission of ‘Mansfield Park.’ I cannot but be sorry that so clever a man as the Reviewer of ‘Emma’ should consider it as unworthy of being noticed” can be read in a positive or a peevish tone.
Scott continued to reflect positively on Austen's work throughout his own career. In 1826, he wrote in his private journal:
READ again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me...
In 1832, Scott wrote in the preface to the one novel he wrote with a more domestic setting, St Ronan's Well, that he had no:
hope of rivaling... the brilliant and talented names of Edgeworth, Austen... whose success seems to have appropriated this province of the novel as exclusively their own."...
I would have liked to see... Austen versus Mark Twain. Twain loathed Austen's work, interestingly he also loathed Walter Scott, so much in fact that he once cited Walter Scott disease as a prime cause of the American Civil War: "Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war." Reading Twain on Austen reminds me of the horrors of having to teach her to teenage boys...
#shouldread
