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Article: Jane Austen's Englishness: Emma as national tale.(Miscellany)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
- Article date:
- January 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Jane Austen Society of North America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Except in America, she does not travel. She is too soaked in Englishness and English literature to be caught--a most malign histrionic, especially when quiet.
--V. S. PRITCHETT
OF ALL NOVELISTS, Jane Austen is the Anglocentric, narrowly and specifically concerned not with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but only with England, the English, and Englishness. The novels are determinedly English through and through, a particularity Jane Austen arrived at after completing the juvenilia, those childhood pieces designed for family entertainment and full of jokes about Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, with invented Scottish and Irish names to laugh at and ludicrous ...