and The Making of Jane Austen. A Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar, Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.
Looser applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, with the following results:
Unfortunately, page 99 is not a full page of text in Wild for Austen! It includes the final paragraphs to the book’s 9th chapter, which describes features of wildness in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Page 99 concludes the chapter. It features musings on the little-known legacy of the novel's heroine, Catherine Morland, which start on the previous page of Wild for Austen.Visit Devoney Looser's website.
In the 1970s, the name Catherine Morland was chosen as a pseudonym by the writer of two mass-market novels. The first one published was Castle Black (1972), with the melodramatic tagline, “Was her own unanswered past a part of their tragic family history—or was she just a pawn in their deadly game?"
Page 99 continues the exploration of the pseudonym Catherine Morland:Morland turned author again in 1976 with a second gothic novel of suspense. Its cover blurb asks, "Was her brother-in-law’s death an accident . . . ? The terrible secret is revealed in The Legacy of Winterwyck." These novels joined the late twentieth-century vogue for cheap Gothic fiction.I end the chapter (and page 99) by revealing the identity of this 1970s Gothic novelist:I’m almost sorry to reveal that, once the veil was lifted from Catherine Morland’s Castle Black and The Legacy of Winterwyck, the pseudonymous author who wrote them turned out to be, in reality, John D. Schubert. I, for one, wish it had been otherwise, but I leave it to be settled by whomever it may concern whether such a tale of literary cross-dressing makes for a worse or a better outcome for this curious heroine. Or perhaps this chapter should end by riffing on the words with which Austen began Northanger Abbey: No one who saw Catherine Morland in her infancy would ever have supposed her born to be a man’s pseudonym.The Page 99 Test is a partial success in revealing the thrust of Wild for Austen. It definitely gives readers some idea of the tenor and tone of the whole. It provides an example of the level of research involved in the book (uncovering this 1970s Catherine Morland’s identity) and provides a sense of the book's tongue-in-cheek tone.
But page 99 reveals only elliptically the theme of the book—exploring evidence for Jane Austen’s legitimate wild side through her writings, life, and legacy. Readers of page 99 wouldn’t know that the book includes 25 chapters, with one on each of Austen’s six major novels, her juvenilia, and lesser-known or unfinished writings.
Readers of page 99 wouldn’t know that the second section of the book goes into Austen's connections to wild relatives and a social circle that was lot more cosmopolitan, vibrant, and interesting than readers today may understand. I describe not only her aunt who stood trial for a capital crime. I describe her London acquaintance with an international spy and his opera diva wife, both of whom were ultimately assassinated. The book tells stories that overturn the myth of Jane Austen as the simple, sheltered figure we’ve long been sold.
The last third of the book is well previewed through the page 99 test. The final set of chapters in Wild for Austen explore Austen’s legacy--who’s gone wild over her--over the past two centuries. These chapters look her and her fiction in popular culture, through the first imagining of her ghost (in 1823) to the first known mention of her fiction in a court of law (1825). One chapter investigates the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that almost were, including the time Judy Garland was set to play Elizabeth Bennet in a big budget musical.
Taken together, Wild for Austen’s chapters—like its page 99—show us that we ought to move the dial from milder to wilder where Austen is concerned. There is hard evidence for overturning the story of Austen’s fiction, social circle, and afterlife as boring, prim, and proper. She, like most of her heroines, could be positively wild.
The Page 99 Test: Sister Novelists.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
