The Fortunate Fall: Ill Writing and Sanditon

In his magisterial Jane Austen: The Secret of Style, D. A. Miller writes that “the better to measure these faults of style in Sanditon, it will be convenient if I first indulge a confession. Whenever I write, I fear this more than anything else: writing badly. Accordingly, against an imagined charge of ‘ill written,’ I diligently produce signs of a will to style” (81). Inspired by Miller’s imagined charge, I want to extend it to argue not that Sanditon is badly written, but that it is written out of a state of illness. What, I ask, would it mean to read Austen as an ill writer? Writing from a nonnormative body might prioritize disorientation, surreality, slippages, giddiness, slurring, clenching, disconnection, dependence, pain, distraction. Ill writing might blur the lines between subjects – perhaps between a character and a narrator, perhaps even between D.A. Miller and Jane Austen, as in the passage I quoted above, where a contagious bad style infects the critic from his long-dead source. In this talk I use recent theoretical work in disability studies to read Sanditon as a paradigmatic example of a genre based in a very different somatic experience, a genre that opens up new ways of reading.

Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. In 2018-2019 she was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She has published widely on Victorian familial and marital norms, disability studies, noncanonical women writers, material culture, popular fiction, aestheticism, and late-Victorian texts. Her most recent book is Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2016), which won the NAVSA Best Book Prize for 2016 and was chosen as one of Choice‘s Outstanding Academic Books of 2016. She has also written Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011); The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001); co-edited with Kathy A. Psomiades, Women and British Aestheticism (1999); edited Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and edited Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006).

Her forthcoming book, Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (Princeton UP, 2021), addresses the feminist philosophy of ethics of care as a promising theory for reading nineteenth-century character.

Event details

Date: Thursday 19 November, 2020

Time: 5.00-6.30pm (17-18.30) GMT UK

Location: This is an online event. The Zoom link will be sent to you directly via email before the talk. Please note that registration will close at 3.30pm on Thursday 19 November.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact d.dove@surrey.ac.uk

Image of Austen's Sanditon manuscript digitised by Cambridge King's College, Cambridge https://janeausten.ac.uk/manuscripts/sanditon/b1-1.html