Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style

by D.A. Miller

Book Overview

What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer's unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen's style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.

For no Jane Austen could ever appear in Jane Austen. Amid happy wives and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069112387X
• ISBN13: 9780691123875
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Written with style

Austen's achievement is to create a kind of magically anonymous narrator, one whose judgements and descriptions never seem to proceed from a person freighted with human foibles, but from an untouchably transcendent wit, and Miller's book teaches us how and why this is. It is a tour de force.

An extraordinary work of criticism

This is probably the most thoughtful and intelligent book that has ever been written on Austen. Miller addresses the basic problems that any critic of Austen's work must consider -- particularly the narrative stance for which she is famous -- and he carefully examines its component parts and its preconditions. It will be impossible for any future commentators on Austen to proceed without taking account of Miller's insights.