Jane Austen's Names
Riddles, Persons, Places
In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in "Northanger Abbey", is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a "big cheese" – the moon's reflection on the water's surface. It worked.
In "Jane Austen's Names", Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places – real and imaginary – in Austen's fiction. Austen's creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen's names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen's technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism – in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency.
Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, "Jane Austen's Names" will revolutionize how we read Austen's fiction.
Conetnts:
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts
Part I. England
Chapter 1. Words, Names, Persons, and Places
Chapter 2. Names as History: Invasion, Migration, War, and Conflict
Chapter 3. Civil War, Ruins, and the Conscience of the Rich
Part II. Names
Chapter 4. Naming People: First Names, Nicknames, Titles, and Rank
Chapter 5. Titles, Status, and Surnames: Austen's Great Surname Matrix
Chapter 6. Personal Names (First Names and Surnames) in the "Steventon" Novels
Chapter 7. Personal Names in the "Chawton" Novels
Part III. Places
Chapter 8. Humans Making and Naming a Landscape
Chapter 9. Placing the Places
Chapter 10. Counties, Towns, Villages, Estates: Real and Imaginary Places in the "Steventon" Novels
Chapter 11. Real and Imaginary Places in the "Chawton" Novels
Conclusion
Notes
Index
About the Author
Margaret Doody is the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame.
Reviews
"A brilliant, provocative, and important book. Doody has marshaled a truly unprecedented array of material about names, places, and plotting culled from a dazzlingly expansive reading of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels – as well as books on local history and the English countryside. The result is an illuminating and enjoyable book that teaches us to think about Austen's artistry in a fundamentally new way" – Claudia L. Johnson, author of "Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures"
"Doody brings the insights of a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing about Austen to this book. I admire how Jane Austen's Names brings to view the riddling and punning play that Austen indulged in her naming practices. Doody reveals an author who positively relishes the comic resonances of the names she encountered in the social world around her" – Deidre Shauna Lynch, author of "Loving Literature: A Cultural History"
"This is a remarkable book – profuse, forensic, vividly imagined. To say that it enriches our experience of Austen's fiction hardly does justice to the way Doody brings all its people and places to life through their names. In this erudite etymological adventure she excavates the deep text of Austen's England, its embedded meanings and hidden histories" – David Fairer, author of "Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790-1798"
"Doody draws on a prodigious array of literary, geographical, historical, and linguistic information to figure out what the names of people and places in Jane Austen actually mean. With characteristic energy and curiosity, she links Austen's riddling allusions to larger worlds, even to the movements of time itself" – Jocelyn Harris, author of "A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen's Persuasion"
