Jane Austen is known and loved for her wit and wittiness. But how did she actually use the term itself in her novels? Examined with close reading of Jane Austen’s novels, and contextualised with 17th, 18th, & 19th century definitions of the word ‘wit’.
Here is the link to my article: doi.org/10.3390/h11060132
‘& Not the Least Wit’: Jane Austen’s Use of ‘Wit’, in Humanities 11:6 (2022)
In this video, I talk about Jane Austen and wit. One of the things I love most about Jane Austen’s writing is its funniness, its cleverness, its intelligence, its wit and wittiness. But how does Jane Austen herself actually use the word ‘wit’ within her novels? I think the answer might surprise you!
Austen championed wit. It is a truth universally acknowledged. Her brother, Henry Austen, described her as possessing ‘the keenest relish for wit’ (Biographical Notice of the Author, 1817). In 2013, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, in a speech given at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, explained that she ‘merits her place’ on the new ten-pound note because her ‘sharp wit…has ensured her place among the country’s favourite authors’. The epithet ‘witty’ is frequently applied to her heroines too. An introduction to Pride and Prejudice (1813) describes ‘Elizabeth’s witty intelligence’. There is much truth to this, but we might also remember that within the novel itself the only character who explicitly applauds Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘wit’ is Mr Collins. Other characters refer to Elizabeth’s ‘quickness’ (Mr Bennet) and ‘liveliness’ (Mr Darcy). It is in fact Caroline Bingley to whom the word ‘wit’ is most frequently applied within the novel. Austen’s satirical Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters (c.1815-6) archly proclaims that a ‘Heroine’ must be ‘a faultless Character herself’, who is ‘perfectly good’ and therefore has ‘not the least Wit’. We know that perfect faultlessness in a heroine made Austen ‘sick & wicked’ (she wrote to her niece Fanny Knight in 1817 of her ‘ideas of Novels & Heroines’ that ‘pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked’) but should a heroine, or indeed a hero, really have no wit?
Many critics have examined the implications of Austen’s and her characters’ wittiness but have assumed the meaning of the word ‘wit’ without full interrogation. In the long 18th century, in an attempt to cognize and rationalise its myriad disparate connotations, the definition of the term ‘wit’ was much debated and policed. Histories of long-18th-century wit demonstrate its imperative significance to the period’s intellectual and literary context. What remains to be clarified and articulated, however, is Austen’s understanding of the term, and therefore why and how she deployed the word ‘wit’ in the way that she did. Hitherto, Austen’s utilisation of the word ‘wit’ as it appears in her fiction has never been subject to a detailed analysis. This is a considerable gap in critical scholarship, given the centrality of wittiness to Austen’s novels and to many readers’ appreciation of her writing. I overturn accepted understandings of Austenian ‘wit’ by demonstrating that, within Austen’s lexicon, the word does not have the positive associations that critics have often assumed.
In this video, I start by surveying and outlining the development of the term ‘wit’ in its 17th, 18th, & 19th century conceptions in order to illuminate what ‘true Wit’ might be (with reference to Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, John Locke, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Hannah More, and Thomas Gisborne). I then move on to examine how the word ‘wit’ is employed within Austen’s novels; and contextualise the usage of the term:
1. as a designation of insincere language
2. as common-place banality
3. as antagonism
4. as false cleverness
Habitually in Austen’s diction, what is categorised as ‘wit’ in the novels is, with wonderful irony, in fact a failure of true wit.
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