How to Do Jane Austen Criticism

Jane Austen's novels pose a challenge for criticism. Something in the texture of her writing – its conversational ease, high spirits, bourgeois-domestic subject matter – confounds the heavy machinery of the academic critical apparatus. (Confounds it, but needless to say doesn't deter it.) Isn't it possible to do justice to the importance of the novels without trampling all over the reader's fresh pleasures and burying the point of the reading along with its innocence? On the other hand, a respectable critic doesn't want to end up sounding like the "Janeites" who warble so wonderfully through Claudia Johnson's history of Austen cults, gushing about her "indefinable charm" and "bright sunny nature", and her life that "passed calmly and smoothly, resembling some translucent stream which meanders through our English meadows".