Why do some authors stay famous, while others fade from history’s roll of honor? When it was published in 1811, Mary Brunton’s racy novel Self-Control was a runaway bestseller. Although its theme was moral fortitude, it was wildly exciting. An ardent suitor, Hargrave, kidnapped the heroine, Laura Montreville. Despite loving her captor, she resisted his improper advances and passionate mood swings. Her daring escape from Quebec involved piloting a birch bark canoe over a waterfall:
Readers brave enough to open their eyes on the next page discovered that she had survived, to be rescued by a Scottish ship’s captain, who would prove to be the sensible and reliable catch that every girl hopes to find in a murky pool. Jane Austen, who was about to publish Sense and Sensibility, was seriously worried that her novel—which has a similar theme, if a drier line in plot development—had been scooped.
Her fear was justifiable. For the next 50 years, Austen’s novels failed to outpace Brunton’s in sales. Austen died in 1817, aged 41; Brunton in 1818, aged 40. There is evidence that some contemporary readers couldn’t tell the difference between them (Queen Charlotte’s library catalogue attributes Brunton’s novels to Austen) or, like the actor William Macready, actively preferred Brunton. Nobody in 1840 could have predicted that rather than idolizing Sir Walter Scott, whose level of superstardom in that era was supreme, or catapulting over cataracts with Brunton, readers in 2015 would prefer the tea-table realism of Jane Austen, whose fame would resound triumphantly from Harvard to Hollywood.
Professor H. J. Jackson sets out to analyze the factors that affect literary renown and to consider why some authors become permanent exhibits in the gallery of public memory, while others molder forgotten in backrooms. One possible reason, of course, is that quality triumphs in the end. As Austen herself remarked, Brunton’s Self-Control, while “elegantly-written,” has nothing of “Nature or Probability” in it. Scott’s novels are mostly long and feature tartan-clad historical melodrama of a kind that modern audiences relish less than witty domestic romance. But was this evolution of taste inevitable, and Austen inexorably fated to become a sleeper hit? Jackson suggests not. Indeed, she argues that “what happened to Brunton—the gradual fading and extinction of her name—could easily have happened to Austen.”
One thing that made all the difference, Jackson posits, was family. Brunton had none. Austen had a nephew, James Austen-Leigh, who in 1870 published a memoir of his aunt that was a key text in reviving interest in Austen’s life and work. Austen-Leigh conflated Austen with the heroines of her novels, extolling her love of dancing, her lack of pretension, and the bank of green turf at the back of her childhood home down which, like Catherine Morland, she must have rolled. He tactfully omitted details such as the aunt who was a shoplifter and the brother who went bankrupt. His nostalgic myth of Jane Austen was one of minimally educated “natural genius” and rural seclusion. He (falsely) presented her as an author who had no popular following: By claiming that she was an acquired taste, he encouraged hundreds of discerning readers to acquire it.
Jackson notes that it is often authors who have only a coterie readership at first who become the darlings of posterity. (Think of Emily Dickinson and James Joyce.) It is especially useful to an author’s posthumous success if there is more to discover: letters, unpublished work, fragments, romantic scandal. If you are an author who wants to be remembered, I advise you right now to develop a secret cache of writing. And to leave behind, if possible, some helpful relations who can drip-feed the oil of biographical speculation onto the pyre of your reputation, to keep the flame alight.
You should also think carefully about your name and where you live. If your surname is Sim and you reside in Dullsville, you may have a problem. For, Jackson astutely observes, authors whose names can be made into pleasing nouns or adjectives are advantaged in the fame stakes. Devotees of the cult of Jane Austen early became known as Janeites. Poems can be Blakean, Keatsian, Coleridgean, or Wordsworthian. Whereas a Simian poem would just be bananas.
Moreover, those authors whose oeuvre is associated with a picturesque locale, as William Wordsworth’s verse is with the Lake District, can create a compelling tourist tie-in, offering the possibilities of pilgrimage and purchase. Those who have visited Jane Austen’s house at Chawton in Hampshire will know that “Georgian gingerbread” and I Love Mr. Darcy T-shirts are a significant element of the experience.
In her fascinating account of why some authors’ stock has sunk, and others’ has risen, Jackson examines various triumvirates of Romantic-era authors, where one writer has triumphed while the other two have not. The first “three men in a boat” are Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and George Crabbe. Crabbe was an excellent poet whose work was original and satirical. He wrote sympathetically about the lives of the working poor in poems such as “The Village” (1783), which, while introducing multiple characters in a kind of early precursor to TV drama, did not shrink from difficult topics such as domestic violence, sibling incest, prostitution, and alcoholism. His poems were both critically acclaimed and popular, and Wordsworth himself thought they would “last, from their combined merits as Poetry and Truth, full as long as any thing that has been expressed in Verse.”
Sadly, he was wrong. Why don’t we read Crabbe now? Well, certainly his unmelodious name was not helpful in creating a Crabby, or even Crabbesque, following. But there were other factors. Like most of his contemporaries, including Scott and Wordsworth, Crabbe wrote long narrative poems. In the 21st century, poetry is the caviar of literature: enjoyed occasionally by a few, in canapé-sized bites. Long poems are, by definition, history. Also, Crabbe wrote in heroic couplets, a poetical form that was already rather dated in his era. And his life as a clergyman was modeled on the “plain sense and sober judgement” he professed in his realist works. Here was none of the ardent zeal for the French Revolution and then horrified apostasy that characterized Wordsworth’s early career. Crabbe had no Romantic circle; he left no illegitimate daughter in France. Like Robert Southey, the overweening poet laureate from 1813 to 1843, he may have produced good work, but his career didn’t make exciting copy.
Wordsworth had more luck. As well as long poems he penned short lyrics, which would be widely anthologized in the late 19th century. His tone and subject matter commended themselves for inclusion in textbooks. Yet his biography had a dramatic arc. And his controversial “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” to his Poems (1815) became a statement of poetical theory with which students continue to do intellectual battle. Wordsworth claimed, loosely following the classical dictum of Horace, that great, game-changing authors were never immediately popular or critically acclaimed. Rather, they must cultivate a small group of “fit” readers—thoughtful intellects, open to new ideas—and thereby creates the taste by which they may be enjoyed.
Professor Jackson is not persuaded by Wordsworth’s theory: On the whole, she prefers Samuel Johnson’s notion that the mass of common readers will, over the course of a century, determine an author’s survival value. However, as Jackson is at pains to demonstrate, fame is not monolithic. It consists of reputation among various different groups: nonreaders of that author (who nonetheless recognize the author’s name); leisure readers (who may know only one work); academics (who analyze literature professionally); and writers (whose relationship with the author may involve practical influence). An author may have a graph of reputation that charts high with one group and low with another.
John Keats, for example, was not in his lifetime particularly popular with academic readers or professional writers. His early mentor Leigh Hunt was much better known: for his political interventions, his friendship with Lord Byron, and his editorship of magazines that published liberal writing. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge preferred the poetry of Barry Cornwall, an established poet who wrote thrilling dramatic scenes that particularly appealed to a female audience.
However, after his painfully early death at 25 in Rome from tuberculosis, Keats acquired a symbolic value as an emblem of aesthetic martyrdom. It was rumored that his fatal illness had been instigated by a damning review. His slim but sensuous output was reassessed and found to be the nipped bud of a glorious poetic flowering: a totem of aspiration and promise cut tragically short. Keats’s posthumously published letters—which are some of the most playful, passionate, and profound in English literature—fed this narrative of unconsummated love, both between Keats and his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, and between Keats and his public: a host of future fan(nie)s, who never got to embrace him in anything but imagination. Keats’s short and fiery life became inescapably part of his enduring literary brand.
We love to love those whom we appreciate too late. Thus, William Blake, an artist and poet who died largely unknown, was championed by later 19th-century writers and artists including Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, becoming much more famous than other working-class poets such as Robert Bloomfield and John Clare. Blake fitted the ideals of the Victorian arts and crafts movement as an artisan who created his own, experimental, self-published texts, integrating painting, engraving, and writing. In America, he became celebrated as a libertarian, a political radical and religious iconoclast.
As Jackson argues, different eras have made their own Blake. In the 1960s and ’70s, he was cited as an exponent of free love and a critic of the repressive forces of state control; now, in Britain, Hubert Parry’s 1916 setting of Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” is routinely chosen as a favorite anthem by both the Conservative and Labour parties. The importance of his words and of his reputation is sustained by the fact that they are contested; old bones that are constantly picked remain unburied.
Jackson explores the competing forces in the Internet age that affect the progress of fame. One is the fact that it is easier now than ever before to discover and champion a “lost” author. Many Romantic-era women writers, like Mary Brunton, whose work for years was neglected, have resurfaced thanks to projects that post their novels for free online. Academia is overpopulated, and young scholars, who need to find space to colonize, may well move out from the Manhattan of Byron to the Staten Island of Southey. Yet the globalizing tendency of digital culture and the gravitational pull of Google also create a self-reinforcing feedback loop of celebrity, where publishers sell (and thus commission) most books on well-known figures and university courses are safely built around the Big Six (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley).
Those Who Write for Immortality comprehensively demonstrates that this list of six is not reflective of the diversity of authors who were valued in the 18th and 19th centuries. H. J. Jackson urges us to read widely, to think outside the box set of Romanticism, and to remember how much accident and afterlife have contributed to creating a canon that would have mystified many of those who were part of the era’s literary scene. Her book is also a timely reminder to any writer dead-set on immortality that it is foolish to court such a fickle mistress. Better to espouse Woody Allen’s dictum: “I don’t want to live in the hearts of my countrymen. . . . I want to live on in my apartment.”
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.
