Penny Gay

‘If you are afraid of half a dozen speeches,’ cries Mr Rushworth, as the rehearsals for Lovers’ Vows at Mansfield Park are getting underway, ‘what would you do with such a part as mine? I have forty-two to learn.’ Did the editors of the new Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen intend to evoke Mr Rushworth’s self-admiration or his barely disguised anxiety when they commissioned the forty-two essays of this plump, large-format book? The 1997 Cambridge Companionto Jane Austen, by comparison, seems exiguous: thirteen essays of about 7,000 words, edited by two of the Blackwell contributors (Juliet McMaster and Edward Copeland). An updated edition is due later this year, and indeed many of the Blackwell writers also appear in the Cambridge volume.

Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.

Why do we need another edition of Mansfield Park? Particularly, what is the justification for an expensive one, when we can get a plain reprint for $5, or a well-annotated paperback for $10? The answer is the one that all scholarly editors are driven by: editorial principles have changed. What was considered acceptable textual practice even twenty years ago no longer fulfils readers’ desires to get close to origins, to understand contexts.