Janet Malcolm’s books are usually written with an ulterior motive, some hidden subject encased within the stated one. 

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

 (1994) was a meditation on the art and business of biography, 

 (1990) a comment on the relationship between journalist and subject, 

 (1999) a portrait of trial law as the struggle between conflicting narratives. Each book dealt, if only obliquely, with the search for an ­ever-­elusive ideal of “truth.”

 has no such ulterior motive; indeed, it is difficult to perceive any motive for the book at all. It seems to have germinated when Malcolm stumbled on a passage in her old copy of 

, a cult volume during Malcolm’s youth in the 1950s, in which Toklas (1877–1967) wrote of the years she and writer Gertrude Stein had spent in the Bugey region of eastern France during the Nazi occupation. “When I had occasion to read this chapter again,” Malcolm writes, “I was struck by its evasiveness, no less than by its painfully forced gaiety. How had the pair of elderly Jewish les­bians escaped the Nazis? Why had they stayed in France instead of returning to the safety of the United States? Why did Toklas omit any mention of her and Stein’s Jewishness (never mind lesbianism)?”

This certainly seems a promising line of inquiry, but the story itself, once Malcolm dug it up, turned out to be the usual tale of wartime expediency, and while the pair behaved no better than most, in that dire time and place, they also behaved no worse than many. Stein and Toklas proved to be what the French at that time dubbed 

: They accommodated themselves to those in power in order to get by, just as most of the population ­did.

Rich and spoiled, Stein (1874–1946) had in her youth been protected from grim economic realities, and her politics were those of the rentier class from which she sprang. She was a snob, as well as “a conservative with an increasingly reactionary ­bent—­she loved the Republican Party, she hated Roosevelt, and she actually supported Franco.” Living in an ­anti-­Semitic world had conditioned her, and Toklas too, to downplay their Jewishness to the point where the subject eventually became unmentionable. Stein’s 

 (1945) never refers to it, and when Toklas entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1957, she contrived to make her action sound more like a return than a ­conversion.

As late as 1937—during the Spanish Civil ­War—­many of Stein and Toklas’s French friends were members of the Croix de Feu, a ­right-wing organization founded by veterans of World War I, but the two ladies adjusted their ideas somewhat as Hitler’s armies overran Europe. Still, they never turned their backs on their reactionary friends, and Stein always expressed open admiration for Marshal Pétain, who headed the collaborationist Vichy government during France’s occupation. It was one of Pétain’s advisers, Bernard Faÿ, who served as Stein and Toklas’s protector during the war ­years.

Faÿ, who came from a family of rich Catholic royalists, was appointed head of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the Occupation, replacing a Jew. A writer and pro­fessor, he specialized in American history and culture and had long been a promoter and translator of Stein’s work. Throughout the war he saw to it, via the ­

 of police in the Bugey town of Belley, that the two American ladies were protected from harassment and provided with a sufficiency of food and coal. Faÿ would be arrested and imprisoned after the liberation; in 1951 he escaped from a prison hospital with the aid of a group of friends that ­included—according to the scholars Malcolm ­consulted—­Alice Toklas, who apparently sold artwork by Picasso to help with costs. (Stein by this time had been dead for five years.)

This tale may cast no great glory on the American couple, but it is not terribly damning either. While it is true that wartime France had its share of heroes, the vast majority of the population simply did what they had to in order to survive. Which of us, under those circumstances, would have done better? This seems to be the way Malcolm sees it too, for she soon abandons the unedifying little story and proceeds to examine Stein as a ­writer.

Here, again, her treatment of the subject is cursory, if occasionally amusing. The three eminent Stein scholars she interviews at length are ­high-­modernist purists: They are pitying when Malcolm tells them she doesn’t care for Stein’s more ­avant-­garde works, and appalled when she admits to having enjoyed Thornton Wilder’s middlebrow, sentimental play 

. (“At these times I feel like someone who has ordered a cheeseburger at Lutèce,” she remarks dryly.) The background reading Malcolm took on during her research for 

seems to have been something of a chore. “For a long time I put off reading 

” (Stein’s hefty mod­ernist novel), she writes. “Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and thick and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of the book’s weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections.” (Mal­colm is in good company: Even the voracious Edmund Wilson said defiantly, “I have not read this book all through, and I do not know whether it is possible to do so.”)

Once she finally gets down to reading the book, she is not encouraged. “It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the author’s refusal (and inability) to write a novel.” Stein’s style, as other non-fans of her work will testify, is egregious and deliberately challenging—some might say stupefyingly self-indulgent. “It is as if Stein had made a rule for herself that she must allow every subject to exhaust itself before letting go of it,” Malcolm says. “Nothing is ever said once. It is always said many times with slight variations creeping in as they do in repeats in music.” The excerpts from the novel Malcolm includes in her text richly confirm this description.

Malcolm comes close to declaring Stein an artistic fraud, bolstering this case with copious quotations from the writer’s disaffected brother Leo, who believed that his sister’s eccentric style derived from the fact that she couldn’t write proper English, referred to her admirers as “fatuous idiots who go to hear her silly twaddle,” and called her most popular book, 

, “a rather clever superstructure on a basis of impenetrable stupidity.” Yet after describing her own reservations about Stein’s work and her laborious delvings into the oeuvre, a task that appears to have been both painful and unrewarding, Malcolm draws few conclusions, and ends up softening her sometimes sharp remarks with a few morsels of praise. “The alacrity with which [Stein] catches her thoughts before they turn into stale standard expressions may be the most singular of her accomplishments,” she writes, and opines that “every writer who lingers over Stein’s sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.”

Surely not every­ writer—­and perhaps not even Malcolm herself. The statement seems disingenuous, the mark of an unwillingness to render an aesthetic judgment that might place Malcolm in the unaccustomed role of critic rather than her usual guise of journalist. But 

 is not really a work of journalism; it is an uneasy mixture of essay and reportage that lacks a unifying idea or direction. Malcolm includes her ­by-­now-­familiar philosophic digressions on the elusiveness of truth, the control of narrative, and the nature of biography. “Biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell.” There is nothing too surprising in this. She goes on: The biographer “turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography.” Why bracing? Why flaccid? Couldn’t the two adjectives just as easily be switched ­around?

But the nature of biography is not really Malcolm’s subject in 

, and it’s not really clear what is. It’s hard to figure out what Malcolm is trying to achieve with this book, or what originally sparked her interest in two women she doesn’t even seem to like very ­much.

. By Janet Malcolm. Yale Univ. Press. 229 pp.

Cover photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Reviewing Janet Malcolm's book on Gertrude Stein and her long-time companion Alice B. Toklas, in which Malcolm comes close to declaring Stein an artistic fraud.

Literary Companions

For elegance, invention, and mellifluence, the English language is usually considered to have reached its apogee during the Elizabe­than and Jacobean eras. But there is a case to be made for the ­18th-­century Augustan age, with the great critic, poet, philologist, and journalist Samuel Johnson as its brightest star. Observing Johnson in conversation with Edmund Burke, the young novelist Fanny Burney opined that for sheer brilliance Burke was “the second man in this Kingdom,” but that Johnson was “the first of every kingdom.” Praise indeed, for along with Burke, the most dazzling politician of the age, Johnson’s close social circle included Edward Gibbon (whose 

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

 achieved a sustained perfection in prose that has perhaps never been matched), Oliver Goldsmith, Adam Smith, Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the great naturalist Joseph Banks, the portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick (the Olivier of his day), and the irrepressibly naughty and amusing young James Boswell, who would one day write 

In retrospect, it is easy to see Johnson standing as a sort of dividing line between the distant past and our own era. While he identified himself as a Tory and saw himself as a conservative and upholder of tradition, this was true only in the most limited sense. He was passionately ­anti-­militarist and ­anti-­imperialist, and (unusually, for his time) deplored his country’s foreign adventures and the oppression of native peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He was just as passionate in opposing slavery. He spoke out loudly against the political suppression of Catholics in the British Isles. His essay advocating the humane treatment of prisoners of war during the wars against the French was so powerful that the International Red Cross saw fit to reprint it in the mid-20th century. He protested against vivisection of animals for scientific research, which he considered as immoral as the torture of human beings. Most significantly, he commiserated deeply with the poor, whose unhappy lives he ascribed to social conditions rather than their own vices. “A decent provision for the poor,” he wrote, “is the true test of civilization.”

Intellectually, too, Johnson pointed toward a new sensibility. His 

 (1755) marked a revolution in English letters by being descriptive rather than prescriptive: In other words, he gave up on the project of creating a dictionary that would purify the unruly language by fixing meanings and pronunciations (as the Académie Française had recently attempted across the Channel) in favor of simply describing the state of English as it was spoken at that time and had been in the past. His philosophy and achievement cleared the path for the 

 begun a century later. “Language,” Johnson wrote, “is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived.” Of words, he said that “like their author, when they are not gaining strength, they are generally losing it. Though art may sometimes prolong their duration, it will rarely give them perpetuity.”

 appeared in 1791, six years after the great man’s death. Being one of the most enchanting writers who ever lived, Boswell succeeded in creating an image of Johnson that has so far proved impossible to dislodge from the public imagination, that of the clubman, the wit, the doughty champion of tradition, the truculent, bullying conversationalist who “tossed and gored” his interlocutors with impunity. All these aspects of Johnson are real enough, but they are only part of the picture, and probably not the largest part. In any case, Boswell’s account is heavily weighted toward the last 20 years of his subject’s ­life—­the years, in other words, of the two men’s friendship. Only one-fifth of the text is devoted to Johnson’s first 55 years. These defects have now been compensated for in two new biographies, written in time to celebrate the tricentennial of Johnson’s birth: an English one by Peter Martin, and an American one by Jeffrey ­Meyers.

As far as quality and depth go, there is not any real competition between the two. Martin has spent a lifetime steeped in Johnson’s world, having written definitive biographies of Boswell and of Edmond Malone, the Irish Shakespearean scholar without whose help the unstable Boswell might never have finished his massive biography. Meyers is a prolific and facile writer who has produced a range of biographies so large and ­varied—works on ­Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Amedeo Modigliani, W. Somerset Maugham, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Wilson, and many ­more—­as to preclude a deep knowledge of any one area of study. If it were necessary to choose between the two, Martin’s would be the book to read. Nevertheless, they are both interesting, and both succeed in filling in the very substantial gaps in Boswell’s ­account.

 “presents a man essentially at peace in his own mind. Boswell did not want his portrait to be of a man wracked with self-doubt, guilt, fear, and depression. He rarely cited from Johnson’s writings, did not make sensational use of Johnson’s diary extracts to which he had access, and was not privy to his friend’s deepest secrets and worries.” The diaries (or at least what remained of them after Johnson made a huge bonfire of his private papers shortly before his death) and his surviving prayers and meditations portray a man “poised dangerously between control and mad­ness, between doubt, fear, and faith, tormented by the dread of loneliness and death and lacer­ated by physical as well as mental sickness.” A severe depressive, Johnson occasionally toyed with the idea of writing an account of his “melancholia.” It’s a pity he did not, for then we might have had an addition to the literature on the subject as valuable as Robert Burton’s 

A depressed Johnson was not the father figure that Boswell, himself prey to crippling bouts of melancholia and insecurity, wanted to celebrate. Another side of Johnson he chose to suppress was his sexuality, a subject explored by Martin and especially by the more prurient Meyers. Everyone knows Johnson’s much-quoted line about his idea of contentment being to “spend my life in driving briskly in a ­post-­chaise with a pretty woman,” but few will know the answer he gave to Garrick (here provided by Meyers) when asked what activity gave the greatest pleasure in life. The first pleasure, he said, was “fucking & the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho’ all could not fuck.”

Meyers devotes considerable space to evidence for what he calls Johnson’s “secret life”: a sexual desire to be locked up and physically disciplined, activities that Meyers, on the basis of scholarship by Katharine Balderston and others, believes Johnson and his friend Mrs. Hester Thrale engaged in. Martin pooh-poohs the notion, but the citations Meyers provides from Johnson’s correspondence with Mrs. Thrale do seem too suggestive for mere coincidence. And in any case, why shouldn’t Johnson have his sexual peculiarities just like anyone else? The real question is just what, if anything, this knowledge adds to our understanding of the man and his work. Meyers claims that “Johnson’s secret life adds to rather than detracts from his greatness. It makes his character more complex and tormented, his struggle more extreme, his achievement more impressive.”

There is a certain truth in this, however ­self-­justifying it might seem coming from Meyers. Johnson was on record as believing that “to strive with difficulties and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.” If this is true, then Johnson more than earned whatever felicity he attained, for the difficulties he encountered on his upward path were considerable. He was poor, obscure, and largely self-educated. Struck by scrofula shortly after his birth in 1709, he lost much of his eyesight and went through life ­half-­blind, having to read by pressing his face to the page. He suffered from violent physical tics that have been posthumously attributed to Tourette ­syndrome.

Though highly sexed, he was not attractive to women. His 17-year marriage, to a woman two decades his senior, was not a passionate one, and many women found his appearance quite grotesque. Fanny Burney wrote, “his mouth is continually opening and shutting, as if he were chewing something; he has a singular method of twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands: his vast body is in constant agitation, seesawing backwards and forwards: his feet are never a moment quiet; and his whole great person looked often as if it were going to roll itself, quite voluntarily, from his chair to the floor.” “When he walked,” Boswell observed with his usual genius for the apt image, “it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters.”

Johnson was not only the first English literary celebrity, in the modern sense of the word, but one of the first professional men of letters. Lord Chesterfield had originally proposed to stand patron to the 

; in the event, he contributed a mere £10 to the effort as against Johnson’s seven years of unremitting labor and poverty, then tried to claim some credit for the final product. Johnson’s famous snubbing letter to Chesterfield, which Boswell published in 1790 for all the world to read, was described by one critic as “the Magna Carta of the modern author, the public announcement that the days of courtly letters were at last ended.” “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?” Johnson asked pointedly. “ . . . I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.”

As a character, Johnson turns out to be not only funny and wildly eccentric—as we always knew he was—but deeply poignant. I was moved to tears by Martin’s biography, as I also was by his beautiful life of Boswell. But neither Martin’s book nor Meyers’s answers the fundamental question of just how important Johnson’s writing (as opposed to his famous witty remarks) will continue to be to 21st-century readers. Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare and its introduction, as well as his 

, were turning points in literary criticism, vastly important to scholars but not much read nowadays, and the same applies even to the great 

 live on under almost purely academic ­auspices.

His essays, however, particularly those he wrote under the alias of “The Rambler,” in a pamphlet series of the same name he published twice a week from 1750 to 1752, deserve to be brought back into the literary mainstream. Meyers is correct to emphasize the influence Johnson exerted on Jane Austen, two generations younger than he. Like countless readers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Austen was steeped in Johnsonian principles imbibed through his essays, and each of her novels can be seen as a working out, in imaginative terms, of themes explored in 

. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to differentiate one author from the other, as in this excerpt from

 172: “It is certain that success naturally confirms us in a favorable opinion of our own abilities. Scarce any man is willing to allot to accident, friendship, and a thousand causes which concur in every event without human contrivance or interposition, the part which they may justly claim in his advancement. We rate ourselves by our fortune rather than our virtues, and exorbitant claims are quickly produced by imaginary merit.” As guides to the kind of questions that were troubling thoughtful men and women ­then—­and ­now—­Johnson’s reflections can hardly be ­equaled.

 Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (2006). 

 The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, 

mong other publications, and she was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin

, Belknap/Harvard University Press, 608 pp, 2010.

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Brooke Allen reviews two biographies of a man we thought we knew, Samuel Johnson.

First Man of Letters

Not long after Jane Austen’s death in 1817, at age 41, her brother Henry wrote a “Biographical Notice” to coincide with the posthumous publication of 

. “Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer,” he assured his sister’s readers. “A life of usefulness, literature, and religion was not by any means a life of event.”

Can any biographer in literary history have been less prescient? In the two centuries since Henry Austen made that assessment, curiosity about his sister’s life, along with enthusiasm for her work, have reached a frenzied level, and her very name has become “an infinitely exploited global brand,” as Claire Harman observes in her fascinating and beautifully written study of the shifts and changes in the novelist’s reputation, 

. Nowadays, Harman points out, “a glance along the ‘A’ shelf of any good bookshop will reveal a dizzying array of books on Jane Austen: study guides, biographies, source books, companions, books on Jane Austen and the theater, Jane Austen and food, and religion, and money, and the Romantic poets. . . . Jane Austen on film, in a social context, as a parson’s daughter, as a sailor’s sister, the historical Jane Austen, the postcolonial Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s style.”

Austen’s consummate marketability extends far beyond books. As Susannah Carson, a doctoral candidate at Yale and editor of the anthology 

, remarks, Austen has also inspired “board games, tarot card decks, figurines, Web sites, discussion forums, book club meetings, Empire-waist fashions, and so on.” Along with Beatrix Potter and the House of Windsor, Austen is now one of the most reliable cash cows of the British heritage industry, with travel agencies offering tours of “Jane Austen Country” and television companies ever ready to produce the umpteenth version of this or that favorite Austen tale. Better still, her work delights not only the middlebrow book-group matron but the most highfalutin of literary theorists: Never before, perhaps, has so small an oeuvre (she wrote six novels) launched so many academic careers. By now Austen’s name bears “such a weight of signification as to mean almost nothing at all,” posits Harmon. “To many people, 

, and even ‘Jane Austen,’ simply evoke the actor Colin Firth in a wet shirt.”

How did this enormous industry grow out of this least showy of authors, a provincial lady so modest about her work (according to her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who produced the first full-length Austen biography) that she wrote in secret and would hide away the slips of paper when she heard anyone approaching? Harman begins her book by demolishing that vision of the author as a pure canard. There is ample evidence that “Jane Austen never exhibited self-consciousness or shame about her writing and never needed to. Unlike many women writers of her generation—or stories about them—she had no struggle for permission to write, no lack of access to books, paper, and ink, no frowning paterfamilias to face down or from whom to conceal her scribbling. Her ease and pleasure in writing as an occupation are evident from the very beginning, as is the full encouragement of her family.” Quite a few of her family members were published authors, including two of her brothers. All the siblings wrote, and they read each other’s work with interest. Their proud father actually acted as his daughter’s agent, sending around her early manuscripts to London publishers. Jane Austen considered herself a professional and was eager to earn money from her work.

She achieved considerable renown during her own lifetime and attracted a collection of fans that included Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, and the disreputable Prince Regent, who let the author know that he would be pleased to have a novel dedicated to him. (She obliged—she could hardly have done otherwise, much as she disapproved of the man—with 

.) She also earned a total of more than £700, not a bad sum for a supposedly retiring lady author of that period. But by the 1820s, only a few years after her death, Austen’s books had gone “out of print, out of demand, and almost out of mind.” In 1832 the publisher Richard Bentley purchased her copyrights, and over the next few decades the books appeared in a trickle, a few hundred copies a year. They “were not essential reading for the high Victorians and certainly were not ‘beloved.’ She had become a half-forgotten niche writer.”

What changed? Harman says that Austenmania arrived in two major surges: one in the 1870s, after the publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoir, the other in the wake of the burst of Austen film adaptations of the mid-1990s, including the phenomenally successful 1995 

 miniseries (in which Colin Firth, as Mr. Darcy, appeared in the famous wet shirt) and the wonderful Clueless, a reimagining of 

 in contemporary Beverly Hills. Jane Austen was included in the Dictionary of National Biography in 1885; William Dean Howells lauded “the divine Jane”; the late-

Victorian literary historian and critic George Saintsbury coined the term “Janeites” to describe her fanatic admirers. By 1905 Henry James, jealous as ever of the success of another writer—even a dead one—was grousing about “the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be saleable, form.” From a hundred years beyond James, one can only say he didn't know the half of it.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Thirty-Three Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

 glancingly treats some of the same issues Harmon grapples with. It should be said right up front that the title is a misnomer. A few of the 33 are great writers (E. M. Forster, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, Kingsley Amis, C. S. Lewis, W. Somerset Maugham, A. S. Byatt); the rest whom Carson includes are just writers. Plenty of great authors who have written brilliantly about Austen are left out: W. H Auden, Edith Wharton, George Henry Lewes (the most percipient literary critic of the Victorian age), and Willa Cather, among others, but then perhaps the collection would have poached on the territory of B. C. Southam’s comprehensive two-volume Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (1968, 1987).

The real treats in Carson’s collection often come from writers you can’t quite imagine as diehard Janeites. There is Martin Amis, for instance, who contributes a charming essay on 

. “Why does the reader yearn with such helpless fervor for the marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?” he wonders. “Why does the reader crow and flinch with almost equal concern over the ups and downs of Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley?” Who would have suspected the formidable Amis of such a sentimental streak? Or that he had read this favorite novel five or six times?

Curiously enough, much of the best work in Carson’s book comes from academic critics. Ian Watt’s examination of 

 in the context of late-18th-century philosophy is a model of lit crit at its best; so is Lionel Trilling’s classic essay “Why We Read Jane Austen.” In a dazzling analysis of some of the formal attributes of Austen’s novels, Eva Brann points out that “no symbols, metaphors, mere patterns, or levels of abstraction are to be found in them. Certainly there are revelations, correspondences, significances. But nothing is ever there for mere form’s sake or to suggest or stand for something else—which is why the novels so repel literary criticism.”

C. S. Lewis had the gifts of both the creative artist and the scholar, and Carson has included his profound observations about 

; he is the only commentator I have read (even including Kingsley Amis, who came close) who succeeds in making us understand just why Fanny Price makes such an unsatisfactory heroine, in spite of the Janeites’ insistence that she is to be admired.

Something must be put into the heroine to make us feel that the other characters are wrong, that she contains depths they never dreamed of. . . . But into Fanny, Jane Austen, to counterbalance her apparent insignificance, has put really nothing except rectitude of mind; neither passion, nor physical courage, nor wit, nor resource. Her very love is only calf love—a schoolgirl’s hero worship for a man who has been kind to her when they were both children, and who, incidentally, is the least attractive of all Jane Austen’s heroes. Anne [Elliot, in 

] gains immediately by having for her lover almost the best. In real life, no doubt, we continue to respect interesting women despite the preposterous men they sometimes marry. But in fiction it is usually fatal.

To judge by the continued and even accelerated proliferation of Austen-related films, souvenirs, and books (of which both Harman’s and Carson’s volumes are manifestations), the surge of Austenmania that started in the 1990s is far from over. What new heights can Jane’s fame reach, now that she has already conquered the world? Perhaps the current craze for Jane Austen book clubs may draw enthusiasts away from the miniseries and movies and tea towels and get them back, finally, to reading the books. For no filmed version of an Austen novel is really satisfactory: Of all 19th-century novelists, she dwells the least on the physical surfaces that are the essence of the cinematic art.

The Other Side of the Mirror: Travels in Ancient and Modern Syria

, which is forthcoming. She was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. 

"Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World"

"A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Thirty-Three Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen" 

edited by Susannah Carson, Random House, 2010.

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Nearly two centuries after her death, Jane Austen's very name has become a global brand.

Celebrity Jane

The era when serious historians aspired to write works that also qualified as literature are long, long gone. During the Enlightenment, David Hume and Edward Gibbon wrote prose as grand as any in our language, and brought sophisticated literary techniques to the craft of history writing. Their tradition was carried on by the great historians of the 19th century: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Hippolyte Taine, Francis Parkman, Alexis de Tocqueville, George Bancroft, Jacob Burckhardt, and Thomas Carlyle all composed their epics with an eye to the literary immortality they eventually achieved. Exciting, mellifluous narrative was, to them, no insignificant part of the historian’s craft, and the result is that while many of their ideas are no longer groundbreaking, we continue to read them for their flair, their masterful syntax, and most of all their big-picture perspective.

The 20th century saw a narrowing of focus, an increased specialization and professionalization. Historians, like social scientists, joined university faculties and began to write more for their peers than for the general reader, and — again like social scientists, not to mention literary scholars — to develop an opaque jargon that might almost have been designed to repulse the non-specialist. “Popular” history was often left to nonacademic historians, whose work was enjoyed by readers but looked at askance by the professionals — viz. the academy’s snide disparagement of the biographer David McCullough, whose work has provided pleasure and edification to millions.

But there continue to be a few academic historians who write for a broad public, and one of the most visible is 

, the Harvard historian who is also a staff writer for 

. Tellingly, Lepore’s first ambition was to be a writer rather than a scholar, and she did an undergraduate major in English literature before going on for a PhD in American studies at Yale. Throughout her career, she has adhered to the storytelling standards of an earlier era: Her historical works have garnered numerous mainstream honors (including a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize), and she contributes frequently to widely read periodicals apart from 

. She has even written (along with fellow scholar Jane Kamensky) a frothy romantic novel set in 1770s Boston.

 is a new collection of Lepore’s essays, almost all of which initially appeared in 

. As with so many essay collections, a rather awkward attempt has been made to corral the disparate pieces under an overarching theme, in this case that of “American origins” — to show, as the jacket blurb informs us, “how American democracy is bound up with the history of print.” Not all the pieces quite fit the mold (there are essays, for instance, on Edgar Allan Poe, Charlie Chan, and Clarence Darrow that have quite different things to say), but there are enough of them to make a satisfactory whole, from a discussion of John Smith’s famously unreliable account of the founding of Jamestown to a disquisition on the history of the presidential inaugural address, culminating with that of Barack Obama. According to Lepore’s own description, “The essays in this book concern documents — things like travel narratives, the Constitution, ballots, the inaugural address, the presidential biography, the campaign biography, the IOU, and the dime novel. Historical inquiry relies on standards of evidence because documents aren’t to be trusted.” Neither, she implies, are grand narratives:

To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation’s story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn’t foreordained, or even stable. The story’s plot, like the nation’s borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle.

A number of the essays in this collection illustrate this contention in sometimes startling ways. It’s important for us to remember, in this era of vocal constitutional “originalists,” that the Founders never foresaw many things we now consider inevitable — such as universal suffrage, to take an obvious example. After all, as Lepore reminds us, the now-hallowed word “democracy” was actually considered a slur until the advent of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, and democracy’s rise “was neither inevitable nor swift. It countered prevailing political philosophy. If democracy is rule by the people and if the people are, as Federalists like John Adams believed, ‘the common Herd of Mankind’ — the phrase was a commonplace — then democracy is the government of the worst, the tyranny of the idle, the ignorant, the ill informed.” For a century and a half, it has been the done thing to deride this theory as reactionary and to poke fun at Adams as a relic of monarchism. From the vantage point of the 21st century, however, as we observe the fruits of 200 years of Jacksonian democracy in both our elected government and our national discourse, one is tempted to give Adams credit for a little more sense on the subject than he normally gets.

All evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe, deep in our hearts, that the Founders’ “We the People” meant all the people, not just the propertied white men. We also seem to believe that the act of voting was always an inalienable right, justly administered — hence our righteous outrage when innovations such as the Diebold voting machine or, currently, the South Carolina Voter ID law are introduced. Lepore’s fascinating essay “Rock, Paper, Scissors” puts the voting booth into historical perspective, demonstrating that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do about our political institutions. In the early years of the Republic, voters had to write their own ballots, and the potential for manipulation, intimidation, and falsification was enormous:

Early paper voting was, to say the least, a hassle. You had to bring your own ballot, a scrap of paper. Then you had to (a) remember and (b) know how to spell the names and titles of every candidate and office. If “John H. Jones” was standing for election, and you wrote “John Jones,” your vote would be thrown out. (If you doubt how difficult this is, try it. I disenfranchise myself with “comptroller.”) . . . . As suffrage expanded—by the time Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, nearly all white men could vote—scrap-voting had become more or less a travesty, not least because the newest members of the electorate, poor men and immigrants, were the least likely to know how to write.

A travesty, yes, but the method by which it was eventually improved turned out to be a mixed blessing at best. Political parties stepped into the breach by printing ballots in partisan newspapers (allearly American newspapers were openly partisan) that came to be called “party tickets,” and listed the entire slate of candidates for their favored party. For the voter, there was no need to know how to write — or to read, for that matter. This innovation facilitated the rise of the major parties (thus limiting voters’ choices) and led to “massive fraud, corruption, and intimidation.” (The development of the party system was another eventuality the Founders did not plan for, and would not have liked; in fact, in his Farewell Address, George Washington warned that “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”) It was not until the 1890s that America adopted the so-called Australian ballot, “with its radical provision that governments should provide ballots.”

It’s clear that many aspects of our political culture that we look on as sacrosanct and traditional are in reality nothing of the sort, and Lepore is at her most provocative when she takes these on. In another excellent essay, “To Wit,” she discusses the history of the presidential inaugural address, a custom that, like so many in our political culture, developed almost accidentally. There is no mention of such an address in the Constitution, which calls only for an oath of affirmation; Washington inadvertently set a precedent when he addressed Congress after being sworn in at Federal Hall. His address was characteristically brief and to the point, but subsequent presidents saw the inauguration as a forum for populist oratory and developed the address accordingly: The worst was William Henry Harrison, whose speech went on for more than two hours and brought on the pneumonia that would send him to the grave a month later. Length did not make for quality, as James Garfield noted in his diary: “I have half a mind to make none. Those of the past, except Lincoln’s, are dreary reading.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., nearly a century later, thought much the same thing: “The platitude quotient tends to be high, the rhetoric stately and self-serving, the ritual obsessive, and the surprises few.”

Lepore’s strength as a popular historian is her ability to make her target audience — informed but non-specialist readers — take a second look at the political culture we have long taken for granted, and realize that our system was not preordained, not historically inevitable, not even, always, very well planned. A number of these essays are surprising and enlightening; invariably, they are also too short and simplistic. But this is because they are “popular” works, tailored to the attention span of the 

 reader. We should be grateful that they are also tailored to the 

’s standards of literacy and elegance. Let’s hear it for popular history!

 is the author of several books, including Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (2006). She teaches literature at Bennington College.

, by Jill Lepore. Princeton University Press, 432 pp.

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All evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe, deep in our hearts, that the Founders’ “We the People” meant all the people, not just the propertied white men.