Jane Austen's Names - by Margaret Doody (Paperback)

About the Book

Jane Austen took a particular delight in the resonance of names, and in her novels she used the names of people and places as a potential source of meaning, satirical or historical. Margaret Doody s book is a learned and enjoyable investigation of this aspect of Austen s art. Doody tells us that Austen preferred first names in common and traditional English use, though these sometimes acquire a subtly new flavor in her works. Austen also favored the names of saints and of royalty, but she did use some classically derived pagan names, always with a purpose. And Austen would signal political loyalties and allegiances in her novels through the use of names, both first names and last names, as well as place names. In exploring Austen s names and their connotations, Doody has a larger point to make. By uncovering the riddling and punning in Austen s names, as well as Austen s interest in history, Doody casts Austen as a decidedly earthy writer steeped in the particulars of place and time, rather than a timeless novelist writing in an abstemious style. From this attention to names in her work emerges a picture of Austen that is both fuller than we ve had before, and controversial."

Book Synopsis

In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a "big cheese"-the moon's reflection on the water's surface. It worked.

In Jane Austen's Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places-real and imaginary-in Austen's fiction. Austen's creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen's names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen's technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism-in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency.

Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen's Names will revolutionize how we read Austen's fiction.

Review Quotes

"A brilliant, provocative, and important book. Doody has marshaled a truly unprecedented array of material about names, places, and plotting culled from a dazzlingly expansive reading of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels--as well as books on local history and the English countryside. The result is an illuminating and enjoyable book that teaches us to think about Austen's artistry in a fundamentally new way."--Claudia L. Johnson, author of Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures

"Doody brings the insights of a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing about Austen to this book. I admire how Jane Austen's Names brings to view the riddling and punning play that Austen indulged in her naming practices. Doody reveals an author who positively relishes the comic resonances of the names she encountered in the social world around her."--Deidre Shauna Lynch, author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History

"Doody draws on a prodigious array of literary, geographical, historical, and linguistic information to figure out what the names of people and places in Jane Austen actually mean. With characteristic energy and curiosity, she links Austen's riddling allusions to larger worlds, even to the movements of time itself."--Jocelyn Harris, author of A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen's Persuasion

"Her meticulous research supports her thesis admirably, giving even the most ardent Austen fan new perspectives on her writing."-- "Names: A Journal of Onomastics"

"This is a remarkable book--profuse, forensic, vividly imagined. To say that it enriches our experience of Austen's fiction hardly does justice to the way Doody brings all its people and places to life through their names. In this erudite etymological adventure she excavates the deep text of Austen's England, its embedded meanings and hidden histories."--David Fairer, author of Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790-1798

"Jane Austen's Names is a treasure chest."
-- "First Things"

"A magical mystery tour of virtually every location, and every family and individual, mentioned not only in the novels, but also in the Juvenilia and even the letters and diaries. . . . Doody writes with clarity and elegance, and arranges her material to lead the reader ever onwards into a whole world of language and meaning. . . . A comprehensive study, but never a dull one, this book is as entertaining as it is revealing, and will doubtless uncover fresh layers of meaning for even the best-read Austen fan."
-- "Jane Austen's Regency World"

"Doody makes a convincing argument that Jane Austen (1775-1817) imbued most, if not all, of her character and place names with historical, geographical, or social significance, and provides the historical and cultural context necessary to understand the import of each of these careful naming choices. . . . A delightful, edifying read for both scholars and lay Austen fans."
-- "Library Journal"

"Doody's book is a marvellous thing. . . . The bravura set-piece literary criticisms are fresh, and valuable in themselves (Elinor Dashwood isn't really as sensible as all that; obscured window panes are important in Persuasion), and so are the frequent, hitherto unmade links to the other novels by women that Jane Austen was reading."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"No one, with the possible exception of Jane Austen herself, knows the fiction of Jane Austen and her time more intimately than Margaret Doody, and the depth and breadth of this knowledge is richly deployed here. . . . An erudite, provocative, and original book."
-- "Review 19"

"This is rich material, and Janites will love the code-cracking. . . . [A] playful and exuberant book." -- "Telegraph"

"This meticulous, expansive, and enjoyable book recreates the delight of Austen's wordplay in detailed etymologies, anecdotes, and historical and literary references. Doody's vast research will undoubtedly afford readers of Austen new angles on the novels' familiar characters and significant places. There is great payoff in this book's copious details."-- "Eighteenth-Century Fiction"

"To read Jane Austen's Names is to appreciate Austen's writings anew in the company of a peerlessly learned, delightfully opinionated scholar--an opportunity not to be missed."
-- "JASNA News"

About the Author

Margaret Doody is the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of many books, including the Aristotle Detective series, the first three of which are available from the University of Chicago Press.