The Flemish Jane Austen

Walter Scott’s unsigned review of Emma in the Quarterly Review was the first to identify Austen’s writing as a new kind of fiction. In an intriguing gesture, Scott compares Austen's fiction with “the Flemish school of painting.” Seemingly remote, Scott’s comparison links to a rich hinterland of aesthetic theory, art and literature that informed the nineteenth-century reception of Austen and continues to illuminate her place within the history of the novel. This essay uses Scott’s figure to explore the idea of a “Flemish” Jane Austen and to speculate on what an Austenean “Flemish school” might look like. How is Jane Austen’s fiction “Flemish”? How does Flemish art help us understand Austen’s fiction and realist fiction more broadly? In exploring these questions, this essay seeks to illuminate how an existing hierarchy of genres of painting maps onto literary genres, especially the realist novel, in surprisingly generative ways.