“One of Folly’s Puppies”

The passion for Jane Austen in our time, for those of us who have important relationships with companion animals, ought to make us sensitive to her views on the nonhuman world. While Austen is regarded as a novelist of the traditional English countryside, she is not usually associated with natural description, let alone the representation of animals. Instead, critics have typically viewed Austen as pursuing the Augustan literary project of studying “men and manners.” As she herself declares, on a visit to the natural history exhibits at the Liverpool Museum in Piccadilly, “my preference for Men & Women, always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight” (Letters 187). As for “the element of animal life,” as Léonie Villard long ago asserted, “Austen has no tenderness and very little attention”; “she ignores animals because they inspire her neither with interest nor affection” (146). J. David Grey has similarly remarked that Austen “pays little attention to pets and animals” (324). Still, despite the conventional view, there are good reasons to think about Austen in the context of animal studies at the present time. Dominick LaCapra’s claim “that the twenty-first century will be the century of the animal” (Bekoff and Pierce x) is being borne out every month with new publications—not only books and articles but also series from scholarly presses and special issues of journals in many fields.1