Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense. The other, which predominates, is the voice of Mr Collins. Long driven to that conclusion, I came upon Professor Halperin himself, some three hundred pages into his book, pronouncing that the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, the librarian to the Prince Regent who transmitted to Jane Austen his employer's permission (in the sense of command) for her to dedicate her next novel to the Prince, 'must have convinced Jane that Mr Collins had come to life.' Well, that one deutero-Collins should recognise another when he sees him seems only fair; and in the notion that one of Jane Austen's inventions turned into real life he pays a tiny fragment of recompense for the gross injustice he does her in his indeed gross book.

LRB 7 February 1985 | PDF Download