Was there a soupc,on of sapphic yearning when heroine Fanny Price — playing a vicar in a home theatrical! — was caressed by Miss Crawford in the new movie version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park?

Jane Austen is one of those women from the past who has both been co-opted by feminists and patronized for her lack of geopolitical interest. Of course, her unmarried state is a hopeful sign to feminists, and the injection of at least a hint of lesbianism into an Austen movie was inevitable.

But the politicization of Jane Austen began much earlier, at the conclusion of the suffragette era and the beginning of modern feminism, with that pivotal figure in modern female thought, Virginia Woolf. Woolf faced the problem that feminist lovers of books always face with Jane Austen — she writes so well, and is so much fun to read, that some way must be found to “save” her for private reading and academic study even though her plot lines run to standard romantic boy-meets-girl, boy-leaves-girl, boy-gets-girl formulas. In other words, feminists must distinguish Jane Austen from her successors in the romantic fiction genre in order to justify the pleasant habit of reading her.

They face this same problem with the Bronte” sisters’ slightly later entries, notably Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. These are much more broodingly “romantic” works, but all those smoldering passions and broken conventions — or conventions teetering on the brink of being broken, as in the almost successful attempt at a bigamous marriage by Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre — count as marks in the Bronte”s’ favor. This is because spontaneity and elemental passions and lack of self-control and epatering the bourgeoisie are modern virtues.

And one other thing counts in the Bronte”s’ favor: their selection of heroes or heroines precariously perched on the edges of middle-class respectability, and at times falling over the edge. Heathcliff, the foundling of obscure, possibly gypsy parentage, and the penniless orphan Jane Eyre (who tutors an illegitimate child of a French courtesan, no less, and fights off the mad mixed-blood Caribbean married to Mr. Rochester) are far removed from the more proper circles of Jane Austen’s Bennets, Woodhouses, and Elliots.

It is in her (let us admit it) delightfully written A Room of One’s Own that Woolf uses the Bronte”s and Jane Austen to develop a forthrightly feminist thesis: that historically, female social constraints and lack of financial independence and educational opportunities have prevented almost all gifted women throughout most of English history from competing on equal terms with men in literature. (Never mind that almost equally daunting drawbacks have prevented nearly all gifted males throughout most of history from making use of their talents as well. Misfortune is remarkably gender-blind.)

Virginia Woolf, like many non-religious authors of her day, valued the integrity of the written word with a religious fervor. She believed the novelist had a duty to subordinate his voice and concerns to the consistent development of his fictional characters. Woolf described Austen’s “miraculous” freedom from resentment and frustration in her sphere — “I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. … Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.” Woolf concedes that this psychological balance permits Austen to approach a kind of creative perfection within the world of her novels.

But where Austen comes in for faint praise and even criticism is in that very acceptance of her limited experience. Not only did Austen have no opportunities to jaunt about Napoleonic Europe, sail the seven seas with her naval brother, or pursue parliamentary politics, she did not even betray a desire to do any of these things by covering any of these topics second-hand. Her heroines dispense baskets of food to the poor, but do not involve themselves in questions of land reform, the economic dislocations of the early Industrial Revolution, labor struggles or the extension of the suffrage.

Indeed, Austen’s lightness, good humor, and mental balance, her easy negotiation of the conventions of her social class, contribute to her technical success but also keep her from that creative dissatisfaction with her lot that might have moved her, in Woolf’s judgment, to reach out for a greater and larger world — pumping her brother, perhaps, for nautical recollections in sufficient detail to make them her own for literary purposes.
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