"Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist"
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It is both a compliment and a quiet rebuke: the grand novel doesn’t need grand material. When George Saintsbury credits Jane Austen with revealing “the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things,” he’s staking out an aesthetic position in a literary culture still half-enchanted by spectacle - by historical pageantry, exotic locales, and melodramatic coincidence. Saintsbury, a critic with a Victorian taste for system and lineage, is effectively canonizing Austen as the patron saint of restraint.
The intent is to elevate a particular kind of realism, but not the grimy, industrial naturalism that would later dominate “realism” as a brand. Austen’s “ordinary” is social, domestic, conversational: rooms, visits, letters, small slights, money talk. Saintsbury’s phrasing insists that these are not limitations but technologies. The subtext is that the novelist’s real instrument is not plot machinery but attention - the ability to turn the present tense of daily life into drama through precision, irony, and moral pressure.
“Infinite possibilities” is the key inflation, and it’s strategic. He’s answering the skeptic who thinks the marriage plot is trivial by saying: watch how power circulates in the trivial. Austen’s innovation is that she makes the everyday legible as a battleground of status and desire. In Saintsbury’s late-19th-century critical environment, that becomes a way to defend the novel as serious art without borrowing seriousness from wars, kings, or tragedies. The ordinary is not an escape from consequence; it’s where consequence learns to hide.
The intent is to elevate a particular kind of realism, but not the grimy, industrial naturalism that would later dominate “realism” as a brand. Austen’s “ordinary” is social, domestic, conversational: rooms, visits, letters, small slights, money talk. Saintsbury’s phrasing insists that these are not limitations but technologies. The subtext is that the novelist’s real instrument is not plot machinery but attention - the ability to turn the present tense of daily life into drama through precision, irony, and moral pressure.
“Infinite possibilities” is the key inflation, and it’s strategic. He’s answering the skeptic who thinks the marriage plot is trivial by saying: watch how power circulates in the trivial. Austen’s innovation is that she makes the everyday legible as a battleground of status and desire. In Saintsbury’s late-19th-century critical environment, that becomes a way to defend the novel as serious art without borrowing seriousness from wars, kings, or tragedies. The ordinary is not an escape from consequence; it’s where consequence learns to hide.
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| Topic | Writing |
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