Jane Austen Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  A Few Words About Sources

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  GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2001 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Copyright © Carol Shields, 2001 All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Shields, Carol.

  Jane Austen / Carol Shields.

  p. cm.—(A Penguin life)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09957-5

  1. Austen, Jane, 1775-1817. 2. Novelists, English—19th century—

  Biography. I. Title. II. Penguin lives series

  PR4036.S48 2001

  823’.7—dc21

  [B] 00-043807

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  For Hazel and for Grace

  Prologue: A Life Glimpsed

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1996 my daughter, the writer Anne Giardini, and I traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to present a joint paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America, an organization that comprises some of the world’s most respected Austen scholars, as well as rank amateurs like ourselves. These affectionate annual gatherings are serious attempts to look at Jane Austen’s work and examine how it illuminates her time and ours. There is minimal incense burning at these meetings, and no attempt to trivialize Jane Austen’s pronouncements and mockingly bring her into our contemporary midst. The gatherings are both gentle in approach and rigorous in scholarship, and unlike many academic assemblies, they are festivals of inclusiveness, with middle-aged groupies from Detroit dressed in Regency costumes; keen-eyed, tenured professors from Canada; and a scattering of Europeans intent on winning the trivia quiz. (Wherever three or four come together in Jane Austen’s name, there is bound to be a trivia quiz. This detailing of Austen’s minor characters—what they ate for breakfast, how much income they’ve settled on their daughters, the precise hour of a ruined picnic—has never been a part of my own impressionistic response to her work, and I worry, but only a little, about what this says of me, her devoted reader.)

  The subject for the 1996 conference was “Jane Austen’s Men,” but the presentation Anne and I had prepared kept slipping sideways into the fully gendered world and coasting toward the subject of how women, despite their societal disentitlement, were able to play such a lively, even powerful role. The Austen heroines, deprived of the right to speak, employ the intricacies of body language—a term not invented until the 1960s, but no matter. Jane Austen was familiar with the body’s vivid mechanics and relied heavily, especially in her dramatic conclusions, on the body’s expressiveness.

  Our talk centered on what Anne and I called the “politics of the glance.” If, in an Austen novel, a woman’s tongue is obliged to be still, her eye becomes her effective agent, one piercing look capable of changing the narrative direction—even a half glance able to shame or empower or redirect the sensibilities of others.

  A glance can both submit and subvert; it can be sharp or shy, scornful or adoring; it can be a near cousin to scrutiny—but it almost always assumes a degree of mutually encoded knowledge. A spark is struck and apprehended; the head turns on its spinal axis; the shoulders freeze; the eyes are the only busy part of the body, simultaneously receiving and sending out information, so that a glance becomes more than a glance. It is a weapon, a command, or a sigh of acquiescence.

  After the conference Anne and I traveled separately to our homes, I to central Canada and she to Vancouver. In Chicago, Anne was obliged to change planes, and she was amused to find that her new seatmate had come fresh from the annual Napoléon conference in that city. Riding high over the clouds, they exchanged conference notes, and the Napoléon man challenged her, not at all to her surprise, on the fact that Jane Austen had commented so scantily on the unfolding history of her era.

  We’ve heard this often: How could a novelist who writes astutely about her own immediate society fail to have mentioned the Napoleonic wars?

  The modeling of war is mostly male—almost everyone would agree on this and on the truth that war’s exactitude and damage may elude a conventional fictional transaction. But shouldn’t Jane Austen at least have mentioned one battle or general by name? Why is there not a word about the rapidly evolving mercantile class and the new democratization of Britain? What about changes in political structure, in the power and persuasion of the Church, in the areas of science and medicine? These questions are often challengingly presented, as though novels are compilations of “current events” and Jane Austen a frivolous, countrified
person in intellectual drag, impervious to the noises of the historical universe in which she was placed.

  In fact, Jane Austen covers all these matters, if not with the directness and particularity our Napoléon man might have liked. Her novels, each of them, can be seen as wide-ranging glances—that “g” word again, with its tune of deliberation—across the material of the world she inhabited, and that material includes an implied commentary on the political, economic, and social forces of her day. These glances, like ubiquitous sunlight, sweep and suggest, excoriate and question. The soldiers who distract the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice are posted nearby in case of an invasion from France—why else would they be there?—and their presence threatens the stability of local society, a sociological certainty that was fully comprehended by the author of six novels written over a stretch of unsettled time, each of them offering its historical commentary.

  By indirection, by assumption, by reading what is implicit, we can find behind Austen’s novels a steady, intelligent witness to a world that was rapidly reinventing itself. Every Austen conversation, every chance encounter on a muddy road, every evening of cards before the fire, every bold, disruptive militiaman is backed by historical implication. For even the most casual reader, the period of Austen’s life, 1775-1817, becomes visible through her trenchant, knowing glance. That glance may be hard-edged or soft, part of a novel’s texture or backdrop, or it may constitute the raw energy of propulsion. It is never accidental. For the biographer, one such “glance” is multiplied a thousand times. Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.

  1

  TODAY JANE AUSTEN belongs to the nearly unreachable past. She kept no diary that we know of. There is no voice recording such as we possess of Virginia Woolf, and no photograph like the one that George Eliot denied she had had taken—but which remains in the records, proclaiming her an indisputably unhandsome woman.

  Austen’s intractable silences throw long shadows on her apparent chattiness. In part, the opacity of her life may rest on the degree to which it was fused with that of her sister Cassandra, providing a mask or at the very least a subsuming presence. Each sister’s life invaded the other, canceling out parts of the knowable self. (Cassandra once famously described her sister as “the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.”) The accidental adjacency of these two sisters reaches out and shapes each of their lives, and at the same time informs the novels of the younger sister and asks persistent questions about the nature of the creative act. How does art emerge? How does art come from common clay, in this case a vicar’s self-educated daughter, all but buried in rural Hampshire? Who was she really? And who exactly is her work designed to please? One person? Two or three? Or an immense, wide, and unknown audience that buzzes with an altered frequency through changing generations, its impact subtly augmented in the light of newly evolved tastes and values?

  One hundred sixty Austen letters survive, but none written earlier than her twentieth year. Many other letters were destroyed by Cassandra after Jane Austen died, and we can surmise with some certainty that the jettisoned letters were the most revealing and riveting. Somehow we never hear quite enough of Jane Austen’s off-guard voice. Her insistent irony blunts rather than sharpens her tone. Descriptions of herself are protective when they are not disarming, and her sketches of others are frequently arch or else cruel. She writes quickly so that the text will mimic the sound of her own voice, a letter-writing technique that was encouraged in her time, and so the scattered and somewhat breathless nature of her correspondence is not the result of carelessness but of deliberation.

  Of the eight Austen children, there were only two who were not honored by portraits: Jane and her handicapped brother, George. Cassandra produced the two informal sketches we have of Jane Austen. One is a rather unattractive back view—round-shouldered, dumpy—and the other shows a woman whose curved cheeks and small straight mouth give a slightly absent, querulous air of sad reasonableness. She is looking sideways in this portrait, perhaps at that lack of event that was said to characterize her life. Her niece Anna, who adored her, wrote admiringly about Aunt Jane’s various features, saying: “One hardly understands how with all these advantages she could yet fail of being a decidedly handsome woman.” Meaning, clearly, that she was not a beauty, though mercifully she had escaped the smallpox that disfigured so many of her contemporaries. A family friend spoke of the childlike expression in her face, so “lively and full of humour.” Various accounts refer to the slightness of her figure, and several mention the liveliness of her movements, her quickness of step. Was she dark or fair? There is wide variation even on this topic by near and distant witnesses, but a lock owned by a descendant of Jane Austen confirms that she had curly dark-brown hair mixed with a few strands of gray. A neighbor, the renowned writer Mary Russell Mitford, rather maliciously compared her to a poker, “perpendicular, precise, taciturn.”

  Jane Austen’s appearance is of interest to the reader partly because it satisfies a curiosity we all feel, but chiefly because it is known that, at the time, exceptional beauty occasionally gave an advantage to women of little means, which is exactly what Jane Austen was. Beauty had value, as it always has: Seductive powers were informally factored into the dowry arrangement. Intelligence, on the other hand, was more likely to present a negative weight. Intelligent women could not always be kept under control, and control was a husband’s obligation.

  A writer of “marriage novels,” Austen did not marry, and it must be wondered to what extent her looks, handsome or unhandsome, played a part in that destiny. A silhouette has been found in recent years that seemed to connect, along an ambiguous pathway, with a fine-featured and “pretty” Jane Austen. The hopeful excitement this image stirred was extraordinary, indicating the affection in which Austen is held; readers, and perhaps scholars too, appeared eager to believe that she was, after all, favorably disposed, since that would mean she had more power over her choices, and that Cassandra, as portraitist, was unreliable or even vindictive as a sisterly witness, as many have suspected. Unfortunately, the identity of the silhouette has remained unproven.

  Jane Austen is recognized for her moral sensibility, and for what is assumed to be her rare ability to expand insignificant material, turning the doings of a few village families into wide-screen drama. Critical commentary has often served her poorly, rarely posing the question of whether she knew what she was doing. Her solid writerly advice to her scribbling nieces and nephew should convince us absolutely that she did. “You are now collecting your People delightfully,” she wrote her niece Anna, “getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” She also warned Anna about such novelistic clichés as “vortex of Dissipation.” To her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, another hopeful writer, she referred to her own writing as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”

  She is being self-deprecating here; her trust in the microcosmic world is securely placed. It is also a brave and original view. Out of her young, questioning self came the grave certainty that the family was the source of art, just as every novel is in a sense about the fate of a child. It might be argued that all literature is ultimately about family, the creation of structures—drama, poetry, fiction—that reflect our immediate and randomly assigned circle of others, what families do to us and how they can be reimagined or transcended.

  She is also—and the vagueness of this perception is baffling—widely believed to be someone possessed of a small soul marked by a profound psychic wound. This is an idea that has become enameled and precious and ready for museum sanctity. The defensive tone of her letters and the cheerful mockery that characterizes her unsentimental novels support this belief to a point, but we can only guess at the degre
e of her alienation or its cause. It might amount to little more than simple contagion. She lived, after all, in an age of satire, and as near as we know, she was the child of unsentimental parents.

  Scholars can’t even agree on what to call her. This is a messy problem and not a new one in the field of biography. The biographer and scholar John Halperin calls her, mostly, “the novelist,” which is terrifyingly respectful but also reductive, and just slightly obsequious. “Jane” itself feels too familiar an address to apply to the adult writer, although it is found everywhere in the more recent biographies. Jane is also what Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh resorts to on occasion in his famous memoir written long after his aunt’s death, and the reader can feel the struggle this very conservative nineteenth-century male is suffering while trying to find a proper form of address for his aunt Jane. Ms. Austen is unthinkable. Miss Austen? No! (Cassandra as the older sister claims that title.) Austen on its own possesses an indelicacy; we know, somehow, that she would have been offended. Like a literary butler, the biographer is obliged to weigh the options and employ the unsatisfactory Jane or else repeat the whole name again and again—Jane Austen—or rely on the clumsiness of treasonous pronouns.

  Another problem a biographer of Jane Austen faces is how to proceed without sounding like Jane Austen. The cadence is catching, and so is the distancing “one” voice, as in “one thinks,” “one observes.” Her equivocations, so sprawling, thoughtful, and “correct,” conflict with what we like to think of as a stern critical eye. Her reflectiveness, that calm, deliberate voice, hums in the background, deflecting analysis and telling us to disappear, please, so that the novel can get underway. Biography zaps the enchantment of the writing itself by throwing a profile of theory against a text—that crisp and useful word—that had no immediate acquaintance with literary theory. This is, in the end, what matters: the novels themselves, and not the day-to-day life of the author, the cups of tea she sipped with her neighbors, the cream cakes she bought at a bakery. Even her extraordinarily revealing letters must be separated—somehow—from the works of fiction that have survived. The novelist George Gissing wrote that “the only good biographies are to be found in novels.” He was speaking about the genuine arc of a human life, that it can perhaps be presented more authentically in fiction than in the genre of biography. Biography is subject to warps and gaps and gasps of admiration or condemnation, but fiction respects the human trajectory.