Not so plain Jane
Jonathan Keates
JANE AUSTEN by Carol Shields Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 154, ISBN0297646192
Until recently, the popular image of Jane Austen's life was that of an untroubled idyll, led against Regency backdrops which combined English pastoral cosiness with the dash and frou-frou of Bath as portrayed for us on boxes of 'Quality Street' chocolates. She wasn't lucky with men of course, but then, cynics might argue, who is? Her death from an unspecified disease was premature and quite possibly agonising, yet she faced it with Christian resignation in a nice house in Winchester, where her brothers interred her in the north aisle of the cathedral, under a ledger stone which, while praising 'the extraordinary endowments of her mind', completely failed to mention the six novels which have guaranteed her immortality. We were encouraged to believe that she was happy, secure in the love of a close family and confident of burgeoning success as an author, With its occasional diversions, in the form of trips to London and the seaside, and the presence of nephews and nieces to whom she played the role of indulgent maiden aunt with suitable verve, it was the kind of life we could have wished her to lead. A husband, after all, might have expected her to give up the famous 'little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush'. Look at what happened to poor Charlotte Brontë when she married that dreary curate of her father's!
In the past two decades this bromide has been largely thrown away and a more acrid mixture submitted for our consumption. Biographers like Park Honan, Claire Tomalin and David Nokes have delved deeper into family backgrounds, local scandals, contemporary attitudes and expectations regarding women and the possible bearing of Austen's life on her fiction. The result is a far less serene prospect unfolding around 'England's Jane', as Kipling called her in one of his not so good poems. Paradoxically the tur bulence enables us to see her more clearly, whether as the 'little husband-hunting butterfly' recalled by a malicious contemporary or as the woman who wrote of herself, 'If I am a wild Beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.' Now we want to blame the Austen family, having formerly seen them as ideal cherishers of the flame. Her sister Cassandra is taken to task for burning, censoring and generally sanitising Jane's letters, while her father's attempts at promoting her literary career are viewed as not wholly altruistic, given his overstretched finances. We must make what we can of Austen's silence on the subject of her handicapped brother George, let alone the existence of an aunt jailed for shoplifiting, set free but probably guilty as charged.
Why did such things not find their way into her fiction? Carol Shields, herself a novelist of outstanding gifts, is careful not to take works like Emma and Pride and Prejudice as baffled or transmuted essays in autobiography. She prefers instead to examine their evidences of Austen's artistic development, the way in which each book is individualised by the novelty of a particular creative challenge, invigorating the narrative to a point at which we can catch the echo of the author's own laughter or rage. The authentic voice of Pride and Prejudice becomes 'a cry of youthful anguish' at the 'non-Darwinian emergence of brilliance from a dull dynasty'. Within the satirical framework of Northanger Abbey she identifies a similar cri de coeur in Catherine Moreland having 'reached the age of 17 without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility'.
The central crisis in Jane Austen's life, or at least the one most easily understood from Shield's reading of it, was created by this very same isolation. Company indeed she had, almost too much of it, so that the most trenchant episodes of her novels, Anne's final meeting with Wentworth, the Box Hill picnic, the visit to Pemberley, are always designed with a sense of what has to be suppressed because others are present. Solitude, coveted though it might be by her Romantic contemporaries, was precisely what she didn't need as a writer. Each novel was 'my own darling child' and she was as vulnerable as the rest of us to the lack of critical attention from a wider literary community.
'Whatever she produced', wrote her nephew Edward, 'was a home-made article' yet this very same detachment from the mainstream, as Shields's study shows, validates her greatness. Other reviewers have stressed the book's debts to Tornalin and Nokes, but I don't think this matters. The point of this series is not straight biography but famous names encapsulating their celebrated avatars of past times in 150 pages. In Shields's hands Jane Austen appears less elusive, wanner to the touch and altogether more vulnerable than earlier writers have allowed her to be. The wild beast has been captured but, thank God, not tamed.
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