More important, when considering the life of Jane Austen, is that all the family read novels, a form that must have seemed to them very much as early television struck its mid-twentieth-century audience. The Austens, as far as we can tell, were not particularly discriminating, enjoying inferior novels alongside the works of Richardson and Fielding. Established novelists, junk novelists, writers of romance—these classifications had not in the late eighteenth century been firmly established. Even as a child Jane Austen seemed to be thinking of herself as a future novelist, and one who would create more resilient characters than those drawn by the popular writer Mary Brunton, the author of Self-Control. Austen wrote, comparing herself to Brunton: “My Heroine shall not merely be wafted down an American river in a boat by herself, she shall cross the Atlantic in the same way, and never stop till she reaches Gravesend.”
The novel as a form was in its infancy, and the wonder of the new genre blunted criticism, for here on the page were living, reflective men and women facing real predicaments and expressing genuine desire. Here, in fact, was all that was immediately knowable: families, love affairs, birth and death, boredom and passion, the texture of the quotidian set side by side with the extremities of the human spirit. And here, too, was the specter of a woman’s future, the great questions over which there was little control: Was it better to be alone and in some sense intact? Or better to be coupled—and compromised, denied freedom but awarded the respect of society?
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JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS are about intelligent women who take themselves seriously, but not solemnly. Each of the Austen heroines possesses an implicit moral system and an impulse toward improvement that seems to require no exposition or justification, no wrestling with ethical dilemmas, no laborious arrivals at the gates of perception. A steadiness of nerve prevails. The perfection of behavior, the refinement of sensibility—these were the natural conditions Jane Austen urged upon her men and women and upon us, her readers.
The young often read Austen’s novels as love stories. Later, more knowing readers respond to their intricate structures, their narrative drive, their quiet insistence that we keep turning over the page even though we know the ending, which is invariably one of reconciliation and a projection of future happiness in the form of marriage. But what did marriage mean in the context of these novels? Not a mere exchange of vows repeated in church. Marriage reached beyond its moment of rhetoric and gestured, eloquently and also innocently, toward the only pledge a young woman was capable of giving. She had one chance in her life to say “I do,” and these words rhyme psychologically with the phrase: I am, I exist.
Still later, readers come to appreciate the novels’ comic brilliance, laughing out loud not just at situations, but at turns of phrase. As a whole, Jane Austen’s work presents a consummate artistry that is almost impossible to deconstruct, but which revolves around the fusing of moral seriousness with comic drama. Jane Austen’s writing with its wit, elegance, and narrative control outshone that of her contemporaries and those Victorian novelists who came after her. It is almost as though she reinvented and stabilized the wobbly eighteenth-century novel—which seemed unable to stare at itself, to know itself—and made it into a modern form.
The novel, though a relatively late literary innovation, almost immediately crowded other forms aside. Its roots can be traced to travel writing, to essays, to narrative poetry, to lives of the saints, and to the French or Italian novella, but as a form it went off like a firecracker in the 1740s with the work of Richardson and Fielding. Here, unapologetically, was the texture of real life on the page; here were men and women whose dilemmas resembled our own. The novel’s invention also coincided, happily, with a new widespread literacy among women, making it the only form in which women participated fully, from the beginning. True, the novel’s instant popularity gave it something of an inferiority complex; the fact that it explored moral issues indirectly, and with shades of human ambiguity, separated it from more formalized, traditional prose. Serialization distorted some early novelistic experiments, and there was a natural—even moral—confusion over the nature of fiction, its viability, its relationship with the authentic world, how it might be framed, and how seriously it might take itself.
Luckily, the Austen family of Steventon embraced the novel form and welcomed it rather uncritically, it seems, especially the sheer entertainment it offered. The small, quiet Steventon society was enlarged and amplified by beings who were both like and unlike themselves. As a child, Jane Austen would have participated in family readings or, at the very least, would have found the latest novels displayed in her parents’ parlor, many of them acquired from a circulating library in nearby Basingstoke. Her father was not inclined toward the role of censor, or perhaps he was preoccupied; in any case, he allowed his daughter to read what she liked. She loved, especially, the work of Samuel Richardson, and particularly a novel titled The History of Sir Charles Grandison, a seven-volume tome—one million words—which is little read today, a grand narrative excursion touching on adultery, drunkenness, rape, eroticism, fortune hunting, and most interestingly, the psychological effect of parents on their children—all of which seem a strong dose of worldliness for a rather protected young clergyman’s daughter who nevertheless swallowed it down eagerly, making herself familiar with each scene, and perhaps thinking of it as a kind of fantasy rather than an imprint of the world’s “reality.” (Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that “reality” was the one word in the English language that always needs a set of quotation marks around it.)
The pomposity and didacticism of Sir Charles Grandison cannot have escaped her, and she would have been provoked to laughter by Richardson’s melodramatic effects. If we grant Jane Austen the least degree of prescience, we may be able to perceive her reading against the Richardson tradition, and unconsciously forming her own idea of the “realistic” novel and of what material she might herself include when her time came. She carried the Richardson influence throughout her writing life, but substituted wit for longwindedness and comedy for sententiousness. Turning away from Richardson’s melodramatic excess, she trimmed and tempered her own episodes, and made certain they stood on legs that were psychologically sound. In Jane Austen’s work there are no creatures resembling Richardson’s thundering villain, Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, but instead the merely weak of heart: Wickham in Pride and Prejudice or Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility or the somewhat feckless but good-hearted Frank Churchill in Emma. In Jane Austen’s novels there are no fainting women such as Richardson’s ridiculous heroine, Harriet Byron. Austen’s women don’t faint unless they have real reason to; Louisa in Persuasion gives way to unconsciousness only when she is genuinely injured jumping from the wall in Lyme. Jane Austen admired the Richardson range, the undoubted energy and invention of the work, but she was able to replace sensation with sense and to avoid the kind of exaggeration that threatens to undermine the whole project of fiction.
Jane Austen’s oldest brother, James, had turned to poetry and essay writing, and edited, for a time, a weekly magazine known as The Loiterer, in which the whole family took a keen interest. It is not surprising then, given her family circumstances, that Jane, early in her teens, should try her hand at writing too. But it is the satirical form of her youthful writing that astonishes us today. We can only guess that parody was the family flavor, and that the Austens were proud citizens of a satirical age.
What makes a child of twelve or thirteen a satirist? (To call her a teenager is to dip a toe in contemporary presumption—the term had not yet been invented, and adolescence carried few of the cultural weights it does today—but we can guess that a passage of biological and intellectual awkwardness has always prevailed to some extent in the species, requiring society’s tact and ultimately its forbearance.) Jane Austen had been nurtured, certainly, in a circle appreciative of burlesque. She was narratively gifted and able to provide the kind of pleasure that was valued by her immediate audience, but she was also a small presence in
a large and gifted household. Her desire to claim the attention of her parents and siblings can be assumed. She gave them what they wanted, that which would make them laugh and marvel aloud at her cleverness. Without a doubt, she took her cue from her literary brothers, James and Henry, both satirists, giving support to the dictum that writers are as good as the audience they wish to capture.
She was also awakened by the contemporary romantic novel, being, as we know from her own Northanger Abbey, a reader of romances, the kind of unserious literature that was in her day placed in female hands. Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Smith, though, were among her favorite novelists; they were both intelligent writers, prolific and popular, and their novels can be read even today with interest. Austen also read Dr. Johnson and William Cowper at an early age, and the famously uneven Fanny Burney, but most young women of her time were protected, not to say deflected, from serious works. Readers, however, have always had the power to disrupt the bland surfaces of pedestrian fiction and convert the fluff of romance to something more nourishing. (“If a book is well written, I always find it too short,” Jane Austen said of a Charlotte Smith work.) A deliberate and inventive misreading may have led her toward her vision of what a novel could do and be when fortified with irony and structure.
In the three notebooks of writing that have come down from Jane Austen’s teen years we find a strain of burlesque, absurdly broad at first, and then more and more seen to be refining itself. At thirteen she can be observed rejoicing in her self-created role, the sentimental female who mocks her own sentimentality, invoking clichés that poke their long fingers at the shallowness of clichés. Using the name Sophia Sentiment, she writes to The Loiterer in an explosion of mock exasperation: “Only conceive, in eight papers, not one sentimental story about love and honour and all that.” The “all that” is the telling phrase, for clearly the subtext is “all that rubbish,” or, at another level, “all that matters.” In a similar vein, she informs The Loiterer that, should they publish romantic fiction, “your hero and heroine must possess a great deal of feeling, and have very pretty names.” In her satirical story “Jack and Alice,” she creates a country gentleman who foils the women who pursue him by setting up steel traps around his estate. “Cruel Charles,” one of these women laments, “to wound the hearts and legs of all the fair.” The incongruous linking of hearts and legs, of great feeling and pretty names, shows Jane, the clever child, pulling the rug out from under her own clever feet. It is as though she can’t, for lack of nerve, speak without immediately subverting her own expression, with a need to charm and also to shock. Don’t take me too seriously, she seems to be saying to her intimate audience, at least not yet.
What kind of child was she? A cousin, Philadelphia Walter, meeting the twelve-year-old Jane for the first time, found her “whimsical and affected,” and certainly not as charming as her sister, Cassandra. She was intelligent, we can be certain, and perhaps smug, heedless and prim at the same time, and accustomed to praise from those who knew her best. At home she was not as compelled to temper her opinions, nor constrained to behave as an ordinary well-brought-up child—and we all have seen how such outspoken, precocious children are misunderstood once they stray beyond the family circle.
To read this girlish work today is to see Jane Austen in the sometimes painful process of educating herself to become a writer. Trying on different genres was a way of discovering who she was and the kind of material she could best handle. Her faith in her own inventiveness must have grown with each completed piece, and so did an increasing understanding of psychological realism. Her haphazard schooling and undirected reading left her uncentered, longing for the attention of others, but crying out for her own attention as well.
Her early writing was produced within protective circumstances, and it is no surprise that her efforts are full of family jokes and private references, some of them stinging. The family response to her deliberate outrageousness may be imagined: a rolling of the eyes and “There goes our Jane again!” An almost reckless need to turn the world upside down can be glimpsed in the very early work. Everything in these narratives is at odds. The cozy allusions to family happenings conflict violently with tales of elopement and murder. Extraordinary and shocking class inversions occur, an upstairs/downstairs comedic eye that disappears completely in her mature period, when she seems to have understood the truth that satire can never be used against the powerless; the reader looks in vain to find such clichés as the comical servant or country rustic in Austen’s great novels.
On the other hand, sexual innuendos leap from her mock History of England, completed just before her sixteenth birthday. Murders are committed. Duels are fought. It might even be said that duality fueled the earliest Austen persona, a crude, unnuanced, heartless world of black and white. Though she had not yet found her true expression, she concerned herself from the beginning with the sins of pretentiousness, pomposity, and sentimentality, a thematic line that established itself in all her work.
Amidst all this dramatic exaggeration, there is little that has the feel of deliberate experiment. As a girl, she was less interested in creating new genres than in subverting those that were already established, and she seems to have happily truncated work that was not going well, killing off the more tiresome villains with a stroke of her pen. The chapters of her “novels” are very short, many of them mere gestures. In hindsight, we can see that her gifts, particularly her sense of comedy, were developing. Although there is a restlessness in her rapid skipping from one genre to the next—tributes, mock memoirs, histories, mininovels, verse, drama—and an impatience with extended work, she was respectful enough of her early efforts to keep amending them as she grew into her twenties. The survival of these early works says a good deal about the regard in which they were held by the Austen family; this beloved scribbling child consciously set out to entertain her small audience, but she was taken by them with a surprising measure of seriousness. She was encouraged, was supplied with precious paper, was listened to and applauded.
The best of the works waver between farce and feeling, as though this young writer were torn in three directions, wanting to amuse and also to move her audience, and driven to express what some have called the Cinderella fantasy, the apprehension that a child is, for some mysterious reason, superior to his or her parents. Lesley Castle, an epistolary novel written around Jane’s sixteenth year, indicates an early ability to convey individual voices and to embark on what must have seemed daring directions. Its heroine, Charlotte Lutterell, is intelligent, witty, astringent. (“I have often felt myself extremely satirical,” says Charlotte at one point.) The novel includes an adulterous affair, the abandonment of a baby, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism—which must have left her Church of England father blinking. These forays into vice and high drama may have alarmed Mr. and Mrs. Austen, but their expression seems to have been tolerated. Curiously enough, though, this child of an amiable, indulgent family almost always, in her early work, sketches parents who are either cruel or neglectful or determined in one way or another to thwart the sensitivities of their offspring. What can we make of this? It’s possible she was rebelling against a reality that remains invisible to us. Or she may have been frantic to dramatize what seemed narratively inert and uninteresting. In her mature work the despotic parent is given a much more believable shading, becoming the merely silly or ambitious parent, or the parent who favors one child over the other. Almost always in these cases Austen champions the underappreciated child—Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price—and holds the misguided parents up to ridicule.
The gradual softening of the parodic edge can be traced in even her earliest work. Her assaults as she moved through her teens were more and more indirectly delivered. The management of dialogue, undeveloped in her early work, became her weapon, replacing the crude manipulations of a disconnected narrator. Undoubtedly the family dramatics in the barn helped establish her ear, which in the later books is perfected. When Mrs. Allen in Northanger A
bbey, for instance, says that Miss Tilney “always wears white,” we are handed an economical piece of loaded information by the very person for whom this declaration has meaning: Mrs. Allen, a silly but shrewd woman, knows that someone who “always wears white” has no need to worry about the cost of laundering; someone who wears white exclusively has also adopted an eccentricity that speaks of a certain daintiness, and also resolution and stubbornness of mind.
Two qualities distinguish Jane Austen’s early work from the juvenilia of other writers. The works were public, at least in a limited sense, and they were part of a continuum. The unformed writer who produced Lesley Castle in her teens is the same Jane Austen who was writing Pride and Prejudice at the extraordinary age of twenty-one, a mere five years later.
None of the early writing we have on record hints at the secrecy and confessional desperation associated with young girls. Instead, all of the work appears to have been shared openly with family and friends. The erasure of the private self from Jane Austen’s early work suggests a confusion concerning that self or else a want of permission from those around her. Her maturing sensibility must be read today through the scrim of an increasingly subtle voice as she attempted to close the gap between longing and belonging, between wanting to please herself and placate her audience. Her satirical thrust remains in the foreground, but becomes more and more her own intricate invention. Moving from Lesley Castle to the later Catharine, we see her growing attention to plausibility, to psychological realism, and to expository halftones that mitigate the earlier childish excess.
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