by Helena Kelly
In the late 1860s, Jane’s nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh – the son of her eldest brother James – started to collect material from his sisters and cousins and published the result in 1869 as A Memoir of Jane Austen. Two years later a second edition appeared. Born in 1798, James-Edward had lived through enough of the war period – and absorbed enough of its caution in literary matters – to remain tight-lipped on the subject of his aunt’s personal beliefs. He explained that she never wrote about subjects she didn’t understand, and paid ‘very little’ attention to political questions – or only enough to agree with whatever the rest of the family thought. She lived a life ‘singularly barren … of events’. She was ‘sweet’, ‘loving’, her personality ‘remarkably calm and even’. So entirely devoid of interest is this Jane, in fact, that James-Edward had to pad out his memoir with other material: his own memories of growing up in the rectory at Steventon; some ponderous history lessons on the manners of the late eighteenth century; a letter sent by an aristocratic great-great-grandmother. The second edition of the Memoir includes, as well, quite a lot of previously unpublished material by Jane. Notable by its absence – for James-Edward certainly had access to it – is Jane’s teenage History of England, a hilarious piece of writing which delights in upsetting religious and political sensitivities. At one point the authoress even declares herself ‘partial to the roman catholic religion’.
The Memoir does, however, succumb to little spurts of Victorian romance. James-Edward gives the reader an improbable story about his uncle Henry and aunt Eliza escaping through wartime France when the brief peace of 1802–3 abruptly ended. He tells us that his aunt Jane had at one point ‘declined the addresses of a gentleman who had the recommendations of good character, and connections, and position in life, of everything, in fact, except the subtle power of touching her heart’. He records ‘one passage of romance’ – an acquaintance with a man at ‘some seaside place’ who died soon afterwards. Although this tale is so vague as to be scarcely worth the telling – even James-Edward admits that he is ‘imperfectly acquainted’ with the details, and ‘unable to assign name, or date, or place’ – he nevertheless assures his readers that ‘if Jane ever loved, it was this unnamed gentleman’. His source, at several removes, was apparently Cassandra, whom biographers have tended to view as Jane’s confidante and – as James-Edward calls her – a ‘sufficient authority’. But in Jane’s novels even the closest, the most affectionate of sisters – Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet – have secrets from one another.
In fact none of the romantic stories about Jane stands up to scrutiny. The two most frequently repeated ones concern Jane’s relationship with a young Irishman called Tom Lefroy, and her ‘broken engagement’ with a neighbour, Harris Bigg-Wither. The story that Jane was betrothed to Harris for one night, and broke off the engagement in the morning, has been repeated so often that it’s viewed as a matter of fact. Biographers even offer a date for the proposal – Thursday 2nd December 1802. This information comes from a letter written in 1870 by James-Edward’s sister Caroline. ‘I can give, I believe’, writes Caroline, then aged 65 and so not even alive in 1802, ‘the exact date of Mr Wither’s proposal to my Aunt.’ Caroline’s source is ‘some entries in an old pocket book which make no allusion to anything of the sort – but some peculiar comings & goings coinciding exactly with what my Mother more than once told me of that affair, leave me in no doubt’. Caroline’s mother Mary, whom Jane disliked, had died in 1843. This is family or even neighbourhood gossip, transmitted long after the event; how much can we trust it?
There seems at first to be much more evidence to support the idea that, in her early twenties, Jane had some involvement with Tom Lefroy, the nephew of the vicar in the neighbouring village. He dominates a letter of January 1796 – Tom’s birthday, Tom’s good looks, Tom’s coat, dancing with Tom, sitting out with Tom, Tom being teased about her. In another letter, apparently written around a week later, Jane jokes about giving up her other admirers – ‘Mr Heartley’, ‘C. Powlett’, and ‘Warren’ – because ‘I mean to confine myself in future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I donot [sic] care sixpence’. Tom is mentioned a second time towards the end of the letter, in a tone which, again, doesn’t seem entirely serious, though perhaps the humour is defensive; ‘at length the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will all be over – My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.’ As late as November 1798 Jane seems still to be emotionally invested in Tom: ‘I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking … I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland.’ There’s been a popular biopic (2007’s Becoming Jane) based on these letters, and they look very promising – romantic, stirring – until we delve a little deeper.
All three letters are missing. We have no idea where they currently are. Two of them – the first and the last – have never been seen by anyone outside the Austen family. Our only authority for what they say – or indeed, for the fact that they existed at all – is the volume of Letters published in 1884 by Lord Brabourne (Edward Austen’s grandson, and so Jane’s great-nephew).
The most recent edition of the complete Letters, published in 2011 and edited by Deirdre Le Faye, lists 161 of Jane’s letters, notes, and drafts. When it comes to manuscripts of the letters, however – the actual objects themselves, written in Jane’s own handwriting – it’s a different story. Over twenty are missing altogether. Another 25 are either scraps (some of them tiny) or have been significantly cut about. Of what remains, more than twenty can’t really be dated at all, and nearly 30 others only from internal evidence, with varying degrees of confidence.
But biographers need the letters – they need all of them. They need Henry’s Biographical Notice, even though it’s full of lies, and they need James-Edward’s Memoir, which has so very little to say about Jane. They need Harris Bigg-Wither, and Tom Lefroy, and they’re not prepared to let the absence of proof that anything happened between Jane and either of these two men stand in their way.
There is a story to be told, though. We don’t need to doubt everything. We can use quite a number of the letters, with caution – certainly the ones written in Jane’s own hand, and which can be dated confidently. And even if we accept that we’ll never know whether Jane really wrote on a small table in the dining room at Chawton, or whether there was a huge hiatus in her writing life, we do still have the writing itself – in particular, the novels of her maturity, balanced, considered, artful.
We can’t discount the possibility that her novels underwent some degree of external editing. In a letter written in January 1813, Jane, brimming with happiness at the publication of Pride and Prejudice, cheerfully mentions some ‘typical errors’ (that is, typographical errors made in the setting of the book), and talks about having ‘lop’t and crop’t’ it at some point. We have no way of knowing whether this shortening was the result of Jane’s own artistic judgement or was suggested by the publisher.
Even edited, even shortened, it’s the novels as they were printed that bring us as close to Jane as we’re ever going to get, closer than any memoir or biography could – closer not necessarily to what she might have done or felt, but to what she thought. It’s impossible for anyone to write thousands upon thousands of words and reveal nothing of how they think or what they believe. And, contrary to popular opinion, Jane did reveal her beliefs, not just about domestic life and relationships, but about the wider political and social issues of the day.
She did so warily – and with good reason, as we have seen. But when she was writing, she was anticipating that her readers would understand how to read between the lines, how to mine her books for meaning, just as readers in Communist states learned how to read what writers had to learn how to write. Jane’s novels were produced in a state which was, essentially, totalitarian. She had to write with that in mind. The trick was never to be too explicit, too obvious, never to have a sent
ence or a paragraph to which someone could point, and say – Look, there – it’s there you criticise the state, it’s there you say that marriage traps women, that the Church is crammed with hypocrites, that you promote breaking society’s rules. Jane did fail, once, to err on the side of caution. Mansfield Park, alone of all her books, wasn’t reviewed on publication. This, as I will show, is because it was an inescapably political novel, from the title onwards – a ‘fanatical novel’ which continually forced its readers to confront the Church of England’s complicity in slavery.
Jane talks in one letter about wanting readers who have ‘a great deal of ingenuity’, who will read her carefully. In wartime, in a totalitarian regime, and in a culture which took the written word far more seriously than we do, she could have expected to find them. Jane expected to be read slowly – perhaps aloud, in the evenings, or over a period of weeks as each volume was borrowed in turn from the circulating library. She expected that her readers would think about what she wrote, would even discuss it with each other.
She never expected to be read the way we read her, gulped down as escapist historical fiction, fodder for romantic fantasies. Yes, she wanted to be enjoyed; she wanted people to feel as strongly about her characters as she did herself. But for Jane a story about love and marriage wasn’t ever a light and frothy confection. Generally speaking, we view sex as an enjoyable recreational activity; we have access to reliable contraception; we have very low rates of maternal and infant mortality. None of these things was true for the society in which Jane lived. The four of her brothers who became fathers produced, between them, 33 children. Three of those brothers lost a wife to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Another of Jane’s sisters-in-law collapsed and died suddenly at the age of 36; it sounds very much as if the cause might have been the rupturing of an ectopic pregnancy, which was, then, impossible to treat. Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband – her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. Husbands could beat their wives, rape them, imprison them, take their children away, all within the bounds of the law. Avowedly feminist writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the novelist Charlotte Smith were beginning to explore these injustices during Jane’s lifetime. Understand what a serious subject marriage was then, how important it was, and all of a sudden courtship plots start to seem like a more suitable vehicle for discussing other serious things.
No more than a handful of the marriages Jane depicts in her novels are happy ones. And, with the possible exception of Pride and Prejudice, even the relationships between Jane’s central characters are less than ideal – certainly not love’s young dream. Marriage mattered because it was the defining action of a woman’s life; to accept or refuse a proposal was almost the only decision that a woman could make for herself, the only sort of control she could exert in a world which must very often have seemed as if it was spiralling into turmoil. Jane’s novels aren’t romantic. But it’s become increasingly difficult for readers to see this.
For a reader today, opening one of Jane’s novels, there’s an enormous amount standing between them and the text. There’s the passage of 200 years, for a start, and then there’s everything else – biographies and biopics, the lies and half-truths of the family memoirs, the adaptations and sequels, rewritings and re-imaginings.
When it comes to Jane, so many images have been danced before us; so rich, so vivid, so prettily presented. They’ve been seared onto our retinas in the sweaty darkness of a cinema, and the after-effect remains, a shadow on top of everything we look at subsequently.
It’s hard; it requires an effort for most readers to blink those images away, to be able to see Edward Ferrars cutting up a scissor case (a scene which arguably carries a strong suggestion of sexual violence) rather than Hugh Grant nervously rearranging the china ornaments on the mantelpiece. By the time you’ve seen Darcy poised to dive into a lake 50 times, it’s made a synaptic pathway in your brain. Indeed, I’d question whether we can get away from that, certainly how we do.
And this ought to concern us, because a lot of the images – like the images on the banknote – are simplistic, and some of them are plain wrong. Pemberley isn’t on the scale of Chatsworth; Captain Wentworth doesn’t buy Kellynch Hall for Anne as a wedding present at the end of Persuasion; the environs of Highbury, the setting for Emma, aren’t a golden pastoral idyll. We have, really, very little reason to believe that Jane was in love with Tom Lefroy. But each image colours our understanding in some way or another, from Henry Austen’s careful portrait of his sister as an accidental author to Lily James delivering roundhouse kicks in the recent film of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
The effect of all of them together is to make us read novels that aren’t actually there.
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously suggested that there were three classes of knowledge. There were known knowns – things you know you know. There were known unknowns – things you know you don’t know. And there were unknown unknowns – things you don’t know you don’t know.
I would suggest that, when dealing with someone like Jane Austen we could add another, and more dangerous, class of knowledge; what might be termed the unknown knowns – things we don’t actually know, but think we do.
If we want to be the best readers of Jane’s novels that we can be, the readers that she hoped for, then we have to take her seriously. We can’t make the mistake that Crosby made, and let our eyes slide over what doesn’t seem to be important. We can’t shrug off apparent contradictions, or look only for confirmation of what we think we already know. We have to read and we have to read carefully, because Jane had to write carefully, because she was a woman, and because she was living through a time when ideas both scared and excited people.
And once we read like this, we start to see her novels in an entirely new light. Not an undifferentiated procession of witty, ironical stories about romance and drawing rooms, but books in which an authoress reflects back to her readers their world as it really is – complicated, messy, filled with error and injustice. This is a world in which parents and guardians can be stupid, and selfish; in which the Church ignores the needs of the faithful; in which landowners and magistrates are eager to enrich themselves even when that means driving the poorest into criminality. Jane’s novels, in truth, are as revolutionary, at their heart, as anything that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote. But, by and large, they’re so cleverly crafted that unless readers are looking in the right places – reading them in the right way – they simply won’t understand.
Jane wasn’t a genius – inspired, unthinking; she was an artist. She compared herself to a miniature painter; in her work every stroke of the brush, every word, every character name and every line of poetry quoted, every location, matters.
It’s here, in the novels, that we find Jane – what there is of her to find, after all these years, after all her family’s efforts at concealment. It’s here we find a clever woman, clear-sighted, a woman ‘of information’, who knew what was going on in the world and what she thought about it. An authoress who knew that the novel, until then widely seen as mindless ‘trash’, could be a great art form and who did a lot – perhaps more than any other writer – to make it into one.
We’ve grown too accustomed to the other Janes – to Henry’s perfect sister and James-Edward’s maiden aunt; to the romantic, reckless girl in Becoming Jane and the woman on the banknote. I’ll try hard to shake these Janes off. In what follows, I offer flashes of an imaginary Jane Austen, sometimes in ordinary life, sometimes in the places she revisited in her books, but always primarily as a writer. They’re intended as glimpses of what the authoress might have been thinking, of how real events and locations, and people, might have made their way into her novels. I don’t claim these as biography; even though they stay close to Jane’s manuscript correspondence, and to her own writing, they’re fiction.
Jane wouldn’t, I think,
have disapproved of this approach. Northanger Abbey contains a lengthy passage about history, about its blend of fact and fiction. The naive heroine Catherine Morland states an undoubted truth, that ‘a great deal’ of history is made up – ‘the speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs – the chief of all this must be invention’. The older and more intelligent Eleanor Tilney, who reads history chiefly for pleasure, expresses herself ‘very well contented to take the false with the true’. For Jane herself, though, fiction isn’t simply an enjoyable embellishment. It can offer deeper truths than fact. It’s in fiction, Jane says, that we should look for ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties’.
The ‘truthful fictions’ in Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, the glimpses of an unfamiliar woman, should help to prepare readers for novels which will also become suddenly unfamiliar. Each chapter is devoted to one book and suggests how, by forgetting what we think we know, and focusing instead on the historical background, and on the texts themselves, we can make an attempt at reading as Jane intended us to. Tackling them in the order in which they were made ready for publication, we’ll move from Northanger Abbey to Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and then on to Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. But these won’t be the novels you know and love. These novels deal with slavery, with sexual abuse, with land enclosure, evolution, and women’s rights. They poke fun at the monarchy, and question religion. I’ll also shed new light on characters – on their behaviours and motivations – and the results won’t always make for easy reading.