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Book review
Becoming Jane Austen

by Jon Spence

Hambledon and London, 2003

Jon Spence’s long-awaited biography of Jane Austen is the one many readers will secretly wish they had written. Apart from his own ground-breaking work on the Austen family wills and the Oxford undergraduate magazine The Loiterer, Spence offers little new factual research. But what he does offer in rich and satisfying abundance is a reading of the known facts of Jane Austen’s life in relation to what he – a most sensitive reader – sees as the impulses underlying major aspects of the novels, and even of the juvenilia. And most of the time his readerly intuitions are startlingly convincing.

Spence’s principal argument is that (apart from her family) the two great loves of her life were Eliza de Feuillide and Tom Lefroy, both of whom she met and was fascinated by during her adolescence and young womanhood. These two people – the one ‘a sophisticated, worldly and charming woman’, the other a delightful but somewhat feckless young man – form the basis of characters and situations in several of the juvenilia, and retain their power in the writings of her maturity.

The more one reads about Eliza de Feuillide the more obvious it is that this fascinating and exotic woman, fourteen years Jane’s senior, would have exerted a powerful hold over the young writer’s imagination. Her ongoing and dangerous flirtation with Jane’s brother Henry (even while she was still married to the absent Comte de Feuillide) brought the insistent presence of youthful sexuality right into the Austen household. Spence calls this ‘one of the most profound and troubling experiences of Jane Austen’s life, an experience that haunted her imagination for more than twenty years.’ The evidence is there, Spence argues, as much in Lady Susan’s attempt to seduce a man twelve years her junior as in Mary Crawford and her love for the man she did not want to be a clergyman. Henry Austen had been intended by his family for the Church, but it was not until after the death of Eliza and his own bankruptcy that he took up the call to a devout and holy life.

Spence believes that Jane was in love with Tom Lefroy and was waiting for him to finish his law studies and then claim her in marriage. As he points out, it was Tom Lefroy’s family that provided the basic situation that begins Pride and Prejudice, the novel whose first version Austen wrote while waiting for Tom: five daughters arrived before Tom was born – and both fictional and real families are the children of a Miss Gardiner. Spence suggests, intriguingly, that Elizabeth has Tom’s character while Austen herself had the qualities of the reserved but warm-hearted Darcy. The novel is the world’s finest wish-fulfilment romance. But devastatingly, Tom did not visit Jane when he returned to Ashe over two years later; he was in fact already engaged to a suitable young woman in Ireland. He had probably been dissuaded by his family from continuing the acquaintance with the penniless Miss Austen, since he had heavy responsibilities to his large family of siblings. There is, perhaps, the germ of both Willoughby and Anne Elliot here.

Spence musters more circumstantial evidence to support the importance of Jane’s youthful love for Tom Lefroy than there is available for the ‘nameless, dateless romance’ at a watering-place, which he sensibly relegates to an appendix. He also deals very sensitively with the Harris Bigg-Wither fiasco – and how fascinating it is that Austen does not use this incident in her own writing, except perhaps obliquely, in making Fanny resolutely refuse the tempting offer of Henry Crawford. (Patricia Rozema’s film of Mansfield Park, which plays fast and loose with the life/art connection, does use this circumstance in having Fanny accept then reject Henry.)

Other friends, not only the charismatic Eliza and the charming Tom, get honourable mention in this biography for their part in Austen’s emotional life. The warm and kindly Anne Lefroy, for example, provided the young Jane with ‘special attention’ and a house of ‘peacefulness and order’ outside ‘that satirical household’ (p. 33) of her mother and brothers. Using Spence’s methods of emotional association, might one not see a late homage to Mrs Lefroy in Anne Elliot at Kellynch and Uppercross?

My only complaint about this fascinating narrative of Austen’s inner life – and it is the minor one of a lazy reader- is that Spence proceeds without the usual quota of dates and defining external events as signposts. The dates are, of course, available in the form of references to Austen’s letters and other contemporary documents; but why should the comfortable reader keep having to turn to this rebarbative list and thus interrupt her enjoyment of the story? I am also, I must admit, not entirely convinced by Spence’s claim that Austen encoded her feeling for Tom Lefroy into virtually every novel by calling a (usually minor) character after someone in Tom’s favourite novel Tom Jones – it could just be a coincidence created by her magpie-like memory. More convincing, along the same lines, is Spence’s demonstration that names and situations that she gathered up in her trips around the country stayed in her imagination until they were called upon to supply a plot or character detail in a new novel. For example, her mother’s cousin Mary Leigh’s unpublished history of the Leighs of Adlestrop provided the story of the three Misses Ward and their marriages that opens Mansfield Park, as well as details used in Persuasion. Various names in many of the novels originate in the Leigh and Brydges family connections. Austen’s observations of everyday life were demonstrably more fruitful than her reading in providing base matter for the alchemy of the novels.

Spence strongly highlights the adult Jane Austen’s determination to be a professional writer: his observation that ‘at some point Jane Austen stopped calling what she did ‘writing’ and started referring to it as ‘work" (p. 173) is typical of his perceptive and illuminating observation of details. Not to marry, after her early romantic disappointment, seems to have been a deliberate decision. Spence rightly stresses Austen’s consciousness of the way married women’s lives were not their own, with a continual round of pregnancies leaving them exhausted and in danger of early death, as she saw in her own brothers’ wives. This leads him to observe of Persuasion, ‘Austen had done all she could for Anne Elliot; she had made her with any luck too old to have eleven children in less than twenty years’ (p. 225)

Spence’s observations on all the novels are acute and wonderfully illuminating. He is more perceptive than most critics on the fragment Sanditon, treating it as a ‘radically different’ departure from her previous works: ‘never before has Austen so insistently made us aware of the physical world: topography, houses and their trappings, food, clothes’ (p. 235). And of course bodies, both healthy and sickly – an appropriate topic, argues Spence, for Austen’s awareness of her own failing body; but this is not a piece written in a spirit of valetudinarianism. Rather it is alive to the changes in behaviour brought about by Regency-period social developments, including the strikingly modern one of real estate speculation.

Possibly some reviewers will argue that Spence’s demonstration of the connections between the novels and the life is critically naive. Contemporary critical fashions stress either the subject’s complete shaping by the ideology of her time, or argue that all of a writer’s ‘original’ work is the product of her reading. In either case, the writer has, apparently, no creative will of her own. And neither of these positions adequately explains Austen’s characteristic irony – which implies both knowingness and control – or the deep feeling in the mature novels that, despite the irony and elegance of form, all readers of Austen recognise and love. Jon Spence in this biography brings us perceptibly closer to understanding the wellsprings of that unique quality in her writing.

Penny Gay

14 February 2004

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