Dear Jane

by Constance Pilgrim

According to Austen family tradition, Jane Austen travelled to the West Country for a family holiday in 1801. There she met a young man to whom she was very much attracted, and it appears that he returned her interest. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, spoke in her old age of this holiday romance and hinted to her niece Caroline that the young man was worthy of Jane and that she would not have been surprised if the friendship had eventually resulted in an engagement. Soon afterwards, however, the young man died. Most biographies mention this episode of Jane Austen’s life, but devote to it no more than a few pages at most. The name of the man is not known and because few of Jane’s letters from that time survive, it is impossible to judge with any accuracy how deeply her feelings were involved.

Constance Pilgrim, however, devotes an entire book to the subject of this romance and in doing so manages to create what must be the worst biography I have ever read. Having made up her mind that the mystery lover was Captain John Wordsworth (younger brother of the poet), Constance Pilgrim proceeds to find all the ‘evidence’ she can to support her theory. John Wordsworth was a sailor, he was on shore at the time of the romance and he did die not long afterwards when his ship, the Earl of Abergavenny, was shipwrecked. There is, however, no evidence whatsoever that the couple ever met. Certainly William Wordsworth, a prolific letter-writer, never mentioned it, and it is almost inconceivable that Cassandra would have failed to mention that her sister had once been in love with the brother of one of the most famous poets of the day.

Constance Pilgrim, throughout her book, imagines many scenes between Jane and John. She describes the walks they would have taken together at Sidmouth and the Isle of Wight, the tearful farewells at Portsmouth when his ship was due to sail, the agony when Jane heard of his death. She also imagines that Jane’s friend Mrs Lefroy, who had once kept her nephew Tom away from Jane, interfered again and did her best to keep John and Jane apart. The following quote is typical of Pilgrim’s general style:

We can imagine the angry, hurt feelings with which John Wordsworth left Jane; he knew his dismissal had all been Mrs Lefroy’s doing...he knew that he and Jane were ideally suited to each other – in similarity of family background, in temperament, in tastes of all kinds. He knew they would neither find anyone else to whom they could be equally devoted. But pride, bitter and agonising, made the shy, sensitive sailor determined to try, as best he could, to forget his deep love for Jane.

According to Constance Pilgrim, Jane Austen and Anne Elliot were one and the same person. It was in Persuasion, she argues, that Jane gave a heroine the happy ending she herself was denied. She quotes at length from this novel, insisting that every walk, every conversation and every action were based on Jane and John’s real experience.

Perhaps the most extraordinary explanation in this appalling book is the one concerning the ‘engagement’ between Jane Austen and Harris Bigg-Wither. Constance Pilgrim’s version is that Harris’ proposal was accepted by Jane after she had seen a newspaper announcement of a marriage between a Mr Wordsworth and a Miss Hutchinson. Believing that John had been untrue to her, Jane accepted Harris. However, somehow during the night (the details become very vague here!) Jane learned that it was William and not John Wordsworth who had married, and so she withdrew her acceptance of Harris Bigg-Wither in the morning!

Constance Pilgrim suggests many other extraordinary things in her book – a meeting between William Wordsworth and Cassandra in later life and a definite engagement between Jane Austen and John Wordsworth are just some of them. The work stretches reader credulity from the first page to the last, is full of absurd speculation and is written in a style which might perhaps interest the publishers of Mills and Boon romantic novels. It deserves a place in a Jane Austen library only as an example of how very bad a book about Jane Austen can be. She herself would probably have enjoyed a good laugh with Cassandra over this book, but true admirers of Jane Austen can only groan!

Susannah Fullerton

Jane Austen: A Family Record

by W Austen-Leigh, R A Austen-Leigh and Deirdre le Faye, 1989

In 1913 R A and W Austen-Leigh, descendants of Jane Austen’s brother James, combined to publish a Life and Letters of Jane Austen. It appeared that later a revised edition of this book was planned, but neither author got around to it. They left behind a vast collection of family letters, papers etc which had not all been fully used for the first edition of their book. The descendants of the two men asked Deirdre le Faye to take on the task and the result was Jane Austen: A Family Record.

Deirdre le Faye is a scholar who is totally meticulous, who checks every fact she uses, who returns to all original sources available and who has access to the family papers. This made her the ideal person for the job. Her book is written in a clear, no-nonsense style, and recounts everything that is known about Jane Austen’s brief life. There are many quotations used, so that Jane Austen and the various members of her family are allowed to speak for themselves where possible.

The biography begins with a very comprehensive chronology and ends with a useful chapter on what happened after Jane Austen’s death - the ups and downs of her reputation, the reviews of her novels, what happened to her close relatives, the destruction of the letters, the controversy over portraits etc. What comes in between this excellent beginning and ending is hard to fault. While I prefer Claire Tomalin’s style of writing (she is more imaginative and more stimulating to the reader than is Deirdre le Faye) Jane Austen: A Family Record is always the biography I turn to when I want to find a date or quickly check a fact. This book is a must on the shelves of any serious Jane Austen enthusiast or scholar.

Susannah Fullerton

A Portrait of Jane Austen

by Lord David Cecil, 1978

Lord David Cecil, the author of A Portrait of Jane Austen was the son of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury, educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was Goldsmith Professor of English Literature from 1948 to 1969. He is the author of several works of biography which the Oxford Companion to English Literature says ‘combine scholarly attention to detail with accessibility to the general reader’.

This is an excellent description of this particular biography. The style is clear and elegant, and it is scholarly without being pedantic or dull. To those already familiar with Jane Austen’s life and works it may not offer much new information but as a portrait of her and her time it could scarcely be bettered. There is an old Viennese saying which translates as ‘Why have it simple when you can have it complicated?’ These days I think some biographers have taken this saying as their motto. David Cecil keeps it simple but this does not mean that he is simplistic. In his prologue he points out that information about his subject is limited and fragmentary and says:

She remains for me – as no doubt she would have wished – not an intimate but an acquaintance.

He admits that he could not resist the temptation to ‘draw her likeness’ but he keeps his imagination well in hand. Elsewhere I have seen it stated categorically that Aunt Leigh Perrot was a kleptomaniac, that Jane Austen was seriously in love with Tom Lefroy and deeply affected by his defection, that Mrs Austen was a selfish hypochondriac, or that Jane was a bitter and frustrated woman. There has even been the suggestion that there was a lesbian element in the friendship of Jane and Cassandra! There is little that is controversial in this biography but this does not mean that the conclusions Cecil has come to are suspect or the result of an uncritical admiration for his subject.

The judgments he makes are solidly based on his reading and research and all the more convincing for that. Perhaps he is a little too ready to believe in Aunt Leigh Perrot’s innocence but there were certainly enough suspicious circum-stances surrounding her arrest to suggest an attempt at blackmail and these, together with her triumphant acquittal after eight months in custody are surely sufficient to explain why Cecil takes the view that she was falsely accused.

His reading of the Tom Lefroy affair is that Jane was attracted, but not to the extent that his defection caused her any great distress. In fact, judging from her comments to Cassandra, it seems that her response to Tom was on a par with Emma’s flirtation with Frank Churchill or Elizabeth’s with Wickham.

As to Mrs Austen, his picture of her is of a spirited old lady, with a sense of humour and little self-pity. He describes her at over 70 as ‘still vigorous’ and goes on to say that:

She could often be seen from the window, dressed in a labourer’s round green smock digging energetically in a potato patch.

Later, she is described thus:

Mrs Austen lingered on, an ageing invalid, spending most of her time on the sofa, but still cheerful and good-humoured.

Obviously nothing that he read suggested to him that Jane and her mother were not on perfectly good terms.

To those who are scandalised by some of Jane’s more caustic remarks and accuse her of making jokes in poor taste he replies:

These readers forget the period she lived in and misapprehend the nature of her relation to Cassandra. Any acute observer of his or her fellow men must be critical of them; and, if he/she happens like Jane Austen to be a humourist, will make fun of them. But if, also like Jane Austen, he/she is discreet and dislikes giving pain, they will reserve their criticism and jokes exclusively for the ears of the few persons who are really in their confidence. For Jane this meant Cassandra. Only with Cassandra did she let herself be as frank and flippant as she felt inclined, say what she really thought about other people, sure that her remarks would be taken in the spirit in which they were intended and certain that they would not be repeated.

It will be obvious to you that I have thoroughly enjoyed re-reading this biography after a break of several years, probably more so because it presents Jane Austen as I see her. I like the way David Cecil concludes his work, quoting from a Memoir of his Aunt written by James Edward Austen Leigh, James’ son in 1870:

Though in the course of fifty years I have forgotten much, I have not forgotten that Jane Austen was the delight of all her nephews and nieces. We did not think of her as clever, still less as being famous, but we valued her as one who was always kind, sympathetic and amusing.

David Cecil concludes:

Let these last sentences end my pen portrait of Jane Austen. While engaged on it I have come to like her so much that I want my farewell to be one that would have pleased her; and, surely, she would have been pleased by these words of Edward’s. They keep her secret, shed no unwanted light on the hidden workings of her genius; and praise her as she would have been glad to be praised. Indeed, and once again they show her as exceptional. There are few great authors of whom they could have been written – even by an affectionate nephew.

Marjorie Jones

The Parson’s Daughter

by Irene Collins

I enjoyed this biography very much – it is most readable, entertaining and informative. The main focus is how the religious views of Jane Austen’s father, and the values of the household in which she grew up, influenced Jane, her views of the world and so her writing. As such it can be seen as a supplementary biography, furthering the information that can be enjoyed through Claire Tomalin or Park Honan’s works.

The Parson’s Daughter is the latest book by Irene Collins, who so entertained and informed us at our conference last year, her first book on Jane Austen being Jane Austen and the Clergy. Both these books are marked by Irene’s excellently researched historical facts, which reflect her many years as a an academic lecturing in History, as well as giving an insight to her strong personal faith. She is the author of a number of books on Britain and Europe in the 18th century, and is particularly interested in the connection between history and literature.

The biography contributed very much to giving me a better understanding of the integral part that Jane Austen’s quiet Christianity and its values played in her life. It emphasises the major influence of the Enlightenment on George Austen, as someone educated at Oxford in the 1740s and 1750s. This view bestowed a growing respect for individuals as equal participants in a common humanity.

As an Enlightenment scholar, George Austen believed that Jane should use her reasoning powers to enlarge her understanding and, as a Christian, he knew that it was her duty to improve her talent. Both he and his wife encouraged her writing, and George Austen was liberal enough to try and help her become a published author.

In regard to Irene’s handling of controversial issues, I think her comments about Jane’s relationship with her mother is of interest. She explained Mrs. Austen’s decision to put her children out to be nursed by a ‘good woman’ in one of the peasant cottages nearby, from the age of 3 months until they could walk and talk. This decision is discussed against a background of the changing social preferences of the time, but she comments ‘the emotional effect such a process may have had on the children can only be imagined.’

Irene also presents Jane’s relationship with Tom Lefroy as ‘plunging recklessly into her first love affair’. She discusses the events surrounding this relationship with reference to issues that Jane wrote about in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park. Throughout The Parson’s Daughter historical events on the time are related to Jane Austen’s life, and this makes the biography all the more interesting.

Overall I would warmly recommend this book for an enlightening read.

Anne Harbers

Obstinate Heart 

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer, 1997

Myer’s Preface of this biography states her position clearly:

Jane Austen was never secure financially and was less secure socially than many readers of her novels have assumed. She belonged not to the squirearchy but to the upper end of the professional middle class, and spent her entire life as a poor relation. Although socialising with richer neighbours and visits to landed relatives gave her an insight in to the way wealthy people lived, it was very different from her own life of genteel poverty… she lived on the outside looking in.

The first chapter is titled ‘What was she like?’. Grosvenor Myer starts by discussing Cassandra’s portrait of Jane and says it ‘shows a woman more sharp-featured than appealing’. The watercolour by Mr Andrews she describes as ‘falsified’ and ‘ a bland lie’. The steel-engraved version of Mr Andrews picture was worse.

It made her look smug instead of sharp, and sentimentalised … Regrettably this travesty is still often reproduced.

Mrs Grosvenor Myer seems determined to emphasise all that is sharp and uncomfortable about Jane Austen. The biography is a clear attempt to revise the somewhat saccharine image of her initiated by the Victorian relatives. Previous biographers, both family and professionals, have denied she was capable of malice. All those vinegary comments that modern enthusiasts love so much were softened or edited completely in the past. The Victorians did their level best to deny that Jane’s letters were, according to Valerie Grosvenor Myer ‘often a demolition job on her neighbours.’

Her revision of Jane’s character seems to sweep away even her capacity to imagine romanticism:

All Jane Austen’s novels follow the romance pattern of happy marriage achieved after difficulties have been overcome. Her own life was very different, emotionally unfulfilled. She was far from unfeeling, but she cultivated detachment and avoided emotionalism. She became adept, in her letters and in her novels, at making jokes on painful subjects. It was her way of coping. (my emphasis)

She treats the various flirtations and romances as nothing more than entertaining diversions. One gets a sense that ‘this’ Jane could not and would not marry, on principle. Her superior intellect and wit meant that ‘she dreaded marriage to a man of inferior understanding.’

Despite her youthful popularity, all Jane’s relationships with men came to nothing. Her obstinate heart forbade her to marry except for love. The flippant, flirtatious teenager faded into a middle-aged maiden aunt, dowdy not because she chose to be – indeed she loved clothes – but because she was poor. (my emphasis again)

Obstinate Heart is an easy to read, a chatty (if not catty), gossipy biography. I learnt nothing new except one piece of trivia about the Lloyds. (They used the Welsh pronunciation, ‘Floyd’). The work emphasises Jane’s satire in her private life and writings, and seems to recycle existing biographies rather than offering a different perspective. An interesting read, but certainly not the first biography I would recommend.

Meghan Hayward

Jane Austen: Her Life

by Park Honan, 2nd edition 1987

London and New York, Routledge, 1996

The first thing I noticed about this work dismayed me a little. The back cover and the first page are full of testimonials of how good the books is. In the first sentence of his Preface Honan states, ‘Jane Austen: Her Life is acknowledged to be the most complete, realistic life of Jane Austen.’ I think it would have been more in keeping with his subject to have been just a little bit more modest.

There is no bibliography. I found this to be a minus, particularly after reading some of his notes, many of which are unclear as to what work or document he is referring to.

According to the biographical sketch of Honan, he is an academic who has written several biographies and whose most recent position was at Leeds University in the School of English. He appears to have done little fresh research through County Records Offices and the like, relying on known manuscript sources. At the start of his Notes section he lists 20 manuscript and other sources: 17 of them are letter and family sources (if you include the Lefroy papers as ‘family’ papers) and he acknowledges how much assistance he has had from various descendants of Jane Austen’s family and friends. It is not clear however who owns what manuscripts and where they are located. To lump various manuscript letters, verses and notes together and say they are in Hampshire leaves a little to be desired. This book is not a guide to the whereabouts of source material for Jane Austen.

However, I actually quite enjoyed the book itself. It does not start with the usual recital of ancient Austen and Leigh family histories. Much of this is eventually given, but is scattered through the book as background to various events in Jane’s and her family’s lives. Instead, this book starts with Prelude: Frank Austen’s Ride, which gives us a glimpse of how hard, harsh and cruel the wider Georgian world could be, without descending to the whorehouses and gin shops of London. This unusual beginning and the way it is followed through actually becomes one of the book’s strengths. Throughout, Honan emphasises the way the outside world touched Jane Austen, together with her interest in and knowledge of it. He does not treat his subject and her family as living in a genteel vacuum, in a romantic, idealised Regency world. The outside world also comes into his analyses of Jane Austen’s works. He looks at events and thought contemporaneous with the novels and points out the ways Jane Austen reacted to the world and the effect it had on her work.

Park Honan’s portrayal of Jane Austen is of neither a sinner nor a saint. His Jane Austen is not the saintly Aunt Jane of David Cecil and some family members, nor is she the arch-bitch of Valerie Grosvenor Myer and John Halperin.

Nothing is made in this work of the Austen family’s custom of sending babies to live with local cottagers from the age of about 3-18 months. Other than saying Jane returned to a happy, secure family home, the practice is not really mentioned. Her brother George also hardly gets a mention. As another handicapped Leigh cousin was living with a family in nearby Monk Sherborne, it seemed natural to have George do the same. Honan certainly does not claim either of these things had a lasting psychological effect on Jane.

As a child Mrs Austen instilled in Jane the importance of rank, both in the world at large and within the family. As daughters Cassandra and Jane were of less importance than the Austen sons, and as the younger daughter Jane was the least important member of the family. It does not appear that Mr Austen felt this way about his children. He tried to help Jane to get her work published in the same way that he tried to assist all his children. If he had lived to see Jane’s works in print he would have been proud of her, whereas to her dying day Mrs Austen gave precedence to James and his sermons and poems. However Honan does not go out of his way to prove that there was a lifelong friction between Jane and her mother.

Park Honan comes to the conclusion that Jane Austen convinced herself she was in love with Tom Lefroy. She was ready to fall in love and so did most of the work to make Tom mildly interested in her. Unfortunately, his family were worried about the danger to him of making an imprudent marriage, so they shipped him back to London. While Jane Austen’s love was real, much of it was created in her imagination – much in the way Emma Woodhouse was to be an imaginist.

Honan does not give you the feeling Jane was jealous of her brother Edward, rather that the friction was between Jane and his wife Elizabeth. Most of this came from Elizabeth’s treatment of her husband’s poor relations. He describes Elizabeth Austen as having ‘a smoothly condescending, lazy and well-bred snobbery which could take ... a smug, high-handed managerial form when the occasion demanded.’ Jane was sensitive to Elizabeth’s condescension and Jane’s intellect and wit were too much for many in the Bridges family. He also suggests that it was possibly Elizabeth who sowed the seeds for characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Park Honan has come up with some interesting ideas about why some things happened in Jane’s life. Two which were particularly intriguing related to letters. The first is Jane’s letter of 27-28 October 1798 in which she writes:

Mrs Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.

Cassandra’s fiancé Tom Fowle had died before this letter was written and Honan suggests that her child-bearing and other jokes were an attempt to force Cassandra into happiness by way of ‘arrogant humour’. He writes, ‘Her comedy had a mission, it was a sign of defiance’ and of the letter, it was ‘tasteless and cruel, exuberant and healthy. It defied life and laughed at death.’

The other letter of particular interest is the one written by Fanny Knight many years after Jane’s death in which she claims Jane and Cassandra were unrefined and vulgar. In 1826 Fanny’s husband’s eldest daughter from his first marriage eloped with Fanny’s younger brother, Edward. This was felt to disgrace the Knight and Knatchbull families as the union was almost incestuous. To make matters worse, on the lovers’ return from Gretna Green they were married in Steventon church, and Cassandra Austen and Anna Lefroy allowed the newlyweds to visit them. In Fanny’s eyes this was unforgivable and she later directed her venom at both Jane and Cassandra.

The author also comes up with many odd little snippets about Jane Austen and her family which were new to me. The one I found most delightful is about her Sanditon manuscript. She sewed bundles of folded sheets of paper together to give herself the feeling of writing a book. As an embroiderer I love the idea that the sewing and embroidery that played an important part in her daily life also played a part in her writing.

Despite an unencouraging beginning, this is one of the better Jane Austen biographies, as it tries to present a real person living in a real world. Park Honan’s Jane Austen is not twisted to highlight different aspects of her character and life as some biographers have done, nor does it completely toe the family line. In the end I agree with most of the testimonials to the book!

Andrea Richards

Jane Austen: A Life

by David Nokes, 1997

David Nokes was born in London in 1948. He is a reader in English at Kings College London. In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received critical acclaim for two of his books: Jonathan Swift, A Hypocrite Reversed (1985) and John Gay, A Profession of Friendship (1995). He has also written the screenplays for Clarissa (1992), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996), and is a regular reviewer for The Sunday Times, TLS and The Spectator.

I found this biography quite a chore to read, heavy in content and weight! The family tree on the inside cover was essential as so many family members, relationships and associations are mentioned. (Overloaded, I believe!)

David Nokes states at the beginning that Cassandra’s burning of Janes letters may have been done to cover up some deep, dark secrets about our Jane – hence the title of the first Chapter ‘Family Secrets’. This put me on the defensive as I felt he was out to ‘get some dirt’ on Jane. Happily, as I read on, this was not so, although I get the impression he was trying to find a darker side to her, but Jane triumphs.

One thing that Nokes repeatedly said was ‘Jane thought so and so’ which I found really irritating. How could he presume to know what Jane thought!

At the time of the JASA Annual Conference I had not finished the book, but on the advice of others, thankfully, I did so. From Part IV, 1809-1817, the chapters from Chawton onwards (about one third of the book) I found enjoyable. As for the first 350 pages – I think it can be summed up by Shakespeare, in Hamlet, ‘ Brevity is the soul of wit!’

Lyn Drabsch

Jane Austen: A Biography

by Elizabeth Jenkins, 1938/1972/1986

This biography was first published in 1938 and revised in 1972. Both these pre-date the next well known biography, by Lord David Cecil, written in 1978, so for many Austen lovers, teachers and academics in these years Elizabeth Jenkins’ study was an invaluable resource. It is the first interpretative biography, making use of the known family records at the time, the letters edited by Dr R W Chapman in 1932, and most probably the Leslie Stephen Lecture on Jane Austen’s works given by Lord David Cecil in Cambridge in 1935 and then published. The last is guess work because there is a minimally compiled biography in my edition which is a Gollancz paperback issued in 1986, after the biography had for some years been out of print. This list has undated entries with no publishing details and refers to ‘Jane Austen by Lord David Cecil’ which is not the title of his biography and does not therefore suggest more revision for the paperback issue. For Gollancz, Elizabeth Jenkins did add a Postscript referring to new information contained in the Annual Reports of the Jane Austen Society, which was founded in 1940. She must be a founding member of that Society, since she says that the matters she discusses, she herself has ‘mentioned’ in the reports. This later information is mostly on minor matters but points to the 1964 paper which concluded that Jane Austen had Addison’s Disease and to the evidence which suggests that Eliza Hancock was the daughter of Warren Hastings.

The 1972 revised biography retains its 1938 intensity and is written in a vibrant prose, imbued with the conviction that she is writing about the development of genius and that Jane Austen’s art is a manifestation of ‘perfect taste’. The opening recalls the 1938 period, not in relation to the threat of war, but to the pressure of a growing popular culture, in a Britain coming out of the Depression. Masses of ordinary people with tastes uncluttered by a classical education (or much education at all beyond the age of 14) aspire to houses with baths, sophisticated entertainment for their leisure hours and popular reading.

The author recognises the need, but with evident regret for the best of the Georgian age: The 18th century was an age such as our imagination can barely comprehend; weltering as we do in a slough of habitual ugliness, ranging from the dreary horrors of Victorian sham gothic to the more lively hideousness of modern jerry-building, with advertisements defacing any space that might be left unoffendingly blank, and the tourist scattering his trail of chocolate paper, cigarette ends and film cartons, we catch sight every now and again of a house front, plain and graceful, with a fan light like the half of a spider’s web and a slip of an iron balcony; among the florid or stark disfigurements of a graveyard we discover a tombstone with elegant letters composing, in a single sentence, a well turned epitaph. Among a bunch of furnishing fabrics we come upon a traditional 18th-century chintz, formal and exquisitely gay; a print shows us the vista of a London street, with two rows of blond, porticoed houses closing in a view of trees and fields. The ghost of that vanished loveliness haunts us in every memorial that survives the age: a house in its park, a tea cup, the type and binding of a book (p.10).

She does go on to mention wretched 18th century conditions in slums, in prisons and in the army and navy, but a belief that the Georgian Age was the last in English history to produce great works of art, and a yearning for past beauty, especially in relation to country life, leads her to Hampshire and Steventon. Once there she covers the early years of the Austen family and their environment with charming but brief description. It is here that she mentions that Mrs Cawley ‘undertook the care of a few children at her home in Oxford’ (p 10), but a page later refers to the Abbey School as ‘another boarding school experiment’. Thus she is seen by T A B Corley (in an article in The Jane Austen Society Newsletter No. 11, October 1998) as being the originator of an error built up by later biographers. By failing to check original sources, they (including Tomalin and Nokes), presented a picture of an academy with rules and regulation, a ‘phantom school’. Corley does point out that earlier biographers understood the real arrangements.

Re-reading this biography after so many new ones in this decade, it seems to me that it is still a useful, stimulating and scholarly account which illuminates Jane Austen’s art. She discusses 18th century prose from Dryden, through to Addison, Sterne, Fielding and Richardson; Fanny Burney’s novels; the cult of the picturesque and its relationship to landscape and architecture; the gothic novel from Walpole to Radcliffe as well as the genesis of each of the novels. The picturesque is discussed in chapter 6 as a preliminary to comment on Sense and Sensibility, which she sees as an apprentice novel, and each discussion of Jane Austen’s works is given a useful context. Her assumption that Lady Susan was written in 1805 is not generally accepted now but she argues that the fair copy of that date is contemporary.

These kinds of subject matter mean that there is less emphasis but, in my view, adequate discussion of family history and the activities of the Austen brothers and other relatives. It is this area which later biographers have tended to elaborate. In contrast to newer commentators, she saw Jane Austen as confident and content in her social milieu, although quiet outside the family. She also romances on the unknown young man met in Devon, Jane’s likely suffering and its effect on the development of her powers, ending chapter 9 rather wildly, with an epitaph ‘Nameless here for evermore’. She is a writer who can, in E M Forster’s terms, connect prose with passion.

Elizabeth Jenkins was born in England, educated at a private school and at Newnham College Cambridge. Her publications have spanned many decades; her first novel was published in 1931 and a book defending a Victorian Medium, Daniel Home, in 1983. She has written other biographies, on Lady Caroline Lamb, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth and Leicester and Elizabeth I, and many novels including Harriet (1934) which won a prize, Brightness (1963) and Dr. Gully (1972). She received the OBE in 1981.

Yvette Field

Biographical Notice of the Author

by Henry Austen, 1818

A Memoir of Jane Austen

by James Edward Austen Leigh, 1870/1989

The Biographical Notice of the Author was written by Jane Austen’s brother Henry, and prefaced the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818. It is an account – only six pages long – of her life and death, written shortly after she died, and reads more like an obituary –

The hand which guided the pen of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma is now mouldering in the grave… [Hers was] a life of usefulness, literature and religion.

Henry dwells on her personal attractions and comments that she was:

formed for elegant and rational society, excelling in conversation as much as in composition … faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive and forget – she never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression … She didn’t want public notice but in the bosom of her own family she talked of her works frequently, thankful for praise, open to remark and submissive to criticism … One trait only remains to be touched on ... which makes all others unimportant. She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.

Slight as it was, this was the first public information released about Jane Austen.

There were a few reviews of her books in her lifetime, but between 1821 and 1870, she was largely ignored. In the 1820s her books were even out of print, but in 1833 they were re-issued, which led to the appearance of a small, steady but discriminating following. By the 1850s, enthusiasts started visiting Winchester Cathedral in order to find her grave, (one of them referred to it as the ‘shrine of Jane Austen’ ). In his Memoir, James Edward Austen-Leigh relates this story:

A few years ago a gentleman visiting Winchester Cathedral desired to be shown Miss Austen’s grave. The verger, as he pointed it out, asked ‘pray sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady; so many people want to know where she was buried?’

James comments that during her life most people shared the ignorance of the verger; few knew that ‘there was anything particular about that lady’.

However, this increasing interest in Jane Austen is what led to the Memoir now under consideration. Written by James Edward Austen-Leigh, son of Jane’s oldest brother James, it is based on his personal recollections and those of his half-sister Mrs Anna Lefroy, his sister Miss Caroline Austen, and some cousins, (daughters of Jane’s brother Charles). He writes in his introduction –

More than half a century has passed away since I, the youngest of the mourners, attended the funeral of my dear Aunt Jane in Winchester Cathedral; and now in my old age I am asked whether my memory will serve to rescue from oblivion any event in her life or any traits of her character to satisfy the enquiries of a generation of readers who have been born since she died … I am the more inclined to undertake the task from a conviction that, however little I may have to tell, no-one is left who could tell so much of her.

Although often referred to as the Memoir of 1870, a first edition came out in 1869 and was so well received it was followed by a second edition in 1871, the latter including, in response to many requests received for any more of her work, Lady Susan, The Watsons, the cancelled chapter of Persuasion and information about her final work, now known as Sanditon. Some 17 reviews followed publication of the Memoir, which itself forms the basis of all subsequent biographies. And as some 20th century reviewers have commented, it also launched ‘dear Aunt Jane’ and the Austen industry.

The value of the Memoir lies in that which can never be repeated – it is a first-hand account written by someone who knew Jane Austen and who had access to others still living who could similarly write down their recollections for its publication. Although this account can perhaps produce an impression of James as an aged Victorian gentleman, sitting in his cluttered Victorian sitting room, nostalgic for simpler times, nevertheless a clear picture of Jane Austen emerges, and certainly his admiration for her person, her writing and her devout piety is apparent.

James shares details about her immediate ancestors and her family, stressing their closeness, and especially her reciprocal love for her only sister, Cassandra. He also mentions various nieces and nephews, cousins and acquaintances, both close and casual, who introduced variety into the family circle. He describes the various residences of Jane Austen – Steventon, Bath, Southampton and Chawton and writes of the latter:

I cannot recommend any admirer of Jane Austen to undertake a pilgrimage to this spot … the building indeed still stands, but it has lost all that gives it its character … it was divided into tenements for labourers and the ground reverted to ordinary uses. (p329)

Today, of course, thankfully, it has been restored, is open to the public as a museum (see the Letter from Chawton), and is a valuable resource for researchers, media, and Jane Austen events. On those issues which have come to attract some controversy or dispute, JEAL is largely silent. The existence of Jane’s second brother George, who was mentally impaired and did not live with the family, is completely ignored, and the position of second brother is given to the third, Edward. This brother was

early adopted by his cousin Mr Knight, of Godmersham Park … Though a good deal separated in childhood they were much together in later life, and Jane gave a large share of her affection to him and his children.

There is no suggestion of any jealousy of his good fortune on Jane Austen’s part.

Of Jane’s thoughts on the removal to Bath, he says only that she was exceedingly unhappy, as was natural:

The loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons of strong feeling and lively imagination ... and she had little time to reconcile herself to the change (p312).

He makes brief mention of Mrs Austen’s only brother Mr Leigh Perrot who spent part of every year in Bath, and no mention at all of the slightly less salubrious residence which Mrs Leigh Perrot occupied for some time.

Regarding Jane Austen’s romantic attachments, James is discreet. He mentions the loss of the clergyman whom Cassandra was to marry as a great affliction and then goes on to say –

Of Jane herself I know of no such definite tale of love to relate ... (but) … she did not indeed pass through life without being the object of warm affection. In her youth she had declined the addresses of a gentleman who had the recommendations of good character, and connection, and position in life, of everything, in fact, except the subtle power of touching her heart.

He goes on to mention the mystery man of the West Country:

I believe that, if Jane ever loved it was this unnamed gentleman; but the acquaintance had been short and I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness (p291).

As to Tom Lefroy, whose name has also been sometimes linked with Jane’s, he says only that they were for a short time intimately acquainted, then never met again:

yet in his extreme old age, he spoke of his former companion as one to be much admired, and not easily forgotten by those who had ever known her (p310).

As to whether Jane Austen liked or disliked her mother, we cannot believe he would even consider that the latter could be possible. Her family was all to her. James spends some time describing Jane Austen’s person, character and tastes, noting that although she was not highly accomplished according to the present standard, she was well educated. We are also told that she

took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter.

We learn that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philips’ clerks, and that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell about two years. (p376)

Also included in the Memoir are some of Jane Austen’s letters, introduced by saying:

A wish has sometimes been expressed that some of Jane Austen’s letters should be published. Some entire letters, and many extracts will be given in this Memoir, but the reader must be warned not to expect too much from them … the materials may be thought inferior to the execution, for they treat only of the details of domestic life ... they may be said to resemble the nest which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand … curiously constructed out of the simplest matters. (p312)

Not for him the insight that it was her awareness of the simplest matters of domestic life which generated so much of her densely realised novels. And we now know that he edited some of her letters. Anything felt to be less than perfect in her writings was attributed to the imperfections of her Regency period. In a letter to Cassandra, for example, she writes:

Give my love to little Cass, I hope she found my bed comfortable last night and has not filled it with fleas. James omitted the reference to fleas.

Critic Roger Sales also demonstrates how this editing denies Jane Austen’s strength, both of purpose and physique, as well as not allowing her to betray any knowledge of the world beyond her home.

The final chapters of the Memoir cover the slow growth of her literary reputation:

It may be difficult for readers of the present day to believe how coldly her works were at first received, and how few readers had any appreciation of their peculiar merit. (p361)

He then quotes the words of a friend of his who had:

established it in his own mind, as a new test of ability, whether people could or could not appreciate Miss Austen’s merits,

this test being one which we may find ourselves using today! We hear about her correspondence with Mr Clarke, the librarian at Carlton House, and his suggestion that Emma be dedicated to the Prince Regent.

Chapter 11 is subtitled Declining Health of Jane Austen – her resignation and humility – her Death.

We may well believe she would gladly have lived longer; but she was enabled without dismay or complaint to prepare for death … In quietness and peace she breathed her last on the morning of July 18, 1817.

A final point of interest to note in connection with the Memoir is that a portrait of Jane Austen was prefixed to the original volume, which James notes was taken from a drawing by Cassandra. The ‘from’ is important. Cassandra’s original drawing:

shows a young woman with penetrating dark eyes sitting with arms rather aggressively crossed and staring boldly ahead. The mouth is caustic, and there is no more than the suspicion of a smile; the curls are slightly absurd. The subject is plainly attired. The Jane Austen of the Memoir is more decorous; the face is no longer slightly alarming, the cap and curls are prettier, the pose is more ladylike. (Jane Austen, Feminism & Fiction, Margaret Kirkham. (p59)

On Cassandra’s death in 1845, Cassy-Esten, the eldest daughter of Jane’s brother Charles, had inherited the original sketch of Jane, but described it as being ‘hideously unlike’. James commissioned a local artist to redraw it, under his and his sisters’ superintendence. Of the revised portrait which accompanied the Memoir, Cassy-Esten wrote:

I confess to not thinking it MUCH like the original, but THAT the public will not be able to detect.

And his sister Caroline wrote: I did not reckon upon finding any likeness – but there is a LOOK I recognise as hers ... the general resemblance is not strong, yet as it represents a pleasing countenance it is so far a truth and I am not dissatisfied with it. (Austen-Leigh/le Faye p253).

When Kirkham’s book was first published in 1983, she wrote that this assimilation of Jane Austen to a Victorian ideal remains the most frequently produced likeness and that it continues to exert a harmful influence upon the reading of the novels (p59)

Despite the limitations I have briefly outlined above, I would recommend this biography. Besides the virtue of being concise, its main value lies in its being an account of one who for some period of time, knew Jane Austen well, if not intimately. It gives valuable information about her family, her habits and her life, and even if it did lead to subsequent consideration of her as a quaint and saintly spinster aunt, modern scholarship has balanced this viewpoint. Taken on its own merits, it is an invaluable testimony to the writer whose works have given us all so much pleasure.

Amanda Jones

Jane Austen: A Life

by Claire Tomalin, 1997

When coming to a work such as Tomalin’s has been reputed to be, it is an indulgence first to pause and glance at the ‘peripherals’ of the publication, and this test Tomalin passes with flying colours. The work defines her as being an academic in English Literature, an editor, then later a full-time biographer, of such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield, Nelly Ternan (partner of Charles Dickens), and the excellent Mrs Jordan’s Profession. The comprehensive Notes to the text, and the concise bibliography, show a very wide range of primary sources, from diaries, letters and other papers of Jane Austen’s relatives and neighbours, and Tomalin’s own physical exploration of the area and its archives. There is an excellent and comprehensive index, essential for a work that will be used as a reference for some time; and a selective family tree, always a helpful tool in reading a biography. There is also a map of Jane Austen’s Hampshire, showing the places she visited – another helpful visual aid to the reader’s enjoyment of Austen’s life, times and place.

Illustrations are of portraits and early engravings, and first illustrated (French) editions. The cover is certainly not exciting – even, at first, disappointing – and with the other illustrations gives a very conservative ‘feel’ to the work. However, further thought brought the recognition that Tomalin was using only those works and illustrations which were not in any doubt – those which could be proved to be of Jane, her work, her family and her environment. They therefore are appropriate from a researcher as meticulous as these first glances prove Tomalin to be.

The text itself is not disappointing. Tomalin combines eloquence with research, and with perceptive criticism of the works themselves, putting them into the context of contemporary thought. Sense & Sensibility, for example, she defines as a debate –

in which Austen compares the discretion, polite lies and carefully preserved privacy of one sister with the transparency, truth-telling and freely expressed emotion of the other. Austen is considering how far society can tolerate openness, and what its effect on the individual may be. The question was keenly debated in the 1790s as part of a wider political discussion, with radical writers like William Godwin and Robert Bage favouring the complete openness practised by Marianne, conservatives insisting that the preservation of the social fabric requires an element of secrecy and hypocrisy. These were serious questions, and one of the things that gives the book its intense interest is that Austen starts as though she is favouring one set of answers, and grows less certain as the book progress. To me, this ambivalence makes Sense & Sensibility one of her two most deeply absorbing books – the other being Mansfield Park, which has a similar wobble in its approach… Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot. (p155)

The treatment of Jane’s brother George is factual, though brief. Tomalin hypothesises that George ‘lacked language’, since from a letter of 1808 it is evident that Jane knew deaf and dumb sign language. Tomalin sees him as a repeating sorrow for Mrs Austen, who would have been eight when her own backward brother Thomas Leigh was born. His father wrote of this exception to the successful Austen children

We have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or wicked child. (pp7-8)

Of Mrs Austen Tomalin is more acerbic, describing her as a hypochondriac, ‘far tougher than her healthy friends’, living to be 87, but a formative influence to Jane:

She had been a strong force in the family, a tough, self-confident and remarkable woman, not always on easy terms with her most brilliant child, whose genius she nevertheless helped to shape by her example as a writer of verse and her taste as a reader. (p279)

Regarding the relationship with Tom Lefroy, Jane’s own light and gay –

‘imagine everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together’ –

encourages Tomalin, without basis in the view of this reviewer, to the conclusion that she had ‘believed he cared for her, and known she cared for him’ (p181), a jump in logic not worthy of a biographer of this standing, and far too close to Mills & Boon.

The contact with ‘love’ in a Devon resort is handled much more prosaically and dismissively …

There is nothing in writing by Cassandra, no name, no precise place or date. When Caroline set down her account forty years after she was told it, it had become as mistily romantic as the wilder shores of Devon itself when the weather is uncertain. (p179).

The episode with Harris Bigg Wither – described as a shy young man with a stammer, and some five years Jane’s junior – stimulates a perceptive probable reading of the event, with the devastating final comment that, at 27, ‘after this she, like Cassandra, hurried into middle age’! (p181)

As a biographer, Tomalin relates events in the author’s life to the act of writing, rather than, as with other biographers, to the characters she created – that is she relates Jane’s real world to the act of creation of her imagined world (in the perceptive terms of Professor Oliver MacDonagh in Jane Austen: Real & Imagined Worlds). Thus, after the flirtation with Tom Lefroy, over the Christmas/New Year period of 1795/6, she turned to the writing, in 1796, of the marvellously light and sparkling work that became Pride & Prejudice. After the ‘fiasco’ with Harris Bigg Wither in 1802, she returned to Susan, which as Northanger Abbey was offered to publisher Crosby early in 1803. Tomalin sees Jane, during the family’s wanderings after they left Steventon,

carrying these precious bundles [her manuscripts] around from place to place, year after year, and purely as physical objects they must have caused some anxiety. They had to be preserved from water, fire, loss, disintegration and all the hazards of life on the move. Packets of paper are easily mislaid on coaches, in lodgings, at inns. Even the houses of relatives and friends do not offer perfect security; there are always maid lighting fires, and children looking for something to make paper darts with. The manuscripts had gone with her to Bath, first to the Leigh-Perrots, then to Sydney Place. They then accompanied her around the Devon coast and Wales, and wherever the Austens travelled during the next years, to Godmersham, and back to Hampshire for their frequent visits to different households there; for it seems unlikely she would have left them on a shelf in an empty or rented-out house in Bath. The more you think about it, the more surprising it becomes that nothing was lost. Keeping them under her eye must have been one of the unmentioned but essential disciplines of her life.

Tomalin makes the major point that because she lived for her writing rather than for a husband and children we, Jane’s readers, are the beneficiaries of her ‘failed’ romances and her care of these precious manuscripts.

This is a perceptive, well researched and enlightening biography, which only rarely falls into the trap of assuming the thought processes of its subject. It is highly recommended.

Helen Malcher

Lackington Allen & Co, booksellers, Finsbury Square, was 'one of the curiosities of the metropolis ... on account of the vast extent of its premises, and of the immense stock of books'.

From Ackermann, R: The Repository of arts. literature, commerce, manufactures, fashion and politics (1809 - 28).

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04 June 2004

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