A Creative Life--Jane Austen
Written: Jun 25 '05 (Updated Jun 27 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: well-written and well-balanced (between details of Austen's life and her novels)
Cons: quite a bit of conjecture, unavoidable as so little is known of Austen's life
The Bottom Line: A short but very informative and worthwhile read by an author very well-acquainted with Austen's work
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| jc_hall's Full Review: Carol Shields - Jane Austen Books |
Did you know there’s a ‘Jane Austen Society of North America’? Apparently, respected Austen scholars and middle-aged groupies get together on an annual basis to deliver and listen to scholarly presentations on various aspects of Austen’s body of work. There’s also active ‘Jane Austen Societies’ in the UK, in Australia, in Germany, in Japan, and in Buenos Aires. How many dead 18th century authors can claim fans and active fan clubs in such diverse countries in this day and age?
Considering that Austen wrote novels generally considered to be limited in range (her novels invariably chronicle the emotional lives of young women in the world in which she lived—a genteel part of southern England in the later part of the 18th century and the turn of the century), it is remarkable that so many people nowadays still find her novels enjoyable and hold them in such high esteem.
Critics complain that though Austen lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, she made no mention of either in her novels. But then, as Carol Shields (1995 Pulitzer Prize winning author of ‘The Stone Diaries’), points out most succinctly, novels are not, and have never been, compilations of current events.
But a biography, on the other hand, is an account of someone’s life, and by definition, requires day-to-day minutiae. Shields has her work cut out for her, because Austen never kept a diary and the little correspondence she exchanged with her only sister Cassandra was further reduced by Cassandra’s deliberate destruction following Austen’s death. It is postulated that she was trying to protect Austen’s image: the destroyed letters could have contained revealing and perhaps arch or even cruel sketches of people close to them.
There is truly very little more than Austen’s nephew’s 1870 memoir (published more than 50 years after Austen’s death) to go on, yet this has not stopped many Austen biographers before Shields. Her sources necessarily reflect the works of these biographers. I was more than a little concerned that, given the dearth of information available, she would draw dodgy parallels between Austen’s novels and her life, but Shields never once made assumptions that she could not substantiate.
Jane Austen was a precocious child, born into a family of 6 boys, and the younger of two sisters (she remained attached to her elder sister Cassandra until her death). Her father, a rector of the parish of Steventon in rural Hampshire, was of the educated but unlanded genteel poor. He took in young boys whom he tutored, and Jane learned to read and write from him. She was soon reading from his library. The novel was in its infancy, and high melodrama was all the rage. Jane started to write for family amusement as a child and her early works were similar to what she read. But soon, she found her own style, and her intellect and wit began to shine through.
Still in her early twenties, she had completed Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey (although it took a while for any of them to be published). A period of silence followed before Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion were completed. That period was an unsettled one for Jane--she was uprooted from her beloved Steventon and lived for a while in rented rooms in Bath with her sister and parents (perhaps a last-ditch attempt on her parents’ part to marry off the spinster sisters), and then her elderly father passed away. The silence, brought on by depression (postulates Shields), stretched to 9 long years. It was not until she was settled in a cottage in Chawton (with a well-off brother as landlord) that her spirits improved and she began to write again.
Much of Austen’s novels deal overtly with courtship, love, and marriage. More covertly, they reveal the lack of power held by women in that particular time and place. The only way to gain independence, and a place of one’s own, was by marrying someone who could offer her the position of mistress of their new home.
Time and again, Austen’s heroines struggle to choose wisely, balancing their hearts with their heads as they make the one defining choice of a woman’s life—who’s it going to be? Who will rescue them from a life of shameful, poverty-ridden, spinsterhood? Someone, please God, who’s at the very least personable, decent, and well-read. Landed gentry would be a boon, though there was the rigid class structure of the time to consider, but a rector’s daughter, articulate and intelligent, must have harboured hopes of a comfortable, if not illustrious, future.
In fact, Jane did fall in love, insofar as Shields and others have proposed, but her knight in shining armour (with whom she discussed the novel Tom Jones) was one Tom LeFroy, an educated young man who was ‘swiftly removed by the LeFroy family, who had greater plans for this young man than marriage to an unmoneyed clergyman’s daughter’. Soon after this traumatic episode, more shocking news arrived: Cassandra’s fiancé had perished abroad. The two sisters drew together even more, and perhaps the faint hope that had sparked in Jane’s heart was extinguished. Years later, a childhood friend proposed marriage, and Jane accepted (she was in her late 20s by then) and then reneged on her promise the following morning, leaving in some disarray with Cassandra by her side. What is one to make of this episode? A grab at a last chance for independence and respectability? Then a more clear-headed decision not to compromise with a loveless marriage?
Certainly, she would have lived vicariously through her heroines who were, for the most part, luckier than her and Cassandra. While they were from various walks of life, from penniless to independently wealthy, all were concerned, not to say obsessed, with making the right choice of lifelong mate. Jane Austen herself never did marry, but for her (and many women of her time) marriage was very much a means to an end—the end being independence and respectability, and perhaps even more, a sense of belonging, of being settled and free from the indignities accorded to spinsters who (having no job and income of their own) were always at the mercy of other people’s charity.
Happily, she gained much through her novels, achieving a degree of success in her own lifetime, in terms of fame and fortune. I believe she got a great deal of pleasure from achieving a measuire of recognition and independence, on her own terms. She never compromised and, in the end, did not have to compromise.
The only tragedy is that such a promising author (still writing frantically in the year of her death) had her life cut short (at the age of 41) by illness. Her early death is doubtless a loss to the literary world. The continued appreciation of her work 200 years later is to be expected. Anyone who has gone through her novels with a more than cursory reading will agree that Jane Austen’s claim to fame for all posterity is more than justified.
In her own novels, Carol Shields specialized in examining women’s lives and inner thoughts. “I’m concerned about the unknowability of other people,” she once said. Her friend, Eleanor Wachtel, the writer/broadcaster who hosts CBC Radio’s Writers & Company, said that Shields, through her writing, ‘redeems the lives of lost or vanished women’. If that is true, then Carol Shields is the ideal match as Austen’s biographer.
Her approach is sensitive, her scholarship rigorous. At the end of the book, she cites her sources-—some 15 past Austen biographers as well as what remains of Austen’s correspondence. What she does not need to tell the reader is that she is fully familiar with Austen’s entire body of work, which she dissects and refers to throughout as they relate to the different chapters of Austen’s life.
She has taken what little is known of Austen’s short life, filled in the gaps with insight and sensitivity, and imbues the whole with affection and learning. For anyone interested in the life of Austen, this slim volume distils the work of generations of Austen scholars into a scholarly yet eminently readable form. Highly recommended.
Posthumous praise and criticism:
Sir Walter Scott (whose work was very different from that of Austen’s):
The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader....
George Henry Lewes accorded her status and identified issues that critics would be arguing about for the next century or so:
There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed, there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never set foot…Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb, and vital. Life, as it presents itself to an English gentlewoman peacefully yet actively engaged in her quiet village, is mirrored in her works with a purity and fidelity that must endow them with interest for all time.
Charlotte Bronte was not a fan:
Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well…The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood ... What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores....Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman), if this is heresy--I cannot help it.
Horace Walpole had this to say about the difference between the approach and subject matter chosen by Austen and Bronte: "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Virginia Woolf, however, considered Austen "a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears on the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there."
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jc_hall
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Member: JC Hall
Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 54 members
About Me:
Going back to Vancouver for Christmas! Happy Holidays, everyone!!
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