Jane Austen E-Book

Caroline Sanderson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

'This delicious acorn of a book is as spare, elegant and to-the-point as the literary oak it describes.' – Emma Thompson Jane Austen lived to just 41, never married, never had children, lived all her life in the south of England and rarely strayed far from the genteel and orthodox social circle into which she was born. She completed only six novels and achieved little fame in her lifetime. Yet, over 200 years after her death, she remains one of our most revered writers, and one of the most regularly adapted for television and film. Her novels are beloved by readers all over the world who continue to be inspired, beguiled and delighted by her often comic and always shrewd insights into the calculations and complexities of human hearts and minds. Jane Austen: The Life of a Literary Titan gets to the heart of this enigmatic woman, and to the enduring qualities in her work which make it so universally loved and admired.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

Thank you to: my mother Margaret, whose school prize copy of Pride and Prejudice was the start of it. And my discerning daughter Julia who is Jane Austen’s latest fan.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

There’s Something About Jane

1

The Clergyman’s Daughter, 1775–87

2

The Aspiring Writer, 1787–1800

3

The Social Observer, 1800–06

4

The Spinster Aunt, 1806–11

5

The Published Novelist, 1811–17

6

The Global Celebrity, 1817–Present

Timeline

Further Reading

Web Links

By the Same Author

Copyright

Introduction

There’s Something About Jane

These boo-words, ‘insular’, ‘parochial’ and ‘domestic’ could be used against Jane Austen – and have been used on occasion. But she was a great writer. It is easy to mistake what is exotic and unfamiliar for real originality.

David Lodge, 19991

Jane Austen died aged only 41, didn’t marry, never had children and lived out her days in the south of England, rarely straying from the genteel and orthodox social circle into which she was born. She completed only six full-length novels, and tasted only brief and limited fame in her lifetime.

Yet, 200 years after her death, she is one of the world’s most revered writers, a literary giant, her life the topic of dozens of biographies, her work the subject of thousands of academic studies. In recent decades, her novels have frequently been adapted for television and film. The internet has spawned countless blogs and websites on which all things Austen are analysed and adored. There are mugs, and tea towels, and t-shirts, and books of Jane Austen quotations, and instructions on just how manners maketh man – and woman – according to her expert word.

Novels have been written in imitation of her own, in tribute to her own and in completion of her own. There are sequels, parodies and eroticised versions of her writings, and, most entertainingly perhaps, contemporary mash-ups, including recent bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which bears the subtitle, ‘The Classic Regency Romance – now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!’ Jane, who was not at all averse to a good parody, and wrote several of her own, would probably have found all this adoring preoccupation with her work highly amusing. As she once wrote:

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.2

In this hyper-connected world, why do we still care so much for her stories, drawn in the far-off days of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on to such a small canvas, ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush’, as Jane Austen herself once called it. ‘You are now collecting our People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; 3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on,’ she advised her aspiring novelist niece Anna, in 1814.3 Her own novels rarely extend beyond these parameters, and the biggest dramas we encounter are broken engagements, sprained ‘ancles’ and that now quaint social crime: elopement.

Despite the fact that she lived in turbulent times, there are no wars in Jane Austen. Poverty and rural crime, which was all too present even in her limited world, rate scarcely a mention. Her plots can be summarised as: girl meets boy and eventually, after varying obstacles are overcome, they marry.

And yet there’s still something about Jane, far beyond the famous romances which are the subject of her novels. Over 200 years after they were written they still capture the complexities of human beings, and the nuances of their relationships, with all their joys, tensions, contradictions and ironies – and they continue to beguile readers the world over.

This spinster novelist with little experience of the wider world, raised on a diet of swooning, unrealistic tales of love and scandal, was a genius at observing and describing ordinary human behaviour. Her narratives are immensely satisfying because of the sophistication of their construction and the precise brilliance of the style with which they are told. Her dialogue never sounds less than true.

Sir Walter Scott, the most popular novelist of his day, was one of the first to recognise Austen’s talent in this respect, declaring himself envious of her ‘exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment’.4 Genteel ladies and gentlemen, whose behaviour rarely deviates from acceptable social norms, her characters may be, but as she declares in Emma, what Jane Austen understood so well was that ‘seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human discourse’.

Scratch the surface of her characters’ polite social exchanges and universal, timeless human dilemmas emerge. Is this man all he seems to be? Is my friend true? Am I really in love? Hypochondriacs are annoying. Some girls are very silly. Some men are only out for what they can get. Some women only care about money. Austen’s insights into what goes on in the human head and heart beneath the social veneer are second to none. The smallest telling detail – a word, a turn of phrase, a witty aside, a foolish remark, a look, a look away – can reveal the innermost workings of her characters’ hearts and minds.

Virginia Woolf once remarked that of all great writers, Jane Austen was ‘the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’.5 It is her minute attention to detail that makes Austen such a giant of a writer and such a favourite of so many readers. Her novels can be returned to again and again, throughout life, because on each reading they will reveal something new. Read her as a teenager and, despite Jane’s own protestations that she couldn’t write a ‘serious romance’ to save her life, her novels present themselves as love stories, where the heroine always gets the right man in the end, but finds out things she needs to know about him and about herself along the way. Read them when older, and perhaps more cynical about life and relationships, and her characters reveal not so much their romantic aspirations but the extent to which property, status, health and wealth preoccupy them.

In short, Jane Austen’s stories give her readers a profound sense of her characters’ inner lives. So what does her own life story tell us?

Notes

1 Quoted in The Guardian, 11 May 1999.

2 Le Faye, Deirdre (ed.), Jane’s Austen’s Letters (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 312.

3 Ibid., p. 275.

4The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, March 1826 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

5 Quoted in Southam, Brian, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1968).

1

The Clergyman’s Daughter 1775–87

Her fire began with herself.

G.K. Chesterton6

Jane Austen’s story starts in Steventon, a small and little-known village buried deep in the Hampshire countryside. Even today, in this heritage industry era when the birthplaces of famous writers come with coach parks and souvenir shops, not even the smallest monument commemorates Jane Austen’s birth in the green field which marks its location.

The Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra had moved to Steventon in 1771 from the parsonage in the nearby village of Deane. Seven years after their marriage in Bath in 1764, they had a growing family of three sons: James, George and Edward. Years later, in his A Memoir of Jane Austen, Jane’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh imagined the scene on the day of the move to Steventon: ‘Mrs Austen, who was not then in strong health, performed the short journey on a feather-bed, placed upon some soft articles of furniture in the waggon which held their household goods’, for the road was a ‘mere cart track, so cut up by deep ruts as to be impassable for a light carriage’.

The rectory at Steventon had been refurbished prior to the Austen family’s arrival, but was still somewhat dilapidated. Set among fields some distance from the cottages of the main village, it had two storeys, a latticed porch, dormer attic windows and two projecting wings at the back of the house. There was a large garden with elms and sycamores, a shrubbery, flowerbeds and a vegetable patch, gradually sloping up to a terrace walk and a path which led to the parish church of St Nicholas beyond.

Once settled into life at Steventon, the Austens took steps to supplement the meagre income of a country clergyman by taking in pupils. Four or five boys at a time, from the genteel families of the surrounding area, came to live at the rectory to be tutored in Greek and Latin by Rev. Austen. With the arrival of more Austen offspring in succeeding years, the rectory must have been an exceedingly lively place, full of the high spirits and the energetic play of growing boys. James, George and Edward were soon joined by Henry (born 1771), a first sister, Cassandra (born 1773), and then Francis, known as Frank (born 1774).

Into this animated environment, during the especially cold and hard winter of 1775, a seventh child was born, on 16 December. Jane remained indoors with her mother for some weeks after her birth, tucked up against that Siberian winter, her senses slowly waking up to the surroundings that would provide the boundaries of her world for the first twenty-five years of her life.

Her mother breastfed the new arrival for three months or so, and then baby Jane was sent to live with a woman in the village, probably shortly after her christening in April 1776. There she remained for a year or perhaps even eighteen months, only returning permanently to her family when she could easily be managed at home. This practice – not uncommon for genteel families of the time – seems harsh to our twenty-first-century sensibilities with our notions about the importance of bonding between mother and child. But Mrs Austen would have had precious little time for such ‘sentiment’. A busy, no-nonsense clergyman’s wife, with six other children, a house and school to run, servants to supervise and livestock to husband, she certainly did not have the time to provide the intense supervision which toddlers require. Employing a village wet nurse-cum-nanny to care for Jane was a highly practical solution, which Mrs Austen probably adopted with few pangs. It is hard to know whether this early separation affected their later relationship: Jane’s surviving letters do not give much impression of mother-daughter closeness. At a time when the mortality rate for infants under 5 was still very high, concern for the emotional well-being of her offspring probably came some way down Mrs Austen’s list of priorities.

One of Jane’s elder brothers had given his mother very definite cause for concern, however. The Austens’ second son George was born epileptic and possibly deaf and dumb. From an early age he, too, was sent away to be cared for, but this was a permanent arrangement. His upkeep was paid for by his family throughout his life and he lived to 72 – a much riper age than his youngest sister. It is thought that he lodged with his uncle, Mrs Austen’s younger brother, Thomas Leigh, who was also disabled. The Austens were disinclined to agonise about this accident of birth, and George appears to have been more or less written out of the family history. Jane does not mention him in any of her surviving letters.

In a more fortunate turn of fate, the next Austen son, Edward, born the year after George in 1767, was adopted at the age of 16 by a distant but wealthy cousin, Thomas Knight and his wife, thus becoming heir to the grand estate of Godmersham Park in Kent, as well as substantial properties in and around Steventon and elsewhere in Hampshire. Throughout their lives, both Jane and Cassandra made frequent trips to Kent to stay with her brother and the eleven children he brought into the world with his wife Elizabeth.

Though Jane’s upbringing was respectably genteel, late eighteenth-century Steventon was no rural idyll. Home to perhaps thirty families, it was regularly cut off for days after bad storms or snow. Many of its inhabitants lived in extreme poverty, exacerbated by disease, bad weather and poor harvests, and so charitable works would have been expected of a clergyman’s daughter. Jane itemises her ‘charities to the poor’ in a letter to Cassandra in December 1798: ‘I have given a pair of Worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens & Dame Staples, and a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins; amounting in all to about half a guinea.’7