After "Jane Austen: A Life" came "Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self". One title bland, the other pithy. Titles matter; would you, dear reader, have bothered with this post were it entitled "Some idle thoughts" or worse, "Drunken footballer starts new season with a wonder goal"? I'm guessing No.
But do these two titles say anything about Claire Tomalin's empathy with her subjects? The country girl saunters through life, observing it; the urban diarist rages through it, enjoying it to the full. Tomalin moved on to "Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man" then back to "A Life" for Charles Dickens. I find these distinctions fascinating. If it means that the author finds Samuel Pepys a more rewarding personality to explore than Jane Austen, I'm with her there.
Even Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1974 Tomalin's first subject, gets "The Life and Death of".
I should confess at this point that I have never, as far as I can recall, read a Jane Austen novel. Does this disqualify me from commenting on a book of her life? I do come to the author's descriptions of Austen's life with an unfettered eye where others, lovers of Jane's writing, might be less dispassionate.
So just "A Life". I struggled with the early chapters. I wanted to move quickly to the adult Jane Austen writing her iconic novels. Instead there are pages of family bonhomie, James and his writing, flirtatious Eliza, questionable Warren Hastings and Christmas plays. The only one of them that I find interesting is Jane's father. Tomalin calls him "an exceptional father for an exceptional daughter", in particular for his allowing, even encouraging her to read from his library books which most parents of the time would have regarded as "not proper" for a young lady, such as Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, "full of discussions about the place and condition of women, and of love, marriage and eroticism". Austen's character Isabella Thorpe, in Northanger Abbey, calls it "an amazing horrid book". Jane's "father's bookshelves were of primary importance in fostering her talent".
The second half of Jane's teenage years are the subject of many pages. However, Jane herself is a bit of an absentee, as tales of the Hampshire gentry dominate. The Boltons, the Portsmouths, the Terrys, the Portals, more and more. Occasionally a quote from one of Jane's letters shows she is closely observing everybody and everything, and Tomalin relates many of these observations to characters in her novels. "The Austens' neighbours, shifting, diverse, eccentric and sometimes outrageous in their behaviour, look like a great rich slab of raw material for a novelist to work on."
Jane's brief "romance" with Tom Lefroy is given short shrift. It isn't even clear how much of a romance it was. In due course he decided it wasn't for him - or, more likely, his family so decided. There is no record of Jane being distraught or, contrarily, relieved. Tomalin quotes from her letters as though she, in her early twenties, was still hopeful of a husband but there seems to have been little effort involved and a number of possibilities are given the cold shoulder. In a letter to sister Cassandra reporting on a ball: "There was one Gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good looking young Man, who I was told wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about." This attitude might well have put admirers off. Perhaps Jane didn't really know what she wanted from a marriage.
Chapter 15: Three Books. At last, something other than country tittle tattle that I can get my teeth into. As someone more or less ignorant of the early books - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey - I am intrigued to know whether I am led to read them and, if so, would I have been better reading them first, before reading this biography? And what is it about Jane and her books that make her such an object of fascination, even reverence, for 20th (and maybe even 21st) century readers?
According to Tomalin, Sense and Sensibility sees Jane developing her own values; after all, she was only 21 when she wrote the first draft. At first sympathetic to Elinor and her 'discretion, polite lies and carefully preserved privacy', she appears to grow closer to 'the transparency, truth-telling and freely expressed emotion' of Marianne. Sense of duty vs personal integrity. Is it too much to postulate that Jane had lived in a small, enclosed world and gradually felt a need to explore a greater universe? There is nothing to suggest that she ever went as far as Marianne's reproach to Sir John Middleton: "I abhor every common-place phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap at a man', or 'making a conquest', are the most odious of all."
From Tomalin's description, Pride and Prejudice would make the ideal Mozart comic opera. Various ensembles for the Bennet girls, a trio for Darcy, Bingley and Wickham and a tasty duet for the Bennet parents. It sounds like Jane would have been a great librettist. Sadly Mozart wasn't available, having died a few years earlier but we can drool over what might have been - a Dream Team. Had Jane been more worldly-wise, she might have sought out someone like Salieri and suggested a collaboration.
I did discover that there have been some musicals of the book. That sounds frankly awful.
Tomalin treats Northanger Abbey summarily, just a page and a half. I couldn't discern why that is.
In these three early novels Jane displays an ability to work in different styles - the dichotomy of Sense and Sensibility, the comedy of Pride and Prejudice and the author as narrator in Northanger Abbey. Tomalin clearly admires her as a [my words] 'master craftsman' (I know, that should be craftswoman but that's such an ugly word).
Then for a period of ten years, Jane wrote - or at least completed - nothing. It was a traumatic time; an unwelcome move to Bath, followed by unsettling peripatetic living arrangements, the death of her father and later that of her sister in law. Tomalin suggests that Jane was very discomforted by all this, perhaps extremely so ("Cassandra...was the closest witness of Jane's depression, seeing...how the lack of a settled home kept her from writing"). She was perpetually poor ("Jane's entire spending money for 1807...was something like £50") and had to rely on others for travels to stay with friends and family. The author refers to her becoming familiar with her status as a ‘maiden aunt’, at the grand old age of 33.
There was even a proposal of marriage which she accepted then, the following morning, told her suitor that she had changed her mind.
A mid life crisis in her late 20s and early 30s!
Finally in 1809, the crisis eased. Tomalin notes “By 7 July they were in the cottage at Chawton, joined soon afterwards by Cassandra and Martha. The effect on Jane of this move to a permanent home in which she was able to re-establish her own rhythm of work was dramatic. It was as though she were restored to herself, to her imagination, to all her powers: a black cloud had lifted”. She returned to writing.
The extent of Tomalin’s fascination with Mansfield Park can be judged by the amount of analysis of the characters in which she indulges. Page after page, quite unlike anything of the earlier works. Clearly she finds it baffling and morally challenging, as did Jane's mother, sister and brother Henry; the characters strong and ethically equivocal (including "a group of worldly, highly cultivated, entertaining and well-to-do young people who pursue pleasure without regard for religious or moral principles" [a reference to the Prince Regent's court, perhaps]). The mature Jane clearly felt comfortable exploring such attitudes and their counterparts with "strongly held religious and moral principles" . Tomalin questions the extent to which the characters reflect Austen's own values. In the mid twentieth century Kingsley Amis "concluded that Jane Austen's own judgement and moral sense had gone seriously astray".
By now her works were being published (at first not in Jane's own name) and hence scrutinised. Although given that over half of the population were illiterate and printed books were very expensive to buy, the readership was probably a limited circle of literati. Mansfield Park had a print run of 1,250 and made her £320, the most in her lifetime.
"Emma begun Jany 21st 1814, finished March 29th 1815" wrote Jane's sister Cassandra. This is the only book with which I have at least a passing acquaintance. I find Jane's eponymous heroine simply annoying. I'm not the only one; Austen herself wrote "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." So a bold move. But one that worked, according to Tomalin: "Emma, with its far from faultless heroine, is generally hailed as Austen's most perfect book, flawlessly carried out from conception to finish", "an indication of Austen's power to imagine experience outside her own". Jane collected the 'opinions' of others about the book - 43 of them, of which "only six gave unreserved praise". Seventeen said they preferred Pride and Prejudice.
[A survey by the Jane Austen Society of North America in 2008 showed Pride and Prejudice as the most popular (53%) of Austen's novels; 28% went for Persuasion, 7% for Emma, 5% for Sense and Sensibility and 4% each for Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park]
Early in 1816 Jane began to feel unwell but "She kept busy, working on 'The Elliots' - her working title for Persuasion". She finished it on 18 July, although she continued to do some re-writes. Tomalin sees it as " a present to....all women who had lost their chance in life and would never enjoy a second spring. "At once the warmest and coldest of Jane Austen's works, the softest and the hardest" wrote Reginald Farrer in 1917. "Years later Cassandra wrote wrote beside it in the margin of her copy of Persuasion the words 'Dear, dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold'". Tomalin's description of the novel moved me as no other part of this biography did.
In January 1817, increasingly sick and frail, Jane started work on a new novel. When the unfinished work was published in 1925 it was entitled Sanditon. Jane passed away, apparently well prepared in her mind for the end of her short life, in July.
This is a magnificent biography, all the more so since there is so little source material from or about Jane Austen. I cannot deny I struggled much of the time, largely due to Tomalin having to include a great deal of contextual material about family, friends, neighbours and country life of the time. Did it achieve my goal of finding the real Jane? Probably not; she remains a mystery to me in many ways; she herself did not court fame and seems to have been immune to (even nervous of at first) any sense of popularity.
Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading it and also doing this - writing about it. I found that process gave me more insight. I don't pretend this is any more than a series of impressions; certainly not a review. I will leave the final words to two far better judges of Jane Austen than I:
Claire Tomalin: "I must return to...the person...who kept notes on what people said about her work, to read over to herself. This is my favourite image of Jane Austen, laughing at the opinions of the world".
Cassandra: "She was the sun of my life, the gilder of my pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her".
I think Jane would have been happy to have either of those as an epitaph.
