The family memoir inaugurated the tradition of full-length Jane Austen biography. It proceeded from cradle to grave at uneventful pace and with provincial calm. In the century and a half since it was compiled, devoted scholars have gathered many more details about Austen’s life. One hundred and sixty of her letters survive, as do the pocket books of family members, the diaries of acquaintances, the banking transactions of her father.10 With the benefit of such mundane material, biography after biography has followed the pattern of James Edward and tracked Jane Austen’s daily life from Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester.11
This book is something different and more experimental. Rather than rehearsing all the known facts, this biography focuses on a variety of key moments, scenes and objects in both the life and work of Jane Austen. It does not begin where the official family record began, with the tracing of ancestry. It does not seek to foster the illusion that Austen knew little of the world. It recognizes the gaps in our knowledge as well as in the documentary evidence. Several thousand of her letters are lost or destroyed and for some crucial years we know hardly anything of her whereabouts.
In addition, this biography follows the lead of Frank Austen rather than Henry. It suggests that, like nearly all novelists, Jane Austen created her characters by mixing observation and imagination. She drew on people she knew and experiences she went through. Captain Harville is not a portrait of Frank, but the fictional character is brought alive and made memorable by the adoption of a particularly charming characteristic of a real individuaclass="underline" his fondness for carpentry. When Austen writes about ideas – the virtues and vices of the British navy, the case against the slave trade, the Evangelical movement – she does so by creating memorable characters, not by writing sermons. Her sympathy for abolition may be inferred not only from what she writes in her letters about the campaigner Thomas Clarkson but also from the pro-slavery associations of two of her most monstrous characters, Mrs Norris and Mrs Elton.
Jane Austen loved nothing more than to talk about people. She knew a great deal about the lives of her extended family, her friends and her slighter acquaintances. When we tell the stories of these people’s lives, we suddenly see Austen on a much wider stage than that on which she is confined in the clerical brothers’ version of her life. We are transported to the East Indies and the West, to the guillotine in revolutionary Paris, to a world where there is high-society scandal one moment and a petty case of shoplifting the next. This biography follows Austen on her travels, which were more extensive than is often recognized, and it sets her in contexts global as well as English, urban as well as rural, political and historical as well as social and domestic. These wider perspectives were of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life.
Kingsley Amis, a comic novelist who admired Austen enormously, once wrote that ‘those who know my novels and me will also know that they are firmly unautobiographical, but at the same time every word of them inevitably says something about the kind of person I am’.12 It is in this spirit that we should read the relationship between Jane Austen’s novels and her world.
The opinions of her characters are not her own. The writings in which she exposes her true self most directly are her letters. When her devoted niece Fanny Knight died in 1882 (by which time she was Lady Knatchbull), Fanny’s son Lord Brabourne came upon a treasure-trove: the original manuscript of Lady Susan ‘in Jane Austen’s own handwriting’ and:
a square box full of letters, fastened up carefully in separate packets, each of which was endorsed ‘For Lady Knatchbull,’ in the handwriting of my great-aunt, Cassandra Austen, and with which was a paper endorsed, in my mother’s handwriting, ‘Letters from my dear Aunt Jane Austen, and two from Aunt Cassandra after her decease,’ which paper contained the letters written to my mother herself.13
These letters, Brabourne suggested, ‘contain the confidential outpourings of Jane Austen’s soul to her beloved sister, interspersed with many family and personal details which, doubtless, she would have told to no other human being’. With his mother’s death, the time was ripe for their publication. The unique talent of ‘“the inimitable Jane” (as an old friend of mine used always to call her)’ was, Brabourne argued, that she ‘describes men and women exactly as men and women really are, and tells her tale of ordinary, everyday life with such truthful delineation, such bewitching simplicity, and, moreover, with such purity of style and language, as have rarely been equalled, and perhaps never surpassed’.
For this reason, what could be more fitting than the publication of ‘the letters which show what her own “ordinary, everyday life” was, and which afford a picture of her such as no history written by another person could give so well’? ‘It is certain’, Brabourne triumphantly concluded, ‘that I am now able to present to the public entirely new matter, from which may be gathered a fuller and more complete knowledge of Jane Austen and her “belongings” than could otherwise have been obtained.’14
All subsequent biographers have made extensive use of the letters. Nevertheless, a fresh reading of them reveals a number of hitherto neglected but significant details and connections, among them a crucial act of literary patronage, the momentous consequences of a will, and evidence of Austen’s knowledge of the extraordinary story of the abolitionist judge Lord Mansfield’s adoption of a black girl.
Lord Brabourne’s view of his great-aunt as the inimitable novelist of ‘ordinary, everyday life’ had become a commonplace opinion by the late Victorian era. It is ultimately derived from the most important account of Austen’s work written in her own lifetime: a long review-essay on the publication of Emma, also discussing Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, by Sir Walter Scott, the most celebrated novelist in all Europe (though one who at this time was still publishing his fiction, like Austen herself, under the veil of anonymity). Scott’s essay will be further discussed towards the end of this book, but its main thrust is indeed the high claim that Jane Austen was the first novelist in history to offer an accurate representation of ‘the current of ordinary life’. She presents to the reader ‘instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him’. Scott concludes that ‘The author’s knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.’15
The ‘correct and striking representation’ of scenes from ‘ordinary life’, rendered with precision, tact and minute detaiclass="underline" this is indeed the essence of Austen’s art, as it is of Dutch realism in painting. Vermeer creates the sense of a real world by means of an opened letter, a pearl earring, a latticed window, a jug and a tablecloth, a musical instrument. By the same account, objects play a key part in bringing alive Austen’s fictional worlds.
My inspiration for the writing of this book came from two exquisite moments in Mansfield Park, quoted earlier as my epigraphs. First there is Fanny Price’s little sitting room, made real by a few carefully chosen things.
Mounted on the window-panes are three pictures of romantic scenes – the ruin of Tintern Abbey, a wild cave in Italy and a moonlit lake in Wordsworth country – in the new and fashionable form of ‘transparencies’. In An Essay on Transparent Prints and Transparencies in General, published in 1807, a certain Edward Orme claimed that he invented the medium by accident when he dropped some varnish on to the dark part of an engraving ‘which afterwards being exposed again to light, the spot where the varnish had been spilt formed a light in the midst of shadow’.16 Their presence hints at Fanny’s romantic sensibility.