The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
can be no doubt that Captain Harville’s carpentry is both a compliment to Frank and a family joke. By acknowledging the allusion after Jane’s death, Admiral Austen is giving her readers warrant to make connections between the people his sister knew and the characters she created. By implication, he is also licensing us to make links between her novels and the places she went to (and those she heard about), not to mention the historical events through which she lived.
Yet in the ‘official’ family biography of Jane Austen, it is stressed that hers was an enclosed, sequestered world and that the characters in her novels were always generic types, never based on real individuals. The ground for this reading of her was laid by her brother Henry in the brief ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ which prefaces her posthumously published novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.’ Furthermore, ‘Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals.’9
Henry’s denial of eventfulness and of drawing ‘from individuals’ was of a piece with the desire of the clerical Austens to be discreet, decorous and reticent. That was the image of Jane Austen herself that the family wished to establish in the public domain. They reinforced it in the Victorian era by means of a memoir published in December 1869 by James Edward Austen-Leigh, son of another of her clergy brothers, James. Jane Austen was one of the wittiest of writers, but there are not many jokes in the official family record. Admiral Francis Austen was known for his lack of a sense of humour, but at least he manages to drop in a joke at the end of his second letter to Miss Quincy: ‘I am not a Vice Admiral, having for the last 3 years attained the higher rank of Admiral. I wish I could believe that in the change of rank I had left every vice behind me.’ Startlingly, here he seems to be remembering his sister’s most questionable joke, concerning ‘Rears, and Vices’ in the British navy. That was not the sort of subject to detain James Edward Austen-Leigh in his pious record of his aunt’s allegedly quiet life.
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 individual: 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