Not that her life can have been uniformly cheerful. Quite what tragedies it comprised cannot be known for sure, since in a spirit of protectiveness for which posterity has not thanked her, Cassandra destroyed much of her sister’s correspondence after her death in 1817. What griefs, what disappointments, what scandals she may have been concealing in the process will never now be known, though the speculation has afforded hundreds of scholars many thousands of hours of more or less harmless amusement. What we do know for certain is that the Reverend George Austen died in 1805, not long after retiring with his family to Bath. His widow and children moved first to Southampton and then, in 1809, to Chawton, to the little cottage on what was now Edward’s Hampshire estate, in which Jane would live for most of her adult life, and complete the great works of her maturity. Of these, Sense and Sensibility was the first to appear, in 1811, followed in 1813 by Pride and Prejudice. Early versions of both of these novels had been written as much as fifteen years previously, but the author’s own meticulous revision and re-revision over a number of years had been followed by a long spell gathering dust on a publisher’s shelf. (Much the same thing happened to Northanger Abbey which, though bought by Crosby & Co. as early as 1803, would not finally appear until after Jane’s death.) Once published, however, these early novels were well received: the 1814 publication of Mansfield Park was eagerly awaited, not least, it seems, by the Prince Regent, whose secretary wrote to Jane Austen with the idea that she might want to write a ‘historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Cobourg’. Delicately sidestepping this suggestion, she dedicated her next novel, Emma (1816), to His Royal Highness. It is hard to imagine that he can have felt himself in any way the loser. Persuasion was completed in 1815, but not published until after its author’s death, in 1817, of Addison’s disease, when Jane Austen’s last-completed novel appeared alongside what was probably her first, Northanger Abbey. Another novel, Sanditon, had been left uncompleted at her death.
Yet much of Jane Austen’s time will have been spent not as writer, but as daughter, sister and aunt, living the very ordinary, unassuming life of the Austens of Chawton. Theirs was a genteel, rather than a luxurious, lifestyle, for though George Austen had been a respectable clergyman and his sons would prosper in their chosen professions, the family was by no means rich. Their existence would not have been so very different from that described in the novels. They walked in the nearby woods and fields, visited and received neighbours, took tea and chatted, and generally endured and enjoyed the routine chores and treats of the genteel country society of the day. It was a quiet existence, perhaps, but anyone who has read Jane Austen’s novels – or, for that matter, anyone who has browsed at any length in the present anthology – will hesitate before dismissing it as a ‘narrow’ or ‘sheltered’ one. There’s some superficial truth in the charge, of course. Jane Austen’s reader can undoubtedly feel a sense of being removed from the concerns of the wider world. It can be hard for the reader of Sense and Sensibility to remember that its author grew up and wrote in an age wracked by revolution and war. Yet as her reader comes quickly to realise, Jane Austen’s world contains the wider one. Polite and contrived as it may at first seem, the social round of the rural gentry conceals beneath its civilised surface all the bloodiest instincts of human nature, all the raw aggression and competition of social existence. If life for Austen’s heroines can at times seem like one long husband-hunt, the business (and it was indeed a business) of courtship and marriage was by no means a trivial one in an age when other professions than wifehood were not open to women. To the young girl who knew she had but one chance of happiness, the drawing room was a jungle, the ball a battlefield: if marriage might involve a life sentence with a pompous bore or, worse, a drunken brute, spinsterhood could at best mean humiliating dependence and at worst destitution. Yet if Jane Austen saw through the mythology of romantic love and marriage to the squalid struggle for economic advantage which it all too often concealed, she saw too that marriage could, on occasion, represent real love, and bring men and women alike a degree of personal fulfilment that made every day a joy. A sceptic, then, but still at heart a believer, Jane Austen brought together romance and realism in her writing. No other writer, before or since, has managed to combine as thrillingly as she does the competing qualities of yearning eroticism, ardent idealism … and shrewd common sense.
Jane Austen did not need to go out into the world to find the world. A writer with an eye like hers for the weakness, the folly, the malice of humanity, found the world daily beating a path to her door, presenting itself in every item of gossip, in every name-dropping anecdote, in every overbearing neighbour, in every brash, boastful dinner guest and in every calculating caller. Yet, far too intelligent a writer to despair, she saw other things too. In the cheerful endurance of the sick, the patient optimism of the poor, in the everyday courage of the bereaved and abandoned – and, of course, in the occasional happy marriage! – she saw just how noble, how worthwhile human existence might be for those who were prepared to live honestly and well. These qualities are timeless – as instantly recognisable to us as they were to the family and friends who were Jane Austen’s first readers nearly two centuries ago. Not only did Jane Austen’s fiction encompass her world – it encompasses our world too.
‘Jack and Alice’, ‘The Adventures of Mr Harley’ and ‘The Three Sisters’, from VOLUME THE FIRST, written 1787–90.
‘Love and Friendship’, written 1790.
‘A History of England’, written 1791.
‘Lesley Castle’, written 1792.
‘Catharine, or the Bower’, written 1792–3.
LADY SUSAN, written around 1795, never submitted for publication.
SENSE and SENSIBILITY, written 1795 as ‘Elinor and Marianne’, renamed and revised 1797 and published 1811.
PRIDE and PREJUDICE, written 1796–7 as ‘First Impressions’, rejected by publisher; revised and renamed version published 1813.
THE WATSONS, begun 1804; abandoned incomplete on father’s death in 1805.
MANSFIELD PARK, begun 1811, published 1814.
EMMA, written 1814–15, published 1815.
‘Plan of a Novel’, written 1816.
PERSUASION, written 1815–16, published posthumously 1818.
NORTHANGER ABBEY, written as ‘Susan’, 1797–8; revised, renamed version published posthumously 1818, together with Persuasion.
SANDITON, begun 1817, left uncompleted on Jane Austen’s death.
What a strange thing love is! (EMMA)
Love conquers all; young love, at least:
When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary