Austen is that rarity in the traditional canon of English fiction: a figure pored over by scholars while being loved and read by the general public. Only Dickens and the Brontës come close to this achievement, but not even those valued writers have acquired her megafandom, leading to an internet full of invented characters snatched from the novels to become psychotherapists, detectives, etiquette gurus and teenaged pals. Jane Austen’s books have been subjected to analysis in all facets, while films and television adaptations have made the author and her fiction a global brand.
Happily, she has survived fame and celebrity unspoilt.
The popularity is explicable. Love and romance are winning subjects and Jane Austen delivers them, but with a hard-headedness about money and compromise that surprises a reader who comes from the films to the novels rather than vice versa. The characters she creates seem real: they live in families with whom they must relate, however repugnant some of the members, as well as in the wider society of men and women. Her heroines learn how to stay true to their own intelligence and some inner core of being, while coping with uncongenial people and responding to constricting social pressures. They are believable.
Yet Jane Austen and the characters she creates move in a world very different from ours. The early nineteenth century is often called Regency, although the actual Regency, when George III was declared insane and unable to govern, lasts only from 1811 to 1820. It occurs just before the railways made England smaller and its people more mobile, and before photography became widespread, causing us to look back on the Victorian world as predominantly black and white. Jane Austen has become synonymous with a colourful Regency of romance and grace. In popular culture she also stands for heritage, an immemorial rural England of church, great house and grateful villagers, a place of stability.
In fact, the Regency was a time of extraordinary upheaval and change. It included two revolutions, the effects of which are still being worked out in the modern world. The French Revolution started in 1789 when Jane was still a child, then morphed into the first truly global conflict, the Napoleonic Wars, lasting, with one brief interval of peace, until 1815 and darkening almost all Jane Austen’s adult life. The Industrial Revolution, which would transform Britain into the first urban industrial power, accelerated in her lifetime, ultimately reshaping the world.
Readers have remarked that Jane Austen’s subject (‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’) seems largely to ignore these turbulent historical events, as well as the movement of enclosure which turned England into a land of private property and hedged fields. (Austen’s own family members benefited from this transformation.) But look closely and you will catch between lines and in apparently desultory dialogue glimpses of all these changes. You will also encounter political and social opinions sometimes gratifyingly liberal, at others sternly alien to our present way of thinking: rare certainties and many ambiguities.
Her life
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire. Her extended family was mixed, including a few rich landowners, many clerics, and an apprentice milliner. Hers was a reasonably pleasant middle-class background, close to the gentry but never absolutely secure in status or income.
Her father George Austen, a country rector, obtained his living through patronage of a wealthy relative, and augmented it with farming and tutoring pupils for university. He had need of all the income he could get, for he and his wife Cassandra had eight children to raise. Two were girls, Jane and her elder sister Cassandra.
Apart from a disabled one, the boys did reasonably well in life through patronage and effort. The eldest James followed his father into the Steventon living. Edward, the most fortunate, was adopted by rich relatives called Knight, and in due course inherited their vast estates which included Godmersham Park in Kent and Chawton House in Hampshire. At the tender ages of eleven and twelve, Frank and Charles entered the Royal Naval Academy and rose up the ranks during the long French wars. Henry became soldier, banker and clergyman by turns.
In contrast, the Austen girls had marriage or attendance on relatives to look forward to in later life. Both received marriage proposals. Cassandra was engaged to a curate who became a military chaplain and died abroad, while Jane accepted, then speedily rejected, an offer from a neighbour, Harris Bigg-Wither, a young man of good family and estate but insufficient attractions. Perhaps, too, she already knew what she wanted most of all to do with her life. It was not long after this rejection that she sold her first novel – Susan – though sadly it was not printed at the time. (It was revised and came out posthumously as Northanger Abbey.)
Jane began writing early, amusing her family with comic, knowing little stories and plays, then turning her hand to complete novels. First versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were all composed at the rectory in Steventon. Then, abruptly in 1801, youth ended. Her father decided to leave his son James as curate of Steventon and move to Bath where he and his wife could take the waters for their health. Unconsulted, the spinster daughters of course accompanied them.
Soon after the move, in 1805, George Austen died, and his income with him. For the next years the Austen women led a makeshift life, moving from place to place to be near male relatives or find suitably cheap lodgings. Finally, in 1809, they were rescued by the wealthy Edward, who set up his mother and sisters in a former bailiff’s cottage on his estate in Chawton. From this house, Jane published her first novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Then followed two new ones, Mansfield Park and Emma, both evoking a more intense sense of home than the books drafted in Steventon. After she died, two further novels, the early drafted Northanger Abbey and the late Persuasion were brought out by her family.
The cottage in Chawton, Hampshire
On her death at the age of only forty-one, Jane Austen left two works unfinished. The Watsons was begun in the Bath years. It tells the story of a family of girls rather like the Bennets, but the work lacks the lightness and jollity that make Pride and Prejudice so appealing. The Watson daughters need to marry but from more desperate financial circumstances. As the heroine remarks to a stupid, rich young aristocrat, ‘Female economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.’
Jane Austen made many corrections and revisions to the manuscript, then stopped writing. Possibly the difficult situation of the women she described came too close to her own rather insecure life; possibly her existence in all its facets was simply interrupted by her father’s death. The novel was to have depicted the death of a clergyman, who dies leaving his daughters unprovided for.
The other, more fluent, innovative fragment is Sanditon. The writing of this was not abandoned but interrupted by her own last illness, which ended in her death in July 1817.
Sanditon and its plot
Was there ever a fragment like it? The distinguished novelist suffering a long decline – her brother Henry alleged that ‘the symptoms of a decay, deep and incurable, began to show themselves in the commencement of 1816’ – used her last months to compose a work that mocks energetic hypochondriacs and departs radically from the increasing emphasis on the interior life marking the previous novels. However weak her body – and she wrote some passages first in pencil, being unable to cope with a pen – clearly her spirit was robust. Not only that: worrying herself sick about money after a family bankruptcy, she was writing a book of jokes about risky investments and comic speculators.
For us, her readers and admirers, the farcical, ebullient Sanditon is achingly sad, for it ends with ‘March 18’, neatly written on an almost empty page. The final date signified that Jane Austen would write no more novels. A few days later she admitted, ‘Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life.’ She had begun the work in a period of remission, but now