Two thousand twenty-five is the 250th anniversary of the birth of the English novelist Jane Austen. England plans to celebrate the event in a big way, with gala balls, exhibitions, costume parades, live lectures, podcasts, happenings in the places where she lived, besides much else. BBC Arts, which has already made a serial, Miss Austen, focusing on Cassandra, Jane’s sister, announced a three-part docuseries, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius. The announcement of this serial spoke of Austen as one of our most important and best-loved writers. All this will gladden the hearts of Austen admirers and lovers. However, one can’t help wondering: Why is this woman, who lived and wrote in great obscurity and was almost unknown in her lifetime, being so honoured? Even after her death, a time when few lucky writers attain posthumous fame, she was not much known. Her own publisher, John Murray, remaindered the unsold copies of her novel after her death. Murray had not been a very supportive publisher earlier, either. Asking Walter Scott to write about Emma in the Quarterly Review, he gratuitously added, “It wants incident and romance, does it not?” Claire Tomalin, Austen’s biographer, rightly calls Murray a disloyal publisher.
Austen had many critics after her death. Charlotte Bronte called her writing “a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden … I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.” This is gentle criticism compared to Mark Twain, who was ferocious: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her (Jane Austen) up and hit her on her skull with her own shin-bone.” (Did anyone ask him why, when he hated the book so much, he read it often?)
Jane Austen’s novels did find a place as texts for college students, even in Indian universities. What Indian students would make of her novels, so deeply rooted in the customs and habits of English society as they were, was, I imagine, never a concern. Pride and Prejudice was prescribed for my first year in college. I think there were only two of us in that class who knew the author’s name and only one of us had read her. I was lucky that the first book of hers that I read was Pride and Prejudice. To me, the book was sheer magic. After reading it, I looked for more of her novels. Eventually, through the years, I read every Jane Austen novel, ending appropriately with Persuasion, her final one. With no more novels left to read, desolation faced me. Fortunately, I chanced then upon Lady Susan, Jane Austen’s very little-known novel, one she never tried to get published.
A young writer
My next discovery was her Juvenilia, her writing as an adolescent, which was a great surprise. The stories were hilarious. One could see that the girl-author was enjoying herself hugely, making fun of the very popular Gothic novels of the time. These novels were built around highly exaggerated events, loud emotions, long-lost heirs being found, families getting united, lovers eloping, and females swooning all the time. It was a significant leap from this to her first novel, Susan. Yet it was also, in a way, a continuation of her early writing because Susan was critical, not only of the Gothic novel, but also of their readers, young girls mainly, who believed all the incredible things that happened in the novels. Austen’s Susan, however, had a plausible story, a very ordinary heroine, and, for a first novel, an unusually different and interesting hero. It was an even greater leap from Susan to the next novel, which she titled Elinor and Marianne. This was to become her first published novel, though it took a very long time to be published. Like many new writers, Austen didn’t have much luck with publishers. Which was why, even after three novels, she remained unknown.
Jane Austen’s popularity began, one may say, with the movies discovering her. All of Jane Austen’s novels have been adapted into movies; Pride and Prejudice has been an all-time favourite. Bridget Jones, which transported Pride and Prejudice to contemporary times, was hugely popular. Movies made from her novels came in many languages. In India, there was Bride and Prejudice in Hindi, (which I read was a huge flop), and a Tamil Sense and Sensibility which got good reviews. There have been prequels and sequels to the novels; Kindle has an amazingly large list of Pride and Prejudice sequels. But sequels rarely work. Even PD James, such an excellent crime writer, made a hash of a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, which she titled Pemberley.
After I seemed to have read all her fiction (all that was published) I found a copy of a book which contained her letters. The letters have been controversial, one critic calling them “oases of trivialities”. EM Forster, detecting ill-breeding in them, said their main fault was that the letters had no subject matter. But of course, these were not official letters, not solemn letters by learned men; they were women’s letters. Women have always been good communicators, they communicate to convey news, to keep family ties and friendships intact. These letters are between two sisters who had always confided in each other and continued to do so through letters when they were apart. The sisters knew what the letters were for and about: To converse, the way they did when they were together. One of Jane’s letters begins with, “Which of my important nothings shall I tell you first” Important nothings maybe, but Jane Austen’s voice comes strongly through in her letters. Look at this: “My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper, which I have no reluctance in doing, because I really think it my peculiar excellence and for the reason that I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider the chief merit in housekeeping.” ( A letter to her sister Cassandra)
Jane knew that even if a letter was for Cassandra, it would be read out to the entire family. She also knew she was not always discreet. In a letter, she urged Cassandra to keep the scissors ready. Sometimes, it was just innocent fun like a letter about a man who was in “such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife or himself must be dead”. But she could be nasty as well. She wrote of a woman who had a miscarriage because “she must have looked at her husband’s face”! Cassandra, wiser than Jane, destroyed a great many letters after Jane’s death, letters which could offend family, friends and neighbours. Letters to her two nieces and a nephew are treasured because in them, she gives advice to the budding writers which shows her complete grasp of the craft of writing.
In a letter to a nephew, an aspiring writer, she speaks of “his strong, manly spirited Sketches full of variety and Flow.” At the same time, she speaks of her own writing as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush.” Her advice to a niece that “three or four families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on” is often quoted. Only 160 letters escaped being destroyed by Cassandra. Austen scholars, of whom there are a large and increasing number, have rued the destruction of the letters. The number of scholars working on Jane Austen is another very surprising thing about Jane Austen: She is not only a writer whose novels are much read, she is a great presence among academics. So much has been written about her work in academic papers, theses, critical books, biographies and so on. It has become a major business in the academic world.
The publishing career
Jane Austen wrote three novels by the time she was 25: Northanger Abbey (initially titled Susan), Sense and Sensibility (earlier Elinor and Marianne) and Pride and Prejudice (first titled First Impressions). There is something very endearing about the fact that it was Jane’s father, much impressed by her writing, who sent Susan to a publisher, not mentioning the author’s identity. The publisher bought it for ten pounds. Much later, Jane wrote to the publisher and, trying to seem businesslike, threatened them with getting the novel published by another publisher if they could not do it. (She still had to learn that an author can never win against a publisher). Once again, like her father, she did not reveal her identity but wrote under the initials M A D. To this, she received a scathing reply saying that they were not bound to publish the novel within any specific time, or at all. And that if she carried out her threat to give it to another publisher, they would take steps to stop it. She could get the novel back only after paying back the ten pounds.
Aspiring writers have dreams and hopes, perhaps talent, but rarely money. And so, she left it at that. Ultimately it was her brother Henry who, after Jane’s death, bought back the manuscript by paying ten pounds and got it published under the title Northanger Abbey. First Impressions was sent by her father to another publisher. It came back in record time, with the words “Sent back by return post” on the packet. Claire Tomalin said, “As far as publishing blunders go, this was one of the worst made through laziness.” Indeed, because First Impressions, when it came out into the world, was titled Pride and Prejudice. All these attempts at publishing having failed, Jane remained unpublished. Perhaps Jane’s novels were so different from the novels of the time that publishers didn’t know how to read them. Emma was submitted to John Murray, who, fortunately, gave it to a discerning reader. His verdict was: “I see nothing but good in this novel.” And so the novel, which is now considered a masterpiece, came out rather quickly.
A writer, a woman
After this, Jane wrote nothing, there was a silence for nearly ten years. This silence has aroused both curiosity and conjecture. Why, after that initial burst of writing, did she retreat into silence? Was it because of the disappointment at the rejections by publishers? Undoubtedly, rejections can hit a young writer hard. An old writer as well! Depression following rejections is a possibility. But when the subject is a young woman in her twenties, a disappointment in love could also be a cause. It is true that when she was 21, Jane had a fling with a young Irishman who was visiting family in the neighbourhood. Jane wrote a great deal about him in her letters to Cassandra. “My Irish friend,” she called him. In one letter, she says, “Imagine everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” The only picture of Jane that exists shows a woman with a severe expression on her plump-cheeked face. It is hard to associate this woman with the girl who writes of dancing every dance with her Irish friend.
But Jane, at 21, was a gay, flirtatious girl, fond of dancing. And of wine. (“I believe I had too much wine last night. How else account for the shaking of my hand?”) Ultimately, nothing happened and Tom Lefroy, the Irish “friend”, went back to Ireland. Jane wrote a letter to Cassandra telling her about his departure: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy. When you receive this, it will be over. My tears flow as I write at that melancholy idea.” Was she serious? Or was she, as usual, trying to mask the truth by joking about it? Cassandra would know; Cassandra knew her sister well.
Whatever the truth, the two parted. And mostly, because of what Walter Scott later unkindly called the “calculating prudence” of Austen’s heroines. Tom Lefroy was the eldest son of a large family with very little money. Jane had nothing. They could not afford to marry. It would have been foolhardy to marry and start a family without money. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen shows us what happens to a marriage which begins with love and nothing else. Fanny, the heroine of Mansfield Park, visiting her family after years, finds a chaotic and noisy home, the children wild and undisciplined, the mother uncaring, foolishly lavishing all her feelings on her eldest son. All this because of the usual unhappy combination of too little money and too many children.
Some time later, Jane received a proposal of marriage from the brother of her friend. He proposed in the evening, she accepted, then the next morning took back her acceptance. Once again, many conjectures have been made about why she drew back from marriage. Perhaps the answer lies in her novels. Fanny in Mansfield Park steadily resists accepting Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage because she does not love him. And she turns out to be right. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is shocked at Charlotte Lucas accepting Mr Collins. And here’s Austen’s much-later letter to her niece Fanny, who is debating about whether she should marry a certain man.
“Don’t be in a hurry, depend upon it the right man will come in time,” Jane advises her. No marriage without love, her novels tell us loud and clear. Jane herself could never have married a man without love. And she knew both sides of the picture. “Single women,” she states, “have a dreadful propensity to being poor.” On the other side was the loss of freedom, continuous pregnancies and too many children. “Poor Animal,” she wrote of her niece Anna when she learnt she was pregnant for a second time immediately after the birth of the first. “She will be worn out before she is thirty.” And, there was always the possibility of death in childbirth; all four of her brothers’ wives died in childbirth, two of them when delivering the eleventh child. Warning enough, especially for a woman who was realising she was a writer. Perhaps Jane was lucky she never met the “right man”.
Jane’s silence has, perhaps more rightly, been connected to homelessness. When her father turned 70, he decided to retire from being an active clergyman and handed over his living of Steventon to his eldest son, James. The Austen couple took the decision without consulting their children. For Jane, it was a great shock. Steventon was home. And now she saw it being given to her brother, not just the living and the house, but almost all the artifacts in the house, artifacts which, through the years, had become companions, part of her life. Obviously daughters’ feelings didn’t matter. Even their beds were not spared. Jane was angry and resentful. “There is a plot to enrich one branch of the family at the cost of another,” she fumed. Unsurprisingly, there are no existing letters from this time. Jane must have expressed herself so intemperately in her letters that Cassandra had to destroy them.
With the Steventon home gone, the Austen couple and their daughters went to live in Bath. Bath is much associated with Jane Austen. She has located some part of two of her novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, in Bath. But Jane hated Bath. They could not find a home which satisfied all of them. They moved several times, finally to Southampton after the father’s death. The mother, two daughters, a friend of theirs, Martha Lloyd and the wife of one of the brothers formed an all-women ménage. The problem that faced them after Mr Austen’s death was that his earnings came to an end. The wife and daughter were left penniless and homeless. (One cannot but think of Pride and Prejudice and the entail. Perhaps, being too close for comfort, Jane Austen gives us the fact of the entail through Mrs Bennet’s hysterical lamentations which makes it comic.)
They had to depend entirely on the brothers, all of whom contributed something according to their means. Edward, the rich brother, contributed the most. This dependence must have been very painful for the sisters. Jane, in one letter, complained to Cassandra about always having to depend on someone to travel with, both as escort and to pay her fare. Edward’s mother-in-law was, however, a kind of patron of Jane’s, giving her ten pounds occasionally. Jane’s first and, in her lifetime, only patron.
Relief came when Edward offered them a house he owned in Chawton Village. It was here that they got the semblance of a home at last, the mother, two sisters and Martha. It was also here that Jane wrote her last three novels: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Chawton gave her the home she needed and Jane was able to devote much time to her writing. Cassandra and Martha took the burden of housekeeping on themselves; Jane’s only responsibilities being tea and wine. It was because of this, perhaps, that she was able to write Emma in just over one year. She not only wrote three new novels, she also revised, very carefully, the earlier three. Both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were redone and sent to different publishers. This was a time of great creativity for Jane. There are times in a writer’s life when creativity flows, when there is a sense of power as words and ideas come to the writer’s bidding. It was such a time for Jane in Chawton. Writers consider these blessed times, and so, one can be sure, did Jane.
Later life and legacy
Much after Jane Austen, another great woman writer made a statement in her book, A Room of One’s Own, that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Jane Austen seems to be a living example of the truth of this. Both Mrs Austen and Cassandra had some money of their own, which came from legacies. Jane not only had no money, but she lost her home as well. Later, when she began earning money from her books, she urged Cassandra to accept a gift from her. “Don’t refuse me. I am rich,” she pleaded with her. The money she earned mattered to her. She carefully noted down the money she earned from each book, with the copyright or without. For Pride and Prejudice, the publisher gave her 110 pounds. She wrote to Cassandra, “I wanted 150 pounds but both of us could not be happy.” So she settled for 110 pounds. Sense and Sensibility was also accepted by a publisher. It sold well and went into a second edition.
Jane’s reputation grew very slowly. Some critics had always praised her. Walter Scott, who had not been very kind to Emma earlier, now changed his tune and wrote more generously about her. George Henry Lewes, literary critic and philosopher, was a great champion of hers. He wrote on her novels and urged writers to read her. Lewes was the life partner of George Eliot and the first part of Middlemarch is supposed to be influenced by Austen. And there was the reputed critic FR Leavis, who began his book The Great Tradition with the sentence: “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.” A controversial statement, perhaps, but pronounced with an absolute certainty.
The greatest praise for Jane Austen, however, comes from Virginia Woolf. Writing about women writers in A Room Of One’s Own, this is what she says about Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.” Woolf regarded Jane Austen and Emily Brontë as two women who wrote as women write and not as men write and goes on to say, “What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it, and Emily Brontë. They wrote out of themselves,” she added. At a low point in my writing when I despaired of getting out of the demarcated space called women’s writing which was allotted to me, I read this and was strengthened. After that, I never again thought of writing about women as a weakness, a lack.
Jane Austen has been called “the perfect artist”. But, after her death, strangely enough, her family, with the best intentions, wronged her. In Northanger Abbey, published after her death, her brother Henry wrote a biographical notice of the author. Her anonymity ended here, as Henry revealed that this novel and some other novels were also authored by his sister, Jane Austen. He then went on to present her as a gentle, pious woman whose interest lay in her family and in domestic duties. Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward wrote A Memoir of Jane Austen much later, in which he too painted a similar picture of his aunt. She did not ever write for fame or money both the writers implied. In effect, for Jane Austen, writing was “an amateur activity”.
These statements can be easily countered with Austen’s own words. There are enough statements in her letters which speak of how she resented housework taking up the time she would much rather have given to her writing. “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb,” she wrote to Casssandra. She took infinite pains over her novels, revising them until she was satisfied. As for not taking her work seriously one has only to read her letters to know what her novels meant to her. She calls Pride and Prejudice “my darling child” and looked at Sense and Sensibility like a suckling mother. Jane’s father gave her a mahogany desk when she was young, which travelled everywhere with her. She stored her papers in it, papers which she called her treasures.
Those who speak of her writing being of commonplace and trivial matters forget the power of some passages in her novels. There is a passage in Sense and Sensibility where Willoughby comes in the middle of the night to see Marianne who, he is told, is dying. The confession he makes, his great sense of guilt, his fear and sorrow that Marianne might die – these come through powerfully against the background of the silence in the house and the unseen presence of the perhaps-dying girl. Austen was also a minimalist. Perhaps the excesses of the Gothic novel had induced a great opposition to exaggeration in her. But she could infuse a few words with tremendous feeling. Like Darcy’s (first) proposal to Elizabeth: “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be suppressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
You can sense the words being propelled out of him, perhaps even against his will. And then there is Emma’s moment of self-knowledge about her feelings for Mr Knightley: “It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself.”
A life-changing moment, a life-changing understanding given to us with a great economy of words.
I came upon Jane Austen when very young. In a sense, it seems to me that I have accompanied her on her journey from relative obscurity to this great splash of fame. Readers change their favourite writers through the years but Jane Austen’s position has been steady in my mental chart. I have been laughed at for my Jane Austen near-obsession; each birthday my gift has been an Austen novel, obviously a copy of a book which I already have. It makes no difference. She is much admired by many writers and I would like to end with a quote from Fay Weldon’s book, Letters to Alice: On first reading Jane Austen. A slim book of only 150 page, it encapsulates Jane’s life, her times, her works in a marvelous way.
Fay Weldon first quotes the first paragraph of Emma: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Fay Weldon then goes on to say: “Emma opens with a paragraph which sends shivers of pleasure down my spine; it glitters with sheer competence; with the animation of the writer who has discovered power.”
Why is Jane Austen so honoured? BBC Arts spoke of Jane as having ripped up the rule book and reinvented the novel. So she did. She was a pioneer, an originator, an influence on other writers. She turned her back on the novels of her time and gave the novel a different face. The novel today is still tethered to Austen’s novel. BBC Arts also spoke of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius as being a “story of how a self-taught young woman from a small Hampshire village became one of the greatest novelists who ever lived.” One is a little uncomfortable with such superlatives being associated with Jane Austen because it was not Austen’s style. Understating was her way. Perhaps it is because of this that it took us two centuries to recognise her greatness.
Jane Austen died in Winchester at the age of 41, leaving behind a peerless legacy of six novels and two incomplete ones.
Shashi Deshpande is a novelist. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Shri in 1990 and 2009, respectively.
