Jane Austen
If there is one generally popular novel in the English language, it is
Pride and Prejudice and this was true before a recent successful
television version. It has always been taken seriously by the eminent in
society and in literature: Jane Austen was celebrated from her first book,
Sense and Sensibility. It is a very English novel, and foreigners have
been known to question our admiration. Class and money! – and where are
the great themes of Life and Death? So come the criticisms, still, and the
reply often is that class and money defined the lives of the novel’s
characters, not to mention the life of the woman who wrote it. So let us
deal with these issues first, leaving aside for the moment the real themes
of the book.
Jane Austen was a member of a network of middle-class families that merged
upwards into the aristocracy, but her own family was poor. Her father,
with six children – two girls and four boys – to feed and clothe and
find careers for, had to take in pupils, so the home was for part of the
year a school, noisy and full of rambunctious boys. Jane and her sister
Cassandra felt themselves to be, and were often treated as, poor
relations, dependent on presents, little trips and handouts from
better-off and generous relatives. Not until – late – Jane earned some
money writing, did she enjoy any kind of independence. Her situation was a
common one then for poor unmarried women anywhere in Europe.
She has often been portrayed as a conventional spinster, partly because of
Mary Mitford’s unfriendly description of her as ‘a poker’ – upright and
judging. She was malicious – this time the critic is Virginia Woolf
quoting not very attractive bon mots at others’ expense. She wrote her
immortal novels in corners, always ready to set them aside to take part in
tea and gossip. What do we have here? A woman of the kind I remember from
when I was a girl, the unmarried maiden aunt, ready to be useful to
others, without any life of her own, a pitiable figure. Austen was
supposed, so we have often read, to be a sheltered woman, her experience
limited to village life and a narrow middle-class circle.
Here is a quote from an article by a once influential critic, Demetrius
Capetanakis, in the very influential periodical New Writing and Daylight
for winter 1943-4 – that is, in the middle of the war. ‘Round every page
of Jane Austen’s novels one feels the hedge of an eighteenth-century
English home. It is the hedge of ”sense”, of logic, or rather the logic
of a person leading a secure life in the midst of a secure society. Jane
Austen was protected by a hedge of unquestionable values …’ Nothing
could be further from the truth. First of all, her situation among the
genteel poor exposed her: there can be few worse positions in society,
even if often useful for the creation of literature. She had a close woman
friend in the fashionable world, a cousin, probably Warren Hastings’
illegitimate child, married to a French count who lost his head to the
guillotine. The whole course of the French Revolution and its aftermath
must have seemed as close to her as news from her own family. Her four
brothers were often off fighting in the Navy against Napoleon, in danger,
and afflicting their family with anxiety. Above all, Jane was enmeshed in
the lives of female relatives and friends, who were always pregnant,
nursing, giving birth to innumerable children who died then so easily and
often. And, more potent as an influence than anything, Jane was sent as a
tiny child to boarding school, and there was as miserable and neglected as
Jane Eyre was at her school.
The triumph of Jane Austen’s art was that the little piece of ivory she
claimed as her artistic territory was carved out of such an abundance of
experience and material. She excluded and refined. That means for people
now who know even a little about that time, her stages seem confined
brightly lit places where all around loom and mass shadows, dangers,
tragedy. Nowhere in an Austen novel does an aristocrat lose his head, a
woman die from milk fever or puerperal fever, or give birth to a mentally
sick child, like her cousin Eliza. Pain and grief are cured by love,
kindness and presumably kisses, though I cannot imagine more than a chaste
kiss in an Austen novel: more and the delicate fabric, the tone, would be
destroyed.
Jane Austen loved well and lost, young. He was Irish and he loved her too,
and now it seems this marriage would have been made in heaven, but he was
poor, had a mother and sisters to support, and so he must marry for money.
This abnegation was understood by both sides. But she did love him, and he
her, and the pain of it is, so it is generally thought, in Persuasion.
Later, when her single state was at its most circumscribing and difficult,
she was asked in marriage by a neighbouring estate owner, who was rich,
with a big house. The temptation was such that she accepted him, and the
prospect of running an estate, being wife to a man of considerable
standing, having children, leaving behind for ever her status as poor
relation. But next day she changed her mind and refused him. This seems to
me as sharp a glimpse into her mind as any we have. It is suggested that
the memory of her love for Tom Lefroy made it impossible for her to marry
anyone else. But it is useful to remember here that Cassandra reported
Jane’s moments of exultation at being free and unmarried. Free from what?
Surely, childbearing. Again and again one reads how some cousin, or
friend, has died in childbed with her eighth or …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Time Bites
by Doris Lessing Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-083140-5
