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A sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra. It is owned by the National Portrait Gallery.
My wife is a member of a bookclub. They have been meeting for twenty years. I was recently invited to talk to the club about the genius of JaneAusten This year being the 250th anniversary of her birth many Austen societies , Austen places and academics are celebrating this event in all sorts of ways. The ,"bookclub," are reading all her novels and also, now, have listened to me going on about her. Using the idea of how nature and nurture work together to make who we are was my starting point. What made Jane Austen a genius?. This is a copy of the talk I gave. What is missing are the asides from group members, witty comments and me going off at a tangent when I was asked a question. Also it is impossible to recreate the warmth and friendly atmosphere of the meeting. I'll leave you to imagine the scene.
DEATH
Jane Austen died on the 10th July 1817. She was 41 years old. She probably died of Addisons Disease or some think it could have been arsenic poisoning or a number of other diseases. Her doctors left no definitive diagnosis, just descriptions of her symptoms. Later in the year following her death her brother Henry wrote a tribute to her in the introduction to Northanger Abbey. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published in the year of her death.
HENRY’S OBITUARY
He wrote,
“The style of her correspondence was in all respects the same as that of her novels. Everything came finished from her pen; for in all subjects she had ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen. It is not hazarding too much to say that she never dispatched a note or letter unworthy of publication.”
That was complete nonsense.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Jane Austen was one of eight siblings. She had five older brothers, James, George, Edward Henry and Francis, an older sister, Cassandra and a younger brother Charles. Jane was the seventh. Her father George was the rector of two parishes in Hampshire, that of Deane and also of Steventon. Both parishes are located near Basingstoke. The family lived in the Steventon Rectory. George Austen was an academic. He had been a scholarship student and later proctor at Oxford University before he married Cassandra Leigh. With marriage he had to leave the university and he became a parish Rector. With two parishes he collected tythes but also had some land on which he could farm. To supplement his income he tutored the sons of the gentry , often the sons of friends he knew at Oxford. He prepared the sons to enter Oxford in their turn. The boys lived with the Austen family at Steventon. George Austen owned a diverse library of some hundreds of books including, novels, poetry, religious books, travel journals and science books which he let Jane, her sister and her brothers freely read .
Jane’s brothers were on the whole a talented bunch. James and Henry went to Oxford following in their father’s footsteps and both tried their hands at writing, plays, poetry and journalistic writing, which they published. They copied the style of Dr Johsons magazine The Rambler in their own magazine called The Loiterer. The family loved Dr Johnsons writing and so did Jane. There is an anonymous article in the ninth edition of The Loiterer called Sophia Sentiment. It humorously criticises the magazine for not publishing more writing by and for women. The article promotes the genius of women writers. Many academics think the article was written by a young teenage Jane Austen.
The siblings put on dramatic presentations in the barn of their home at Steventon. Some of the scripts were written by the eldest James. There is no record of Jane performing in them, her brothers might have thought she was too young to perform adult roles but she certainly was in the audience and commented on the productions.
Other members of her family tried their hand at writing. Her mother Cassandra wrote passable poetry. Her mother’s cousin , also born Cassandra Leigh , later, when she was married, Cassandra Cooke, wrote a novel which Jane read called ,”Battleridge,” an historical novel. So Jane had precedents within her own family and was herself encouraged to read and write. She learned from the strong influence provided by her family.
Her early juvenile writing, that was not published during her lifetime, includes a History of England illustrated by her sister Cassandra, poetry and plays and short epistolary novels, Lady Susan and Love and Friendship. These were early teenage attempts at novel writing. They are fun and somewhat salacious. Her parents didn’t seem to mind too much about her reading books such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. The History of England she wrote is partial and not something to read if you want to learn about history but it gives an insight into the 18th century daughter of a country rectors view on history.
EDUCATION
As far as a formal education goes she didn’t have much. In 1787, when she was seven years old, she went with her older sister, Cassandra to a Mrs Cawley’s School in Oxford. Mrs Cawley removed the school to Southampton where Jane, Cassandra and their cousin Jane Cooper became ill with typhoid fever. Mrs Cooper and Mrs Austen both took their children swiftly away to nurse them at home. Unfortunately, Mrs Cooper caught the fever and died. Her mother and father didn’t give up on formal schooling immediately. They then sent Jane , Cassandra and their cousin Jane Cooper joined them, to Reading Abbey School for eighteen months. It is thought Jane’s description of Mrs Goddards School in Emma was derived from her own school experiences. Formal schooling was a not a success. But jane did seem to learn the rudiments of being an educated young lady. She learned to dance, play the pianoforte. Jane and Casandra both sketched. There is a large patchwork quilt that Jane made. In one letter to Cassandra, she asks her sister to source pieces of material for her quilt making. Her real education was learning from her sister, her brothers and her father and reading voraciously and continuing to experiment with her writing.
INFLUENCES
I have mentioned some of the writers that influenced her. Dr Johnson wrote a novel called Rassalas Prince of Abyssinia. The plot involves the main character travelling through many lands in search of what it means to be a balanced human being. There are links here with Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. We know she read Francis Burney’s Camilla, her aunt and uncle The Cookes lived in Great Bookham near Box Hill. Nearby lived Francis Burney and her husband General D”Arblay. Jane would often visit. The Cookes knew Francis Burney well. The Reverend Cooke baptised the D’Arblays son. Her aunt encouraged Jane to subscribe to buying a copy of Camilla. There is a mention of,” pride and prejudice” in Camilla and probably Jane got the idea for own novel from Camilla.
In Northanger Abbey there is a scene where a number of Gothic novels are mentioned. Catherine Moorland is hooked on reading them. Jane probably got some of her ideas for Northanger Abbey from Anne Radcliffe’s novel The Mystery of Udolpho which is one of the novels Catherine Moorland reads in the novel. Other authors that influenced Jane Austen’s writing were Maria Edgeworth and Lord Byron, you can see how some of Austen’s men are Byronic characters, She read Samuel Richardson and Shakespeare, when the characters in Mansfield Park get lost in the wilderness at Mr Rushworths house Sotherton there are echoes of A Midsummer Nights Dream. She also read Hannah Moore a Quaker and abolitionist and the playwright Sheridan who wrote School For Scandal. Her favourite poet was William Cowper. She loved going to the theatre when she stayed with her brother Henry in Covent Garden in London at number 10 Henrietta Street. She mentions in her letters from London about her visits to the Covent Garden theatre. She saw Edmund Keane perform Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Dialogue and listening to characters speak to each other and interact with each other was one of her loves and passions.
PUBLISHERS
Her father and brother Henry as well as other members of her family supported her writing.Henry especially made great efforts to arrange for publishers to buy and publish her novels. That was not an easy task but her own family believed in her and thought she warranted the effort. One of the first publishers to buy her manuscripts was Benjamin Crosby. He bought a copy of First Impressions an early version of Pride and Prejudice but did nothing with it. Eventually Henry bought the manuscript back from Crosby for £10. More successful was Thomas Egerton who had his offices in Whitehall. He published Sense and Sensibility followed by Pride and Prejudice. Later she was published by John Murray of Albemarle Street. He published Mansfield Park and Emma during her lifetime. After her death, in the same year, he published Northangar Abbey and Persuasion.
INNATE TALENT
She was obviously born with and developed an intelligence which she put to the task of writing. Her early juvenile attempts at novel writing, Lady Susan and Love and Friendship were written in the epistolary style that writers such as Francis Burney used. The epistolary style was a story written as a series of letters between two or more characters. Because they were letters they created a distance between the reader and the characters within the story. Jane’s attempts at this style are hilarious though. Jane changed her process of writing novels in later years, Elena and Marianne that later became Sense and Sensibiliy and First Impressions which became Pride and Prejudice were probably first written as epistolary novels. She was not averse to giving up on a novel if she didn’t think it was working such as The Watsons. Only a few chapters exist. Sanderton was never completed because she was ill towards the end of her life. At some stage Jane decided to do things differently. You can see how her love of plays came into use. Books like Pride and Prejudice are full of conversations. Her characters are unique.with their own particular strengths and weaknesses, faults and failings. Austen portrays their individual development. They are never mere caricatures. They are alive and feel real. Emma Woodhouse is a good example. She is not everybody’s favourite character. She is selfish self centred, and acts as though she is superior to everybody else. Austen portrays her development in a very human way. The pain of self awareness and her improved treatment of others is a slow process which makes her all the more real.
Austen never gives up fully on the use of letters though. Letters still play an important part. The famous letter in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth expresses his love to Anne Elliot is a letter in question. Apparently people still swoon over that letter to this day.
“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late…”
So Jane Austen reinvented the novel making it real.
CONTROVERSY
There has been some controversy in the last few years over whether Jane Austen needed an editor which obviously counters her brother Henrys assertion that, “Everything came finished from her pen.” Katheryn Sutherland, an Oxford University professor has studied over a thousand pieces of writing Jane wrote in her own hand. Her punctation is hit and miss. She has a habit of using capital letters randomly for emphasise. Her grammar and sentence construction is poor at times. If you read her remaining letters, about 160 in all, you can read for yourself the patchy grammar and see her creative use of punctuation. John Murray her final publisher asked William Gifford, one of his editors, to have a good look at Jane’s writing. Gifford told Murray he thought she had talent, but her prose needed, “buffing,” as he put it. So maybe the polished smooth version of Jane Austen’s novels we know today were not so polished originally. As you can imagine this has upset a lot of people. I don’t think it should take away from her achievements.
Many people I know have said,” so what, many great writers if not all have needed an editor to help their process.”
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Is jane Austen on a par with Shakespeare? Virginia Woolf wrote a long essay called A Room of Ones Own. She argued that a woman author to be equal to Shakespeare needed enough independent income, her own private space and a whole cohort of other women writers over the generations to provide a rich female literary background enabling this future female author to be on a par with Shakespeare. Woolf also thought that women required the same level of education as men. In the 1930s that was not the case. She calls this woman of the future, “Shakespeare’s Sister. “She mentions Jane Austen as being good but still not able to reach the heights of Shakespeare. Austen’s’ world was far too restricted and narrow. She wrote about a small community in each novel and mostly only included the gentry class.
On the other hand you can argue that you can find a whole world in a grain of sand and that Virginia Woolf was being too negative.
FINISH
But to finish off, what we need, following Virgina Woolf’s argument, is a lot more, hundreds ,probably thousands more women to write novels, to really build up a bank of experience that one day one woman writer can rise up to be on a par with Shakespeare. In other words you lot need to get writing a novel.
(NB George and possible deafness. George did not live with the Austen family. His father paid for a local farmer and his wife to take care of him. George is mentioned once in her fathers letters . He had visited George. He says that his son was good natured and behaved well. It is thought because of his disability whatever it was George was unable to join in with the family’s everyday life. JA recorded that she learned to speak with her hands. There was no reason for her to learn sign language other than somebody she knew well was deaf.)
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