Kitabı oku: «The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen»

Introduction

Few great writers can have cut so unglamorous a figure in the world as Jane Austen did. Though her novels from the first proved popular with the reading public, among the Hampshire gentry with whom she lived and visited her abilities went unguessed at. As for her family, while treasuring her merry, irreverent conversation, they found other accomplishments more immediately praiseworthy. According to her nephew, J. Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote a Memoir of his aunt in 1870, in his own old age, ‘Her needlework both plain and ornamental was excellent, and might almost have put a sewing machine to shame. She was considered especially great in satin stitch.’ Her younger relations, not surprisingly, were more alive to her sense of fun – ‘Her performance with cup and ball was marvellous’, records her nephew fondly – but they were no more able than their parents to imagine the miraculous talent that was coming to fruition in their midst as, working steadily away in the crowded parlour in the little family house at Chawton, between convivial family mealtimes, noisy games of ‘Spilikens’ and quiet sessions of reading and sewing, their aunt created the novels which would in time admit her to the company of England’s most revered writers – and as the most enduringly readable, lovable genius of them all. Even many decades after her death, when the fame of Jane Austen extended across the world, her Hampshire neighbours were the last to know. ‘A few years ago,’ recalls Austen-Leigh, ‘a gentleman visiting Winchester Cathedral desired to be shown Miss Austen’s grave. The verger, as he pointed it out, asked, “Pray, sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady; so many people want to know where she was buried?” ’

As the sixth of seven children, Jane Austen was introduced early to the idea of her own insignificance. The Reverend George Austen had been given the neighbouring Hampshire parishes of Deane and Steventon to administer in 1764, the same year that he married Cassandra Leigh. The couple lived in Deane for the first few years, however, and it was not until 1771 that they moved, with their growing family, to the rectory at Steventon in which, in 1775, Jane would be born. By that time, her eldest brother, James, was over ten years old: he must have seemed like another adult to the young girl, kind but a little imposing; a cultivated young man of wide literary and intellectual interests, he did much to foster her early interest in books. Affable and lively as he was by temperament, her next-eldest brother, Edward, was a remote figure in a different way. By an arrangement of a sort not uncommon at the time, he had been adopted by a relation, Mr Knight, in order to relieve some of the Austen family’s financial pressures. Living with his adoptive father in comparative splendour, he would eventually inherit both his name and estate; he became close to Jane in adulthood, his daughter, Fanny, becoming perhaps her favourite niece. The nearest to an underachiever the family was to produce, Henry was nonetheless a witty and likeable young man: it was his lack of steadiness, rather than any shortage of ability, which prevented his making more of a mark in a career as clergyman to which he was characteristically slow in settling. Though three years older than Jane, Cassandra, the novelist’s only sister, was also to prove her lifelong friend and confidante – and the recipient of many of her most acerbic and entertaining letters. The two brothers closest to Jane in age would both rise successfully in the Navy: both Francis and Charles would attain the rank of admiral, the former finally being appointed Senior Admiral of the Fleet.

Yet if the presence of so many strong personalities taught Jane to know her place, it also guaranteed an unending flow of jokes and games. Overflowing as it was with bright, boisterous children, the rectory at Steventon was a house of hilarity: there was always an eager cast of actors for any dressing-up game or dramatic presentation, an affectionate, appreciative audience for any doggerel rhyme or skit. It was in just such a spirit of family fun that Jane Austen produced her first work of fiction: by the age of twelve she was already writing little stories and plays, by fourteen she had written the short novel, Love and Freindship [sic], and the stream of outrageously nonsensical (but impeccably crafted) squibs, spoofs and satires continued unabated throughout her teenage years. Slight as these performances may be, they express opinions and interests which would reappear in Jane Austen’s ‘grown-up’ writing: there’s the same derisive disrespect for pretension, for example, the same unfoolable eye for hypocrisy. Most of all, however, there’s the same irrepressible humour, for even in the darkest works of her adulthood – works like Mansfield Park and Persuasion – the same wit and mischief can be seen. In its own preposterous way, the Juvenilia establishes Jane Austen as, essentially, a comic writer with a serious side, rather than a serious writer who tells jokes. The voice of Love and Freindship is unmistakably the voice of Pride and Prejudice and Emma: the joyous games of girlhood were built upon by the maturing author, and refined beyond recognition, but they would never be entirely left behind.

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.