Jane Austen: A Life

"That’s definitely not Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is the only one – at the end of Pride and Prejudice the author really thinks that her central characters are going to live happily ever after. It’s a wonderful ending. Everybody knows that famous first sentence: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ There are many, many things that can be said about that sentence, but the view of marriage that it implies is what I might call the commercial view of marriage. This is the view that Mrs Bennet has, and that Charlotte has – that a woman has her attractiveness, variously defined, and the man has his money, and the woman exchanges her attractiveness for his money. But the last sentence of Pride and Prejudice is about the various people who come to visit at Pemberley, and how they are welcomed. It implies a view of marriage as the centre of a community, of marriage being a community and making a larger community. It’s a much larger and more romantic but also, in my view, a more moral view of marriage. It’s a view of marriage as a centre expanding outwards that is totally absent at the beginning of the book. It doesn’t recur in any of the other Jane Austen books. At the end of Persuasion , which I was talking about as a love story, there is a happy marriage. But there is a reminder of the quick alarms of a sailor’s life that are before Anne, because she is married to a sailor. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with marrying a sailor, or the particular sailor she’s married to, but it is a reminder that she isn’t going to be nothing but happy. But at the end of Pride and Prejudice you can believe that they aren’t going to be anything but happy. It is perplexing to think about. As you probably know she was proposed to, she accepted the man, she thought about it overnight and she rejected him in the morning. One doesn’t know very much about the man – but the fact is she rejected what would have been a very practical marriage, to a friend of the family, a prosperous man, who would have taken care of her. That may suggest that she really personally had a very romantic view of marriage, and wasn’t willing to settle."

"Tomalin’s is still my favourite among all Austen biographies, and there are some really good ones. What I like about hers is that it shows us, in the context of crucial family, literary, and social context, that Austen was tough; that she was unafraid; that she was in an environment of difficulty and distress – even crisis – through parts of her life. For example, Tomalin was one of the first to make sense of the beheading of her cousin’s husband – the Comte de Feuillide – and what it meant that her cousin Eliza was enmeshed in that revolutionary moment in that close proximity. She also digs into what it meant that Eliza, who was a flirt and apparently a very charismatic woman, returned to her English family and ended up marrying, in her second marriage, Jane Austen’s banker brother, Henry. (E. J. Clery has just published a biography from this vantage point, Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister . ) These kinds of details and events were talked about in previous biographies, but what Tomalin did was the deep research, the clear, engaging writing, and the psychological exploration that allowed us to see that Austen was not “in smooth water all of [her] days”, as Admiral Croft’s wife puts it in Persuasion . Jane Austen, too, I think, wouldn’t have expected to be in smooth water all of her days, and Tomalin shows us that she just wasn’t. Austen grew up in Steventon Rectory, where her clergyman father also took in male pupils as boarders, so she was growing up in a household of boys – some her brothers, others unrelated students. Tomalin looks at what that might have meant for her childhood. All of these things are brought forth in the biography in a way that is not sensationalised, which would certainly be a temptation with a lot of this material. But Tomalin does it all in a way that is very engaging and well-researched. Tomalin worked in the Hampshire Record Office, the British Library, Kent County Archives; she worked with some French archival materials, bank ledgers, and family papers. You can see this in the bibliography section of her book and in her notes. She’s worked principally with previously published material. She wasn’t necessarily the first to use the unpublished materials she consulted. But I think she put the whole together with a new and moving depth. That’s just fabulous. I can’t read that line without laughing, but you’re right (or Jarvis is right) that it may be a laughter born out of rage. Nokes’s biography is, to my mind, a bit over the top. I do know some Austen specialists who prefer the Nokes biography to all others. It seems to me that it was written really more with the screen in mind. When I called Tomalin’s biography less sensational, I think Nokes is the one I had in mind as more sensational. Sometimes it seems he’s going for the gory detail and is approaching story-telling in a more melodramatic way. It’s a perfectly viable way to tell a story, although some of the fictionalising and imagining Nokes uses is less to my taste. That’s why I prefer Tomalin’s biography in the end. It certainly reads like he’s writing a screenplay. I don’t believe it happened for him, but it has happened with Austen biography. Jon Spence’s biography Becoming Jane Austen (2003) led to the film Becoming Jane [2007; directed by Julian Jarrold]. So, there have been a number of lives of Austen that seem to have been written with the screen in mind. There are just different emphases and different motivations involved in that kind of biographical storytelling. There is room for all of them. I think you just need to be mindful of the difference between reading biographical speculation drawn from facts and biographical speculation drawn from the desire to tell a good story."