RARE SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34031, 20 December 1975, Page 10

RARE SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

This year the world celebrates the bicentenary of the birth this month of Jane Austen, one of the very rare novelists in the English language whose eminence is, and will surely always be. unchallenged, in this article David Holloway, one of the literary critics of the "Daily Telegraph’’ wonders what would happen if Miss Austen was interviewed by a cosmic television crew. Only the most determined and humourless rationalist would deny Jane Austen a place in heaven. And only the most petty-minded and envious of her fellow-writers would deny her the sort of heaven that she would have wished — a room for her writing desk and her piano, a sofa for family and friends to sit on and an ed supply of paper, pens and ink. Of course heaven to other people might well be an unlimited supply of new Jane Austen novels arriving gently by cloud a volume at a time, providing always that she was prepared to release them, for few have been more careful revisers. And, who knows, true heaven for her might ‘'e never having to finish a novel, always having the time to bring it that one degree nearer perfection No one ever interviewed Miss Austen (i prefer to call her this: the “Jane” of the Janeites makes it sound like the gallery girls talking about their latest idol). No one asked her impertinent questions about her private life or demanded how many hours a dav she spent at her writing desk. No-one could ask her whether she drew her characters from life. And quite right too. Assuming, though, that someone, (a cosmic television crew) went to see Miss Austen. Assuming too that she would agree to see them. (Certainly she had no desire for publicity in her life and had no desire to join literary circles. She even refused to go to meet Mme de Stael. the somewhat overpowering French writer and hostess of a literary salon.) What would these visitors find? Not. let us hope, the tired and ill figure of the last couple of years when Addison’s Disease (not then identified) was wasting her away, though not impairing her capacity to write her way out of the depression illness brought, but four years before her death in 1817. Let it be January 1813, when “Pride and Prejudice” was published by Thomas Egerton in an edition of about 1500 copies for which he had paid £IOO to Jane’s brother who was acting as her business agent.

At 39 was she still, with her sister Cassandra, one of “two of the prettiest girls in England?” Perhaps not, but her nephew wrote of her at about this age: "In person she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose well formed, light hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If not so regularly

handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar charm of its own.” But there might be problems for the visiting interviewer — her shyness, for instance. In childhood it had been chronic. Later it must have modified for to her family, at least, and to children in particular she was someone very special, “kind, sympathising and amusing.” Her niece Caroline added: “She seemed to love you and you loved her in return.” So there she is, calm and in control of the situation. That the world was celebrating in 1975 the bicentenary of her birth in December, would be accepted without false modesty though not without levity. How do I guess this? I would have thought that the clue lay in Miss Austen’s reply to the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, chaplain to the Prince Regent, who had written suggesting that she might dedicate her next volume to Prince Leopold (the Regent’s son-in-law): “Any historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Coburg, would just now be very interesting.” She replied: “You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and 1 am fully sensible that an historical romance ... might be much more to the purpose of profit and popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. 1 could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself and other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way ...” No flutterings of pleasure, you see, at hints of royal patronage. Centenaries too she would take in her stride. Let the interviewer tell her that she will be the first English woman writer to be celebrated with a special issue of stamps in her own country, and she will accept the honour. What better way could there be to celebrate so industrious a letter writer as she was? But there might be a little amused pleasure that the issue should be for "first-class” post. Perhaps even greater joy that her face would not be included but those of some of her characters. And what about the Jane Austen industry? Would this have staggered her — someone who had published four well-received novels in her lifetime (the other two completed ones were published posthumously) but who

was certainly not a best-seller even by the standards of her time? She could be told that, according to Professor Douglas Bush, the American authority on her writing, between 1923 and 1973, 67 books were written about her and her work, some 31 of them in the last 10 years of that period plus hundreds of essays and articles. Surely she would be delighted to know that there were such titles as “Jane Austen’s Novels: the Fabric of Dialogue” or “Critical Realism in Northanger Abbey” or even “Jane Austen’s English.” Perhaps best of all she would enjoy “Jane Austen and the Peerage” from the “Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, volume 68, 1953” in which the author demonstrates how the names of Jane Austen’s characters “correspond closely to names recurring in the annals of a group of great families, connected, if distantly, with her mother’s ancestral background.” Cited are Wentworth and Wodehouse, both involved in the Strafford pedigree. With the splendid certainty of the literary detective the author of the article produces as his clincher the fact that a contemporary work on the peerage, which Miss Austen might have known, was edited by a Mr Collins. It is a pity that no literary scholars lived in the villages she knew; she would have relished them. Would she be surprised to know that she was “the first Marxist novelist” (someone said it) or that she was “the last of the Augustans”? Not a bit. After all she had said: “I go my own way.”. And then the questioning might get more personal. The interviewer could rake up Charlotte Bronte’s criticism of Miss Austen: “The passions are perfectly unknown to her; even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the elegance of her progress.” Of course Charlotte Bronte is talkin o about the novels not the writer. But was Miss Austen untouched by love? No-one could guess how she would have answered that. Would she tell of the youthful flirtation with Tom Lefroy, the brother of one of her best friends, or the mysterious love affair at a seaside town with a man who died suddenly and mysteriously, or the absurd onenight engagement to Harris BiggWither, called off the next morning? That is the sort of answer we can leave that cosmic television crew to wait for.

Who cares? We can leave them with Miss Austen and go to the bookshelf and celebrate the bicentenary of her birth in the best way possible by taking down what is probably the first Jane Austen novel that most of us read and start again with that opening sentence that made us sit up then and never fails to charm us when we read it again even if we know it by heart: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife . . .”

Jane Austen bicentary thoughts by David Holloway