Jane Austen and her family’s world

Press, 2 December 1978, Page 15

Jane Austen and her family’s world

A Portrait of Jane Austen. By David Cecil. Constable. 204 pp. Index. $18.25. Sanditon, The Watsons, Lady Susan, and other Miscellanea. By Jane Austen. Dent, Dutton. 224 pp. $7.80. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) Even those who express unalloyed delight at Jane Austen’s novels have been known to complain that she led a most uneventful life, and that she appeared almost oblivious of the wars and social upheavals which took place; in the span of her 41 years between 1776 and 1817. Lord David Cecil, in a modest book that appears to have become a major biographical Sketch almost by accident, sets Jahe Austen and her work in new perspectives. If her life lacked the excessive passions and reversals expected from successful writers, it was never dull for Miss Austen herself. She lived it in the company of members of an extended family whom she generally loved and admired, but she was alert enough to draw from an uneventful existence the satirical portraits and wickediv humorous details with which she filled six of the most perfect novels in the English language. David Cecil " finds her special strength, and her continuing popularity, in the realistic eighteenth century. ' “She was born in the eighteenth century and, spiritually speaking, she stayed there,” he writes. It was a robust world, not given to cant or hypocrisy in the manner of the later Victorian world. Its people contrived to be friendly and stylish, elegant and realistic, all at once. Jane Austen, in her quiet rural setting, absorbed these qualities and turned them to assessing her relatives, friends and acquaintances. She accepted the totality of Anglican Christianity, but she also acknowledged that men and women were fallen creatures, incurably imperfect, and that a good deal of fun was to be had from their

imperfections, even including her own. There follows a description of Jane Austen and her family, in their world, all described with an elegance which would have done credit to Jane herself. She appears to have become the maiden aunt that many children would have been delighted to number among their relatives. For she was only too eager to advise and admonish on affairs of the heart, to encourage youthful attempts at writing without seeming to be condescending, and to spread smiles with her clever little anecdotes of family doings. Today, we can only be sorry that she lived so close to many of her family that she had few occasions to write to them and much of what she must have said has never been recorded. As for the criticism that Jane Austen ignored the wider world, this biography reminds us that she was careful only to write about the things she knew of at first hand; she was not at Trafalgar and she did not attempt to describe a great sea battle. But she had two brothers who were in the Royal Navy and she seems to have followed closely their careers and successes. Incidentally, both went on after her death to become Admirals. One died on a campaign in Burma and the other lived into a ripe old age to become Admiral of the Fleet. Jane Austen’s last months became an advertisement for the values she believed in — good sense, good manners, humour, and a firm religious faith. She recognised she was tempted to be uncharitable towards others, the besetting sin of the satirist, and she wrote her own prayers expressing her contrition. The last word on an exquisite book about a remarkable woman should be given to her nephew Edward. In a memoir written years after his Aunt Jane’s death he recalled: “There was scarcely a charm in her most delightful characters that was not a true reflection of her own sweet temper and loving heart ... Jane Austen was the delight of all her

nephews and nieces. We did not think of her as being clever, still less as being famous: but we valued her as one always kind, sympathising, and amusing.”

By a happy coincidence the Everyman’s Library has chosen to reprint a collection of Jane Austen’s shorter writings for the first lime since 1934. Read in conjunction with Cecil’s “Portrait” the “Miscellanea” offer an insight inlo those informal writings of Jane Austen, intended primarily to delight, her family, most of which have’ not. survived. Of particular appeal is the outrageous “Plan of a Novel” which Miss Austen wrote in 1815 bringing together as many as possible of the ideas offered to her by members of the public, as possible plots. In it, a virtuous clergyman and his even more virtuous daughter are subjected to the whims of evil men until driven to exile in. Kamchatka (in Eastern Siberia) where the heroine is finally reunited with her true love, but her father expires after delivering a five hour lecture of “paternal admonition” to his daughter. The synopsis Miss Austen has left, reads like an English version of Voltaire’s “Candide”; the author has turned her clear-headed, swift sense of humour loose on the religious enthusiasms then becoming common in England and which had led her to remark a few years earlier that she could not accept “noisy religion.” The other items in the collection are a mixed bag. “Sanditon” is the opening chapters of her last novel, left unfinished at her death. As David Cecil has pointed out, in the weakness of her last months of illness Jane Austen reverted to writing in the sharp, satirical manner of her earliest works, mocking affectation, melodrama and silliness of many kinds. About 70 pages of the novel survive. A complete short novel of the same length, “Lady Susan,” was written in the form of letters in 1805. It appears not to have been intended for publication, but served as an entertainment for her relations and allowed her to experiment with the “letter” form of writing which she did not, subsequently, adopt. The other items are of interest to those eager to explore the manner in which the author constructed her published works, but they have less intrinsic merit. They are a canelled chapter of “Persuasion,” which was dropped op the eve of the book’s publication because the author considered it too contrived, and a. first draft of “Emma,” of 50 pages, with the title “The Watsons.”