See Jane ElopeWhy are we so obsessed with Jane Austen's love life?
Posted Friday, Aug. 3, 2007, at 2:51 PM ET
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StumbleUponSpence was up against a familiar problem: Literary biographers who set out to establish how Austen's novels arise from her personal experience have long been handicapped by the scarcity of source material. Nothing much ever happened to her. Austen's first biographer, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, began his 1870 book, discouragingly, with the claim "Of events her life was singularly barren" and neglected to mention even the marriage proposal—from a certain Harris Biggs-Wither—that she did receive and reject in 1802. It doesn't help matters that Austen's sister Cassandra destroyed many of the novelist's letters: Whatever events did befall her are lost to us now.
In some ways, this apparent eventlessness has operated as a spur to the biographical imagination. Spence's Becoming Jane Austen has a truly loopy forerunner in Constance Pilgrim's 1971 Dear Jane, which took an Austen family legend about "Aunt Jane's seaside romance of 1801" and ran with it. Pilgrim proposed that the mysterious admirer on whom those legends centered was a sea captain—and not just any sea captain, but rather the poet William Wordsworth's brother John—who subsequently went down with his ship before he could return to England and whisk a waiting Jane to the altar. (It is true that John Wordsworth died at sea in 1805, but that is the only hard fact in Pilgrim's wholly speculative story.)
Pilgrim's biography reimagined Jane Austen as a version of Anne Elliot, the heroine of her novel Persuasion: Anne is romanced by a Capt. Wentworth, who eventually returns from the sea and weds her. The makers of Becoming Jane exhibit a parallel eagerness to think of Austen as Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice. The repartee in the film between Jane and Tom is frequently lifted from the novel's dialogue. Like Darcy, Elizabeth's frosty suitor, the film's Tom is a snob who eventually learns better manners. Like Elizabeth, its Austen rebels against propriety and rambles around the countryside in muddy petticoats.
Why this fixation on imagining Austen as the heroine of one of her own stories? Austen wrote on many subjects: women's lack of freedom, the injuries wrought by the 19th-century class system, literature's falsification of life, the importance of manners, the virtues of independent thought. But, by and large, it is Austen the expert on courtship rites who dominates contemporary popular culture. It is this Austen who is emulated by authors of middlebrow women's fiction, from Helen Fielding (who wrote Bridget Jones's Diary) on. A few of the students who enroll in my Austen courses admit that they are there to trawl the books for dating tips. (So far, I have not put Jane Austen's Little Advice Book, chock-full of Austen sound bites on love and marriage, on the syllabus.)
A lot of Austen fans seem to want what the characters in Karen Joy Fowler's novel The Jane Austen Book Club got: "We'd let Austen into our lives, and now we were all either married or dating." Austen fans in real life too seem to want Austen to guide them toward love. And this might be why, as Becoming Jane indicates, we have to imagine Austen as Elizabeth Bennet and grant her a Darcy of her own—even if in the end we take him away again. We can't bear to think that her wisdom was not based on experience.
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Remarks from the Fray:
The most intriguing of the shadowy real-life romances in the Austen biography is related in Caroline Austen's memoirs of her aunt, about a young man whom the family met at the seaside on the south Devon coast west of Lyme, who was taken with Jane, who promised at parting that they should hear again from him, but all they heard was of his sudden death.
The date is vague (the Austens spent summers at the seaside after George Austen retired to Bath in 1800, Jane would have been in her late twenties), and there are no letters to support it (none of Jane's survive from 1801-04). And the story came to Caroline through Austen's sister Cassandra, and sounds suspiciously similar to Cassandra's own blighted romance (her fiancé died suddenly of yellow fever in the West Indies). A sea-breeze could blow the story away.
But both the locale near Lyme and Austen's advancing age suggest a connection to her last-written novel, Persuasion, which also raises the poignant theme of love that survives when all hope is gone. This is the story that, in spite of scholarly skepticism, I hope is true.
--drichter
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I observe that, for some reasons, human beings love to think that their heroes are truly larger than life, and simultaneously humanize them so that these heroes are still somewhat within reach. Something like that.
In the case of Jane Austen, of course she had to have a fiery romance in her life.. with all those inspiring romance-heavy books she'd written. Must've been a larger-than-life romance. Yet, the romance was believed faltered.. because she needed that broken heart to be more mortal. She couldn't have had it all.
You see how that is a much more intriguing picture than a simple spinster with great imagination and impeccable writing skills.
My hunch tells me that Austen must've had some heart-wrenching love tragedy in her life, whether it was LeFroy or the mysterious sea captain or some other men we'd never know. I share birthday with her, and the mad Beethoven. Great love tragedies are something, that for some reason, not exactly an anomaly for people born on that day. My only hope is that, unlike my brethren, I'll get to walk the aisle once in my life.
--Miss Sassy Jakarta
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If the creative process were merely the recycling of one's own life experiences, down to snippets of dialogue, there'd be a lot more great novels in the world than there are.
That being said, the parallel with Austen's fiction that dominates Becoming Jane is not the Elizabeth-Darcy romance but the relationship between Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby. A clever, perceptive and irresponsible young man charms an intelligent, strong minded and somewhat unconventional young woman by appealing to her intellect and her sense that she is superior to those around her. After leading her on and raising her expectations, he drops her because he must marry for money and she has none. Having done so, he reproaches himself, but the consequences for her are a good deal worse than for him. The movie makes Lefroy less of a cad than Willoughby and Austen less of a deceived victim than Marianne, but he skates and she is stuck.
Courtship in Austen is a blood sport, in which mistakes and failures have disastrous lifelong consequences. The aborted courtship in Becoming Jane is fiction, but it is a fiction consistent with Austen's eventual situation as a mordantly perceptive spinster commentator on the marriage market, whose happy endings sugar coat by no means sympathetic observations on the process.
The movie itself sugar coats Austen's career to suit modern concepts of female independence. She did not manage to live on her writings, earning a total of about 700 pounds, but remained dependent on her brothers for support from her father's death in 1806 until her own.
--jack_cerf
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I don't understand why it would be necessary for Austen to have had similar experiences to those portrayed in her books in order to explain her genius. Is it so hard to accept that her books are wonderful because she had a great imagination and keen insight into the world in which she inhabited? To me, the movie seems almost like a stunt to get Austen fans into theaters. I'm not an Austen fangirl, but I can't imagine a true fan of the author would be particular thrilled with the movie.
--sydken
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(8/7)