In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe

Author:Katie Roiphe [Roiphe, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-64402-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-03T14:00:00+00:00

The Ambiguities of Austen

Back in 1905, Henry James complained about “the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of magazines, which have found their dear, our dear, everybody’s dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose.” Imagine how James would feel today were he to witness the blossoming commercial manifestations of our current Jane Austen craze. Over the past few years, Austen’s quiet courtship novels have been made into Hollywood movies, analyzed by fashionable male writers like Martin Amis, and displayed above front counters of Barnes & Nobles across the country.

Though she has long been a staple of high school English classes, our recent affection for this writer born over two centuries ago has less to do with the transcendent literary merit of her novels than with what she has come to represent. In the midst of our contemporary confusion about gender roles and sexuality, Jane Austen has come to symbolize clarity and order. In a world in which millions of women buy books like The Rules or He’s Just Not That into You in order to gain insight into their romantic lives, where the majority of babies born to women under thirty are born to single mothers, Pride and Prejudice promises a few hours of calm and certainty. Jane Austen is best loved for the lost romantic world she describes, for the bright green lawns of a distant English countryside, where the virtue of marriage was a truth universally acknowledged, and love was formal, restrained, and inevitable.

Most of us are intimately acquainted with Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet, and the Dashwood sisters, but we tend to know very little about their creator. Jane Austen lived as a spinster in what is tactfully referred to by her biographers as “genteel poverty.” Her books were published anonymously—“By a lady”—because it was considered inappropriate for a woman of her class to write novels. And though they did achieve a certain amount of critical success and notoriety during her lifetime, it was not until after her death that they became immensely popular. Austen lived her whole life dependent on relatives and plagued by financial worries, and she died of what was most likely Addison’s disease at forty-one.

There is a certain amount of irony to the title of the new biography——Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart tells us almost nothing about the author’s heart, obstinate or otherwise. It’s the kind of biography that casts aside troublesome questions of psychology and motivation for the more tangible details of roast-beef dinners, yearly incomes, and lace-trimmed cloaks. Valerie Grosvenor Myer offers a responsible, if plodding, account of the minutiae of Austen’s daily life while studiously ignoring issues of potentially greater interest—like how she felt about her romantic involvements or her art.

To be fair to the biographer, the information we have about Jane Austen’s inner life is somewhat limited. Her family destroyed crucial passages from her letters, including an intriguing one she wrote on her deathbed about her “domestic disappointment.” As a result, any portrait of Jane Austen is necessarily sketchy and speculative.

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