Jane Austen: A Brief Life by Fiona Stafford

Author:Fiona Stafford [Stafford, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300232219
Google: zHAqDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300232217
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:41:38.270000+00:00

MANSFIELD PARK AND EMMA

1813–15

The intensity of Jane Austen’s preoccupation with her writing cannot be overstated. Although her nephew’s recollections conjure up a picture of the modest aunt quickly putting aside her writing at the sound of approaching visitors as if producing tea and conversation were every bit as important to her as creating such a scene on paper, her own letters tell a different story. A sisterly enquiry about the progress of Sense and Sensibility provoked an unusual metaphor: ‘No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it than a mother forget her sucking child.’47 It recurs two years later to express Jane’s excitement over the arrival of Pride and Prejudice: ‘I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London.’48 The comments jump out from the correspondence as rare revelations of genuine feeling, unmasked by irony, self-deprecation or comic absurdity. Jane Austen was referring to her novels as her children. By now, she was a single woman approaching forty, so the likelihood of having a baby of her own was remote. Instead of children, Jane Austen was producing books; and the affection with which she talks about the characters of Pride and Prejudice in letters to Cassandra demonstrates that the emotional satisfaction she derived from writing was profound.

Although Jane Austen never experienced motherhood, she maintained a deep interest in education and the ways in which children might be affected by their upbringing. Edward’s large family provided an endless topic for Jane’s own mother, while James and Frank’s children, who lived much nearer Chawton Cottage, were frequent visitors. Jane’s eldest nieces, Anna Austen and Fanny Knight (whose name had changed in 1812 when Edward inherited his estate), were now the same age as the Dashwood sisters and the Bennets, so she had plenty of opportunity to witness the trials of adolescence and early adulthood at first hand. As Jane Austen watched her nephews and nieces growing up, she was also reminded of her own childhood, alerted to the contrasts and the continuities between younger and older selves. Had she changed? Had Cassandra? Or James? Or any of her siblings? What made people grow into the adults they became? How important were their physical surroundings or material possessions? Were personalities fixed from birth or did the combined influence of education, family, place and income determine a child’s character? Or was it the result of an individual’s unique experiences?

These were questions that had already occupied many of the greatest minds of the past century and continued to attract vigorous debate. Jane Austen’s approach was always primarily imaginative rather than purely philosophical, her mind moved by the human dimensions of a question. When she read essays, she responded passionately to their authors, even if the subject was as unpromising as Captain Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (‘I am as much in love with the Author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan,’ she wrote on 24 January 1813).

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