Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin

Author:Claire Tomalin [Tomalin, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307426468
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

16

Twenty-five

Anyone arriving at their twenty-fifth birthday with three outstanding novels to their name looks well embarked on the road to success; fame, riches, happiness all within easy reach, you would think. This was exactly Jane Austen’s situation: she had three substantial and original books completed, owing nothing to anyone but their very bright, energetic and inventive author. There had been a set-back with Cadell, but she was sure of her father’s support; and she could joke about her manuscripts, accusing Martha Lloyd of planning to memorize First Impressions and publish it from memory as her own work, teasing Cassandra for not rereading it often enough. This is the laughter of a confident person. Everything was set for her to put in a little more work perhaps on the three manuscripts—revising is easier than the first draft—find a publisher who understood his trade, and start on a new novel.

This did not happen. Instead, she fell silent. For ten years she produced almost nothing, and not until she was nearly thirty-five, in the summer of 1809, did she return to the working pattern of her early twenties. On the face of it there was no reason why she should not have gone on writing steadily through the first decade of the nineteenth century. Her family offered no explanation. Her biographer nephew remarked only that “it might rather have been expected that fresh scenes and new acquaintance would have called forth her powers,” but that they failed to do so; and he shrugs her silence off.

The truth is that Austen depended very little on fresh scenes and new acquaintance; her work was done in her head, when she began to see the possibility of a certain situation and set of characters, and her books are never transcripts of what she saw going on around her. She used the odd particular point and incident—the amber crosses Charles gave to her and Cass become a topaz one given by Midshipman William Price to his sister in Mansfield Park; the Cobb at Lyme Regis suggests a dramatic scene; Henry’s experiences in the militia may have set her mind working on Wickham and his fellow officers— but she did not draw from life, or write down the stories of her friends and family. A series of thrilling novels could have been based on the adventures of her Aunt Philadelphia and her Cousin Eliza; they seem to cry out for fiction. Or she could have put the oddities and crimes of half a dozen neighbouring Hampshire families into novels; but, as we have seen, Hampshire is missing from the novels, and none of the Austens’ neighbours, exotic, wicked or merely amusing, makes a recognizable appearance. The world of her imagination was separate and distinct from the world she inhabited.

What she did depend on was particular working conditions which allowed her to abstract herself from the daily life going on around her; and these she lost just after her twenty-fifth birthday. What made her fall silent was another huge event in her “life of no event”: another exile.

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