Who was Jane Austen

Author and Austen expert Michael Greaney looks past the obvious to shed new light on a much examined woman. 

Who was Jane Austen? It would be difficult to find a reader in the English-speaking world who would be entirely stumped by this question. She is widely known and admired as the author of novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the creator of much-loved characters such as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, and the chronicler of everyday life as it was experienced by respectable landowners and their families in pre-industrial England. A purveyor of sunny romantic comedies with a sharp satirical edge, Austen is that rare combination, a writer with impeccable literary credentials who commands an ardent worldwide following.

Austen is a fixture on the literature syllabus but generations of readers have needed little encouragement to devour her works. Her writings have a luminous style that is inviting to first-time readers but repays continual re-visiting and endless critical scrutiny. Even those who can’t recite the opening of Pride and Prejudice from memory are likely to have seen one of the enormously popular cinematic and televisual adaptations, updatings and reinventions of her work. And a quick refresher about what Austen looked like is available to anyone who has a UK ten pound note in their pocket.

An A-Z of Jane Austen by Michael Greaney

But Austen was by no means a famous face in her lifetime. Although she wrote from an early age to flex her precocious talent and amuse friends and family, she would have to wait a long time for literary recognition. When her father, the Rev. George Austen, offered First Impressions – the novel that would be published as Pride and Prejudice – to the London publishers Cadell & Davies, they declined by return of post. If there was a competition for the dumbest misjudgement in publishing history, Cadell & Davies would surely be in contention for the top spot.

Austen was in her mid-30s when Sense and Sensibility became the first of her novels to appear in print. The author chose to preserve her anonymity; her debut novel, on its title-page, announces itself as ‘By a Lady’. Subsequently, Pride and Prejudice would appear as ‘By the Author of Sense and Sensibility’, Mansfield Park as ‘By the Author of Pride and Prejudice’, and Emma as ‘By the Author of Mansfield Park’. Her final full-length novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which appeared together shortly after her death in 1817, announced themselves as ‘By the Author of Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park &c’. 

Though Austen never courted publicity, details of her identity began to leak out. Her most illustrious admirer was the Prince Regent – the future George IV – who, via his librarian, suggested that Austen might like to dedicate a novel to him. Austen actively disliked the Prince – a notorious philanderer with an extravagant lifestyle who racked up colossal debts – but she was in no position to say no to his ‘invitation’. When Emma was published, it contained the following inscription: ‘To His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, this work is by His Royal Highness’s permission, most respectfully dedicated, by His Royal Highness’s dutiful and obedient humble servant, The Author’. This is, on the face of it, an entirely courteous, respectful and humble dedication to the author’s royal admirer. But might there be a ripple of ironic disdain under the surface of Austen’s seemingly deferential words? It’s hard to say. What counts as earnest in Austen’s writing, and what counts as deadpan irony, isn’t always clear.

Uncertainty is an occupational hazard – and an intellectual pleasure – of reading Austen’s works. Austen wouldn’t be Austen if we were always quite sure of her exact tone. Long-standing and affectionate familiarity with the author and her writings doesn’t always dispel nagging doubts over whether she might is joking at any given moment – and how severely, and at whose expense. Consider the figure of Mr Bennet, the heroine’s sardonic father in Pride and Prejudice – a droll people-watcher who seems to share with creator’s satirical temperament. ‘For what do we live’, he says to Lizzie Bennet, ‘but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’ Mr Bennet might almost be a spokesman for Austen, and it’s hard not to side with him against off-puttingly humourless figures in the same novel such as Mr Collins or Lady Catherine de Bourgh. But the novel also raises some uncomfortable questions about Mr Bennet. Is it really enough to regard life as nothing more than a spectator sport or amusing sideshow? Austen wants us to laugh with Bennet, and to laugh at him, and to think serious and sobering thoughts about the limits of laughter.

Austen is never less than artfully elusive. Consider in this regard the way she sprinkles characters called ‘Jane’ through her fiction. In Pride and Prejudice, the heroine’s sister Jane Bennet is variously hailed as ‘perfect’, ‘angelic’ and ‘super-excellent’. In Emma, the heroine’s enigmatic neighbour Jane Fairfax is described as ‘remarkably elegant’ and ‘a complete angel’. What are we to make of the praise that is lavished on the author’s namesakes in these novels? Has Austen really been so narcissistic as to insert a series of flattering self-portraits into her novels?  It seems unlikely. After all, one thing we know from her letters is that she was never a fan of flawlessness. ‘Pictures of perfection’, she once wrote to her niece Fanny Knight, ‘make me sick & wicked’. 

Austen is bored by perfection. For a novelist who thrives on faults, gaffes and blunders, flawlessness can only ever be a kind of beautiful dead-end. What energizes her imagination is not tedious faultlessness but the kind of redeemable fallibility displayed by heroines such as Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse – bright, perceptive and savvy young women who still manage to misconstrue the world around them in significant ways. Elizabeth is temporarily led astray by the charming but devious Wickham, while Emma’s efforts in the field of matchmaking are spectacularly unsuccessful. An Austen novel is not a picture of perfection but a comedy of errors – one in which the mistakes that we make, if we can wise up to them and learn from them, can be the making of us. 

An A-Z of Jane Austen by Michael Greaney is available now.