Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The summer after graduating from college, I took a bicycle trip through parts of Europe, with a month in England to start. We stayed in a B&B in Winchester one night (the Cricketer’s Arms – I wonder if it’s still there. They were lovely!), and the next day wandered through the cathedral. I happened to look down at a grave marker in the pavement to find I was standing on Jane Austen, amazed to find the inscription said exactly nothing whatsoever about her writing. While I had gobbled up Bronte and Dickens et al., I had never read any Austen. So we stopped in a local bookstore and bought a paperback of Pride & Prejudice – and I was hooked. That was decades ago.
Tomalin is a fine biographer, who has gone through what documentation there remains of Austen’s life and family with a fine-toothed comb, and creates a smooth and detailed narrative. It paints an insightful (though sometimes speculative) picture of Jane (alas, we have only a couple of dubious actual portraits of her). She comes to life on the page as smart, witty, observant, sometimes wry and even snide, against the circumstances of the lives led by most women in her era – constant worries about money, and the mercenary pressures to marry (which she chose to resist, though tempted once or twice), and – god help them – giving birth every year or so. Raised in a household of four brothers plus the boys her father took in as boarding students, Jane could be boisterous, outspoken, and chafed by the restrictions placed by social mores and economics on her freedom of action and movement. After watching several sisters-in-law die after delivering their seventh or eleventh child, she finally sighed that she found herself rather tired of all the children and felt herself lucky.
Tomalin’s coverage of Jane’s books themselves is a good read for those of us who love them, giving some insights into how she developed them (slowly, over a long time), some description of the publishing biz at the time (aided by her brother), and where she might have proceeded with her writing had she had the years to do so.
There is plenty of drama among Jane’s family, friends and relations: a cousin’s husband beheaded by the French Revolution, disabled children, difficult marriages, a sadistic psychopath of a neighbor, her brothers’ travails and successes, death by a runaway horse, etc. – very little of which she wrote about. There is probably too much genealogical padding – Tomalin seems to have sought out every remote cousin, in-law, friend and cousins of friends, and houses and rectories and lodgings… enough to leave a reader floundering (and maybe skimming pages).
Given the dearth of primary evidence from Jane herself (thanks to her sister Cassandra’s decision to burn or scissor all her letters), this is likely as full a biography as we can get of Jane Austen. A welcome read for those who already love her. And a relief to those who are sick to death of pseudo-Austenian “Regency romances,” spinoffs, sexed-up Netflix and other streaming series (Bridgerton. I’m looking at you). Stick with the wonderful version of Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds – still the best of them all.
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