What kind of a person was Jane Austen?

I thought for this journal I might ask myself whether or not I would have liked Jane Austen if I had known her. I know it isn’t relevant to her books or her writing at all, but for me it would make reading her novels much more interesting if I felt like I could relate to her outside of the reading. It’s not that I feel I have to like her, but I think that if we’re going to be reading someone’s entire life’s work, then we’re going to be sharing their head-space quite a bit, and it would be nice if that person was likable. If I had a sense ahead of time that she was, say, a miserable person just writing to escape a miserable life, or a bitter person using her novels to vent about things, then that would definitely affect how I would approach the books. In a way I’m glad that I really didn’t know anything about Jane Austen or her life, before I read Claire Tomalin’s biography. So what kind of a person was Jane Austen, then?

Well, first things first. I absolutely think I would have loved Jane Austen if I had known her. She comes across as funny, smart, witty, unpretentious, non-conformist (up to a point), entertaining, bitchy, and kind. I think Claire Tomalin did a fantastic job in piecing together all the scraps, and filling in the background, to make this woman who lived two hundred years ago seem so alive, and to capture all these aspects of her personality so well. The excerpts from some of Jane’s letters to her sister Cassandra are hilarious and aside from the actual language she used, they could easily have been written today. I’m thinking particularly about the letters that came with instructions to “seize upon the scissors as soon as you possibly can on the receipt of this” – it’s so like what my sisters and I say in emails or texts that we don’t want anyone else to see … “delete and eat” - as in delete this text and eat the phone! I love that she was bitching about things and not just being saintly all the time. 

I think the fact that she didn’t marry, and that she had that youthful love affair with Lefroy, open and out there, dancing and flirting in front of everyone without caring who saw (a little bit like Marianne from “Sense and Sensibility”), and the fact that she didn’t seems to care for fashion, or to be too bothered about her hair, all make her seem like an interesting non-conformist type of person, at least by the standards of the day. Then some of the comments she had some of her characters say in her novels, to do with feminism – I can’t find the quote now, of course, but it was a woman saying she would not take any advice or guidance from any of these books since not one was written by a woman (something like that) - and that comment she made about the Princess of Wales (p224)  “…I will support her as long as I can because she is a Woman...” make it seem like she was a bit of a progressive too. The friendship she had with the women who worked for her cousin Eliza, and the fact that she left money for them in her will shows that she didn’t bother about the fact that they would probably be considered lower class by other people.  She seems to have been marching to the beat of her own drum in that respect too.

Even though I really love the sound of this woman, I’m sure if she didn’t like you it would have been quite unpleasant to be around her. She doesn’t appear to have suffered fools gladly. Based on some of the letters she wrote to Cassandra while she was living in Bath, describing the tedious parties and the people who were at them, she certainly didn’t seem to hold back on her judgments. She had a really sharp eye for details and she was able to describe a person in a most unflattering way with only a few words. But she was able to laugh at herself too (going to a dance and remarking that she was in the embarrassing position of being ten years too old to be there, but dancing anyway). And she could accept criticism of her writing without taking it too badly, which is not a very easy thing to do. The fact that she asked for, and kept in a scrapbook, responses to her novels – even the bad reviews - is pretty cool.

Another thing that struck me was that she really didn’t seem to make a big fuss when she was sick. She seems to have played it down right up until the end. I felt so sorry for her sister when I read what she said about Jane after she had died. ‘She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her & it is as if I had lost a part of myself”. This quote alone would have convinced me that I would have liked Jane Austen if I had known her. I’m really looking forward to reading all her books now.