[In the following review, Allen offers a positive assessment of Jane Austen: A Life.]

It seems that the Jane Austen boom that began a few years ago has not yet run its course: its latest manifestation is an absorbing new biography by the British biographer Claire Tomalin. A mere three hundred pages, written with spare elegance and grace, Jane Austen: A Life is a welcome throwback to a time when biographers did not feel it necessary to stuff their tomes with every dull and unnecessary detail of their subjects' lives. Tomalin, who has also written books on Mary Wollstonecraft; Katherine Mansfield; Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan; and Dora Jordan, the nineteenth-century actress who lived with the future William IV and bore him ten children, displays a novelist's instinct for significant detail and a knack for compelling narrative. She makes fascinating reading of Austen's forty-one uneventful years and brings real substance to the shadowy figure who left behind no diary, no clear portrait, and all too few letters.

Jane Austen has too often been seen as a freak talent, a lone genius flowering in philistine surroundings. Tomalin takes a different approach: She places Austen squarely within her family and demonstrates that, far from having been a unconventional or exotic member of that family, she was entirely in sympathy with its ethos and aesthetic—the most brilliant members of a strong, ambitious, intelligent, and self-sufficient tribe.

Born in 1775, Jane was the seventh of the eight children of George Austen, a Hampshire clergyman, and his wife, Cassandra. The Austens were a robust family, with all eight children surviving childhood, a remarkable record for those times, although the second son suffered from some severe defect, possibly cerebral palsy. The Reverend Austen and his wife were unsentimental people who discourage weakness, either physical, moral, or emotional. They were early proponents of tough love: when each of their children reached the age of three or four months they banished it to the home of a wet nurse in the village, to be cared for away from the family until it reached the age of about two.

However our sensibilities might recoil from this treatment, the fact stands that the Austen children grew up to be self-confident and mentally healthy adults, and that the family as a whole remained unusually close. Tomalin posits that Jane, however, demonstrated throughout her life a certain emotional distance and brittleness. Reading her letters, Tomalin maintains, “You are aware of the inner creature, deeply responsive and alive, but mostly you are faced with the hard shell; and sometimes a claw is put out, and a sharp nip is given to whatever offends. They are the letters of someone who does not open her heart.”

“The Austens cared about goodness, but they also cared deeply about success.” Tomalin characterizes them as classic meritocrats, and for the Austens as for the Watsons in the novel fragment of that name, “The Luck of one member of a Family is Luck to all.” When rich but childless friends, the Knights, made known their wish to adopt Jane's brother Edward, his parents never allowed sentiment to get in the way of their concern for his future: they agreed to the adoption, though happily the boy would remain all his life very much a part of the Austen family. Other brothers, too, were fortunate: the charming but unreliable Henry lived high on the hog for years as a banker, although his business eventually crashed and he was forced at the age of forty-five to take orders as a lowly curate. The steadier Francis, who joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen, took canny advantage of the new opportunities opened to merit and talent by the exigencies of the Napoleonic Wars, working his way steadily upward to end his career as Admiral of the Fleet.

For women, the path to success was a rich husband, but neither Jane nor her sister Cassandra proved willing in the end to purchase freedom, wealth, or status at the price of a loveless marriage. Jane surely shared the feeling exhibited by Elizabeth Bennett in observing the humiliations of Charlotte Collins's domestic life, that marriage can too often be a form of prostitution. The only young man she is known to have loved, Tom Lefroy, had a family dependent on his ability to win a rich wife, and he was briskly hustled away when he showed signs of attachment to the portionless Jane Austen. A few years later Jane received a proposal from an old family connection, Harris Bigg-Wither. Bigg-Wither, younger than she by several years, was the brother of two of her dearest friends, the possessor of a fortune and the heir to considerable estates. Jane immediately accepted his proposal:

Jane would now become the future mistress of a large Hampshire house and estate, only a few miles from her birthplace, and close to her brother James. She would be almost as grand as Elizabeth Austen [her brother Edward's wife] at Godmersham. She would be able to ensure the comfort of her parents to the end of their days, and give a home to Cassandra. She would probably be in a position to help her brothers in their careers. She would be surrounded by dear sisters-in-law and friends. She would be a kindly mistress to the estate workers. She would have children of her own. All these thoughts must have rushed through her head, each one like a miracle, offerings of happiness she had given up expecting.

The temptations must have been almost overpowering. Yet the next morning she sought out Harris and told him with consternation she had decided that she could not, in fact, become his wife. After that, she seems, like her sister, to have ceased to think of marriage, to accept a future in which she would be utterly dependent on her family's uncertain fortunes, made especially uncertain by the Church of England's policy of providing no pensions for widows and children of the clergy.

It is marvelously refreshing these days to read a serious study of a woman novelist in which there is not to be found a single instance of the words “gender” or “patriarchy,” or any other contemporary intellectual jargon for that matter. Yet in Jane Austen, as in her other biographies, Tomalin makes the reader acutely sensitive to the position of women during the nineteenth century. Until she began at the age of thirty-eight to earn a modest amount from her novels, Jane Austen had no personal income whatever, and was accordingly constrained to live a life that was always subordinated to the needs and whims of more powerful family members. For example, the choice of where they should live was entirely up to the senior Austens, and not their adult daughters; hence when her parents decided to leave Steventon rectory, the home Jane loved, she had no choice but to accompany them on their subsequent peregrinations through Bath and other spots that Jane found uncongenial: a way of life that lasted ten years and was so hateful and unsettling to her that her vigorous writing career came to a halt and did not revive itself until the Austen women finally settled in Chawton cottage after George Austen's death.

Jane Austen's personal freedom was limited to a degree that modern women of her social class would find both incredible and insupportable. It was out of the question, for instances, that she travel alone, not that she had any money with which to do so. Even riding was verboten, which made the simple act of getting out of the house in winter a challenge: Jane wrote of the “female foot” with its inadequate cover, unequal to mud, snow, and rain. Village society was homogenous to a degree we can scarcely imagine nowadays: “each cottage was entirely familiar and each face known; any stranger caused a stir, the odd pedlar, or a sailor making his way home across country.”

Jane, like Cassandra, was expected to find an adequate vocation in the roles of daughter, sister, and aunt. Her mother was a lifelong hypochondriac who demanded constant attention (although like many such she survived to a ripe age, outliving Jane herself). Her many sisters-in-law had numerous children, and dependable Aunt Jane was on permanent call to attend births, to care for older children whose mothers were busy with new infants, and all too often to comfort and nurture these same nieces and nephews when their mothers died in child-birth. It is to her credit that she was remembered by the Austen progeny as a charming, high-spirited, and generous member of the family. If, in her heart, her writing sometimes took precedence over their care and entertainment, they were never allowed to suspect it.

While it is true that Jane Austen must often have resented the seemingly endless family obligations that kept her from her work, it must also be remembered that she was in profound sympathy with most of her family; they shared her tastes, prejudices, interests, and most of all her sense of humor. Her brother James, a clergyman, wrote accomplished and sophisticated poetry; Henry was an acknowledged wit; Cassandra, though not a writer herself, was the ideal reader and audience. Jane's nieces Anna Lefroy and Fanny Knight were spirited and original girls. Even the mother whose imaginary ailments were such a trial was also a sharp, congenial companion who took pleasure in writing wonderfully clever light verse for the amusement of her children.

I send you here a list of all
The company who graced the ball
Last Thursday night at Basingstoke;
There were but six and thirty folk,
Altho' the Evening was so fine.
First then, the couple from the Vine;
Next, Squire Hicks and his fair spouse—
They came from Mr. Bramston's house,
With Madam and her maiden Sister;
(Had she been absent, who'd have missed her?).

Jane, it seems, did not come by her wicked wit unnaturally.

While it cannot reasonably be claimed that Jane Austen had an unhappy life, it was a life that contained, perhaps, more than its share of disappointments. Spirited and sunny as they are, her novels frequently reflect this fact. As an astute Victorian novelist, Julia Kavanagh, wrote about Austen, “If we look into the shrewdness and quiet satire of her stories, we shall find a much keener sense of disappointment than joy fulfilled. Sometimes we find more than disappointment.” Yet Austen accepted that disappointment with the stoicism and tough humor that her family had always endorsed. As a result she has traditionally been an impressive, moving figure but rather an intangible one. In Tomalin's words,

She made no claims for herself, for a room of her own, for a place among the English novelists; even her appearance, as we have seen, is hard to visualise at all precisely. The family march towards us, brightly lit in their uniforms or sober in clerical black, surrounded by their children, worrying about wills, installed in fine houses; she is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky.

As Lord David Cecil put it, Jane Austen remains “as no doubt she would have wished—not an intimate but an acquaintance.” Yet it must be said that in this intelligent biography Claire Tomalin has succeeded in bringing her a little closer to us, and a little more clearly into focus.