Most novels, no matter how much I've enjoyed them, don't beg to be reread; and of those that do, the majority rests in the “someday” pile. Some I have read obsessively during one phase of my development and then set aside forever. In junior high school, I raced through a historical romance, Anya Seton's Katherine, time and again; a little later, it was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Were I to return to these today, I suspect I'd find little of interest in them but the echoes of my adolescent preoccupations with sex and autonomy. But a few—the ones that make me wish I really could be marooned on a desert isle with them—bear reading at various life stages and yield fresh insights and pleasures with each return. I number Jane Austen's handful of published novels among them.

I first read these in high school and again in college. My mother had given me her clothbound volume containing all six, and I recall reading from it, as a new mother, in the beauty salon waiting for my hair to bleach. (This whim, fortunately short-lived, might well have drawn Jane Austen's ridicule.) Somewhere in my many relocations, I lost that volume and now possess only dog-eared paperbacks. During my doctoral work, I selected her as one of my major authors. The other was Virginia Woolf, herself an admirer of this “most perfect artist among women,” whom she called “a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface” and “one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature.”¹

Unlike Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen was not a diarist, and so we have no daily record of her life. She may have been an equally prolific correspondent. Before dying, however, her sister, Cassandra, burned many of her letters from Jane and bowdlerized the rest; their favorite but feckless brother Henry likely lost the ones she wrote to him; another brother's daughter unaccountably discarded his long-preserved cache of them upon his death. Consequently, we possess little of her life and thoughts set down in her own words, and the reminiscences of family members and friends are notoriously unreliable. Because she was a genteel unmarried countrywoman born in the late eighteenth century, her life has commonly been assumed to be placid at the least, even utterly uneventful. Under such conditions, only an intrepid biographer would venture to create a full account of her subject's existence.

In Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin takes such a gamble and makes it pay off admirably. An accomplished biographer whose works include the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield, neither of which can be characterized as without event, she employs a variety of strategies to fill out the sketchy structure of Jane Austen's forty years without seeming to pad it. On the contrary, the amount of detail she has the space to include enables her to create a social and familial context for her subject more substantial than most.

The narrative, like Jane Austen's novels, does not—indeed, can not—rely on epochal events for its drive. Jane (so Tomalin calls her, and so shall I), born in 1775, was the seventh of eight children. Her father, the rector of Steventon in Hampshire, supplemented his meager living by farming; in addition, he and his wife ran a boys' school. At seven, Jane was sent away to school, where she was wretched; by 1786, her formal education came to an end and she was kept at home, where, in essence, she remained for the rest of her life. The boys scattered into the world, but she and Cassandra continued to live at Steventon until Jane was 25, by which time she had drafted Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice. There followed an unsettled decade, during which she did no writing. Then, her father having died, the women moved to Chawton, where Jane completed Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion and began Sanditon before she died, probably of cancer, in 1817.

Looking at this bare outline, one can see how the myth of Jane Austen's dull life began. But Tomalin enriches the slender narrative with so much information about Jane's large and diverse family that the book takes on the character of a highly readable social history. Of Jane's brothers, the one who “suffered from fits and failed to develop normally” was sent away; another, adopted by a childless distant cousin and his wife, inherited their fortune; the eldest followed his father into the clergy; one served in the army and two made the Navy their career, one rising to the rank of Vice-Admiral and the other to Rear-Admiral, only to die of cholera in Burma; beloved Henry prospered as a banker, but when the bank failed, he fell back on his ordination and ended his days as a curate. All except the damaged brother married; all but two had children, some in alarming numbers, and Jane spent a good deal of time among her nieces and nephews.

Neither Jane nor Cassandra ever married, although Tomalin points out—oddly but aptly—that “sisters can become couples, as dependent on the companionable chat of bedtime as husband and wife.” Cassandra was once engaged, but when her fiancé died of fever in the West Indies, she never sought another. Jane loved to dance and flirt, and at twenty she fell in love with a young man named Tom Lefroy. Since neither of them had any money, his family kept them apart and saw him safely married to a wealthier woman, though he confessed in advanced age that he had loved Jane Austen. Years later, having accepted a marriage proposal from the younger brother of close friends, she thought better of the engagement in the night and broke it off the next morning.

I have always felt sorry for Jane's spinsterhood, a response that reveals much about my personal and cultural biases and nothing at all about her. Tomalin demonstrates, plainly but without polemic, just how dangerous the role of wife could be in an age when a woman could die when “she was thirty-five: a well-to-do, well-born, well-looked-after woman who had married for love at eighteen and been pregnant almost permanently ever since.” This was Jane's sister-in-law Elizabeth, dead three days after the birth of her eleventh child. Several other sisters-in-law died similarly. Small wonder that Jane did not entirely regret her maiden state, especially since, in her household, her sole responsibilities were making tea and toast for breakfast and keeping the key to the wine cupboard. Otherwise, she was free to write, and, in Tomalin's cool words, “we would naturally rather have Mansfield Park and Emma than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world, and who would almost certainly have prevented her from writing any further books.”

Although not strictly speaking a critical biography, Jane Austen tactfully considers the relationship between these books we would rather have (and their four siblings) and the writer who bore them. In the absence of hard evidence, Tomalin merely suggests the ways in which the works and the life may have informed each other, but the connections are plausible. A child adopted by neighbors when her mother died, for instance, together with Jane's own suffering when she boarded at school, may have suggested Fanny's alienated situation in Mansfield Park.

Tomalin reads all the novels with an awareness of their different strategies and an appreciation for their plot, characters and style that will delight even the “common readers” (and, with the spate of recent film versions, the viewers) who relish the hours spent among the two or three families—whether Bennetts, Woodhouses, or Dashwoods—Jane Austen finds sufficient for illuminating the frailties and finenesses of the human spirit.

Tomalin's narrative involves, perforce, a greater number of characters, and her canvas must be broader than what Austen called the “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush.” Nevertheless, aside from very rare infelicities, her prose is both lucid and graceful. She incorporates massive quantities of research without slowing the lively pace of her narrative. Indeed, Jane Austen is written with much the same verve its subject brought to her novels, and its tale is nearly as absorbing as they. I can think of no higher praise.

Note

1. Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1953). 149, 142, 143.