Jane Austen
It is said that you should write about that which you know best, and Jane Austen did exactly that. She confined her pen to the subjects most familiar to her – domestic life in a rural English setting and relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers, sisters and cousins, friends and neighbours. Growing up in a household of six brothers and a sister, she had plentiful opportunities to observe the joys and the frictions of family life.
As the brothers married and widened the family circle with wives and children, so Jane’s sources of inspiration multiplied as well. Her familiarity with the ways of her numerous nieces and nephews is immortalised in the antics of the little Musgrove boys in Persuasion or the unruly Price children in Mansfield Park. Jane Austen’s family life was of vital importance to her writing; her meticulous observation of all varieties of human nature, her ironic humour, her occasional biting satire, all combined with elegant prose to create a collection of the best loved and most enduring novels in the English language.
Families are timeless and so are her novels. Through her own home life in Hampshire, Bath and Southampton, and at the various homes of her brothers in Kent and London, she gained an unsurpassed understanding and appreciation of universal subjects including love in its many guises, selfishness and selflessness, duty and obligation, compromise and fulfilment.
As a young woman she had her share of romantic drama; – an intense flirtation at the age of twenty with an Irish law student called Tom Lefroy faltered due to a sad lack of fortune on both sides; a seaside attachment at twenty-five to an unknown gentleman Cassandra deemed worthy of her sister, ended with his sudden death; a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, a family friend of good fortune, was initially accepted by the twenty-seven year old Jane but she changed her mind overnight.
In light of these experiences we can perhaps spot the germination of Marianne
Dashwood’s unguarded passion for Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, the
romantic lure of the sea for a regretful Anne Elliot in Persuasion and the
staunch morality of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park who turns down a proposal
from a wealthy man, because she cannot love him.
Time and again there are echoes of real events and personalities in Jane
Austen’s life within her six completed novels and the other unfinished works.
The Mansfield Park theatricals with their undercurrents of romantic rivalry
must surely have their genesis in the Austen family theatricals performed in
the barn at Steventon Rectory, where Jane’s older brothers James and Henry
vied for the attentions of their vivacious cousin Eliza de Feauillide – a
forerunner of the captivating Mary Crawford.
With two brothers serving in the Navy at the time of Trafalgar, Jane Austen had plenty of inspiration for her naval characters such as Lieutenant William Price, Captains Wentworth, Harville and Benwick and Admiral Croft, and the naval wives - Mrs Croft and Mrs Harville. Jane and her mother and sister lived in Southampton for three years, sharing a house with Frank Austen and keeping his wife company while he was at sea. The vividly drawn character of Fanny Price’s father, a coarse and drunken ex-lieutenant of the marines, demonstrates that Jane Austen had encountered all kinds of sailors when living as part of a naval family in a port-town.
Jane Austen’s heroines have a tendency to lose their much-loved homes – just as she did herself, when she learnt that she must depart her home of twenty five years at Steventon for a life in Bath. She is understood to have fainted when she heard the news. Anne Elliot grieves the loss of Kellynch Hall when her feckless father also removes to Bath, as do the Dashwood sisters when they are evicted from Norland Park by the stronger claim of their brother John and his unpleasant wife Fanny. The plot of Pride and Prejudice is driven by Mrs Bennet’s fear for the loss of Longbourn and the future of her five daughters. Fanny Price pines for Mansfield Park when she is exiled to Portsmouth.
The fear of penury preoccupied Jane Austen and other women like her – well educated unmarried gentlewomen wholly dependent on the generosity of relatives, friends and neighbours for their survival. The character of Miss Bates in Emma combines a highly amusing observation of her unstoppable nervous chatter with a deep sympathy for her precarious predicament. Mr Knightley’s angry riposte to Emma when she mocks Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic is a defence of all women who find themselves in such a position. Jane and Cassandra Austen knew well what it was like to have to rely on others for a roof over their heads.
Part of the enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s writing is the timelessness of the themes and the recognition of the characters in those around us today. We still worry about keeping a roof over our heads, we still have to juggle the demands of different generations of family while trying to earn a living, we still live sadly in a time of war in Europe, we still seek solace in the changing seasons and the beauties of nature – just as Jane Austen did over two hundred years ago.
The Austen Chronicles (The Lonely Shore – Jane Austen and the Sea, and the companion book, Jane in Winter), attempt to connect Jane Austen’s family life and personal experiences to her development as a writer, through fictional recreations and factual assessment.
