Creators (18 page)

Alas, it did not last. The decision of the Reverend George Austen to retire to Bath meant the end of the shared sitting room, and Jane was never again fortunate enough to have a private place in which to write. She was obliged to use communal rooms in comparatively small houses. When staying with her brother Edward, after he inherited Godmersham, a fine country house, she was able to use its library for writing; but even there she was liable to interruptions. During most of her life as a writer she had to use a little corridor, convenient when the house was silent, but a passageway at other times, so that Jane had to cover up her manuscript and put it away when she heard someone approach. Being inclined to ribaldry, I was fascinated to hear, when the amorous proclivities of President Clinton were made public, in considerable detail, that his couplings (such being the public nature and geography of the White House) also had to take place in a corridor, similarly subject to interruption; and that, hearing noises, the president was forced to zip up his trousers just as Jane Austen had to conceal the pages of her current novel.
Ceteris paribus
, and allowing for the standards of different epochs, Clinton’s awkward interruptions were precisely the “follies and nonsense” that would have made Austen laugh. But she had no sex life of her own: and there are only sixteen kisses in her novels, none between lovers.

The lack of a private, secure place in which to write was not the only disadvantage from which Austen suffered. Girls of her class did not have careers. It was already well established that women could write books, especially novels, and in the first quarter of the nineteenth century the woman writer was already a familiar figure on the English scene—more so than in France. But an unmarried girl or woman had no rights or privileges in a genteel household (as opposed to the bohemian one of the Godwins); and even after
Austen was a published author, she was expected to put her family and social duties before her professional. Writing came at the end of the queue, after helping her mother, receiving and entertaining guests, and paying visits. Writing was not “serious,” even when it began to earn money. In the family, Austen’s creative passion, though always tolerated, was always seen as marginal. Ostensibly, even she saw it this way, though in her secret heart she must have recognized its centrality in her life.

Yet in important ways Jane Austen was lucky in her family. Except for her elder brother George, who was mentally handicapped, was farmed out, and disappeared permanently from the family circle, all the Austens liked to laugh. Her mother wrote comic verses for all occasions, with rapidity and some skill, and her brother Henry was the editor of, and a writer for, a comic Oxford University periodical. From the moment when she was old enough to make jokes and write squibs, verses, and tales, Austen never lacked a receptive audience at home, appreciative and critical. She was soon accorded an important place in the family’s system of self-entertainment. The Austens were not only an educated family; they were clever. The father and two of the sons were, at one time or another, fellows of their Oxbridge colleges. There were always plenty of books in the house. Mr. Austen made all his children free of his library at all times and, so far as we know, no restrictions were ever imposed on Jane’s choice of reading. They were a great family for amateur theatricals, which supplied Jane with some of the best chapters she ever wrote, in
Mansfield Park
. And there was no Sir Thomas Bertram to put a stop to them by his sudden return. Although Mr. Austen was a clergyman, he had no objection to performing plays for the family and neighbors; nor is there any hint that he, or anyone else, took a narrow view of what plays might be properly performed. The view of decorum at the vicarage was more liberal than at Mansfield.

Jane Austen thus grew up in an educated and literary circle at home that was broad-minded and tolerant; and her earliest efforts were offered to her elders, who could be guaranteed to laugh in the right places (provided the jokes were good enough) and to applaud literary merit. Later, her father, her brother Henry, and other members and friends of the family were generous and helpful in
enabling her to get published. It is true that, from first to last, Austen never met published authors or literary figures of any kind. She knew nothing of the salon atmosphere in which Madame de Staël spent her adolescence and early womanhood. Nor was Austen even tempted, like Marian Evans, to break away from the family and seek the competitiveness and stimulation of literary London. I suspect that Austen would have found such a course abhorrent—and, in practice, quite impossible. There is no evidence that her work suffered in the least from lack of contact with other literary people. After giving much thought to the matter, I conclude that her circumstances, with all their limitations, were highly conducive to helping her become a professional novelist of the highest quality. But that was only possible because, in addition to all her other gifts, she possessed one which is often quite lacking in creative people—the habit of self-criticism.

Austen was a superb judge of what she could do, and what was her best. I say “was”; it is more accurate to write “became.” Her juvenile works, written between 1787, when she was twelve, and 1793, her eighteenth year, survive because as an adult, she went to the immense labor of copying them all out from the original manuscripts (which have disappeared) into three notebooks, as a record of her work and for the pleasure of reading them aloud to her family and friends. The lengths vary. Some of this work is fragmentary or unfinished. In the first manuscript volume are “Frederic and Elfrida,” “Jack and Alice,” “Edgar and Emma,” “Mr. Harley,” “Sir William Montague,” “Mr Clifford,” “The Beautiful Cassandra,” “Amelia Webster,” “The Visit,” and “The Mystery.” All were written when she was twelve to fourteen years old; “Love and Friendship,” her earliest major story, was written in 1790, when she was fourteen. There followed “The History of England,” dated November 1791. These, plus a story from 1792, “Lesley Castle,” make up the second volume, together with “Scraps,” as Austen calls them. The third manuscript volume contains “Evelyn” and “Catherine.” In the first volume, though composed later, are “The Three Sisters,” “Ode to Pity,” and what Austen calls “Detached Pieces.”
¹⁵

These teenage works are remarkable for three qualities. The first two are the enormous self-confidence with which they were conceived and composed, and the direct, incisive, often elegant
manner in which they were written. Austen never had any difficulty with words, vocabulary, grammar, or syntax. Spelling was a different matter. She had difficulty with
i
’s,
e
’s, and
y
’s. Throughout “Love and Friendship,” she has to correct the spelling of the title word, originally “freindship”; and she tended to write “Surrey,” for instance, as “Surry.” She also tended to spell by ear—geraniums thus became “jerraniums.” However, no seasoned critic reading these teenage stories could have had any doubt about the author’s narrative power; and any reader must marvel at Jane’s economy of means, always one of her strongest gifts. Here, obviously, was a professional writer in the making.

The third remarkable quality might be called ebullience, enthusiasm, or recklessness of invention. The young Austen loved fierce, terrifying adventures; intense melodrama; shocking events; and abrupt deaths. Her characters love, revolt and fight, have babies with abandon, run away, marry in the most dashing manner, talk in superlatives and hyperbole, and then are written out of the script with ruthless enjoyment. Austen is writing fireside, nursery theater, or melodrama, to get the “oohs” and “aahs” of her audience, and she succeeds because the characters, though undergoing fantastic experiences, are recognizably the young people of her circle. As she grew older, she tended to vary bare narrative with that eighteenth-century fictional device, the exchange of letters. This was progress, because Austen, by using correspondence, was sharpening her wits to embark on dialogue, which she used in her maturity with increasing and soon brilliant skill, to carry on the story economically, to exercise her wit, and to add the huge new dimension of realism.

At this point in considering Austen’s development, we must examine a fundamental change in her writing, which suddenly turned her from a juvenile of promise into a truly marvelous writer of stories about real life. The transformation, it seems to me, came when she was about eighteen or nineteen and began to see the melodramatic fiction in which women writers specialized in the mid-1790s, and which she read avidly, with critical eyes, and began to laugh. Laughter was the invariable precursor, in Austen’s life, of creative action—the titter, the laugh, the giggle, or the guffaw was swiftly followed by the inventive thought. Once Austen began to
laugh, not with the melodramatic novels she read, but against them, she began to look into herself and say “I can do better than that.” And, looking into herself, and what she did and thought, and her relations with Cassandra and her parents and brothers—and the relations, friends, and acquaintances in her small society—she began to see material for liveliness and laughter, which had no need of impossible events, death, or destruction to be interesting. Quite naturally, she perceived that real life, as she knew it from personal experience, was much more fun to write about than impossible adventures of which she knew nothing. Naturally, Jane put herself at the center of these new stories about the life she knew, for did she not know more about herself than about anyone or anything else? So in her first proper novel, written in 1794–1796 and called
Elinor and Marianne
, then rewritten 1787–1788 as
Sense and Sensibility
, she gives what she realized were the two sides of herself, the thoughtful Elinor and the impassioned Marianne, making the contrast between their natures the axis on which the story revolves. This is her first story in which the characters are all recognizable creatures from her own circle and knowledge and, in addition, behave fully in character and not as melodramatic puppets serving the interests of a sensational story.

But, not content with turning her own fictional back on melodrama, she also felt minded to express her satirical thoughts about it, by way of exorcism. So she wrote, in 1798–1799, a novel called
Susan
, which as revised became
Northanger Abbey
. Its teenage heroine, Catherine Morland, is in some ways the most interesting and touching of Austen’s heroines, since Catherine evokes the author’s earlier self, a gawky teenager with rough edges not yet smoothed off. All the Morland children were “very plain,” and Catherine was “for many years of her life as plain as any.” That proviso, “for many years,” is the key to the novel, for its energy and delight is the transformation of a gawky teenager into a desirable young woman, and a lover of melodramatic novels (like Jane herself) into a highly emotional participant in real-life romance. So Austen introduces what is almost an antiheroine with “a thin, awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank hair, and strong features,” “fond of all boys’ plays,” who “greatly preferred cricket to dolls.” That is Catherine at ten. “At fifteen appearances were mending.” She
became clean and tidy, and on some days “almost pretty.” And from fifteen to seventeen “she was in training to be a heroine,” though so far without an object of love. That is where the story begins, with Catherine’s invitation to accompany the Allens to Bath.

Sense and Sensibility
and
Northanger Abbey
are bridging works, from juvenilia to maturity. They are not great novels, though they contain passages of greatness, flashes of the power that now lay in her grasp. She had found what she could do best, and better than anyone else. As she later put it (in a letter to Anna Austen of 9 September 1814), “3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” She began to narrow her scope strictly to what she had actually experienced by direct observation or hearing, thought about, and cared about deeply. This meant, as she put it to J. Edward Austen (in a letter of 16 December 1816), confining herself to “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour.” It became one of her rules, extremely rare among writers of fiction, never to describe an event or record a conversation that she did not see or hear, or could not have seen or heard, herself.
¹⁶
This means that there is no grandeur or squalor in her novels, and she never records, for instance, men talking among themselves—something which, by definition, she could not have known about. Her self-awareness and her careful nursing and restricting of her talent and subject matter are among the great secrets of her success. And here we come to a key point about Austen: she was not a genius. There was nothing mysterious about her work. In the work of the four supreme creative geniuses of English literature—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Kipling—there remain and will always remain inexplicable aspects—moments of creative achievement that seem to be plucked out of thin air, are pure imagination, and cannot be related to the author’s known life. Each had his demon, and when this creature within flared up, the magic followed.

Now, Austen had no demon. There is no magic about her novels, even the four great ones. They can be explained. They are the discernible result of huge natural talent, honed, improved, and made superlative by “much labour” (as she put it), experience, and self-restraint. A good novelist feeds on direct experience—Austen
most of all, and nothing much happened in her life or in the lives of those close to her. Evelyn Waugh wrote that personal experiences are a novelist’s capital, to be hoarded, and spent only with prudent avarice, because they are irreplaceable. Austen is an excellent illustration of this rule. She made use of key pieces of personal knowledge or direct experience with tremendous care, often using them again and again in ingeniously varied forms. One event that struck her for its imaginative possibilities was the good fortune of her brother Edward in finding favor with the rich and childless Knights, who took him from his natural family and educated him at considerable expense (he did the grand tour) to be their heir. Austen used this device again and again—from within, as it were, in
Mansfield Park
, where she, as little Fanny, enacts the touching business of being snatched from humble parents to be brought up amid ease and affluence—and fears—in the “big house” of her cousins. The device is used again, this time from without, in the character of Frank Churchill in
Emma
. Frank’s experience is much closer to her brother’s, and this character emerges in the novel as a wonderfully real person, a dashing amalgam of extravagance, superficial folly, and innate decency, making a splendid foil to the real, solid hero Mr. Knightley.