The Troubles of Biographers: A is for Austen

I recently reached "H" in my review of picture books, A-Z list 5. I will continue to review picture books, all the way to Z! 

In the meantime, I am beginning a new A-Z list focused on biographies.

Biographies are a subset of non-fiction about which I have mixed feelings.

I often want to like them more than I do. I find some of them fatally flawed--and some downright boring. Is the biography boring due to the biographee (it's a word!)? Or the author's approach?

Each review will tackle a problem with biographies (taking a person's life into our hands) alongside, usually, a particular biography.

Trouble 1: Insisting on direct correlations between personality/achievements and biographical material is fun but ultimately, weak reasoning.

Biographers get to know their biographees very well. And it is tempting, as it is for the rest of us in our own lives, to insist that an uncovered fact has enormous bearing on the biographee's personality and achievements. 

Except, of course, that it may not. 

Several biographies of Jane Austen make this mistake. Every personal experience, the biographers claim, must inform her novels! Years ago, I encountered an exceedingly condescending biography in which the female biographer insisted that when Austen wrote Mansfield Park, she was trying very, very hard to "be a good girl." 

Another (female) biographer was equally shocked that Austen could create a fictional scandal surrounding a play when she and her family put on plays at Steventon! 

The argument that a writer's writing must reflect her personal experiences falls to pieces when one realizes how much Austen left out of her novels. She was, in fact, surrounded by people who indulged in scandals, tug-of-wars over the same woman, financial disputes, accusations of government corruption, possible adultery, an arrest for shoplifting and subsequent trial, death from a carriage accident, multiple deaths from childbirth, military sea battles, a possible spy (truly!), political fall-out from the French Revolution, the rise and defeat of Napoleon, and family infighting.

And okay, the family infighting made it into her books. But Richard Jenkyns is correct when he argues that Austen willingly and artistically restricted herself to a "fine brush of ivory" in order to create novels with precise artistic visions. She was, in fact, motivated by creative desires. "My answer [to the criticism that Jane Austen lost her way]," Jenkyns writes about Mansfield Park, "is that she simply chose to write a different kind of book" (108). William Deresiewicz likewise defends Austen as an artist, pointing out that with Mansfield Park, she pushed herself beyond the relatively easy Pride & Prejudice, which is arguably Austen at her freshest and most witty, to do something different and difficult. 

As Claire Tomalin writes, "[Austen] was too inventive and too interested in the techniques of fiction to settle in any one mode" (157).

Claire Tomalin's biography Jane Austen: A Life does a notable job recognizing possible influences on Jane Austen while also judiciously allowing, This is an artist. Her thought process may not work as literally as EVENT = OUTCOME. Even when Tomalin speculates, she retains an objective tone. 

For instance, she points out the gap in time between when Austen wrote her first three novels (age 20 for Pride & Prejudice) and when they were published (age 37 for Pride & Prejudice), adding, "You can have fun speculating whether she was nineteen or twenty-one, or thirty-five when she wrote a particular passage, but proving anything is like trying to carve a solid shape out of jelly" (156). 

This willingness to say, "I don't know," to allow for gaps in our knowledge of an individual, is enormously refreshing. Tomalin even willingly combats the automatic assumption that Elizabeth Bennet is Jane Austen. To Tomalin, Elizabeth is Jane's creation. There is a difference. "She did not draw from life," Tomalin states emphatically, "or write down the stories of her friends and families...The world of her imagination was separate and distinct from the world she inhabited" (170). 

This is not to say that Austen the writer wasn't affected by life--like many writers, she closely observed the world around her. And her apparent 10-year gap in writing was likely the impact of leaving Steventon for Bath, a move--as Tomalin convincingly illustrates--Austen did not favor.

My only dissension from Tomalin is when she queries why Jane Austen was not friendlier with a neighbor who appears to have shared her interests and wit. Keep in mind, Tomalin occupies a god-like position here, able to peer into letters and diary entries of the Austen family's contemporaries from a removal of several generations. But interests and wit do not equate to tone or personality or even sincerity. And Jane Austen, I would argue, was not one to make friends with a "gloss" of behavior. 

Otherwise, Tomalin does a superb job presenting Jane Austen's life and her work with only occasional excursions into assertions that a single event resulted in a single outcome--and even there, Tomalin nobly checks herself. 

Works

Deresiewicz, William. A Jane Austen Education. Penguin, 2011. 

Jenkyns, Richard. A Fine Brush of Ivory. Oxford University Press, 2004. 

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. 1997. Vintage, 1999.