I had just read the first chapter of Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen when the electricity failed. It was early in the morning so I continued to read by the natural light that came through our South Shore apartment, the light becoming more abundant as the ice-laden branches on the trees in the courtyard cracked with an unearthly sound, and collapsed.
In the evening, I read by the flicker of candlelight imagining my now glacial feet in Austen's shoes (or slippers).
It is a tribute to the allure of Jane Austen's life and work that when my husband and I decided to go to a shelter the next evening, I included the book as an essential with my pillow and blanket.
The illusion of living like Austen, though, had evaporated for I knew the author of such classic novels as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and my personal favorite, Persuasion, could not have experienced what I was going through, never having had the convenience of electricity in the first place.
Yet, as her newest biographer, Claire Tomalin, argues, Jane had known a traumatic loss of security when at 25, she was suddenly forced to move from her childhood home in rural England to the city of Bath, a move that depressed her so much that she could not write for more than 10 years.
This modest biography sympathetically relates an uneventful life. Austen was born in 1775, the last child in a middle-class family headed by George Austen, vicar in the village of Steventon, Hampshire. Surrounded by four boisterous older brothers, she bonded early with her sister Cassandra, who was a life-long favourite companion.
Encouraged by her literary family, Austen at a young age began to write novels that were read aloud to entertain, developing a talent for satire and lively characterization.
At 27, she accepted a marriage proposal from a friend of the family but changed her mind the next day. Like Cassandra, she preferred to be single, though this meant an insecure financial future. Her novel Sense and Sensibility was the first to be published, in 1811, and, at 37, Austen could proudly write to a friend who hesitated in accepting her generous gift of dress fabric, that she must accept for she was now rich.
Though Austen never looked for public acclaim, she was sought after by the highest in society, including the prince regent, whom she met and to whom she later dedicated the novel Emma.
At 40, a mysterious illness struck, perhaps lymphoma, and a year later she died. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Faced with such quiet, uneventful lives, past biographers of famous woman writers like Emily Dickinson and the Brontes, have adopted creative ways to portray their subjects.
Tomalin, who has won the Whitbread First Book Prize in 1974 for The Life and Death of Mary Wollostonecraft, and the NCR Book Award in 1991 for The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, seems to have lacked nerve in writing about Austen,
admitting in a postcript, to a certain fear of her subject:
"Her sharpness and refusal to suffer fools makes you fearful of intruding, misinterpreting, crassly misreading the evidence." Disapointingly, Tomalin's book does not surpass Elizabeth Jenkins's popular 1938 book, Jane Austen: A Biography.
Not that Tomalin's biography lacks quality. It is beautifully packaged with well-chosen illustrations and photographs and a helpful updated bibliography. It contains many details about the Austen clan, but in this there also lies a problem, because in the biographer's enthusiasm for relating the life of each brother, cousin, nephew and friend, Tomalin loses the focus on Jane.
Certainly, having little primary material to work with is a great obstacle in reconstructing a life. Most of Austen's voluminous letters were destroyed by Cassandra and her niece Fanny, and her manuscripts have all disapeared, except for some fragments of the late novel Persuasion. In-depth analysis of Austen's work and some psychological profiling might have compensated for these shortfalls.
Still, Tomalin's diligent research uncovers odd nuggets of Austen trivia. An example: she relates how Austen attended balls at a neighbour's in Hampshire, a Lord Dorchester, who "was an honourable man who deserved well of his country for saving Quebec."
Another problem is poor editing. The sequence of chapters seems disjointed and there are badly constructed sentences such as "James first. He had taken over their father's livings at Steventon and Deane, and remained comfortably at Steventon rectory with Mary and his three children. Anna by his first marriage, clever, sensitive and unhappy in feeling she was slighted by her father as well as her stepmother; good little James Edward and baby Caroline. There were to be no more." Austen would have been appalled!
I had almost finished the biography by the time we could return to our re-connected apartment. Austen had proved to be an elusive, whimsical companion during our upheaval. (On her deathbed, I was amazed to read that she dictated 24 lines of comic verse to her devoted Cassandra.)
Raised a Christian, Austen lived an upstanding life and was remembered on her tombstone for her "benevolence of heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind." Those endowments produced the novels that we treasure today.
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