Monthly Archives: February 2009

I haven’t had much time to read further in Claire Tomalin’s bio of Jane Austen (my limited reading time lately has gone to finishing up Gaudy Night for this Sunday’s mystery book group meeting), but there are still a few things I found interesting I wanted to share with you.

The first is about Tomalin’s treatment of Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy, her potential love interest.  The main evidence we have about Austen’s feelings comes from a few references to Lefroy in letters she wrote to her sister Cassandra.  The story is simple in outline — she met Lefroy at a ball when she was 20, she dances with him on a few separate occasions, they have conversations about books, she makes a few jokes about it in her letters, his family gets nervous about this and arranges to send him away, and they never see each other again.

What all this means, though, is another issue.  I’ve read interpretations of Austen’s letters that play down her feelings for him, arguing that her tone is so ironic and joking that it seems unlikely her feelings were very strong, but Tomalin argues unequivocally that Austen was in love with Lefroy, and also that he was in love with her.  In reference to the letter in which Austen says she and Lefroy have done “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together,” Tomalin says this:

… it is also the only surviving letter in which Jane is clearly writing as the heroine of her own youthful story, living for herself the short period of power, excitement and adventure that might come to a young woman when she was thinking of choosing a husband; just for a brief time she was enacting instead of imagining.  We can’t help knowing that her personal story will not go in the direction she is imagining in the letter … but just at that moment, in January 1796, you feel she might quite cheerfully have exchanged her genius for the prospect of being married to Tom Lefroy one day, and living in unknown Ireland, with a large family of children to bring up.

Thank goodness for our sakes that she didn’t have the large family of children, but it’s very sad to think of the heartbreak Austen might have experienced after she realized the relationship was going nowhere.  The problem was money.  Lefroy needed to marry a woman who had some, and Austen was basically penniless.  It’s not that Lefroy was mercenary, but that he was dependent on an uncle who had provided for him and that he had siblings who were dependent on him for their livelihood.  It’s unromantic but entirely true that his life ran more smoothly without Austen in it.  And her heartbreak means that we have the novels.  But it’s still a sad story.

The other interesting thing I discovered was that Austen’s younger relatives thought of her as unrefined and a tiny bit embarrassing.  I was aware that the Victorians sometimes thought of Austen’s novels as a little crude, a little too open and honest for their prudish tastes in fiction (although I wish I knew exactly what the offending passages were, as it’s hard to imagine seeing her novels as anything but models of propriety).  Austen’s niece Fanny wrote that she:

was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent … They [the Austens] were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes … Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of “common-ness” (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined … Both the Aunts [Cassandra and Jane] were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent … they would have been, tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society & its ways.

Fanny was fond of Austen, Tomalin makes clear, but Austen was still very much the poor relation.  On the surface, Austen’s life seems so calm and quiet, but after reading Tomalin’s description of how often Austen must have felt insecure and on the margins of society, I can see that it really wasn’t calm and quiet at all.

My book group met today to discuss Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle.  I have this idea about myself that I don’t like horrible-childhood memoirs, but I’ve read two of them recently and liked them both (this one and Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, although Diski’s book is a travel book as well as a memoir).  Perhaps I need to revise my opinion?  I don’t like the idea of these memoirs, but the secret truth might be that I really do enjoy reading about other people’s difficult lives.

Walls’s book is a fantastic read.  She is a good writer who knows how to tell a story, and I had trouble putting the book down.  The “stars” of her story are her parents, both of them highly intelligent, capable, imaginative people who never should have had children, although they wound up having four of them.  The father has a wealth of knowledge and a genius for mechanical things, but he’s also an alcoholic and can’t seem to hold down a job for very long.  Soon enough he is stealing money from the family to spend at the bar.  The mother is a painter.  She has a teacing license, which she uses occasionally, but she really wants to devote her time to her art — and she believes she has a right to do this, no matter what is going on in the family.

Walls spends her early years moving from place to place, but the family eventually settles for a while in Phoenix, and later in West Virginia.  It’s the West Virginia part of the story that’s the most harrowing.  Here they buy a place that might charitably be called a shack, which slowly deteriorates from very bad to much worse.  It’s tiny, the roof leaks, they only occasionally have electricity, and their toilet is a hole in the ground.  Walls tries to improve the place by painting it bright yellow, but she can’t reach the whole house and no one will help her out, so she ends up making everything look worse.  The stairs to the front door fall apart until they can no longer use them and have to enter the house through a window.

I could go on and on with the harsh details — I haven’t mentioned any of the worst ones — but what is so memorable about this family is that the parents seem completely unbothered by all the troubles.  The mother transforms all their problems into opportunities for adventure or for learning experiences or for character-building.  She is supremely self-absorbed, angry when she is pulled away from her art.  The father escapes partly by dreaming impossible dreams about the future (the book’s title refers to the castle he plans to build for the family), but mostly through drinking.  Neither of them are able or willing to face up to and take responsibility for their children’s suffering.

It’s easy to get angry at these parents, but they evoke a more complicated response.  They both, especially the mother, have a free-spiritedness about them that is admirable, and they are counter-cultural in all kinds of good ways — they are anti-consumerist, they value creativity and art, they are willing to be brave and take risks, and they raise very smart, creative, and talented children who are years ahead of their classmates (whenever they are in school to actually have classmates).  They are happy living on very little, being squatters in an abandoned building in New York City, for example, finding all they need from dumpsters.  I, at least, admire people who can happily live on the margins of society in this way.  They spend a good chunk of their lives homeless, but it’s by choice — they have the skills and resources to live solidly middle-class lives if they wanted, but they don’t care about how the middle class lives.

But my God, if people want to live this way, they shouldn’t have children!  It’s not just that the children led unconventional lives — which would be difficult enough but not uncommon or unbearable — but their lives and health were regularly in danger.

Walls sticks to fast-paced story-telling and rarely stops to reflect on her experience.  I understand why she has done this — it makes for a tense and exciting reading experience and it allows the story to speak for itself, making it even more gut-wrenchingly powerful.  I did want to see some more reflection, though, if only because I’m fascinated by how people process their childhood experiences and integrate them into their adult selves.  What I liked about Jenny Diski’s suffering-childhood memoir was the way she told the childhood story but also described how she’s dealt with it (or failed to deal with it) as an adult.  But this is asking Walls to have written an entirely different book than what she wrote.  Actually, it strikes me as possible for Walls to write a second book on the subject, this time telling how her adult self has dealt with this childhood legacy.

I also can’t help but wonder if Walls feels that she has exploited her family’s eccentricities and her siblings’ suffering for her own gain.  I’m not criticizing Walls for telling her story; it’s just that I felt odd at times reading about her harsh life with a certain amount of enjoyment, and it’s strange to sit around a table with solidly middle-class friends chatting  pleasantly about just how awful those poor people had it.

But, on the other hand, I’m glad that Walls has found success and made what is probably a fortune on her book, after all she experienced, and I’m glad for the opportunity to think a little with friends about parenting and childhood suffering and materialism and free-thinking.  Maybe I won’t become a fan of childhood memoirs, but I should recognize that there are very good ones out there.

I just began Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen, and so far it’s been great fun to read.  I was surprised to find just how much Tomalin emphasizes Austen’s energy, spirit, and attitude in her life and in her youthful writings.  She was no quiet, solemn figure at all — quite the opposite.  An important influence, Tomalin claims, were the young boys her family took in as students for her father to teach:

Jane Austen was a tough and unsentimental child, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes.  She found a good source for this ferocious style of humor in the talk she heard, and doubtless sometimes joined in, among her parents’ pupils, bursting out of childhood into young manhood.  If she was sometimes shocked as she listened, she herself was learning how to stock by writing things down.

I’m imagining Austen surrounded by rowdy boys playing their rowdy boy games, and thinking about her observing what went on and taking part now and then.  I never thought of her as drawn to black jokes, but I kind of like the idea.  I can certainly see her being unsentimental, especially when I think about the sharply satiric tone she uses in her novels.

I haven’t read much of Austen’s juvenalia, but I’m curious about it after reading Tomalin’s descriptions.  Comparing Austen’s stories to the moral tales of Arnaud Berquin, some of which Austen owned, Tomalin says:

Where he sought to teach and elevate, she plunged into farce, burlesque and self-mockery, and created a world of moral anarchy, bursting with the life and energy Berquin’s good intentions managed to squeeze out.  Berquin’s plays are dead on the page; some of Austen’s juvenile stories could go straight into a Disney cartoon.

She wrote stories with all kinds of bad behavior; her characters are rebellious and do things like steal, get into debt, have affairs, drink too much, gamble, and elope with married people.  Her stories sound wild and fun.

I was also interested to read more about Austen’s own reading and influences.  One of the most important books she read is Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which unfortunately isn’t easily available today.  Apparently history has judged it not as good as Pamela and Clarissa, but Austen valued it highly, and there has to be a reason for that.  She also read a lot of Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson (especially his essays and his novel Rasselas), and Charlotte Smith, whom Tomalin calls the Daphne du Maurier of the 1780s and 90s. (I’m very happy to have a copy of her novel Emmeline on hand.)  Frances Burney was also very important, especially Evelina. Here is what Tomalin says about Burney’s influence:

She admired Burney’s comic monsters and her dialogue, but most of what she learnt from her was negative: to be short, to sharpen, to vary, to exclude.  Also, to prefer the imperfect and human heroine to the nearly flawless one.

Tomalin argues that even with these influences, Austen never wrote anything in the style of these authors — she kept her own voice and her own vision.  I’ve enjoyed reading Burney’s novels, but I can see what Tomalin means about learning a negative lesson — Burney has some great social satire, just like Austen does, but her main characters tend to be models of perfection, and Austen’s imperfect people are much more interesting.

I’m now moving into the sections of the biography that get into her adult life, and I’m curious to see what I’ll learn.