Books/Articles:

Jane Austen  by Carol Shields Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 2001
(Available at Amazon.co.uk & .com) Level: Intermediate

Carol Shields is a highly distinguished academic and novelist (e.g. The Stone Diaries, Larry’s Party), but her biography is not really the fruit of personal research and adds only nuances to the sense of Jane Austen’s life we extract from the well-communicated and erudite recent work in this area by Claire Tomalin, David Nokes, and Park Honan (who appears here at one point as Honan Park). This book’s main advantage over these works lies in its being much shorter than any of them. Those who wish to run and read might prefer it for that reason.

She attended a conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America, did badly, but with insouciance, in the trivia quiz, as Claudia Johnson assures us bona fide academics always do. Perhaps the trouble begins here. It is all very well to fail at the trivia level, more difficult to say where trivia end and something else begins. If only Serle knows how to boil an egg, as Mr Woodhouse avers in Emma, that is trivial in the sense that Serle is a mere servant, never reappears in the novel, and egg-boiling may be a mere Delia Smith affair of culinary inconsequence. But the remark is also an index of Jane Austen’s gift for comedy, and of the valetudinarian feeble-mindedness of Emma’s father, which impinges on Emma’s own life with an effect of “weakening” her apparently assured “position”. A biographer may need an expertise in such trivia precisely because trivia is what they may turn out not to be.

In pointing out that Austen never knew the heaven of having a bedroom to herself she brushes past the widely-advertised speculation that she that she may have found “something completely similar” in the shared bedroom with an intense “sister-sister” relationship, an idea aired in the London Review of Books in 1995 and which some creative critics have continued to aver, with ever more complex variations, ever since. In invoking Catherine Morland she misses the feminine, or feminist inflection of the notation, almost Freudian, of the abrupt transition from the noisy and wild, and dirt-loving Catherine to the fairly reserved young lady devoted to cleanliness and Gothic tales, neatly illustrating how, in De Beauvoir’s phrasing, one is not born a woman but becomes one.

She describes Austen’s early, sketchy education at boarding schools in Oxford, Southampton and Reading, but misses out on the sense of horror raised by conditions at such schools provided by Tomalin and imaginatively extrapolated in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. A later sentence looks to be in some danger of making Austen’s early sweetheart Tom Lefroy a hero of her mature novels. A briskly-paced biographical narrative is welcome, but speed of composition induces this sort of inaccuracy or tendentiousness. Austen’s brother Henry and her cousin Eliza’s marriage was “an affair of passion, which lasted”. Is there evidence to suggest this? The most obvious form of evidence for it in Austen’s time -- that of children -- did not appear. The book reads easily, but, typically for its hastily-thrown-off feeling, has no notes or index – a heavy loss for a biography, even if this is a requirement of the series in which it appears.

Carol Shields follows Claire Tomalin in defending, to some extent, Fanny Knight’s notorious claim long after her aunt’s death, that she and Cassandra were, so to speak, only moderately genteel, and “below par as to good society and its ways”. Whatever may be offered as palliative here, there is no real reason for Austen’s readers not to be angry with the niece who meant so much to her here. They might also perhaps feel that this was an ironic and excessive requital for Austen’s own occasional commitments to the false values of snobbism, in her indulgence towards the feelings of her Emma, for example -- a heroine who, ironically, seems to owe something to Fanny Knight herself. The rebuke to Emma for her patronage of poor Miss Bates now seems to be getting a sort of retaliation in first.

Flashes of the accomplished author are worth waiting for, as in the statement that “immediately after Jane Austen’s death she was entombed in veneration”. But it is indicative of the hastily-thrown-off feeling here that the distance and “otherness” of Jane Austen’s historical context is asserted, but her writings apparently easily bespeak an “eternal human drama”. There are occasional inaccuracies as well as occasional misjudgements, as in the statement that “there is [no] sideways (sic) reference to the extraordinary adventures of her cousin Eliza and of Eliza’s mother Philadelphia”. Unhappily, there is, in one of the stronger fragments of the early writings; and Emma Watson, the heroine of the powerful novel fragment, The Watsons, appears here as “Emma Austen” -- an interesting, Freudian sort of slip, but a slip nevertheless.

The pace is brisk here, and there are some nice comparisons of occurrences in the novels and incidents in Jane Austen’s life, and all the usual nodes in the discourse about Jane Austen are assembled in a brief work -- which may make it particularly useful to the reader who will never have the time for a biography like David Nokes’s, for example, just short of 600 pages: but, in general, this is not a work to be remembered in the annals of scholarship.