Woman of the year: Jane Austen goes celluloid
Editor's note: This article about Jane Austen by Centennial
Professor of English John Halperin was written for Knight-Ridder/Tribune
News Service in Washington, D.C., and distributed last week by KRT to its
350 member newspapers as an op-ed column.
by John Halperin
Jane Austen's first published novel, "Sense and Sensibility" (1811),
sold out its meager first printing of a 1,000 copies and went into a second
edition two years later. Altogether it earned the novelist a little more
than £300 during her lifetime, or about $30,000 in terms of today's
buying power. "Sense and Sensibility" was published anonymously;
its title page declared it to be printed "for the Author (A Lady)."
So obscure was Jane Austen at 35 that she was forced to sign a contract
agreeing to reimburse the printer if the book lost money.
When Austen died at 41 of what later in the 19th century came to be called
Addison's disease ‹ controllable now by 25 milligrams of cortisone
daily, the dose John F. Kennedy took in the 1950s ‹ she had earned
something less than £700 (under $70,000) from her four published novels:
"Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice" (1813),
"Mansfield Park" (1814) and "Emma" (1815). Two other
novels, "Northanger Abbey," written in the 1790s, and "Persuasion,"
composed while the novelist was ill and completed just months before her
death, appeared posthumously in 1818.
Austen's name never appeared on the title page of any of her novels during
her lifetime, and she remained unknown to most of the novel reading public.
Unwilling, in her desire for privacy, to let it be discovered who the "Lady"
was, Austen fretted in obscurity and neglect until "Emma" became
a moderate best seller in the year before her death. But she had only a
few months to enjoy this anonymous success; by July 1817 she was
dead.
She pinched pennies all her life, shared a room with her sister and remained
largely at home. She had little formal education and never met another writer
of comparable stature. The leisurely and lengthy inscription on her tomb
in Winchester Cathedral, composed by her sister and brothers and citing
the "sweetness of her temper," didn't exactly uncloset her. It
managed to omit the most interesting fact of all: the lady wrote novels.
Not until 1872 was an additional brass tablet reluctantly erected near the
novelist's grave by her descendants. It announced demurely that the late
Jane Austen was "known to many by her writings."
So what would Austen, who lived without publicity and fanfare or much measurable
success as a writer, have made of all this ‹ a Golden Globe; an Entertainer
of the Year award; her portrait on magazine covers; films of "Persuasion,"
"Sense and Sensibility" and "Emma" ("Clueless");
"Pride and Prejudice" serialized on television with thousands
of copies of the videocassette bought up by the public and another film
version of "Emma" in the works?
She might well have been alarmed by the abrupt termination of her anonymity:
so private a thing as her name on everyone's lips could have been disconcerting
to her. She would have been delighted by the adulation ‹ like all of
us she loved praise, having received so little of it ‹ and ecstatic
about royalties and permission fees. By now she would no doubt be dispatching
to publishers, film companies, TV networks and magazines the appropriate
invoices.
Probably Austen, who never had her own carriage and was forced in her last
painful years to ride, when she could, in what was accurately called a dog
cart, would have gone out by now and bought herself a nice car ‹ a
convertible BMW sports car, say, or a Lincoln Town Car. She liked luxury;
she was no saint.
Could this woman eulogized by her family as patient, benevolent,
sweet-tempered, charitable and pure be the same woman whose ironic moral
vision the world has been celebrating for a century? The Austens were fond
of declaring that Jane never was heard to utter an unkind or even a sharp
word, an image of the novelist (belied on every page of her "Letters")
still dear to the hearts of the most deranged fringe of the Jane Austen
Society.
But Austen's power as a writer has always resided not in benevolence or
sweetness but in her ability to assess and expose the material basis of
social behavior, to perceive in selfishness and egotism the explanation
of much human conduct and expression, to see the potential cruelty and blindness
of ordinary people as well as their more admirable and pleasant qualities.
Above all, hers is a balanced, sane view of humanity. In this she resembles
Shakespeare, the only other writer born before 1800 whose literary reputation
in our time has remained stable.
Like her contemporary the Marquis de Sade, Austen was a deflator of the
sentimental and the excessively romantic, able to depict man as nasty and
perverse as well as virtuous and generous. She understood human nature.
W.H. Auden found her unblinking comprehension of "the economic basis
of society" shocking: "Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass,"
he said. Virginia Woolf, a tough cookie herself, remarked of Jane Austen:
"I would rather not find myself alone in the same room with her;"
she feared being seen through. It might be "alarming," mused Woolf,
"to find her at home."
This is not to say that Austen was ill-tempered or mean ‹ mad, bad,
dangerous to know ‹ the Albert Belle of her day, but rather that something
inside her enabled her to see and to understand. Nor was she the creature
sometimes portrayed by the most demented radical feminists of today's academy:
sexual partner of her sister, a woman who detested men and scorned marriage,
a hater of all institutions. No doubt this is the politically correct view
of Jane Austen.
Her failure to marry does not mean that she was a lesbian or that men and
matrimony repelled her. She did have several offers of marriage from men
she didn't love, and these she turned down. But she was in love with at
least two men, and probably three, who did not offer to marry her, much
to her chagrin. She was smarter than most of the men she met and could not
bear the thought of life with a dull partner. And she had terrifying visions
of child-bearing and of the premature death that often accompanied it in
her day, and she disliked the noise and disorder surrounding young children.
The most striking thing about the award-winning film adaptation of "Sense
and Sensibility" is how contemporary it feels. Again like Shakespeare,
Austen writes about ideas, situations and dilemmas with which we continue
to grapple. In this novel the questions facing the heroines are whom to
love, whom and what to believe, what to value and what to discard, what
to avoid and what to pursue ‹ which is another way of saying that in
many crucial ways not much has changed since Jane Austen's day. Today's
readers and moviegoers find that she speaks to them because she addresses
the most important issue always facing all of us: how to live.
So instead of a BMW or a Lincoln, how about a limousine for Jane Austen
‹ with Immortality in the front seat doing the driving and a little
nook in the back for an Oscar.
John Halperin is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University
and the author of "Eminent Georgians," just published by St. Martin's.
His highly acclaimed "Life of Jane Austen" (1984) is being reissued
this year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Vanderbilt
Office of News and Public Affairs
Document last updated Jan. 14, 1997