Vol. 20 No. 5 · 5 March 1998
pages 3-6 | 4302 words
Simplicity
Marilyn Butler
- Jane Austen : A Life by David Nokes
Fourth Estate, 578 pp, £20.00, September 1997, ISBN 1 85702 419 2
- Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Viking, 341 pp, £20.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 670 86528 1
Do we need another Life of Jane Austen? Biographies of this writer come at regular intervals, confirming a rather dull story of Southern English family life. For the first century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative – Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev. J.E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) and W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913). These pioneers had two main messages to convey: that the author was a very domestic woman, and that outside her family she had no profound attachments or interests. Subsequent biographers rightly complain that this puts a damper on the exercise. But the nine hundred new pages on Austen’s life do not, in the event, significantly change what is still a family record.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 7 · 2 April 1998
From Brian Southam
Marilyn Butler may be right (LRB, 5 March) in connecting Lady Susan with Maria Edgeworth and suggesting that it is not a work of around 1794, as generally supposed, but dates from some time after May 1809. The problem with her suggestion is that Lady Susan is a novel in letters, a form which Jane Austen had already abandoned in converting the epistolary ‘Elinor & Marianne’ into Sense and Sensibility, a process which (according to the family biographies) began in November 1797 and may have been repeated in revising ‘First Impressions’ into Pride and Prejudice. Having given up this somewhat dated form of narration, why would Austen return to it, for this one occasion only, some years later? It does not seem a likely progression: Lady Susan’s obvious stylistic affinity is with Jane Austen’s other epistolary work of the 1790s.
Brian Southam
London NW11
Vol. 20 No. 11 · 4 June 1998
From Trevor Fawcett
Reviewing two Jane Austen biographies, Marilyn Butler (LRB, 5 March) argues for Austen’s dependency on Maria Edgeworth in her novel Lady Susan (and a lateish dating for it) partly on the grounds that Austen’s use of the word ‘manoeuvre’ in a social (instead of the older military/naval) context may derive from Edgeworth’s tale ‘Manoeuvring’, published in 1809. Certainly Edgeworth liked metaphors of manoeuvre, but the term was already being used in this transferred sense as early as 1774, according to the OED, and therefore offers no clue to the dating. It seems to have been current in Bath in the 1790s, before Jane Austen even visited the spa, as a manuscript letter in Bath Central Library from a bright Georgian teenager, Elizabeth Canning, demonstrates. This would-be debutante, writing to her mother in December 1792, describes amusingly, almost Austenishly, the humming and hawing of her aunts in the Assembly Rooms, first over whether she might join in the country dances at all, and then over the manifest unsuitability of the only partner available, ‘a Young Gem’mon of about fifteen’. She ends her account by remarking that on this occasion ‘your poor little picksy was obliged to content herself without cutting capers … but the next time I go to a Ball now that I know the Manoeuvres of it, I shall get them to look out for a partner earlier in the Evening, & then I shall have a better chance.’ This casual remark by an adolescent girl in a family letter – matching Jane Austen’s ‘Silly Woman! what does she expect by such Manoeuvres?’ in Lady Susan – indicates the popularity of the expression well before Maria Edgeworth published ‘Manoeuvring’.
Trevor Fawcett
Bath
