16 December: Boreham on Jane Austen

The Literature of Escape
One always conceives of Jane Austen—to whom thoughts will turn today, her birthday—as a quiet, laughing-eyed, lovable kind of girl. To her, life was a game, full of excitement, full of fun, and challenging to the utmost all her powers.

She seemed from the first to sense her destiny. She spent all her time taking stock of people, summing them up, and noting particularly their oddities and foibles. Observing something that amused her, she would tiptoe out of the room, slip away to her desk, and jot down a record of the intriguing occurrence. She hated to be caught in the act, and, at the sound of footsteps, would smuggle into her blotting pad the sheet on which she had been scribbling, and look as innocent of authorship as an armless Venus or a mermaid in a submarine cavern.

The delicious little drolleries she daily witnessed in her domestic circle moved her far more deeply than the momentous happenings in the world beyond. Napoleon was a boy of six when Jane Austen was born; she was a girl in her 'teens when the French Revolution reached its tragic and dramatic climax, shaking the civilisation of Europe to its foundations; she was 30 when England was thrilled by the epic of Trafalgar and she lived just long enough to hear of "that world-earthquake, Waterloo."

But none of these things moved her. There is no suggestion of them in her manuscripts. Her mind dwelt in a fairyland of its own. In that enchanted realm, political convulsions did not matter; big battalions did not matter; sensational discoveries did not matter; nothing mattered but human life and human love, human passions and human emotions. And, as a consequence, her tales belong, not to the age in which they were first told, but to all the ages that have been and to all the ages yet to be.

Gifted With Perfect Understanding Of Mankind
None of our women writers has been praised as Jane Austen has been. Sir Walter Scott thought her work incomparable. "I read her novels over and over again," he wrote. "Her descriptions of the intricacies of character and emotion are the most wonderful I have ever met." Cole' Bridge and Southey regarded her as the perfection of fiction. Macaulay even compared her with Shakespeare.

Like that peerless master, she has an amazing multitude of characters; they are all natural, realistic and convincing; yet, by pencil touches of clever portraiture so delicate as to elude analysis, each is as sharply discriminated from all the others as if he were the most eccentric of beings. Herein lies her distinctive genius.

She thoroughly understood men and women. Mr. Chesterton says that she understood men as neither George Eliot, the Brontes nor any other feminine writer understood them. By some witchery of her own she made herself mistress of the pulsations and the heart-throbs, the joys and the sorrows, that are the changeless inheritance of all the ages.

How was it done? How could a fragile girl, living the tranquil and secluded existence that fell to her lot, paint the life of the great world in such dashing and yet such accurate colours?

As Dr. A. Compton Rickett points out in his history of English literature, her life was singularly uneventful. The daughter of a country rector, she was reared in the quiet backwater of a small provincial town. Most of her time was spent at home; her longest journey was to Bath; her most exciting relaxation was amateur theatricals. No serious love attachment gathered about her, although her heart experienced the exquisite flutter of one or two minor disturbances!

A Girl Who Poured Her Soul Into Paper
This was all she personally knew of romance. Yet she writes as one who had sounded all the depths and shoals of human anguish and ecstasy. A thousand critics have asked how the trick was accomplished, and, to that question, only one answer is possible. That answer is that Jane Austen's books are all Jane Austen. She looked into her own heart, read the medley of instincts, motives and impulses that she found there, and, adapting or magnifying them to suit her immediate purpose, she transferred her own feelings to the creatures of her fancy.

This explains their resistless appeal. For Jane Austen, herself was as attractive as a girl could be. Gay and vivacious, she overflowed with life, movement, and mischief. To know her was to love her. The slab of black marble that marks her resting place in Winchester Cathedral bears witness to "the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper and the extraordinary endowments of her mind," and, even at this distance of time, nobody can read her novels without falling under the spell of these engaging qualities.

Unhappily, although the greatest praised her, none of their golden encomiums fell on her own ears. Dying young, she left the world before it had awakened to a realisation of her greatness. Moveover, she lived in a day in which the woman novelist was regarded as a particularly doubtful experiment.

Like Miss Burney, George Eliot, and the Brontes, she therefore published her romances anonymously, and, as a consequence, tasted nothing of fame. Yet fame has come. She has taken a place peculiarly her own in our esteem.

The works of Jane Austen are a fragrant pleasance, a haven of peace, a shelter from life's strife and agitation. Their very timelessness secures that, whatever cataclysmic changes the world may know, their pleasant pages will always offer shade and refreshment to those who know how to use the best literature for that healing and recreative purpose.

F W Boreham

Image: Jane Austen