Selectively Remembering Jane Austen

Just as it seems that some new remake of one of Jane Austen's novels (and often, several of them) in production at any one time so do we see the story of Ms. Austen's life told again and again--the author played by Olivia Williams, Anne Hathaway and others over the years. In the depictions it seems that the tendency is to portray her as essentially like the heroines of her novels--minus the happy ending, as if Elizabeth Bennett never got Mr. D'Arcy.

There are some grounds for such a conception. Still, if Ms. Austen was, like her heroines, a daughter of marginal provincial gentry, and concerned primarily with their domestic affairs to such a degree that it is common to say that one can read her books without noticing that the Napoleonic Wars were going on (perhaps the more in as people are more likely to read Pride and Prejudice than Persuasion, or Mansfield Park), this was hardly a matter of her having been somehow unaware of goings-on in the wider world, or indeed their being remote from her own life because of a relatively lowly station. After all, Austen had brothers serving in the Royal Navy as ship commanders during that conflict, with her brother Francis getting a knighthood for his part in the war before Waterloo (this conflict just the early phases of careers that saw both become Admirals, and Francis Admiral of the Fleet), while their sister Jane is known to have drawn on their knowledge of naval affairs during her work (for instance, learning about "prize money" so that she could include it in Persuasion). Such things seem less surprising when one considers their assorted wealthy and prominent connections--Warren Hastings, who is compared with only Robert Clive as a conqueror of India for Britain, a friend of the family.

In my experience one gets even less inkling of Austen having had such a life from the stories told about Austen than those Austen told by Austen in her books. And I suspect few care to have it otherwise, preferring as they do that image of a sort of real-life Ms. Bennett to that worldlier side of her background--leaving it the kind of thing rather more likely to be raised by an Upton Sinclair as he cast a respectful but more than usually historically-minded eye upon her work than to those who read her work to escape into a world they imagine to have been more genteel than their own.