Traveller

I think Jane Austen fans get swept away, rather than carried. As in - her hair flowed around her face as she stood in the gale upon the windy moor...But yes, she was a good writer. Shame she couldn't admit to it.

JB

As in - her hair flowed around her face as she stood in the gale upon the windy moor..

Only if they've been reading Emily Brontė by mistake. Austen almost never mentions clothes, hair, servants, food, except in the voice of tiresome or unpleasant people.

Emma

Just what I was thinking, but she does mention Elizabeth's muddy hemlines when she walks over to see how her sister is recovering from her chill and Fanny in Mansfiel Park has some dilemmas about whose chain to wear with her brother's gift of a cross.The film versions give a different impression. I don't think she was unduly modest about her writing, either. She had to have a very good opinion of its worth to persist, and her father, in particular, was encouraging.Her brother was the first to introduce one of her novels to a publisher he knew.

Sheila

Yes, it is Bingley's disagreeable sister, who has her own eye on Darcy, who points out the muddy hemlines.

Sheil

Sorry about the mis-behaving box. We'll just have to wait for whichever magical being it is who sorts these things out. Anyone else ever feel they're living in The Truman Show?

[Edited by Anna Reynolds at 19:59:00 on 23 October 2005
Reason: I did in this case! you forgot to add the / before end of quote.]

Anna, thank you. I realised seconds after I clicked 'post' that I had, but of course, there's nothing you can do after that!

Emma

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Correction - there's nothing I can do, but there's plenty you, Anna, can do!

JB, I think Austen fans are the ones looking out of the window and hoping that the mad person on the windy moor won't catch her death of cold.

I'm not a fan of the novels-as-biographical-clues school of lit crit but you can't help wondering if Austen would ever have found a man up to her fighting weight.

I agree, Emma. I have only read a small selection of her letters, but in the ones I did read she struck me as a very realistic, and obviously very observant & quick-witted, person -- not like that traditional dear, gentle Jane who penned her little stories in a sheltered parsonage. She wasn't blind to social injustice or the limitations of her own position as a spinster with a limited income, but I don't think she was bitter about it, either; her sense of humour was too good for that. And what is surprising (at least in terms of the 'dear, gentle Jane' myth) is that she was very much aware of her writing as a business. There's an interesting essay on the subject in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen -- 'The Professional Woman Writer' by Jan Fergus.

(The new P&P film won't be released here in Finland until December, but I'm looking forward to it, even if it's flawed. I'd never have thought of Keira Knightley as Elizabeth, but in the trailers she looks a lot like I'd imagined her!)

Sorry to go on harping about Austen Oh, on the actual topic, I'd also like to mention Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson by Paula Byrne. A hugely enjoyable biography of a fascinating woman.

I am intrigued that you don't appear to think novels are much related to people's lived experience, Emma. Where else can they come from? In terms of themes, background, social setting, they relate to some aspect which engages the interest of the author and so reflects their life experiences. Jame Austen writes within her social setting, what she termed her 'two inches of ivory' with her main focus the necessity of marriage, because it's close to her heart and experience. Besides, what would be the point of writing fiction about things you don't empathise with?

Fiction is often a kind of diguise, of course. I'm thinking of EM Forster and 'A Passage to India', a whole novel based on the idea of things hidden, also Henry James, or of wish-fulfilment, as with Dickens and his orphans with their rich benefactors, but his interest in the under-dogs is widely recognised as a working out of his own issues concerning poverty and opportunity. His books have characters recognisably based on members of his family, although he is also one of the most imaginative creators of characters. Some of his stories have foreign backgrounds, such as 'Martin Chuzzlewit', set in America, but they were places he'd been to and not as important or as well-described as the places he knew well,such as London and, of course, Kent.

Is there something else you mean, which I'm missing? I know your own novel is historical, but the choice of period, theme, and the characters and situations must reveal a great deal about your own life - unless you are atypical, of course.

Sheila

Oh yes, of course it does. What I think I meant was that it annoys me when the novels get treated as nothing more than a set of clues to a real person. Some biographers who aren't writers are very prone to that. It's the reductiveness I dislike: it's a bit like when someone tells you that Monet went blind towards the end of his life, as if that explains all we need to know or care about him. That he was blind is interesting, but the paintings are still there if you didn't know it, any more than I need to know that two films stars in a film were having a real-life affair. It doesn't matter, and it doesn't affect whether I think their on-screen partnership works.

Emma

Can you be a biographer without being a writer? I suppose you mean biographers who aren't novelists. Few can have their feet in both camps.

Yes, I suppose people will always be interested in the human being behind the art work. I know I am. Monet going blind I didn't know although I've seen a lot of his work recently. It's like Beethoven's deafness to me - I think they must have been greatly deprived and felt it keenly as it affected their ability to practise their arts. I don't think I'd want to read a life of Monet or of Beethoven, although I've read more sensational ones, like Picasso and Tchaikovsky and Van Gogh, but I feel differently about writers. How do you feel about reading letters and diaries, another favourite genre of mine? Didn't you mention Jane Austen's letters as ones you want to read?


Sheila

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Did you have any particular biographers in mind?

Some of my favourite books are non-fiction. They certainly get re-read more often than the fiction books:

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (Evolutionary theory)
The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins (Evolutionary theory)
The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins (Evolutionary theory)
The Wisdom of Bones - Alan Walker and Pat Shipman (Paleoanthropology)
Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett (Philosophy of consciousness)
The Inflationary Universe - Alan Guth (Cosmology)
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose (Philosophy of consciousness)
Vital Dust - Christian De Duve (Evolutionary theory)

All extremely interesting reads, and there are many more, but this is just the cream of the crop.

Was reminded by various other threads that one of my favourite non-fiction books is How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ.

Polemical, yes, but based on serious study and good evidence. And very, very funny.

Emma