A previous version of the review incorrectly attributed the phrase “Rears, and Vices” to the novel “Persuasion.” It is said by Mary Crawford in “Mansfield Park. This version has been corrected.
Paula Byrne’s ‘The Real Jane Austen,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda
Ever since Jane Austen died in 1817, at 41, her novels have inspired the most intense veneration. Early on, the 19th-century historian Thomas Macaulay praised her as second only to Shakespeare in the creation of characters. Today, few classics are more truly or widely beloved than her masterpiece, “Pride and Prejudice,” which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. It is well known — indeed, it is a truth universally acknowledged — that many men and women happily reread the book every spring.
Unfortunately, it is also true that a passion for Austen — as astringent and gimlet-eyed a novelist as ever wrote — can sometimes descend into sickly sweet sentimentality. Think of the cloying keepsake-style illustrations in some editions of her works, the parasol brigade of ardent Janeites who simply adore her every word, the male readers who fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet, the female readers who sigh over Mr. Darcy. For such smitten fans, she is not Austen the sharp realist, the pioneering comic novelist of everyday life; she is rather “Our Jane, our dear, dear Jane.”
(Harper) - “The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things” by Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne’s “The Real Jane Austen” aims to undermine this image of a country mouse whose entire universe was made up of a few provincial families, the supposedly reclusive spinster who embroidered novels instead of pillowcases.
Byrne takes Austen seriously as a writer, a “consummate professional . . . prepared to devote her life, and to sacrifice her prospects of marriage, to her art as a novelist.”
Again and again, she points to evidence of the writer’s worldliness and sophistication. She also stresses how much Austen “created her characters by mixing observation and imagination,” often drawing on her own relatives for material. As a result, the reader learns an enormous amount, almost too much sometimes, about the tangled interconnections and far-flung adventures of the extended Austen and Leigh families.
Yet Byrne’s is no cradle-to-grave biography (for that she recommends Park Honan), nor is it a systematic study of the novels. She assumes that the reader is already familiar with the plots of “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park” and the other major works. Instead, each chapter begins with an object — a painting, a lap desk, a coach, a publisher’s check — and from that iconic artifact spins out a digressive essay, illuminating Austen’s personality, travels and worldview. Yet Byrne — as in her captivating study of Evelyn Waugh, “Mad World” (2010) — keeps everything steadfastly grounded in fact, in what can be quoted and verified.
Astonishing stories abound. In Chapter 2, “The East Indian Shawl,” Byrne discusses Phila Hancock, the sister of Austen’s father. Phila traveled to India to catch a husband in the company of several other impoverished young women. Two of her friends from this “fishing fleet,” Margaret Maskelyne and Mary Elliott, couldn’t have done better. “Peggy,” Byrne tells us, managed to hook the man who became Lord Clive of India. Mary eventually snagged the immensely rich Warren Hastings. When Phila, by then married to a surgeon and merchant named Tysoe Hancock, finally conceived a child, it was an open secret that the father was Hastings.
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