Five myths about Jane Austen

It’s been 200 years since readers first met the serious-minded Elinor Dashwood, heroine of Jane Austen’s first published novel, “Sense and Sensibility.” Austen-mania got off to a slow start, as the four books published during her lifetime were anonymous. But it has made up for time lost. Now, Austen is a superstar. Films, sequels, prequels and updated versions of her books bring her plots (and her life) to readers and moviegoers. And then there is the work of the academics: She was heartbroken by an Irishman — no, she was gay; she was conservative — no, she was a feminist. We love her; we hate her; we can’t agree about her; we know we should read her. Myths about her abound, but there are some truths we should universally acknowledge.

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Five Myths

A feature from The Post’s Outlook section that dismantles myths, clarifies common misconceptions and makes you think again about what you thought you already knew.

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1. Jane Austen led an uneventful life.

The myth of Austen as a demure spinster was created by her brother Henry, when he published the last two of her completed novels after her death, and burnished by a nephew, who issued a biography in 1869. Guided by his religious sensibilities, her brother wanted the public to see Austen as a conventional, unambitious Christian woman with an uneventful life. Her Victorian nephew agreed, writing that “of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.” Such portraits were perpetuated by the mini-biographies included in different popular editions of her books. In the 1960s, a Signet edition claimed that Austen “died, as quietly and serenely as she lived.”

Her rural birthplace in Steventon, England, does seem to be an ideal setting for a secluded existence. Yet Austen scholar Kathryn Sutherland has shown that both Steventon and Chawton, where she lived when her novels were published, were key stagecoach stops and much busier thoroughfares during her lifetime. For five years she lived and wrote in the larger city of Bath. During that time she accepted a proposal of marriage and the next day retracted it.

Life in the Austen family was also far from sheltered: Her brother Edward was adopted by wealthy distant cousins, took their name (Knight) and inherited from them some rather remarkable property; an aunt was jailed and charged with grand larceny; a French cousin-in-law was guillotined. Then there was a neighbor, described in Claire Tomalin’s biography as a sadist-necrophiliac who, before Austen’s birth, had lived with her parents. Though her adult fiction doesn’t include such a wide variety of people, that doesn’t mean her life mirrored her novels.

2. Austen’s novels are chick lit.

Yes, her heroines always get the guy. But Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” isn’t the only man who unexpectedly falls in love. Male readers, including some severe critics, have read and reread her novels for 200 years. Though Mark Twain complained, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone,” we need to count him, too, as a repeat reader. Maybe he returned to it because it’s a novel that runs like a Rolls-Royce, as Austen scholar Richard Jenkyns has suggested.