Jane Austen
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
A Few Words About Sources
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GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS
VIKING
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First published in 2001 by Viking Penguin,
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Copyright © Carol Shields, 2001 All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Shields, Carol.
Jane Austen / Carol Shields.
p. cm.—(A Penguin life)
eISBN : 978-1-101-09957-5
1. Austen, Jane, 1775-1817. 2. Novelists, English—19th century—
Biography. I. Title. II. Penguin lives series
PR4036.S48 2001
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For Hazel and for Grace
Prologue: A Life Glimpsed
IN THE AUTUMN of 1996 my daughter, the writer Anne Giardini, and I traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to present a joint paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America, an organization that comprises some of the world’s most respected Austen scholars, as well as rank amateurs like ourselves. These affectionate annual gatherings are serious attempts to look at Jane Austen’s work and examine how it illuminates her time and ours. There is minimal incense burning at these meetings, and no attempt to trivialize Jane Austen’s pronouncements and mockingly bring her into our contemporary midst. The gatherings are both gentle in approach and rigorous in scholarship, and unlike many academic assemblies, they are festivals of inclusiveness, with middle-aged groupies from Detroit dressed in Regency costumes; keen-eyed, tenured professors from Canada; and a scattering of Europeans intent on winning the trivia quiz. (Wherever three or four come together in Jane Austen’s name, there is bound to be a trivia quiz. This detailing of Austen’s minor characters—what they ate for breakfast, how much income they’ve settled on their daughters, the precise hour of a ruined picnic—has never been a part of my own impressionistic response to her work, and I worry, but only a little, about what this says of me, her devoted reader.)
The subject for the 1996 conference was “Jane Austen’s Men,” but the presentation Anne and I had prepared kept slipping sideways into the fully gendered world and coasting toward the subject of how women, despite their societal disentitlement, were able to play such a lively, even powerful role. The Austen heroines, deprived of the right to speak, employ the intricacies of body language—a term not invented until the 1960s, but no matter. Jane Austen was familiar with the body’s vivid mechanics and relied heavily, especially in her dramatic conclusions, on the body’s expressiveness.
Our talk centered on what Anne and I called the “politics of the glance.” If, in an Austen novel, a woman’s tongue is obliged to be still, her eye becomes her effective agent, one piercing look capable of changing the narrative direction—even a half glance able to shame or empower or redirect the sensibilities of others.
A glance can both submit and subvert; it can be sharp or shy, scornful or adoring; it can be a near cousin to scrutiny—but it almost always assumes a degree of mutually encoded knowledge. A spark is struck and apprehended; the head turns on its spinal axis; the shoulders freeze; the eyes are the only busy part of the body, simultaneously receiving and sending out information, so that a glance becomes more than a glance. It is a weapon, a command, or a sigh of acquiescence.
After the conference Anne and I traveled separately to our homes, I to central Canada and she to Vancouver. In Chicago, Anne was obliged to change planes, and she was amused to find that her new seatmate had come fresh from the annual Napoléon conference in that city. Riding high over the clouds, they exchanged conference notes, and the Napoléon man challenged her, not at all to her surprise, on the fact that Jane Austen had commented so scantily on the unfolding history of her era.
We’ve heard this often: How could a novelist who writes astutely about her own immediate society fail to have mentioned the Napoleonic wars?
The modeling of war is mostly male—almost everyone would agree on this and on the truth that war’s exactitude and damage may elude a conventional fictional transaction. But shouldn’t Jane Austen at least have mentioned one battle or general by name? Why is there not a word about the rapidly evolving mercantile class and the new democratization of Britain? What about changes in political structure, in the power and persuasion of the Church, in the areas of science and medicine? These questions are often challengingly presented, as though novels are compilations of “current events” and Jane Austen a frivolous, countrified person in intellectual drag, impervious to the noises of the historical universe in which she was placed.
In fact, Jane Austen covers all these matters, if not with the directness and particularity our Napoléon man might have liked.
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