Her novels, each of them, can be seen as wide-ranging glances—that “g” word again, with its tune of deliberation—across the material of the world she inhabited, and that material includes an implied commentary on the political, economic, and social forces of her day. These glances, like ubiquitous sunlight, sweep and suggest, excoriate and question. The soldiers who distract the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice are posted nearby in case of an invasion from France—why else would they be there?—and their presence threatens the stability of local society, a sociological certainty that was fully comprehended by the author of six novels written over a stretch of unsettled time, each of them offering its historical commentary.

By indirection, by assumption, by reading what is implicit, we can find behind Austen’s novels a steady, intelligent witness to a world that was rapidly reinventing itself. Every Austen conversation, every chance encounter on a muddy road, every evening of cards before the fire, every bold, disruptive militiaman is backed by historical implication. For even the most casual reader, the period of Austen’s life, 1775-1817, becomes visible through her trenchant, knowing glance. That glance may be hard-edged or soft, part of a novel’s texture or backdrop, or it may constitute the raw energy of propulsion. It is never accidental. For the biographer, one such “glance” is multiplied a thousand times. Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.

1

TODAY JANE AUSTEN belongs to the nearly unreachable past. She kept no diary that we know of. There is no voice recording such as we possess of Virginia Woolf, and no photograph like the one that George Eliot denied she had had taken—but which remains in the records, proclaiming her an indisputably unhandsome woman.

Austen’s intractable silences throw long shadows on her apparent chattiness. In part, the opacity of her life may rest on the degree to which it was fused with that of her sister Cassandra, providing a mask or at the very least a subsuming presence. Each sister’s life invaded the other, canceling out parts of the knowable self. (Cassandra once famously described her sister as “the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.”) The accidental adjacency of these two sisters reaches out and shapes each of their lives, and at the same time informs the novels of the younger sister and asks persistent questions about the nature of the creative act. How does art emerge? How does art come from common clay, in this case a vicar’s self-educated daughter, all but buried in rural Hampshire? Who was she really? And who exactly is her work designed to please? One person? Two or three? Or an immense, wide, and unknown audience that buzzes with an altered frequency through changing generations, its impact subtly augmented in the light of newly evolved tastes and values?

One hundred sixty Austen letters survive, but none written earlier than her twentieth year. Many other letters were destroyed by Cassandra after Jane Austen died, and we can surmise with some certainty that the jettisoned letters were the most revealing and riveting. Somehow we never hear quite enough of Jane Austen’s off-guard voice. Her insistent irony blunts rather than sharpens her tone. Descriptions of herself are protective when they are not disarming, and her sketches of others are frequently arch or else cruel. She writes quickly so that the text will mimic the sound of her own voice, a letter-writing technique that was encouraged in her time, and so the scattered and somewhat breathless nature of her correspondence is not the result of carelessness but of deliberation.

Of the eight Austen children, there were only two who were not honored by portraits: Jane and her handicapped brother, George. Cassandra produced the two informal sketches we have of Jane Austen. One is a rather unattractive back view—round-shouldered, dumpy—and the other shows a woman whose curved cheeks and small straight mouth give a slightly absent, querulous air of sad reasonableness. She is looking sideways in this portrait, perhaps at that lack of event that was said to characterize her life. Her niece Anna, who adored her, wrote admiringly about Aunt Jane’s various features, saying: “One hardly understands how with all these advantages she could yet fail of being a decidedly handsome woman.” Meaning, clearly, that she was not a beauty, though mercifully she had escaped the smallpox that disfigured so many of her contemporaries. A family friend spoke of the childlike expression in her face, so “lively and full of humour.” Various accounts refer to the slightness of her figure, and several mention the liveliness of her movements, her quickness of step. Was she dark or fair? There is wide variation even on this topic by near and distant witnesses, but a lock owned by a descendant of Jane Austen confirms that she had curly dark-brown hair mixed with a few strands of gray. A neighbor, the renowned writer Mary Russell Mitford, rather maliciously compared her to a poker, “perpendicular, precise, taciturn.”

Jane Austen’s appearance is of interest to the reader partly because it satisfies a curiosity we all feel, but chiefly because it is known that, at the time, exceptional beauty occasionally gave an advantage to women of little means, which is exactly what Jane Austen was. Beauty had value, as it always has: Seductive powers were informally factored into the dowry arrangement. Intelligence, on the other hand, was more likely to present a negative weight. Intelligent women could not always be kept under control, and control was a husband’s obligation.

A writer of “marriage novels,” Austen did not marry, and it must be wondered to what extent her looks, handsome or unhandsome, played a part in that destiny.