A silhouette has been found in recent years that seemed to connect, along an ambiguous pathway, with a fine-featured and “pretty” Jane Austen. The hopeful excitement this image stirred was extraordinary, indicating the affection in which Austen is held; readers, and perhaps scholars too, appeared eager to believe that she was, after all, favorably disposed, since that would mean she had more power over her choices, and that Cassandra, as portraitist, was unreliable or even vindictive as a sisterly witness, as many have suspected. Unfortunately, the identity of the silhouette has remained unproven.

Jane Austen is recognized for her moral sensibility, and for what is assumed to be her rare ability to expand insignificant material, turning the doings of a few village families into wide-screen drama. Critical commentary has often served her poorly, rarely posing the question of whether she knew what she was doing. Her solid writerly advice to her scribbling nieces and nephew should convince us absolutely that she did. “You are now collecting your People delightfully,” she wrote her niece Anna, “getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” She also warned Anna about such novelistic clichés as “vortex of Dissipation.” To her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, another hopeful writer, she referred to her own writing as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”

She is being self-deprecating here; her trust in the microcosmic world is securely placed. It is also a brave and original view. Out of her young, questioning self came the grave certainty that the family was the source of art, just as every novel is in a sense about the fate of a child. It might be argued that all literature is ultimately about family, the creation of structures—drama, poetry, fiction—that reflect our immediate and randomly assigned circle of others, what families do to us and how they can be reimagined or transcended.

She is also—and the vagueness of this perception is baffling—widely believed to be someone possessed of a small soul marked by a profound psychic wound. This is an idea that has become enameled and precious and ready for museum sanctity. The defensive tone of her letters and the cheerful mockery that characterizes her unsentimental novels support this belief to a point, but we can only guess at the degree of her alienation or its cause. It might amount to little more than simple contagion. She lived, after all, in an age of satire, and as near as we know, she was the child of unsentimental parents.

Scholars can’t even agree on what to call her. This is a messy problem and not a new one in the field of biography. The biographer and scholar John Halperin calls her, mostly, “the novelist,” which is terrifyingly respectful but also reductive, and just slightly obsequious. “Jane” itself feels too familiar an address to apply to the adult writer, although it is found everywhere in the more recent biographies. Jane is also what Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh resorts to on occasion in his famous memoir written long after his aunt’s death, and the reader can feel the struggle this very conservative nineteenth-century male is suffering while trying to find a proper form of address for his aunt Jane. Ms. Austen is unthinkable. Miss Austen? No! (Cassandra as the older sister claims that title.) Austen on its own possesses an indelicacy; we know, somehow, that she would have been offended. Like a literary butler, the biographer is obliged to weigh the options and employ the unsatisfactory Jane or else repeat the whole name again and again—Jane Austen—or rely on the clumsiness of treasonous pronouns.

Another problem a biographer of Jane Austen faces is how to proceed without sounding like Jane Austen. The cadence is catching, and so is the distancing “one” voice, as in “one thinks,” “one observes.” Her equivocations, so sprawling, thoughtful, and “correct,” conflict with what we like to think of as a stern critical eye. Her reflectiveness, that calm, deliberate voice, hums in the background, deflecting analysis and telling us to disappear, please, so that the novel can get underway. Biography zaps the enchantment of the writing itself by throwing a profile of theory against a text—that crisp and useful word—that had no immediate acquaintance with literary theory. This is, in the end, what matters: the novels themselves, and not the day-to-day life of the author, the cups of tea she sipped with her neighbors, the cream cakes she bought at a bakery. Even her extraordinarily revealing letters must be separated—somehow—from the works of fiction that have survived. The novelist George Gissing wrote that “the only good biographies are to be found in novels.” He was speaking about the genuine arc of a human life, that it can perhaps be presented more authentically in fiction than in the genre of biography. Biography is subject to warps and gaps and gasps of admiration or condemnation, but fiction respects the human trajectory.

Traditionally Jane Austen’s biographers have nailed together the established facts of her life—her birth, her travels, her enthusiasms, her death—and clothed this rickety skeleton with speculation gleaned from the novels, an exercise akin to ransacking an author’s bureau drawers and drawing conclusions from piles of neatly folded handkerchiefs or worn gloves. In so doing, the assumption is made that fiction flows directly from a novelist’s experience rather than from her imagination. The series of troubled families in the Austen novels, for instance, has been seen as a reflection of Jane Austen’s own presumably disordered domestic space.