Although I have read all of Jane Austen's novels, I knew few things about her life (which is not so surprising, because there are few elements in our possession), and what I knew was mainly inexact and prejudiced.

Confronted with the scarcity of information (information must always seem scarce when there is a whole life to render justice to), the author of a biography has two choices: either to write a biographical novel and fill the gaps, extrapolate and probably draw from his/her own experience as a writer (David Lodge did this and it resulted in the delightful Author, Author about Henri James), or to remain careful not to extrapolate, and to make us aware of the few facts known, with objectivity and honesty. Carol Shields chose the second solution with a very, very satisfying result.

One of the misconceptions I had about Austen's life, was that, knowing she didn't marry, didn't travel much and see much of the world, I therefore assumed she led a quite secluded life, a life of isolation. I was surprised to learn that in fact, she was a very sociable person, depending on relationships to thrive, that she had an important network of family and relations, and that, contrary to what I thought, she had rarely the isolation which I thought desirable for the writer. More shockingly, she didn't have what Virginia Woolf thinks necessary in order to write: a room of her own. For all her life, Austen shared a bedroom with her only sister (she had six brothers), and composed in the family sitting-room, where everybody could interrupt any time. She had "no study of her own, no cosy refuge arranged for her quiet convenience".

The second misconception I had about Jane Austen, is that I apprehended her with twenty-first century eyes: I know, of course (this is basic knowledge for the Austen reader), that all her novels are centered around marriage and the necessity to balance two apparently opposite preoccupations: secure one's material position in life and make a marriage of love. What I didn't suspect, though, is how Jane Austen herself felt concerned by these preoccupations. I had thought naively that she had made the choice to remain a spinster in order to be a writer, that she wanted to avoid becoming a wife and a mother in order to be an artist. I didn't know that she was, at one point of her life, before she resigned herself to spinsterhood, a "husband-hunting butterfly", and that Pride and Prejudice was inspired in part by a love interest who deserted her instead of proposing because his family intervened and reminded him that he couldn't marry into a penniless family. Pride and Prejudice is my favorite Austen's novel, because of its sparkling dialogues, its humor and its light tone, but from now on I will read it with a new sense of poignancy, remembering that P&P's happy ending is the ending Jane Austen never had. Also, Persuasion, which is about second chances in love, is the second chance Jane herself never had. I just watched the movie Angel, based on a novel written in 1957 by author Elizabeth Taylor, which talks about a romance writer rewriting her own life when reality did not meet her expectations, and I couldn't help recalling the facts I had just learned about Jane Austen when watching this movie...

What we also don't necessarily keep in mind when reading Jane Austen, and which renders us blind to at least to part of her genius, is the pioneer she was in the novel genre. Writing a novel, is after all, for today's author, indulging in a genre that is very well established. The challenge for today's author is to innovate, to subvert, to bring something new. As hard as this is, I think it is probably nothing compared to the difficulty of participating in the making of a new genre. As Shields says " the novel as a genre was in its infancy", everything was to be defined, to be written. And Austen, instinctively, with her few experiences (she wrote her first version of P&P and S&S between 19 and 22) and indiscriminate reading (she apparently read fluff as well as good literature) knew exactly what to write about and how to write. She innovated, with her unique voice and original subjects, she created something entirely new and never read before...

I wanted to read Austen's biography for two reasons: because it is about Jane Austen, an author that I love reading (before watching the recently released movie about her love life I wanted to know how much was romanced and how much was true), and also because Carol Shields wrote it. Shields is an author I discovered pretty recently and I delight in her novels, the way I delight in a David Lodge's academic novel. Having read Mary Swann recently, I was amazed that Shields wrote it before Jane Austen's biography, because there are some similarities about the lack of information concerning real Austen and fictitious Swann. Swann is the story of a woman poet whose life puzzles specialists, since the few elements known about her life fail to explain her poetic genius. Shields raises a lot of question about how it is possible for a biographer not to betray an author, not to add inventions to fill the gaps, or not to extrapolate. I suspected that she would be a very good, scrupulous biographer, and I was right. As a biographer, she does honor to her subject...

This biography of Jane Austen did not compel me to read the material I haven't read yet (the novella Lady Susan, about which Shields is not very enthusiastic, and two unfinished novels: The Watsons and Sanditon), but I will certainly be rereading a couple of her novels, like Persuasion, with a new light given by what I know of the author's life, and Emma, now viewing the main character through Shield's interesting input...

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© Discussing Books, 12/06/2007