Customer Reviews

Jane Austen: A Life

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As someone who studied Jane Austen at university and read many of the "not-a-life-of-incident" accounts of her time, Claire Tomalin's biography proved even more compelling than I had expected. For the casual (ie non-academic) reader, this work presents the ideal combination of exhaustive research and a writer who clearly delights in her subject. Although I find myself miles away from my Jane Austen collection, Tomalin has left me longing to read again all Austen's works - including all the juvenalia and 'unfinisheds' that I somehow never quite found time for. Undoubtedly Austen fans will have rushed or will be rushing to read this book. However, I would urge anyone who has never seen the appeal in her works to give this a try, (just avoid Tomalin's excellent synopses of the novels). A call goes out, especially, to all those men out there - I know they exist, I'm married to one - who think Austen is "just for women". Read it and discover one of the greatest writers of all time.

I find it impossible to trust any would-be interpreter of Jane Austen who, in her analysis of Pride & Prejudice, writes the line: "Her [Mrs. Bennet's] restored faith that Lydia and Wickham will turn out very well is wonderfully brought to pass". This is easily my least favorite among the seven or so biographies that I have read; I was particularly disappointed after marvelous beginning that Tomalin made in describing Jane's birth and earliest life. I made myself read it a second time in order to be fair.

I am left with the feeling that while Tomalin genuinely admires Jane Austen, she has considerably more pity for her life than sympathy for her point of view. Ms. Tomalin places a great emphasis on the importance of passion and enthusiasm that I doubt Austen so uncritically shared. Indeed, Ms. Tomalin has to interchange JA's heroes and villains in order to come up with interpretations of the book that please her, and in several cases, insist that JA got things wrong in her epilogues. This leads to some odd juxtapositions that fit right in with Tomalin's somewhat overwrought thinking. Tomalin cannot accept that Marianne could move on and love Colonel Brandon, but she is also upset that Cassandra Austen spent the rest of her life mourning her dead fiance. Isn't perpetual mourning for a lost love what Tomalin would have Marianne doing, given that Willoughby married someone else? Consistently inconsistent, Tomalin lambastes Fanny Price for declining to marry someone that she doesn't love (or like or trust), at least while her true love remains available. Claudia Johnson, in her book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, has some acerbic and apropos remarks about the tradition of women remaining true to their first love, generally by dying, as Marianne almost did.

Tomalin is apparently one of those who feel that it is not enough of an achievement for Austen to be one of the very few authors who, after two hundred years, remain both critical and popular successes. No, she wants to convert JA to a heroine suitable for the late 20th century. This is particularly ironic since she faults the Victorians for their attempts to remake JA in their own image. She attempts, failing dismally in my case, to convince us that JA had an eventful life. She turns to posthumous psychoanalysis for this, interpreting eventful as traumatic and finding psychic wounds from the Austens' childrearing techniques. The book rapidly takes on a whiny quality that I found tedious and annoying.

I comment on this being 52, having been born in 1953. As such, I can remember when "experts had proven" that the child is born a blank slate through the present day when parents are held to have little effect on their children's psychological development except for the responsibility to keep them alive and healthy. I am also well aware that "expert" child-rearing advice has changed over the centuries, some eras recommend techniques that in other eras were considered certain to produce psychopaths. (readers might want to read Sarah Hrdy's Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species or Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature). While my own tastes in childrearing certainly would align more with Tomalin's, I find it foolish and irritating for her to excoriate Mrs. Austen because the Austen children were raised according to the accepted pattern of their day. (And for all that Tomalin may bring in feminist interpretation, she is clearly engaging in mother-blaming here: all decisions that she doesn't like are charged to Mrs. Austen.) While her arguments of how this affected JA may seem logical, does it make sense when considering that so many other people of the time shared similar experiences? The reader may want to read Elizabeth Jenkin's arguments in her 1938 book, Jane Austen: A Biography, that Jane Austen was in fact writing through most of her "years of silence", as well as David Nokes arguments in his 1997 biography, Jane Austen: A Life, that Jane was having too good a time to write as much, before accepting Tomalin's explanation of Jane as falling into a severe depression after a repetition of childhood trauma.

I think in her efforts to make JA into a martyr, Tomalin slights her as a social critic. She also fails to fully appreciate the problems of dependent daughters in interlocked families, the tension between wanting and needing family unity, and the desire for personal autonomy. I have no doubt that JA keenly felt and resented the disadvantages imposed upon her as a younger unmarried daughter, but this is not a unique problem imposed by her particular family. The conventions of the time meant that Jane and Cassandra really were financial drains on their family: their society had failed to make any accomodation to the realities of making women financially dependent but expecting companiate marriages. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the popularity of JA derives from her attention to this double-bind that so many of her female readers shared.

Tomalin sees the effect only on Jane, not on her other family members. I can sympathize with JA's distress at leaving Steventon, but surely her 72-year old father was entitled to retire? Her parents spent decades in Hampshire whether they liked it or not because that is where Rev. George Austen's living was - didn't they have as much right to live somewhere else for a change as Jane had stay where she was? Tomalin faults James for not offering his sisters a home independent of his mother; I presume that Jane could have asserted her wishes on the basis of his offer to house all three women, but, independent of Jane's dislike for James' wife Mary, how practical would that have been? If Jane has lived with James, would Cassandra have been with her or with their mother? At that time, given their resources, it may have been impossible for Mrs. Austen and her daughters to independently pursue the course that each preferred. Several solutions suggest themselves, but they all involve Mrs. Austen living as a dependent relation or the brothers Austen coming up with a lot more money.

Tomalin also by this makes JA something of a hothouse flower. Tomalin makes a point of mentioning servants, but in a somewhat contradictory fashion is arguing that Jane's family should have understood her genius and supported her in the leisured style to which she was somewhat, and would have like to have been even more accustomed. I would have liked that myself. How many people have the luxury of choosing quiet or excitement and work or leisure just as they choose? If JA had lived today, would she have been able to write if she had also been required to earn her own living?

Tomalin has done some wonderful research on peripheral matters such as Austen's neighbors that anyone who is very interested in Austen or her period should find very interesting. Indeed, has this been written as a book on the associates of the Austens, I would probably have given it 5-stars as long as Tomalin left out her psychologizing. This includes much more about Jane's cousin and sister-in-law Eliza Hancock than is warranted by her importance in the author's life. It is very interesting, and I am happy to read it, but it does remain that the real biographical information on JA herself is somewhat scanty compared to other biographies of this length. I would not recommend this as either a first or only biography. My own recommendations for biographies so far are Carol Shields (short), Jane Austen (Penguin Lives); Valerie Grosvenor Myers' Jane Austen, Obstinate Heart: A Biography (moderate length, seriously flawed by a lack of notes); and John Halperin's The Life of Jane Austen (long). Elizabeth Jenkins' Jane Austen: A Biography is considered a classic biography, but it can be difficult to get and doesn't strike me as worth the trouble given the other material now available.

The notes are beautifully done so that it is easy to match the note with the citation in the text. There are also useful family trees and a map of the Hampshire neighborhood of the Austens. I cannot begin to guess what the logic for arranging the bibliography was.

Tomalin wrote this book in part as a response to those (like Austen's brother and cousin) who noted the great novelist's life was one of little incident. Despite her noble intentions, Tomalin doesn't prove anything to the contrary--Austen's life was pretty routine, and we have so few documents pertaining to the particulars of it (since her sister and niece burned so many of her letters) that we have yet to find a biographer who can shed great light on her inestimable genius.

Tomalin, however, gives us a full and beautifully detailed analysis of what we CAN learn about Austen's life from the documents which are still extant. Best of all, she enriches this information by presenting rich, gossipy details about the many fascinating people whom Austen knew and loved. The somewhat nouveau riche society (pretending to be landed gentry) of late eighteenth-century makes for reading almsot as much fun as Austen's own books, and Tomalin writes with great verve. This is a marvelous read.

This book is well researched, but draws some very silly assumptions, beginning with the almost Freudian obsession with her being placed with a wet nurse. There are some very good insights but most of the commentary (which is not always easy to differentiate from the fact) is unnecessary (and questionable) opinion. My biggest complaints are these: (1) the book should be entitled Eliza de Feuillide: A life, as JA is sometimes a minor character or not mentioned at all for pages at a time. Eliza is interesting, but not what I bought the book for. (2) Her mentions of Fanny Price are all very politically correct for the late 20th century but I doubt they have anything at all to do with the way JA saw her. She says she is "intolerant of sinners, whom she is ready to cast aside, just as Mr. Collins recommends that the Bennets should cast aside the sinful Lydia and Wickham. Austen, the novelist, was interested in the way religion could be invoked in different causes and practiced in different styles..." This entire statement IMHO makes no sense. Mr. Collins did recommend that the Wickhams be "cast aside" and is roundly mocked for his intolerance by Austen. FP on the other hand is not casting aside a sinner, she is chosing not to ally herself in the most intimate way with one whom she has no reason to trust. That is not intolerance. That is prudence. If the author looked more objectively at the issues, I think she would see a huge difference. I believe that the last sentence in the above quote should read "Tomalin, the novelist, is interested in the way religion could be invoked in different causes and practiced in different styles..."

I have often wondered what Jane's life was *really* like. Having read every one of her books and seen most of the movies, I often wondered if she was like any of her heroines. In reading this book, I began to understand her situation more. A woman who was reliant on her brothers for a place to live, and money to spend, but who exercised a spirit of independence in her written word.

Honestly, while I can see why Cass mutilated Jane's letters after her death, I think that it is truly a shame because we will never know what she was thinking during that period of her life where she wasn't writing at all, or at any of the other difficult times of her life.

Tomalin's book was well researched and brought me into Jane's life as no other book has done. I thought it was interesting to watch Jane's growth as a writer. I was left with the thought that Jane imbued her heroines with a part of herself. Whether it is Lizzie's intelligence, or Anne Elliot's situation in life, Jane's life was full of interesting events and people. Tomalin's book allowed Jane to shine. A must read.

Jane Austen's stocks rise higher and higher as the years go by. Several of her novels continue to feature in bestseller lists, film and TV adaptations of them abound, and biographies appear regularly. This masterly biography, by Claire Tomalin, is the seventh Jane Austen biography I have read in the past twenty years.

Claire Tomalin examines her elusive subject from very possible perspective. The Austen genealogy is probed, every known neighbor and witness and every witness's evidence is weighed and balanced, Jane Austen's writings are examined and assessed, and the situations of her brothers' living descendants are sometimes mentioned. Publishing and republishing histories are given, a family tree is included, and the many illustrations are given punchy captions. Gracing (or disfiguring) the cover is the only known pictorial representation of Jane Austen, an unfinished sketch done by her sister Cassandra, a sketch that was not discovered until long after Jane and Cassandra had died and which a niece said was "hideously unlike" her aunt.

Don't assume from all this that the book is merely an exhaustive effort of plodding detection. Sensitive and intelligent guesswork is here. Brilliant deductions are made. What is known, for example is that the Austen daughters and their parents had no permanent home during the "unproductive" decade when Jane was in her 20s and early 30s. What is also known is that Jane Austen had drafted three of her novels before this, as well as the novella "Lady Susan". The fact that Claire Tomalin deduces from this is that Jane Austen must have protected and cared for her manuscripts like a mother with newborn babies. Carriers would have been unreliable, cases of paper could break and spill, and a penniless young woman could hardly command premium quality cartage.

Other known facts are sometimes given a creative spin. You will read an especially creative and imaginative account of Jane Austen receiving, accepting and then rejecting a proposal of marriage from Harris Biggs.

While all this is very satisfying, the effect of this substantial biography is to leave me still unable to perfectly "place" Jane Austen, an effect that will probably prompt me to read a further seven biographies of her.

Enjoyable book, for any lover of Jane Austen. The extent to which lovers of Jane Austen tend to empathise with her as a person has always amazed me, and Claire Tomalin is no exception. Which is why her book appeals.

Here, I wish to draw attention to the fact that the analyses of the novels shows occassional signs of a rather unsubtle reading of Jane Austen. To take one specific example, regarding Mansfield Park, which appears to be her favourite among the novels, Ms Tomalin makes the remarkable statement that the characters of Maria and Julia Bertram are indistinguishable. But the insight and the exquisite touch with which the characters of Maria and Julia are delineated, is in fact one of the amazing things in Mansfield Park.

The character of Julia comes through in this kind of thing: She asks Mr. Crawford, regarding his interest in renovating, "You are fond of the kind of thing?" Other places too, she is shown trying to attract his attention (maybe ingratiate herself), by taking an interest in what interests him. Julia, in fact, courts other people. Maria would never do this. She stands proud, and it is the others, including Mr. Crawford, who court her. Something that characterizes Maria is a tendency to rather pretentious, generalized statements like that about some of our best plays being devoid of much scenery, and about good horsemanship having a great deal to do with the mind. The ability to make such statements comes out of her confidence that when she speaks, there will be others to listen. Julia, on the other hand, the younger sister, and the less brilliant one, does not have this confidence.

Claire Tomalin fails to appreciate that the subtlety with which Jane Austen wrote can never be overestimated. She doesn't offer any deep analysis of Jane Austen, the woman. What she does do is to suggest the connections between Jane Austen's social circumstances at different times, her state of mind, and her art. Maybe, something of the "Room of One's Own" theme?

All said and done, this is a fine book, well worth a read.

I was pleasantly surprised to have enjoyed this biography so much. Yes, I am a fan of Austen's work, but Claire Tomalin writes from a totally unbiased perspective and, amazingly, is able to put together a clear picture of Austen in spite of an unfortunate lack of written record from Austen herself. While many may find her life boring and uneventful, the relationships Austen had with her family and friends were genuine and admirable and help us learn more about her as a person. We are able to see how those relationships built upon her own character and the inspiration for her writings.

This biography helped me gain a new perspective on the works I have read and made me eager to read the rest that I haven't. I would recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Austen, and it would make a great companion for any literary study.

I was 'reader' from Sydney below. I did lend it to my friends (and sat on the edge of my seat hoping they wouldn't be the kind who don't return your precious books!)

Anyway, I did read it again, and I love it just as much. I re-read Austen at various times, whenever I feel like 'hearing' that crisp, ironic dialogue and beautiful observations that somehow still seem fresh today.

Tomalin has achieved something magical in this volume. She has managed to make it feel as if I really know something about Jane, her society and surroundings.

When first introduced to Jane Austen in high school, she seemed remote, a woman of another time and place. What could she possibly have to say to a young woman from a distant land? Well, perhaps not much at 15....a bit more life experience would be a good thing. But maybe a good place to start would be this biography.

I was fed on the stereotype that Jane Austen was a sickly, sheltered girl and woman, one who had little experience of life outside the drawing room, a sort of consumptive, repressed being. Tomalin shows how far from the truth that portrait is. Jane knew about the ins and outs of the country ball from active participation. She could draw affectionatley hunmorous word pictures of some of her characters through experiencing them. She was quite well-travelled for a woman of her generation, own country, sure, but then only the most extraordinary women were off on the 'Grand Tour'. All these things are obvious in her books if you think about it - Miss Musgrove and friends - male and female- off on their jaunt to Lyme Regis, for example. Jane could write about love and engagement through experience. She did love, and was loved in return, but chose not to marry. Children (nieces and nephews) were a joy to her and she was actively involved in the upbringing of some of them. But never, ever, do we meet an anachronistic Jane. Tomalin does NOT try to shoe-horn her in to some modern day feminist iconography. What we are left with is a portrait of a thoroughly modern woman of HER times. A woman who lived a full life , on her own terms, but within the boundaries of the society of which she was part. That she managed to offer us, the modern reader, such a beautifully resonant portrait of her class and times, that stays fresh today, is a tribute to Austen. That Tomalin has brought that so vividly alive in introducing us to Jane Austen the woman is a tribute to Tomalin.

Claire Tomalin is a kindred spirit to Jane Austen - her appreciation of Austen's wit and humor comes through every line of this excellent work. She lucidly recreates the social norms and complex personal lives of Austen and her family (and with all the name-changing of brothers and uncles in order to receive inheritances, this is no small feat!). I loved how Tomalin draws parallels between events and places in Austen's life and her various works; she obviously has an intimate knowledge of literary theory. Yet Tomalin does not fall into the mistake of trying to render Austen's books autobiographical - she clearly states what Austen experienced and what was fiction. You practically weep at the destruction of all the correspondance (and Jane Austen was a prolific letter writer in her lifetime) by family members - so few letters survive to give us insight into this intriguing character. Thank goodness Tomalin is able to write such an excellent biography despite this lack of primary material.