Mad about the girl

Since Jane Austen died 200 years ago, more nonsense has been said about her than any other writer. By Frances Wilson

Jane Austen was 42 and at the height of her powers when she died 200 years ago, on July 18 1817, shortly before the publication of her sixth novel, Persuasion. Because her voice was so mature and her work so seemingly complete, we forget that she lived only half a life.

Had she lasted as long as her sister, Cassandra, or her brother Francis, who died aged 91, there would doubtless be six further novels in which six further heroines try to hook a husband with a big house, and she might even have been famous in her time. It took Austen a century to be admitted to the top rank of English writers, and then no time at all for her subtle and knowing novels to be drained of their satire and repackaged as chick lit and romcoms.

The transformation began in 1869 when Cassandra’s surly portrait of her sister, lips pressed together, a mean expression on a pinched face, was airbrushed for the pages of the memoir of his aunt by James Edward Austen-Leigh. From looking like a novelist who wrote with a scalpel, Austen became what a reviewer for The Spectator described as an image of “refinement, playfulness, and alertness, rather than depth of intellect”.

More nonsense has been written about Jane Austen than any other writer. As E M Forster put it, “I am a Jane Austenite, and, therefore, slightly imbecile about Jane Austen.” For her earliest admirers – most of them male – her art lay not in her devastating delineation of character, her control of tone, her grasp of the antennae of the English class system, or the way in which her sentences, tufted and feathered like arrows, went straight to the mark, but in her absence of depth.

George Henry Lewes, the common law husband of George Eliot, praised Austen for her lack of “poetry” and “sentiment”. It is to her credit, Lewes believed, that she “doesn’t touch those profounder and more impassioned chords which vibrate to the heart’s core”. She “never ascends to its grand or heroic movements, nor descends to its deeper throes or agonies.”

Forty years later, in 1890, an Austen biographer agreed that “there is no hidden meaning in her; no philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to bring to light; nothing calling in any way for elaborate interpretation”.

Jane Austen’s reputation is built on a series of negatives: she is not a bluestocking, not a philosopher, not a feminist; she knows nothing of married life, she is unworldly, unpolitical, uninvolved in current events. Austen asks nothing of the reader. When he read Austen, said Forster, he wore a “fatuous expression” which would look “ill if set on the face, say, of a Stevensonian. But Jane Austen is so different. One’s favourite author! One reads and rereads, the mouth open and the mind closed.”

The mind closed: that says it all. Because Austen was not a real novelist, like Robert Louis Stevenson, there is no need to subject her to critical opinion. Austen is what we English love best: an amateur. We know this because we have been given, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, a vivid picture of her study. Instead of sweating over an ink blotched manuscript, screwed up sheets of paper falling at her feet, Austen is pictured fiddling away in the drawing room on what she, ironically of course, called her “little piece of ivory”.

She minimised her own achievement (her subject was, she said, “three or four families in a country village”) because that’s what women do, and her male admirers were more than happy to concur. Austen was, as Henry James put it, not a novelist in the sense that he was a novelist, but instead “a brown thrush who tells their story from the garden bough”.

How could The Master, of all people, say something this silly? But then, as Emma Woodhouse observed when Frank Churchill went to London to have his hair cut: “Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”

Sensible people, myself included, are forever saying silly things about Austen, which is ironic because silliness was the target of her most savage satire. “Men of sense,” said Mr Knightley, “do not want silly wives.” Nor do women of sense want silly husbands, but silly spouses can be found everywhere in Austen’s “three or four families”. Mr Collins, Sir Walter Elliot, Mrs Bennet, Lady Bertram: Austen presides over them all like a hanging judge. At the close of each book the black cap goes on and judgment is announced: emotional indulgence will be punished, so too will vanity, pomposity and verbal incontinence.

But no one is whipped more soundly than Marianne Dashwood, deprived of Willoughby and yoked to a middle-aged melancholic for whom she has felt nothing from the start of Sense and Sensibility to the finish. Because she wanted a life of poetry, Marianne is sentenced to the most prosaic future of all: “patroness of a village”.

It is only now, 30 years after gasping with horror at the final page of Sense and Sensibility, that I admire Austen for her cynicism about sexual desire. A woman’s life, she believes, is not the stuff of three-decker romances; we are worth more than the sum of our emotions. Desire is dangerous; once unleashed, it will undo us all. She’s right, of course. And patroness of a village is nothing to be scoffed at: it’s as near as dammit a political career.

I’ve had plenty of quarrels with Jane Austen – because reading should be a quarrel with writing. She metes out the most appalling punishments for the crime of flirtation: Mary Crawford, who would be the heroine in any other novel, is exiled from Mansfield Park, and Maria Bertram suffers the ignominy of a divorce followed by life with Aunt Norris; in Sense and Sensibility , Willoughby’s marriage is purgatory.

I once moaned in an article about Austen’s portrait (even more airbrushed) gracing the new £5 note. A glance at the online comments page suggested that I had defaced a national monument or declared war on civilised values. I only realised I had crossed a line

E M Forster said he read Jane Austen with ‘mouth open and mind closed’