Jane Austen wrote exclusively about people in drawing rooms. Knowing what there is to know about the way she lived, it is perfectly fitting that she should have done so. She does so with great authority and great art. But some critics of Austen have, for 200 years, used the limitations that her life imposed on her writing against her. Herman Melville served in the U.S. Navy, jumped ship in Tahiti, and later manned whaling ships. Most of his novels, including his most famous, Moby-Dick, are drawn from that - very specialized - experience. No critic is his right mind would think of claiming that Melville's experience, just about as exclusively male as you could get in his lifetime, limited him as a novelist.
Virginia Woolf, who wrote novels to stand proudly beside Austen's, was perhaps more acutely self-conscious of being a woman writer than any of her predecessors, illustrious or otherwise. In October 1928, when asked to address students at Girton, the women's college at Oxford, she boldly told the students that before they can even consider taking up writing as a profession, they will need "money and a room of her own." One of the most significant events in Woolf's life, a life rich with significance, took place in 1918 when an aunt (whom she identifies as "Mary Beton" in A Room of One's Own) died and bequeathed her £500 a year. The money set her free, in ways that surprised her and that took her some time to properly grasp.
It took Austen seventeen years to complete Pride and Prejudice. The announced subject of Virginia Woolf's address at Girton was "Women & Literature," and she confronted the problems experienced by the Big Four (Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot):
I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room—so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—"women never have an half hour… that they can call their own"—she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. 'How she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir, 'is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.
Knowing all this about the conditions in which Pride and Prejudice was written, some critics continue to take exception with Austen's subject, which is nothing more or less than the daily lives of "middle class" women, imposed from without by sexual and social circumstance. Stanley Kauffmann, in his reviews of the (mediocre) films made from Austen's novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice, felt duty bound to bring it up: "But the story! Jane, Jane, the story that you worked on for seventeen years! It was most pithily criticized by Emerson in his journals. He disliked Austen's novels for several reasons, but what bothered him most was their dominant theme: 'The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice, is marriageableness; all that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?' Critics innumerable have either scanted the matter that disturbed Emerson or, allowing it, have rhapsodized about Austen's prose and her perceptions of character.(1) ...Laud Austen's structure as it deserves, her acuteness about character, her wit; still, ultimately this is a story of young women whose sole serious occupation is finding agreeable husbands with money. Was Austen subtly castigating a society that so narrowed a woman's existence? In the late twentieth century we have to hope so: because without believing it, these novels seem pathetic, enraging and just a touch disgusting."(2)
I don't quite understand what is being criticized here. Austen was simply telling us about the lives of the people she knew, living in the world as they found it. How is Austen to blame for telling the truth? Virginia Woolf cuts through to the proper lesson that we should take away with us on reading Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot:
One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. 'I wish it to be understood', she wrote, 'that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation'; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith or whoever it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the social convention, and be 'cut off from what is called the world'. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady 'cut off from what is called the world', however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.
What matters is the individual writer's ability to observe and to transform his or her observable world into ageless art.
(1) "Family Troubles," The New Republic, December 12, 2005.
(2) "Scotland Now, England Then," The New Republic, August 19, 1996.
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