discerning eyes. Heroines are always subjected to surveillance in nineteen-century fiction; here the heroine is invisible but voluble in her mind, as Lucy Snowe is in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.
Anne Elliot is a creature of thought and feeling, not what she seems to others. The same may be said of Jane Austen herself, whose life and writing often appear as one thing in the popular mind, yet turn out to be far more complex than convention allows when closely examined. There is the real Jane Austen, who left little in the way of biographical material (no diary has ever been found, and most of her letters were destroyed by their recipients or their heirs); and then there is the Jane Austen of the contemporary imagination. This latter version has colored the many films and television productions of her work, not to mention the societies and cultish fan enthusiasm, which constitute what the critic Margaret Doody calls “Aunt Jane-ism,” a phenomenon she defines as “imposed quaintness.”
It is easy to see why Austen’s novels have become a kind of cinematic fetish: Film adaptations selectively focus on the clear trajectory of the courtship plot, the fine detail, the enclosed, knowable, seemingly nonpolitical world in which everyone seems to know his place. In fact, for many the novels have come to stand for a nostalgia of pre-Industrial Revolution England, an idyll of country houses, gentrified manners, and clear moral standards, an Old World apart from the chaos of urban, tech nologized life and the struggle for modern capital. So solidified has this mythical vision become that there is now a popular series of mystery novels by Stephanie Barron that feature Jane Austen as the amateur detective, similar to Agatha Christie’s spinster figure Miss Marple, solving fictional mysteries with pert and ingenious wit in her quaint village.
Into this escapist vision of sentimental village days, the life of Jane Austen was molded to fit to perfection from the first biographical sketch of her. This was a short preface to the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by her brother Henry Austen, called “A Biographical Notice of the Author”; it emphasized her modesty, sweetness, and simple piety. He informs us: “Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.” Nor, according to Henry Austen, did his sister take her literary activity very seriously: “Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives [for writing].” For more than one hundred years after her death, the major biographies were in fact written by family members, who painted Austen as sweetly old-fashioned, genially mild and reserved, spirited but primly spinsterish. As a writer she was treated as a kind of modest, supertalented amateur, without the taint of unladylike ambition, someone who diffidently put aside or even hid her pages when anyone came in the room. (Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh insists on the much-quoted idea that Austen wrote on single sheets she could quickly hide, but in her biography Claire Tomalin argues that it is unlikely she could have done her extensive revisions one sheet at a time. In reality, the author had a handsome writing desk in the dressing room she shared with her sister, and regularly read work in progress aloud to her appreciative family.) In fact, critical interest in Austen grew to contemporary proportions only after the 1870 publication of A Memoir ofJane Austen, by Austen-Leigh (see “For Further Reading”), which reinforced the idea of the uncomplicated decency and pure gentle spirit of a “dear ‘Aunt Jane’ ” who lived in a simpler age, “before express trains, sewing machines and photograph books.”
At the turn of the century Henry James wrote about his distaste for the “pleasant twaddle ... [about] our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane,” poking fun at the idolatry of a fictitious nonthreat ening version of Jane Austen (James, “The Lesson of Balzac”). Yet James himself evaluated Austen as “instinctive and charming” rather than a deliberate craftsman, of “narrow unconscious perfection of form” whose chief failure is “want of moral illumination” in her heroines (letter of June 23, 1883; in James, Letters). In this estimation James merely echoes her nephew’s notion of Austen as a gentle, cheerful, prim, domestic woman whose writing was a kind of amateur activity and whose evident genius and durability was therefore a “mystery.”
Though real evidence for what Jane Austen was really like is slim, the publication in the twentieth century of