JANE AUSTEN: HER LIFE
Park Honan
New York: St. Martin's Press
$24.95
A choice, a change of heart, a crisis: A broken engagement was almost always a calamity and an insult to fiancés and their families in early nineteenth-century English society. Even as late as 1879, as George Meredith's The Egoist indicates, that act could still stir up a scandal. An ideal subject for a Jane Austen novel, one would assume: In fact, just such a dilemma was the turning point in her own.
Growing up in Georgian England as the proper, pretty daughter of a well-connected country parson, Jane Austen did not imagine she would become a famous writer. Nor did she expect to be a spinster, despite her lack of fortune and her excess of wit. A contemporary described her as "the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly" she ever remembered, and while that recollection has been indignantly impugned, other, better evidence confirms that Austen was slim, lively, a fine dancer, and an accomplished flirt. At age twenty, in 1795, Jane experienced her first real romance, brief and wounding, with a young Irish law student. He was in Hampshire visiting his wealthy aunt who, despite her real affection for her sprightly young neighbor, abruptly put him on the coach to London to pursue a more profitable match. Which of course he did, as this was still the mercenary, sensible eighteenth century, when affection and affluence were regarded as essential to a "beau mariage." Unlike her heroine in Persuasion, Jane never saw her first lover again.
Six years later, at the seashore with her parents and sister, Cassandra, Jane was wooed by a handsome young clergyman who won her love, sister's praise, and her parents' approval, but who unexpectedly died that same summer. The next year, she gratefully left Bath--where the family had recently moved on her fathers' retirement but which she hated--for what was intended to be a long visit with former neighbors near Steventon, in Hampshire, where she had spent her first twenty-five years. The house party consisted of Jane, her sister, the kind old squire, his two amiable daughters, and his 21-year-old heir, Harris Wither. Harris was awkward, gangling, quick-tempered, and stuttering; to the young lady guests he must have seemed to be a typically bratty younger brother, given to teasing his sisters and their friends and to being treated with good-humored indulgence. But only days later, he asked the astonished Jane to marry him. With Cassandra's encouragement, she accepted him that same evening.
No one could have had better reasons, and reason was what mattered. Although Romanticism was on the horizon, Jane Austen was a product of the eighteenth century and, as another biographer, David Cecil, remarks, "spiritually speaking, she stayed there." In that world, marriage was a woman's destiny and duty, and at twenty-seven Jane would have calculated that her chances were fast fading. She probably then shared the view of Marianne in Sense and Sensibility (which she would later mock in Persuasion) that
A woman of seven-and-twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again; and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a
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