Literary A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh

[Bookpossum]

Thank you from me too fantasyfan. A very interesting article indeed.

To realise that she had so much ill health through her life makes her production of her marvellous books even more remarkable.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I enjoyed this month's biography selection and topic. I'm very grateful to fantasyfan for recommending the Oxford edition! After reading the main memoir by JEAL, I wanted to know much more about Jane. Therefore I really enjoyed reading the additional family writing that was also his source material. I didn't realize the background to why so little is known about Jane Austen. I also found the introduction to the Oxford edition very informative, especially with the details about how Victorian biographies were written compared to today's modern biographies which fill in the gap material with more psychological analysis. My first read through the intro I found it to be a bit rambling and plodding since I wasn't familiar with the subject matter. However I re-read the intro after I finished the book and thought it to be insightful and lucid once I had a better understanding of the material and family relationships.

Jane Austen is one of the few authors that I am inclined to reread. I am not as fond of Pride & Prejudice as most people, but I do enjoy her other works. I think this memoir will give me a new perspective the next time I read one of her novels. It's amazing how her works are so much admired and read 200 years later; the writing still seems so fresh and witty which I think is why it has such universal appeal even in the modern world. And, what an industry has been spawned from all the books and movies which reimagine her life or her characters' lives! I must confess to finding simple pleasure in reading Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen Mysteries or watching sappy movies like Austenland. A nonfiction book that I have been reading off and on is Jane Austen's England by Roy and Lesley Adkins.

Certainly I would like to read the Tomalin biography someday. I'd also like to read the book Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence which addresses her relationship with Tom Lefroy. I saw the movie it inspired several years ago.

I have been to Southampton many times and done a self-guided walking tour through Old Town where Jane lived. I was looking for more information on the places where she lived and stumbled upon this website. It's not the fanciest looking website, but it has good information and links to other websites.
http://www.seekingjaneausten.com/index.html

[AnotherCat]

I have now completed Tomalin's biography and enjoyed it - that said I like good biographies so it is a genre I am partial to and therefore biased. It is professionally written and lucid; also, given the source material problems Tomalin does not let her imagination run riot and try to flesh out the book with loose assumptions of little standing. She also makes it clear where sources are lacking. Even so she manages to produce a substantial book.

I had been interested in Sutherland's criticisms of Tomalin's observations regarding maternal bonding and Sutherland's general criticism of biographers, including Austin-Leigh, regarding the effect of the move from Steventon, etc. on Austen. I found that by my reading that Tomalin was not as forthright in that regard as Sutherland makes out and would suggest that judgement on the matter be left until after Tomalin's work has been read (and a little research on Sutherland's apparent propensity for sour grapes). I personally don't fully agree with all of Tomalin's proposals but I thought them fair enough, and worthy; and never sounding like a knowing all "school ma'am".

I was prompted by Fantasyfan's reference to Leavis's Jane Austen is one of the truly great writers... to have a count up of how many authors from Swift's time (for convenience taking his work as being the beginnings of the modern novel) through to mid 19th Century remain popular. While there were many competent authors during that period whose names remain familiar, it seems to me that there are very few whose works have lasted the distance to be popular works today as Austen's have.

Prior to the nomination of Austin-Leigh's book (which I only skimmed, reading Tomalin's work instead) I had not thought much about Austen's works or of reading them. I had read Emma long ago, so long ago that it may have been read as a set book, I just don't remember if it was or even anything about the story. I think I can put my thinking down to an incorrect assumption that they were "women's" rather than "men's" books, which assumption perhaps goes to prove that the current progressive view that all white males are sexist, racist, privileged (I wish ), bigoted rednecks is true ;-).

So I appreciated the nomination of the biography/memoire and am going to give at least one of Austen's novels a read.

[fantasyfan]

I have read all of the major novels several times as well as some of the "completions" to the fragments. So if anyone wants to explore these works further I'll pass on my opinions which, of course, are only that and not meant to be anything more than one person's thoughts and reactions to these wonderful books.

I personally feel that Persuasion is her masterpiece with Emma a close second. Persuasion in particular is a deeply moving portrait of a good woman in a corrupt world. It develops more powerfully than in any other of her books the conflict between Manners and Morals and the way these intertwine good and evil in human nature. It is the darkest of her works.

Emma is a study of self-deception as well as deception in general. It is beautifully structured with many moving moments. It illustrates the fragility of a woman's happiness and how that happiness depends on social conditions outside her control.

Of course Pride and Prejudice is a must-read. I don't think it is quite as good as the two I mentioned but in Charlotte Lucas it has one of the most interesting characters she ever created. Here we see the terrible dilemma faced by women of intelligence with little fortune.

Mansfield Park is a flawed masterpiece and certainly worth exploration. I would suggest that some of the comments--particularly those made by Issybird-- in the discussion our club had of that book are full of insights.

Finally, Sense and Sensibility shows Austen working out the formal themes and patterns that she would develop more significantly in later works. Northanger Abbey is a transitional novel bridging the gap between her later works and the juvenalia. It is really a funny spoof of the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe.

[AnotherCat]

I'll give Persuasion a go then, it is placed about 3rd book down on my "To Read" list (have been driven to reading Tomalin's Dickens at the moment).

Thanks for the opinions.

[Bookpossum]

A quick hello from a rain-drenched desert! I think I agree with fantasyfan's ordering though it's hard to do, but certainly I agree that Persuasion and Emmaare the first two, followed by PandP.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

Thanks for the opinions.

You're very welcome. I hope you will share your insights when you read it

[bfisher]

Pride And Prejudice has one of the finest openings in English Literature - “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” What I liked best about this book was that a great deal of it was devoted to the corollary, a single man’s want of a good fortune, in the case of Jane Austen’s male relatives, and the means they adopted to get one; including an exhaustive (and exhausting) catalog of her male relatives’ connections. A book that was supposedly about Jane Austen was more like look at how wonderful her male relatives were.


That is the main charm of this work, the indirect view it affords of the environmental constraints that Jane Austen had to operate in; a confirmation of the relentless chase for social advantage by her contemporaries, and of the shade that women of great ability had to grow within.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

You're very welcome. I hope you will share your insights when you read it

I trust that that you suspected what it was that you were going to get, so will not be a shock .

I have just spent a couple of days looking at this book (Persuasion) with a light read through about only a quarter of it before I decided it really was not for me to get seriously into. So, as I didn't read the whole book, my reaction could be regarded as shallowly based. While the book, being part of Austen's works, has a place in the development of the English Novel and is a worthwhile satire and commentary of one aspect of her contemporary society, I am only speaking from the perspective of my own selfish reading for enjoyment.

First, I do not get on well with books that are structured around the detailed trivialities of the lives of people that have nothing to do or offer, especially when there is emphasis on their inter-matchmaking, pettiness's such as the characters' puddle deep opinions of each other, etc. So it turned out that the book was off to a poor start with me from the outset . That said I felt that the satire and social commentary of the book could have done well for me in other hands that wrote without the ponderousness I felt.

I found the prose to be poor when looked at from the point of view of a reader valuing fluidity and emphasis on clear communication. Without claiming this is what went on, the prose reeks to me of being seriously overworked and as not having come from a writer from whom the story flowed out of their pen onto the paper in a natural and easy way (perhaps that is a reason why other novels of hers stayed in her hands for such long periods of time before publishing?).

There are seriously long pieces of narration that I thought really needed breaking up into many sentences instead being semi-divided by the multiplicity of colons and semicolons that are used. Furthermore, the same often applies to the characters' own speech. Even taking into account the likelihood that real life people of that society and time spoke very formally, the seriously long monologues with thoughts separated only by a fleet of colons and semicolons I found both tedious and characterless in manner of speech. I felt that the work could do with a severe run through with the objective of attaining better flow of the prose. I instead felt the possibility that the author had gone through with the objective of adding as much as possible into each sentence and to hell with how long and clumsy that made them to read.

At first I though that maybe the things I did not like about the prose were just typical of the age of the novel, but in fact I do not see things such as being frequent in the works of her contemporaries (Walter Scott, for example), her predecessors (Defoe, for example) and those coming after (Dickens, for example). I note that I found similar things that I did not like with 20th Century Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, that book being further compromised for my selfish reading by the use of cryptic passages of imprecise solution or which were incorrect comparisons in reality.

All that said there were sparks of writing that I thought very well done (who could have guessed I was going to now say that? ). For example, the passages around where Walter Elliott talks about "the most deplorable-looking personage you can imagine" of Admiral Baldwin. Austen is then into, for example, having her characters speaking in clear, lively and flowing prose with them speaking naturally as recognisable individuals rather than in characterless monologues. Why she did not keep that up I have no idea, but, of course, she was not writing to please me . Without doubt it quite rightly pleases others.

[Bookpossum]

Obviously Jane Austen is not your saucer of milk, AnotherCat! Fair enough - it would be a dull world if we all felt the same way about everything.

[AnotherCat]

Yes, luckily there are plenty of other good authors for me to lap up.

It is always interesting to have a look at what others enjoy, and what respected authors have produced. At least sometimes what we enjoy, insofar as prose style is concerned, is conditioned by our backgrounds and often also by the type of output expected of us in our work or whatever. That is certainly the case with me.

[fantasyfan]

Thank you for sharing your insights, AnotherCat.

Yes, I rather expected you to come to that conclusion (with which--predictably--I profoundly disagree). But so what? We all have differing opinions on all sorts of things and that is what makes the world (which includes literary criticism ) so very interesting. I agree with Bookpossum. The world would be dull if we all thought alike.