Jane Austen: A Life

Rating:
Summary: It was entertaining until I found a careless mistake.
Review: I agree with the reviewer who was pleased to see a contrarian view of Jane Austen being presented. No one who was as sickeningly sweet as she is portrayed in other biographies (most notably the ones written by family members) could possibly have written the letters and books Austen wrote.

I was inclined to like Nokes' book, but then read something rather disturbing. He states without hesitation that Mary was the youngest of the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice. This is not true; Mary is the third of the five sisters. Maybe it's a nitpicky thing, but I then started to wonder if he got such a basic fact wrong, what else in this book is incorrect?

Rating:
Summary: Ouch! This book was too painful for me to finish
Review: In all honesty, I could not bring myself to read this whole book, so if you prefer to ignore my opinion, I will quite understand. (I have only read 40-50 pages, but found it so depressing, I gave up!) Here is my review, for what it's worth!

I was quite prepared to grant Mr. Nokes' premise that Jane Austen was not the sugary-sweet homebody that others have made her out to be, but I really do not think she or her family could really be as bad as he insists. I have, for instance, a hard time believing that Mr. Austen encouraged his daughter's writing solely on the mercenary view of augmenting the family's income. I am willing to give credence to Mr. Nokes' arguments of the Austen family's imperfections. I could forgive him a lot easier, however, if he didn't appear to gloat over their defects.

Rating:
Summary: Not Quite
Review: In her 1928 essay, "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf laments as "deplorable" the absence of a history of British women prior to the eighteenth century. "...at what age," Woolf writes, "should she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like?...after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen."

What, though, was Jane Austen's life really like? What was Jane Austen really like? The 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have seen a veritable flowering of Austen biographies and studies (Marilyn Butler, Roger Sales, Jan Fergus, Tony Tanner, Claudia Johnson) that would no doubt have impressed even Virginia Woolf, by sheer number alone, if by nothing else.

David Nokes's biography, Jane Austen: A Life differs from many of the others in its presentation of Austen, not as a staid moralist or a stoic spinster, but as a member of a manipulative and conniving family. To this end, Nokes focuses on the correspondence, not of Jane per se, but rather on that of the extended Austen family and especially Jane's cousin, Eliza de la Feuillide. The book, especially the first half, could just have easily been called Eliza de la Feuillide: The Fascinating Life of Jane Austen's Cousin.

This extension is justified in that it does answer many questions about Austen's more adventurous and worldly siblings, relatives and friends. For example, Eliza Hancock de la Feuillide Austen was no doubt the natural daughter of a colonial administrator in India by the name of Warren Hastings. In her early twenties Eliza married a French nobleman, who sadly, was sent to the guillotine only a few years later. Eliza, herself, escaped France with her young son and lived as a glamorous demimodaine "Countess" in Regency London, her life only becoming staid and prosaic after her marriage to the much younger Henry Austen, Jane's older brother and Eliza's own first cousin.

Nokes's "novelizes" this biography by paraphrasing the Austen family letters. It is an approach that does not always work, at times sounding quite artificial and contrived. In the book's opening sentences, for example, Nokes's writes: "Bengal, 1773: It is the rainy season in the Sunderbunds. Inside his lonely makeshift hut the Surgeon-Extraordinary sits writing a letter home to his wife in England. The livid orange sun is sinking over this dismal region of fetid salt-flats, swamp and jungle...It is three years since he last saw his wife, and he knows now that he will never see her again. Toil and disease have wasted his body and depressed his spirits."

Much later, in recounting a scene between Jane Austen and her brother Frank, Nokes's writes: "The St. Helena islanders, said Frank, charged so much to passing ships for even the simplest supplies that a couple of acres of potatoes or a garden of cabbages there would provide a decent dowry for an daughter. Jane looked down into their beautiful Castle Square garden and thought of Edward Bridges. Would syringas do instead, she wondered?"

Fortunately, Nokes's does focus on the important figures of Eliza, Henry and Cassandra Austen in Jane Austen's life and the role they played in shaping her unique Regency voice. Unfortunately, the "novelizing" of the Austen family letters grows extremely tiresome and quickly becomes a detriment to the overall quality of this book. There are a lot of Jane Austen biographies out there. Although it does have its redeeming qualities, this one was simply not my favorite.

Rating:
Summary: Not Quite
Review: This is a good read, well-researched, well thought out and written. Mr. Nokes takes his reader through a fairly wonderful ride about Steventon and its environs. He gives a very clear picture of Jane Austen's family, especially in his interpretations of her relationships with her sister and brothers and cousin Eliza. Notwithstanding his research and his ability to capture and understand Jane Austen and her life, there are some surprising problems which occur later in his book. He does a nice job convincing the reader of Jane Austen's acerbic wit, her double entendres, her hidden messages, her colorful disdain and delights as revealed in her letters. Consequently it is all the more unsettling when Mr. Nokes, three-quarters into his book, does an abrupt about-face and takes a familiar passage from one of her letters at face value. I refer to the passage where she writes of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as being "rather too sparkling...wants to be stretched out...with a long chapter...An Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte". It is beyond anyone's credibility to imagine that the writer of NORTHANGER ABBEY would write these words with any intent but satire and mockery but Mr. Nokes, after having demonstrated how exceptionally mocking and satirical Jane Austen could be, decides to take her at face value and remarks, "suddenly...she felt as if there was nothing that she could not or dared not write". Perhaps he wants to distinguish himself from other biographers by a fresh appraisal of Jane Austen's self regard but I am not convinced that, upon publication of her early works, she suddenly felt a modern sense of stardom. Mr. Nokes seems to imply that SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, early drafts of which were written years before publication, were simply pulled out of her writer's desk, dusted off and updated so that the certain references would seem contemporary. I was fascinated that Mr. Nokes ends this biography by depicting Jane's brother George (essentially banished and forgotten by the Austen parents for being mentally handicapped) as an example of Jane's ultimate selfishness and callous nature. I doubt that enough is known of the circumstances for this conclusion to be just.