Jane Made Plain

...Writers & Writing JANE MADE PLAIN BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL IN 1796, shortly after checking into a London hotel, a young Jane Austen happily wrote to her sister Cassandra: "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted...

...Together with religion, these influences helped her to cultivate the compassionate spirit that shines through her later work...

...Only after five months of importuning did he sadly relinquish his dream of being the hero of a best-seller...

...and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress...

...Of Austen's reputedly vast correspondence, only 150 letters and fragments that the family deliberately preserved or simply forgot in trunks have survived...

...His intricate familiarity with the period rivals that of Patrick O'Brien, author of the currently popular seafaring novels covering exactly the same era...

...His book is divided into chapters with such headings as "Beaux and a Blighted Romance," "Jane Austen and the Events of Her Time," and "Jane Austen and the Prince Regent" (whom she scornfully referred to as "Prinny" or "Prince Florizel" in private...

...Thus a whole school of criticism faults Austen for not having written an English War and Peace instead of Pride and Prejudice...

...Dyson as usual looked big [i.e...

...In the 177 years since her death from Addison's disease at age 41, biographers have been expressing their distress over the paucity of firsthand material...

...But in a moving chapter, he charts the growth of her admiration for Romantic poetry and novels of sentiment...

...Having drawn her in, he presumed to suggest a story idea for her next book, with a protagonist modeled on himself...

...On another occasion, her impatience with the undisciplined boiled over in a send-up of some neighbors: "The house seemed to have all the comforts of little children, dirt and litter," she wrote her sister...

...Wisdom is better than Wit," she decided, "and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side...

...More recent attempts have dwelled on the public events of her day, or have relied on ideology—Freudian, feminist or Marxist—to shape the picture...

...Readers of the early epistolary vignettes Tucker reproduces will find them reminiscent of the laughing mockery of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey...

...But unlike them, she had grown up in an era when young ladies were permitted to read such risque works as Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, and the Prince Regent was a bigamist...

...He was doubtless aware that, as the loving daughter of one parson and the devoted sister of two others, Austen knew as much as anybody about men of the cloth...

...A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman...

...In 1815 Austen was "invited"—that is, commanded—to dedicate Emma, her work-in-progress, to His Highness Prince George, the son and regent of the mad King George III...

...Austen was not a political novelist, of course, but her grasp of the issues of the day clearly informed everything she wrote...

...He admits that her humor sometimes contained more than a touch of cruelty...

...This was not native to her temperament...

...BY THE TIME her correspondence with the Reverend Clarke took place, shortly before her final illness, Austen's sharp tongue had mellowed into a kindness she extended even to fools...

...Furthermore, Eliza de Feuillide, a cousin who would later marry Jane's brother Henry, had lost her first husband to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror...

...She excused herself from the assignment by falling back on the supposed ignorance of her sex: "The comic portrait of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary," she wrote, sounding every bit as disingenuous as Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse...

...but a woman working in that form is presumed to lack the breadth to do otherwise...

...Tucker, a Virginia journalist who 11 years ago wrote a history of the Austen family, A Goodly Heritage, has spent a lifetime studying the details of late 18th- and early 19th-century existence...

...None of these approaches, though, has given us a vivid sense of the author often hailed as the greatest English stylist after Shakespeare...

...Others have sought to reconstruct her character using the evidence her fiction provides...

...can the royal roue actually have read, much less admired, Austen's work...

...Like Austen herself, Tucker wears his considerable reading lightly...

...Dyson as usual looked wild, and Mrs...

...Probably it was he who dreamed up this rather unwelcome honor...

...In youthful letters, her descriptions of people she thought ill of could be quite stinging...

...they are so smoothly woven into the general conversation and chatter of her characters that less observant readers might easily slide over them...

...Tucker possesses a generous share of the discriminating wisdom that ultimately animated his subject...

...Two of her brothers were Navy officers, and her few surviving letters to them indicate that their battles—and the larger political situation—were very much a concern of hers...

...And like her he devotes more attention to speech and actions than to psychological interpretation...

...Indeed, all of her stories teem with throwaway references to current events...

...A man who chooses to write drawing-room comedies is presumed to do so because his talent best suits the genre...

...On her initial trip to Bath—a spa town popular among the more pretentious set of Regency society, who frequently earned her early ridicule—she recorded a chance encounter with an older acquaintance who was dressed "in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead...

...Some have depended on the family's carefully tailored comments—including a hagiographical memoir written by the Reverend Henry Austen, an Evangelical clergyman and one of Jane's six brothers, presenting her as a paragon of Christian virtue...

...Levin has not read Austen carefully enough to notice that all the novels actually take place before Waterloo...

...To miss that is to miss an important dimension of her social comedies...

...Her protestations of ignorance are still misread by some as a genuine self-assessment, rather than a mandarin rejection of a pest...

...Tucker uses these to fashion a necessarily skeletal "autobiography...

...With Jane Austen the Woman: Some Biographical Insights (St...

...The rather prudish attitude of Austen's relations helps explain why so many of her letters were destroyed once it became clear that her six novels would make her the object of lasting public interest...

...pregnant...

...No wonder Austen's Victorian nieces would lament that "dear Aunt Jane" was not always as refined as they might have wished...

...Nevertheless, by studying the letters alongside the memoirs of relatives and contemporaries, he has managed to give us a fairly definite catalog of her opinions, tastes and habits...

...The negotiations were conducted by a self-important Anglican clergyman, the Reverend James Stainer Clarke, who was both the Prince's personal chaplain and the librarian for his master's residence at Carlton House...

...there are passing references to Lord Nelson's triumph in some, and in Mansfield Park the sailor brother gives a vivid account of life aboard ships...

...Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing...

...The result is a biography nearly as absorbing as an Austen novel...

...The care and diligence of his scholarship allows us at last to see Jane plain, and to re-enter the world she rendered so unforgettably...

...Yet the rich historical texture Tucker creates is merely a backdrop for his subject, the well-educated spinster who noticed everything that went on in her country environment and knew how to turn it into fascinating prose...

...At that point, Austen was pushed to declare bluntly that she was not a pen for hire...

...Austen must have felt her life was beginning to imitate one of her novels, in which clerical toadies figure regularly...

...She banked on ladylike self-deprecation to appeal to his male sense of superiority, but Clarke was not so easily deflected...

...In fact, Tucker illustrates, she followed the course of the Napoleonic wars closely...

...Her last completed work, Persuasion, covers the period when Napoleon was still in exile on Elba, and England was finally at peace...

...It brings alive "a high-spirited, flirtatious, and occasionally satirical young girl" as she matures into "a compassionate but critically objective woman of genius...

...Tucker shows, moreover, that the male characters in Persuasion were a tribute to the naval heroes who saved England from becoming part of Boney's empire...

...Studies have made do as best they could...

...The encounter with Clarke, she would surely be amused to know, created a problem for her future interpreters...

...Later, when a difficulty arose over locating a suitable chaperon for her return journey, she kidded her family about falling "Sacrifice to the arts of some fat Woman who would make me drunk with Small Beer"—an allusion to Hogarth's pictorial series, The Harlot's Progress, in which a country girl meets a procuress and ends up in a brothel...

...Other chapters examine what she read, her interest in contemporary scandals (often the basis for her plots), her travels, and her religious feelings...

...As she grew older Austen came to wonder whether Pride and Prejudice had been "rather too light, and bright, and sparkling," and she worried that perhaps her sensibilities were becoming brittle...

...John McAleer, in his Foreword to Tucker's book, pinpoints the issue when he quotes Harry Levin's patronizing remark: "It never occurred to Jane Austen that the young officers who figure as dancing partners for her heroines were on furlough from Trafalgar and Waterloo...

...Clarke, on the other hand, was unquestionably a fan—but he had ulterior designs on his favorite novelist...

...He tried instead to engage her in a scheme to win him the patronage of the Princess of Wales, suggesting she write a historical romance about the family of the Princess' German fiance...

...Martin's, 268 pp., $23.95), George Holbert Tucker has finally produced a convincing portrait of her career and personality—not by uncovering new or overlooked material, but by ordering the data in a more judiciously informed way...