A Heart Not Mended

...Jordan's Profession: The Actress and the Prince, about Dora Jordan and the future William IV of England...

...The woman whose romantic comedies end in security for her heroines lived a precarious life...

...Tomalin explains, for instance, the novelist's 10-year silence after the composition of Northanger Abbey: With three novels written, Jane was "wellembarked on the road to success" when her parents precipitately decided to give up the parsonage where she had always lived and move to Bath, a place she detested...

...At the end of 1799 she finished Northanger Abbey...

...It has been the contribution of women writers for almost three decades to bring forward lives (and therefore sources) that once seemed irrelevant...

...When Austen, at 21, met Tom Lefroy, the visiting cousin of friends, and they fell in love dancing together, Lefroy's family quickly spirited him away, knowing it was impossible for a young man without inheritence to marry a penniless woman...

...Like all writers, though, she drew on her personal experience to create the environment in which her characters came alive...

...In her youth Jane participated in family theatricals and readings...

...In the end, the Jane Austen who emerges from Claire Tomalin's richly peopled and evocative context is peculiarly elusive and frustratingly thin...

...Having no money of her own, she had no choice but to go along, and the consequence was a siege of depression that made it impossible to do the only thing that gave her an illusion of control over her circumstances...

...Taking note that Austen had just finished a draft of Sense and Sensibility, Tomalin makes a lovely moment of Austen's romantic disappointment: "We can't help knowing that her personal story will not go in the direction she is imagining...

...Others were preserved for decades by her brother Sir Francis Austen, Admiral of the Fleet, but his daughter disposed of them following his death "without consulting anyone else...

...By the time I got to Tomalin's puncturing of that myth—Jane Austen's manuscript pages were too large to fit under her blotter—Mansfield Park had saved me, also the unmarried daughter of a clergyman, from the travails of Christmas...

...Most of her letters were destroyed after she died by Cassandra, her one sister and lifelong companion...

...Like Mary Wollstonecraft, another of Tomalin's subjects, Jane Austen's achievement has not been hidden...

...Nor does she gamble at deconstructing the vitality of an Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet to paint a fuller portrait of her subject than existing archives permit...

...Among them is a wild cousin who married a French count later guillotined in the Terror...

...We have the woman writer and her situation, but not the genius and the workings of her mind...

...Gradually, Jane Austen the novelist emerged from this family of accomplished amateurs...

...What freed her imagination to transform the daily banalities of her existence into Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, books that entertain not only with character and plot, but with a mercurial and Mozartian felicity of form...

...It is in employing the novels to illuminate Austen's interior life that the biographer falters...

...This Tomalin sees as a source of Austen's later vulnerability...

...that, as it turned out, it was not Tom Lefroy or anyone like him, who became her adventure, but the manuscript upstairs...

...Of course, these days when a skillful feminist biographer sets her sights on a subject there is no such thing as a life of no "event...

...Most significantly, in re al life the heroine's broken heart is not mended...

...It became her first published book in 1810...

...Tomalin alludes anecdotally to parallels between the novelist and her characters, but she never ventures to imagine how Austen's creative intelligence sorted and rearranged the events of her own life in giving us an Anne Elliot or a Fanny Price...

...Jane Austen was born during the uncharacteristically snowy winter of 1775, the seventh of eight children and the second daughter of cultivated parents...

...So in four years," Tomalin observes, "three major novels were underway...

...Because you've read Austen, you can also feel the comic possibilities of each situation...

...Or take the beginning of Persuasion...

...She grew up part of a "great connecting web of cousins, mostly clerical, spread over the southern counties" of England, and in the midst of a gang of boy s that included six brothers and the young men her father took in as students to supplement his modest clergyman's income...

...Aside from letters by other family members, and a niece's diary, there is nothing except a memoir by James-Edward Austen-Leigh, a great nephew who barely knew her, and a biographical note by her brother and literary agent, Henry, famously declaring his sister to have led "not by any means a life of event...

...No number of letters captures the essence and subtlety of an artist's being the way her work does...

...More central to her own development is the fact that Austen and her siblings were sent as infants to a wet nurse in the village until they were "old enough to be easily managed at home...

...A mere 160 remain from the pen of the writer herself ("sharpening stones against which she polished the small knives of her prose"), along with a few early notebooks, manuscripts and papers...

...Tomalin establishes at the outset the limitations of any close examination of Austen...

...When, at 27, she accepted Harris BiggWither's proposal in the evening, only to change her mind the next morning, there was no Mr...

...Thus it is fair to speculate from the relationship between Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility that Jane's rapport with her sister Cassandra was not as ideal as the available evidence allows, and from Miss Bates in Emma how she felt about being a poor relation...

...As toddler nieces and nephews tore open stockings and visitors came and went, I sat in a corner of my sister's living room marveling at the novelist's fiendish turns of phrase and timeless virtuosity...

...Nancy Milford's Zelda (1971) was the first such book, and Tomalin herself has given us two: The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens and Mrs...

...Darcy waiting in the wings...

...Still, I wondered what this biographer would make of an author whose life lacked Wollstonecraft's lavish and conspicuous tragedy, and who appeared to come as much out of nowhere as did her American sister in astringent genius, Emily Dickinson...

...Tomalin vividly describes the emptying of the parsonage, the dividing of beloved objects, and the accompanying resentments culminating in the loss of the "particular working conditions that allowed her to abstract herself from the daily life going on around her...

...But there are elements in the biography that the novelist did not treat...

...The widowed Sir Walter Elliot rents out his grand house and moves with his two unmarried daughters to Bath...

...The world of her imagination," as Tomalin puts it, "was separate and distinct from the world she inhabited...

...Reviewed by Honor Moore Author, "The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by her Granddaughter The arrival of Claire Tomalin's latest biography sent me back to the unadulterated fictions that were composed some 200 years ago by the unmarried daughter of a clergyman as she sat in a corner of the parlor—and supposedly shoved the manuscript she was working on beneath a blotter whenever someone entered the room...

...Austen must have tappedher own feelings of loss in fashioning the emotions her heroine felt...

...If you have read the novels, you feel, entering Tomalin's narrative, the pleasure of returning to a place where you once had a really good time...

...Now I realized this was hardly true about her depicting the predicament of a young woman on offer for marriage, or ruthlessly delineating human psychology...

...In November 1797 she returned to Elinor and Marianne, a book she had drafted at 18 or so as an epistolary novel, revised it completely by the spring of 1798 and retitled it Sense and Sensibility...

...She then tracks Jane visiting this relation and that, moving with her parents from one Bath rental to another, always dependent on others: "She must have felt like an awkward parcel...

...Her belief in the efficacy of language did not come out of nowhere—her father George had been to Oxford and her mother Elizabeth's uncle, Theophilus Leigh, was master of Balliol College until he died at 92...

...Anne Elliot, 27 years old, still regrets having eight years before rejected, on the advice of others, an impoverished suitor...

...Next to the bohemian elegance of Virginia Woolf, the high-toned intellect of George Eliot and the gothic emergencies of the Brontes, Austen had always seemed prim to me...

...She began Pride and Prejudice in October 1796, at the age of 20, and finished it in nine months...

...Granted, Austen was not fundamentally an autobiographical writer...

...They were not the writings of a timid spinster who hid her work, but of a professional who shared the process with her closest associates, announcing ideas, subjects and the conclusion of projects—though in Austen's case, as in Dickinson's, the associates were most often family members...

...There are impoverished clerics, balls in country houses, ladies of great wealth who bestow largess and surname on young men, pairs of contrasting sisters, handsome strangers new in the neighborhood, and marriages prevented because of economic reality...

...and she was not yet 24...

...She did not resume writing until 1809...

...Her mother wrote poems, often instead of letters, that taught the future author a "sharp tongue for neighbors...