This statue by Adam Roud of Jane Austen walking steadily, looking to the side, book tucked under her elbow has been my favorite of the modern rendition — found in Chawton churchyard — we know she loved to walk …
Friend and readers,
I’ve written such a number of blogs commemorating Jane Austen’s birthday in some way by this time, the most obvious where I reprint her poem to a beloved friend, Anne Lefroy, who died on the day in 1808; I wrote about what she wrote that seemed to me neglected (yes) and so interesting: her remarks on Tudor queens, including Katherine Parr; and a whole series, some containing notable poems to her, a new opera, some about a much enjoyed social activity (dancing) and so on.
But I never thought to comb her letters looking for how she felt on the day (or maybe I did and couldn’t find anything). Diana Birchalls has done a splendid nuanced job asking: did she enjoy it?, and, apparently, true to character, it’s not clear. That is, what is found is considerable ambivalence.
I put the following lines in quotations as a comment on Diana’s and since then added to it: “She tried hard, she worked at being cheerful and sometimes she was. But she was so intelligent that marking time (as birthdays force us to) is an ambivalent event. Perhaps she might have been happier had she been able to write more,” and it seems been less censured (there is evidence she worried about her family’s response and had to answer to them, including her mother still on Persuasion), had her publishing started earlier. “She was also a spinster with not much money and among her milieu not a high rank and it’s impossible to ignore the average POV and she might have felt that her life was lacking because of the way others treated spinsters.” There was that time in Bath.” OTOH, she knew she was lucky within limits, was solvent enough by living with her family in the prescribed way (she saw how so many others had much to endure, had, as far as we can tell, a supportive family, some loving friends, so she had much to be glad about.” What is most surprising about the quotations and asides and indirect references (beyond the one poem) Diana turns up is the plangent tone of so many of them.
For myself, I imagine Austen happiest when absorbed in her imaginary in the throes of writing, as I imagine a number of her near women contemporaries, for example, Fanny Burney and Anne Radcliffe (given the amounts they wrote), and others she mentions as predecessors, and rivals and simply someone she is reading, e.g. Mary Brunton, Charlotte Smith, Anne MicVicar Grant, Madame de Genlis. She loved memoirists in French as well as English; we catch her reading travel writers, educational treatises, poets. Perhaps it’s best to commemorate her with striking passages by her — they are hard to pluck out, for they gain their depth by context and resonance across a book.
This morning I came upon another statue of Jane, which has joined the first at Chawton (the gardens), Robert Prescott’s Jane absorbed in writing —
So here are some brief ones I keep in a commonplace file, as favorites, as general ironic truths, as what I have turned to — Matthew Arnold style, the touchstones: I’ve organized them by novels in order of publication, or what is the probable chronology of writing, and then from the letters. The first, the epigraph to this blog: “It is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible” … Henry Tilney, NA
Sense and Sensibility
‘We are all offending every moment of our lives.’…. Marianne Dashwood
‘It is not every one,’ said Elinor, ‘who has your passion for dead leaves.’
Elinor could only smile.
Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
Pride and Prejudice:
‘There is a fine old saying, which every body here is of course familiar with — Keep your breath to cool your porridge, — and I shall keep mine to swell my song.’ … Elizabeth Bennet
‘We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing’ … Elizabeth once again …
Mansfield Park
Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated reason to … acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure …
Emma
She regained the street — happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself. … Emma thinking
‘Well, I cannot understand it.’ ‘That is the case with us all, papa. One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’ … Emma and her father
“We all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. Mine, I confess, are exhausted.’ … Jane Fairfax to Emma, fleeing, after Box Hill
Northanger Abbey
‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.’ … Catherine
‘But why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?’ — Catherine about General Tilney
‘After long thought and much perplexity, to be very brief was all that she could determine on with any confidence of safety.’ … Catherine thinking about writing to Eleanor Tilney after having been so insultingly ejected from the abbey
Persuasion
‘One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering….’ Anne Elliot to Captain Wentworth
Here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature herself. It was the choicest gift of Heaven … Austen as narrator & Anne Elliot
Lady Susan
My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age!–just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the gout–too old to be agreeable, and too young to die… May the next gouty Attack be more favourable … Lady Susan herself
Unfinished fragments of novels and Juvenilia:
I wish there were no such things as Teeth in the World; they are nothing but plagues to one, and I dare say that People might easily invent something to eat with instead of them. … Catherine, from Catherine, or the Bower
‘ … she has been suffering much from headache and six leeches a day … [which] relieved her so little we thought it right to change our measures,” “to attack the disorder” in her gum, so they “had three teeth drawn, and [she] is decidedly better, but her nerves are a good deal deranged. She can only speak in a whisper … fainted away twice this morning … Sanditon, Diana Parker about her sister ….
When there is so much Love on one side there is no occasion for it on the other … The Three Sisters
From Austen’s censored, cut up, bowdlerized letters:
Do pray meet with somebody belonging to yourself, — I am quite weary of your knowing nobody.
I do not want People to be very agreable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
Pray remember me to Everybody who does not enquire after me.
My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy.
I write only for Fame, and without any view to pecuniary Emolument …
People shall pay for their knowledge if I can make them …
I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter …
And I cannot resist this longer quotation one, as one possibly never noticed overlooked by my reader:
In defense of spinsterhood:
from Frederick and Elfrida (Juvenilia): one could call it a parodic short story: We have as heroine, “Charlotte, whose nature we have before intimated was an earnest desire to oblige every one … ” when “an aged gentleman with a sallow face & old pink Coat, partly by intention & partly thro’ weakness was at the feet of the lovely Charlotte, declaring his attachment to her”
Not being able to resolve to make any one miserable, she consented to become his wife; where upon the Gentleman left the room & all was quiet.
Their quiet however continued but a short time, for on a second opening of the door a young & Handsome Gentleman with a new blue coat entered & intreated from the lovely Charlotte, permission to pay to her his addresses. There was a something in the appearance of the second Stranger, that influenced Charlotte in his favour, to the full as much as the appearance of the first: she could not account for it, but so it was. Having therefore, agreable to that & the natural turn of her mind to make every one happy, promised to become his Wife the next morning …
It was not till the next morning that Charlotte recollected the double engagement she had entered into; but when she did, the reflection of her past folly operated so strongly on her mind, that she resolved to be guilty of a greater, & to that end threw herself into a deep stream …
We cannot know if this was written before or after Austen refused Mr Bigg-Wither. May we hope it is meant generally?
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Arthur Lindley: “For what it’s worth, I like both statues very much.”
Yes both are lovely and filled with an appropriate spirit for Jane Austen. Quite a contrast to the travesty silver car trophy of a naked woman invented to represent Mary Wollstonecraft.
Diana: “Marvelous. I love the quotes you have chosen and had forgotten Charlotte and the stream. You even make me like the statues. Happy Jane Austen’s Birthday (really ought to be a national holiday).”
John Dussinger: “”A new statue of Jane Austen”? Except for that amateurish sketch by Cassandra, do we even have a clue of what Austen actually looked like? At least this statue is amply clothed, and maybe that somewhat angry countenance captures her sense of alienation from her society? But somehow the mere attempt to capture her dynamic genius in sculpture seems doomed from the start when one considers all the Romantic heroic art associated with the Napoleonic era. Alas, maybe Jane needed a horse at that time! But no, she was confined indoors like all women of her class–thankfully writing in her private room., not a space to be taken for granted in that period. Thank you, Ellen, for your usual insightful updates.
JAD”
John, I think Cassandra did capture what Austen was at the moment or hour that Cassandra was sketching her. Jane suffered headaches, had a hard time sleeping, her eyes hurt. It fits my sense of her that she would put arms akimbo to create a barrier. One of Diana Birchalls’ problems in scouring the letters is that (as Claire Tomalin says), Austen does not just bide our question, she erects barriers of savage irony. I detest the 1870 “improvement” with the unreal face and ridiculously long arms. There is a tradition of sketching women from the back in contemplation. In that second one by Cassandra
where we see Austen from the back we can feel sure Jane got enough to eat.
The face of the walking statue is suggestively like the face Cassandra sketches and we see in Frank — the thin nose for example. I certainly both to the (to me) travesty of Mary Wollstonecraft done some months ago, which we discussed here. There is a statue of Virginia Woolf I’ve seen that is in the style and mood or POV of the Austen statues at Chawton. We see Woolf sitting on a bench, looking contemplative.
[…] need to make my life more real to myself, to write it down so as to make sense of it, to remember (Jane Austen’s birthday) and record and thus be able to look […]