For Jane Austen’s birthday … The two pictures of Austen by Cassandra — all we have for sure

Jane facing Cassandra by Cassandra (circa 1810)

Jane looking out at the landscape

Dear All,

For Jane Austen’s birthday I usually try for something special (see these various blogs), something which relates directly to her birthday or something about her personally, e.g., poems she wrote, poems in her honor, her attitudes towards historical women. Today I am proud and happy to have a guest blogger joining in with me: Nancy Mayer, long-time moderator of Janeites now @groups.io, who maintains a website from her research on things about the Regency.

Her topic for today is the vexed one of Jane Austen’s portraits:

December 16th is the anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. One on-going debate about Austen is, Is there an authentic portrait of Jane other than the ones that Cassandra drew? One of those is a back view, and the other doesn’t satisfy because Jane looks either angry or impatient [both just above]. A sort of modified view is on the 10-pound note. There are, however, three other portraits that people claim are portraits of the author Jane Austen.

People are finding portraits in different places and claiming they have to be of Jane Austen of Steventon, I don’t agree. I think Cassandra’s drawings of her sister are the only authentic ones.

One is of a young girl about 15. The question that first comes to mind is why would the family have an expensive portrait made of a young girl when the family didn’t have that money to spare? At least the portrait should have been of the sisters. No one knew she would become famous two hundred years later. The style isn’t the style that would have been in fashion in 1790. Fashion experts have argued both sides of this, I am with those who say it is unlikely that a young miss of 15 having a portrait made in 1790 would have worn this style dress.

Known as the Rice portrait

Then there is a very fashionable sketch the Regent’s librarian made in the margin of a book. This lady is dressed in a very stylish dress. Jane Austen met him in 1814. None of the clothes that we know she wore have the slightest resemblance to the sketch. The reasons that people want to say it is Austen is that it is a beautiful sketch and she met the man.

Said to be a portrait of Austen made by James Stanier Clarke, with whom she was acquainted [for my part I doubt it is her because she did not dress this way]

The third portrait is of a woman sitting at a table looking out of a window in Westminster. She is older than the previous portraits — much older than the one by Clarke, I think. Why this is thought to be of Austen, I don’t know. Again, why anyone would have paid to have her portrait painted– something she never mentions, btw-I don’t know. My objections are that why would she be painted in Westminster instead of Chawton? She appears to be richly dressed. Though Jane paid attention to clothes and fashion, she dressed within her means. Also, I do not see any resemblance between this portrait and that of her by Cassandra. [This is Paula Byrne’s theory]

See my blogs where I argue against the identification and describe a talk where the presenter asked the audience to decide ….

This question of authentic portraits has been a cause of much dissension I know. For many people [nowadays], the picture of Jane Austen that will be the one they remember will be the one on the 10-pound note in England.

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Nancy omits a sixth image — the one that James Edward Austen-Leigh used for his memoir of his aunt. He hired someone to doctor the sketch of Austen that Cassandra drew so as to make her face rounder, smoother, not troubled (no dark lines under her eyes, no sour look — perhaps from headaches she suffered), basically expressionless and to make her arms hang more loosely from her side. The akimbo arrangement where she is creating a barrier between herself and the world gave as aspect to her character he did not want associated with her.

Jane Austen, by James Andrews [circa 1870]

The above is not ludicrous; it’s the colorized engraving that began to circulate that is embarrassingly bad and false:

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In a recent issues of the New York Review of Books, we can see at work the same impulses that led to the doctoring of Cassandra’s sketch and the attribution of the three unauthenticated images. Kathryn Hughes uses the occasion of the publication of Hilary Davidson’s book on Austen’s wardrobe to herself create an image of Austen she prefers to imagine.

A small image of this pelisse

In brief, I see a few telling contradictory elements in Hughes’s musings; the explicit idea seems to be that Austen just loved to immerse herself in fashion, and keep up to date on the very latest whatever, but alongside that we see how poor she and Cassandra were as they attempted to make the same garment do for years, the same piece of cloth essentially turned and resewn, recolored, with new fasteners put in too. She quotes one of Austen’s occasional asides on how she wishes she could buy dresses off a rack, plus Austen’s discomfort with body-exposing undergarments. Hughes’s to me distasteful conclusion that when Austen made her small amounts of money (not little bits to her I know but nothing near what she might need regularly to live independently in any sense) that the first thing she did was “head for the shops” comes from this explicit “official” — conformist and conventional discourse. Hughes has made Austen someone who would have rushed out to see the Barbie movie. Perhaps, then, a different self wrote the fiction books.

I also demur at the description of Austen at tall and thin. I’ve read descriptions of her by the relatives who lived at Godmersham Park which suggest she was just “above the middle size” (so 5 feet 5 say) and Cassandra’s portrait show a chubby woman, someone who did not go in for regular exercise beyond walking.

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Finally, Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen in a coming adaptation of a fictionalized biography by Jill Hornby (Miss Austen)

The book begins many years after Jane’s death: so Hawes looks like a Victorianized 18th century woman

Given her world-wide reputation, it’s to be expected Austen (and Cassandra too) have become a marquee characters (in one film Anna Maxwell Martin plays Cassandra) in books, and beyond the many biographies is the subjection of fictionalized ones too. I’ve written about the bio/pic, Becoming Jane (where Anna Hathaway played Jane Austen) — I cannot tonight find my blog or essays on my website (if that’s where it is). I’ve ordered Hornby’s novel (if that is what it is) and will read it as a sequel (or post-text). From what I’ve read about it thus far (and felt looking at some other images of Hawes now circulating) I fear (the right word since I care) that the book is from the conventional (philistine is the older word) POV anti-Jane — the world thinks to be social and conform is important and I see from others if anyone criticizes Cassandra as she emerges from Jane’s letters (very conventional) they are “up in arms.” I am aware the makers of a film can reverse or alter or sufficiently qualify a book, and the acting crew is made up of some fine actors, and women are centrally involved in writing, directing and so on. I am willing to hope for a portrait which stays true to and is sympathetic Austen’s unconventional unsocial character.

But women can be bought too, pressured to produce stories and characters that are mass-audience pleasers. Witness the recent or 2022 Persuasion — the undertext for Dakota Johnson, the actress playing Anne Elliot is a semi-porn figure.

Ellen