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Daughter, Sister, and Aunt Jane
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14378 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1988 |
3,184 Words |
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Audrey C. Foote
Audrey C. Foote is a book reviewer and translator who teaches
modern European literature. She lives in Washington, D.C. |
JANE AUSTEN: HER LIFE
Park Honan
New York: St. Martin's Press
$24.95
A choice, a change of heart, a crisis: A broken engagement was almost always a calamity and an insult to fiancés and their families in early nineteenth-century English society. Even as late as 1879, as George Meredith's The Egoist indicates, that act could still stir up a scandal. An ideal subject for a Jane Austen novel, one would assume: In fact, just such a dilemma was the turning point in her own.
Growing up in Georgian England as the proper, pretty daughter of a well-connected country parson, Jane Austen did not imagine she would become a famous writer. Nor did she expect to be a spinster, despite her lack of fortune and her excess of wit. A contemporary described her as "the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly" she ever remembered, and while that recollection has been indignantly impugned, other, better evidence confirms that Austen was slim, lively, a fine dancer, and an accomplished flirt. At age twenty, in 1795, Jane experienced her first real romance, brief and wounding, with a young Irish law student. He was in Hampshire visiting his wealthy aunt who, despite her real affection for her sprightly young neighbor, abruptly put him on the coach to London to pursue a more profitable match. Which of course he did, as this was still the mercenary, sensible eighteenth century, when affection and affluence were regarded as essential to a "beau mariage." Unlike her heroine in Persuasion, Jane never saw her first lover
... (1919 of 19117 Characters)
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