By Sue Scott
Whenever you read about Jane Austen’s life, you’ll see a lot of words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “might.” That’s because there are so many holes in our knowledge of Austen.
We know the basics. That she was born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small town in southern England. We know her father was a clergyman, and that Austen had six brothers and one sister, about whom we also know the basic facts. We know this brilliant, even revolutionary, novelist had little formal education, but was a voracious reader who around the age of 12 began writing stories that satirized the popular novels of the day. But we can only guess what sort of child she was, the games she played, the places she visited, etc.
We have very few details about her life until January of 1796, the date of the first two letters we have that Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra, who was her best friend all her life. Here’s where we get the first bit of real information about Jane’s love life, although it mostly leaves us with more questions. In those first letters, Jane tells Cassandra about dancing and flirting with a young man named Tom Lefroy. Jane’s comments and her teasing, joking tone make it difficult for us to know just how serious her feelings were for him. Some interpret them as love, some as simply a serious flirtation or infatuation. Tom was soon called back home to Ireland. In later years, Lefroy admitted that he had felt love for Jane, but that it was “a boy’s love.”
We feel pretty sure that Jane did receive a marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, a neighbor who was in line to inherit a good estate, and whose three sisters were close friends of Jane and Cassandra. He proposed one evening, Jane accepted immediately, and then took back her acceptance the next morning. But even this well accepted tale is not based on any direct evidence. Instead, it’s based on a niece’s memory of her mother’s memory of what she was told happened. There’s lots of room for error here, but it’s all we have, and so we cling to it.
There are a few even murkier family stories about a man Jane met at the seaside one summer who expressed a strong interest in her, but who died before they could meet again the following summer. These family stories tend to conflict, and to not line up with any facts that researchers have been able to dig up.
After Jane’s death, Cassandra sat down and made a list of her sister’s novels, and the dates they had been written—again, mostly based on her own memory. The widely held belief that Sense and Sensibility was originally written as an epistolary novel is also based on a memory. This time it’s niece Caroline who remembered decades later having heard this manuscript being read aloud when Caroline visited her aunts as a child. Even Caroline admitted that “memory is treacherous,” but her memory was that the book was written in letter format. Based on this memory, and the fact that Pride and Prejudice is such a letter-heavy novel, and that we believe the two books to have been written very close together in time, it’s now assumed by most scholars that this second book was also originally an epistolary novel. Others, however, feel there’s not enough evidence to support this assumption, and a few say it’s a moot point and they don’t even want to discuss it. Some have even suggested that Caroline had actually heard the manuscript of what became Pride and Prejudice, and then misremembered it as Jane’s other early novel.
We do know a fair amount about the publication history of the novels, thanks to research into documents available in the publishers’ archives and similar sources. Also, we have many dates and comments from Jane herself in letters she wrote her sister while visiting London on business related to the books’ publications. You can take advantage of Internet sources, such as Wikipedia, to read some actual facts about this, no guessing needed.
In fact, Jane’s letters to Cassandra are our best source of information about her everyday life, and scholars are still examining them for more clues to any aspect of her life and work. Just over 160 letters written by Jane Austen have survived, with descriptions of shopping trips, people visited, parties attended, and an occasional mention of books written. Even here, there are mysteries to be solved. For example, what did she mean when she told Cassandra (in a letter dated January 29, 1813) that “Now I will try to write of something else, & it shall be a complete change of subject—ordination.” Was she talking about Mansfield Park, a novel she had been working on for two years? Was she referring to something else she hoped to write? Have we misinterpreted the meaning of the word “ordination” as she was using it? Scholars are still debating this one.
Even Jane’s death is an unsolved mystery. We know she was ill off and on for two years before her death at age 41 on July 18, 1817. The doctors she saw were unable to diagnose or successfully treat her illness. In her letters she is always upbeat about her ailments, but does offer modern medicine some clues about her symptoms, which included exhaustion, joint pain, fever, and bruise-like facial skin discolorations. Doctors and medical historians (and enthusiastic amateurs) have offered their guesses about what caused Jane Austen’s early death. For a long time, Addison’s disease (a rare disease of the adrenal glands) was the front-runner. Then, Hodgkin’s disease, a form of lymphoma, became a strong contender. One person suggested accidental arsenic poisoning, and generated some headlines, but this idea never really got much traction. More recently, tuberculosis has been suggested, or even a combination of an adrenal disease with a secondary tuberculosis infection.
There’s one thing we do know—that Jane Austen wrote six novels unlike any others. For that, we are grateful.
If you want to know more about Jane Austen’s life, both known and unknown, a good beginning would be Claire Tomalin’s 1999 biography, Jane Austen: A Life. We’ll be discussing this one in our May 2021 JASNA-North Carolina book club. It is also recommended reading for the 2021 Jane Austen Summer Program that takes place in June.
Sue Scott is a lifetime member of JASNA. She regularly presents about Austen and currently serves as the treasurer for JASNA-NC.