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Novels and Novelists

Friends and Foes

Friends and Foes

Personal Aspects of Jane Austen — By M. Austen-Leigh

It seems almost unkind to criticize a little book which has thrown on bonnet and shawl and tripped across the fields of criticism at so round a pace to defend its dear Jane Austen. But even with the undesirable evidence before us of the stupidity, nay, the downright wickedness of certain reviewers, we cannot help doubting the need for such a journey. True, Jane Austen exists in the imagination as a writer who has remained wonderfully remote and apart and free from the flying burrs of this work-a-day world, and it does come as a surprise to learn that so-called friends of hers have said these dreadful things. But, begging Miss Austen-Leigh's pardon—who cares? Can we picture Jane Austen caring—except in a delightfully wicked way which we are sure the author of this book would not allow—that people said she was no lady, was not fond of children, hated animals, did not care a pin for the poor, could not have written about foreign parts if she had tried, had no idea how a fox was killed, but rather thought it ran up a tree and hissed at the hound at the last—was, in short, cold, coarse, practically illiterate and without morality? Mightn't her reply have been, ‘Ah, but what about my novels?’ Though the answer would seem to us more than sufficient, it would not satisfy Miss Austen-Leigh. Her book is proof to the contrary. Each of these charges can be met—and they are met, though, to be quite candid, it is somewhat quaintly, at times. Take, for instance, the ‘baseless accusation that she always turned away from whatever was sad.’ It cannot, says Miss Austen-Leigh, be allowed page 303 to pass unnoticed. And she cites a family letter written by Mr. Austen on the occasion of a young friend's having been invited to their house to have her attack of measles there: ‘She wanted a great deal of nursing, and a great deal of nursing she had,’ the nurses being Jane, her sister Cassandra and their friend Martha Lloyd. Well, that may go to prove that Jane was willing to face an unpleasant ordeal and to play her part, but we should not like our belief in her tenderness to depend on it. Does it not sound just a little grim? Might not a timid mind picture patient and pillows being shaken together; and, as to escaping one's medicine, Cassandra and Martha to hold one down, and Jane to administer something awfully black in a spoon? …

Then, again, someone having said that sermons were wearisome to her, Miss Austen-Leigh contradicts him triumphantly with Jane Austen's own words, ‘I am very fond of Sherlock's Sermons, and prefer them to almost any.’ But stare at that sentence as we may, we cannot see an enthusiasm for sermons shining through it. It sounds indeed as though Sherlock's Sermons were a special kind of biscuit—clerical Bath Olivers—oval and crisp and dry. And while we are on the subject of religion we would mention Miss Austen-Leigh's theory of the novels. It is, we think, quite a new one:

Every one of them gives a description, closely interwoven with the story and concerned with its principal characters, of error committed, conviction following, and improvement effected, all of which may be summed up in the word ‘Repentance.’

What could be simpler? Yet we had never thought of it before.

But to return for a moment to the foes of Jane Austen. In the majority of cases they are routed in the completest fashion. No one, after reading of her paternal descent from the county family of Kentish Austens or of her maternal descent from the Leighs—a notable ancestor page 304 being Thomas Leigh, who in 1558 had the honour of receiving and preceding Queen Elizabeth, ‘carrying the sceptre before her Grace when she first entered the City to take up her residence in the Tower’—no one could dare say again that she was not qualified to write of the English gentry. And he would be an obstinate fellow who would persist in describing Jane Austen's disposition as calm, unemotional, passionless, after having read her notes written at the age of twelve, in an old copy of Oliver Goldsmith's ‘History of England.’ These fiery outpourings are the pleasantest reading of all, and we are exceedingly grateful to Miss Austen-Leigh for printing them for us. They do, indeed, revive Jane Austen's own voice; we can separate them from the comment. For the truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone—reading between the lines—has become the secret friend of their author.

(December 3, 1920.)