Read Online Jane Austen by Valerie Grosvenor Myer - Free Book Online

quiet, shy girl. She was tall for her age and slender. When, in 1788, the family visited Great-uncle Francis, by now over ninety, at the Red House in Sevenoaks, her cousin Phila Walter cast upon her a cold eye. Phila was in her twenties and not very sympathetic to adolescents. She wrote to her brother that she preferred Cassandra, who talked well ‘The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve. They all spent the day with us, and the more I see of Cassandra the more I admire -Jane is whimsical and affected/ It is noteworthy that both the writer Mary Russell Mitford, a granddaughter of Dr Russell, the Rector of Ashe, and Phila stigmatized Jane as affected: possibly Jane was experimenting with the face she presented to the world and wondering how to contain her own wicked wit within socially acceptable bounds. The implied judgment that Henry was not handsome either is surprising, as the surviving portrait shows him with fine features. The Austens were a good-looking family. Perhaps Jane, in her turn, did not care much for Phila, who was censorious and two-faced. Their cousin Eliza de Feullide, née Hancock, however, described Cassandra and Jane in their teens as ‘perfect little beauties’. She reported to Phila when Jane was sixteen that Cassandra and Jane were both much grown and greatly improved in manners and looks. ‘They are I think equally sensible, and both so to a degree seldom met with, but still my heart gives the preference to Jane.’
    To be seventh in a family means that you can have only a limited share of attention. Cassandra was the elder girl and Jane grew up in her shadow, in a house full of boys, related and unrelated to them. Cassandra was always in demand at Rowling, Edward’s first married home, a manor house provided by Elizabeth’s relatives, and at Godmersham after he inherited in 1797, while Jane usually stayed behind. Jane may well have felt her clever brothers and Cassandra were more important, more highly valued, than herself. She was ten years younger than James, settled in his career as a clergyman, and possibly in awe of him.
    She may have felt too that she could not compete in what, at home and outside it, seemed to be a man’s world. The then current social morality discouraged assertiveness in girls, who were supposed to be cheerful and unselfish. The bluestockings of the mid-eighteenth century were no longer fashionable role models, if they ever had been. How could a girl with only reasonable prettiness and no fortune achieve recognition and respect? There were no competitive exams to challenge her, not even in music. Today’s seventeen-year-olds prove themselves by taking exams and passing driving tests. Jane must often have felt crushed by her own lack of consequence in the world and the lack of opportunities to shine. In adult life she looked with amazement at the self-confidence of young people and asked half-humorously ‘What has become of all the shyness in the world?’
    She took refuge in becoming a shrewd observer. In her writings from the age of fifteen onwards she took apart the excessive sentiment and far-fetched sensationalism of current pulp fiction, especially in her short epistolary novel,
Love and Friendship
, She enjoyed being witty about her neighbours and the words she puts into the mouth of Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
have often been understood as applying to her own practice: ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies
do
divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’
    Pride and Prejudice
is a Cinderella story. All Jane Austen’s novels follow the romance pattern of happy marriage achieved after difficulties have been overcome. Her own life was very different, emotionally unfulfilled. She was far from unfeeling, but she cultivated detachment and avoided emotionalism. She became adept, in her letters and in her novels, at