September Book Report: Jane Austen, A Life

This is my second reading of Claire Tomalin’s thorough and thoughtful book about the life of Jane Austen.  I’m your standard Austen-o-phile and I love all things Jane.  I first picked up this biography more than 10 years ago.  It’s a terrific accompaniment to the Austen novels but even more than that, Tomalin’s exceptionally well-researched book demonstrates over and over again how much the lives and stories of women have been neglected over the years.

That’s no news bulletin, but as a woman alive in 21st century, at a time when women can’t expect a seat at the table or anything near equality, I’m struck by all that is lost when women don’t get included.  In Tomalin’s story of Austen’s life, she researches the people around Austen in order to gain an understanding of Jane.  One of the things that becomes clear is just how much women’s lives in the 1800s were caught up (and regularly ended) in matters of childbirth.

As a woman born in the 20th century who is the mother of one (indulged!) child, it’s easy to take for granted the ways in which I was able to choose to have motherhood shape my life.  That’s a modern development; one that really unfolds in my lifetime.  Austen’s decision not to marry (and Tomalin certainly believes it was a choice), was in part about avoiding brood mare status and saving time for her writing.

But even that decision does not empower the life of Jane Austen.  As a woman of a certain class living in a time when compensation for work was a male privilege, Jane finds herself frequently at the whim of her father and then the brothers who are expected to support their widowed mother and unmarried sisters.  Even the idea of a home of her own (or even just a room!) would prove a struggle for Jane as she shuttled between relations for much of her young adult life.  Given her personal writings and her novels about the idea of home, one can only imagine how painful that existence must have been.

In the end, Tomalin’s biography wraps itself around many unanswered questions.  The feminist reader and historian in me recognizes that much of what we don’t know about Jane Austen is a function of her status as an unmarried woman of the 1880s.  That women today can expect much more is not lost in me; that we can still not expect equality is infuriating.  Jane Austen wrote impressive and powerful novels, stories that were not bestsellers in her day but live on in my lifetime as a virtual industry of their own.  It seems a tragedy that a woman of such talent and ability could not expect such admiration in her lifetime.