Sunday, March 13, 2016

Growing Older with Jane Austen, by Maggie Lane

 I love this cover!

The reviews in JASNA News, the newsletter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, tempt me with every issue. That's where I discovered this. I had already read two of Maggie Lane's books, Jane Austen and Food and Jane Austen and Names, both of which I found very interesting and informative (particularly the book on food). I also have her Jane Austen's England on the TBR shelves.

As you would guess from the title, this book is an exploration of age and aging in Austen's work. It draws on her letters as well as her novels, the juvenalia, Lady Susan, and the unfinished works (The Watsons and Sanditon). Maggie Lane also incorporates the real-life experiences of Austen, her family and friends. As she writes in the Introduction,
    Unlike her parents and six of her seven siblings, who all lived into their seventies, eighties or even, in one case, nineties, Jane Austen did not see old age. She was just forty-one when she died, in the very prime of her writing life. But she did share, with everyone who outlives youth itself, the experience of growing older. Jane Austen at forty was a different woman from Jane Austen at twenty.
    Like any thinking person, she was aware of the changes in herself wrought by time. . . 
There are chapters on "The Loss of Youth and Beauty," "Old Wives" and "Old Maids," "Four Dowager Despots," and "The Dangerous Indulgence of Illness." Maggie Lane points out that Austen's main characters are young, but each book has a large supporting cast of people in different phases of their lives. Much of her discussion focuses on these characters. I had not appreciated before how
With the lightest of touches, Jane Austen grounds her characters in the age range they inhabit. Small details of clothes, hair or deportment, or more frequently and consistently of speech, outlook and habit, help us perceive her older characters to be middle-aged or elderly. We experience them as older people, acting and speaking in ways that distinguish them - yet without exaggerated effect - from the youthful cohort whose foils they are. In fact, from infancy to senescence, her characters act in age, while not sacrificing individuality.
I knew that Jane Austen with her many nieces and nephews appreciated the importance of aunts, but I had not realized how few grandparents there are in her books. She never knew her own, and none of her heroines has one. Jane Fairfax of Emma is the only major character to have a grandparent, in Mrs. Bates - and an inactive one, "a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille." So Austen's heroines lack any guidance from that earlier generation, as do the parents of the heroines (some of whom stand in need of help and advice themselves, like Mrs. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility).

I found the last chapter, "Nothing to Do but to Die," very interesting. Again, I had not considered how few deaths occur in Austen's novels (there are more, and comic ones, in the juvenalia). "Death is never gratuitous in Austen," Lane writes; "it always has some function to perform in terms of plot or character." Mrs. Churchill's death in Emma, the only one to take place in the course of the story, frees Frank Churchill to marry Jane Fairfax. Mrs. Tilney's off-stage death in Northanger Abbey is the only one described in any detail, and hearing the story from Henry Tilney has a huge impact on Catherine Morland and on their relationship. In this chapter Maggie Lane also considers the deaths in Austen's own family, including her own. In a short "Conclusion," Lane asks what Austen's life would have been like had she not died so young. "Professionally, she would surely have grown in both output and reputation. . . Did she have a Cranford in her? Or a 'Condition of England' novel?" How I wish we could know.

Reading this has moved Jane Austen's England up my reading list. And from the bibliography I had a couple of other titles in mind, Jane Austen's Family through Five Generations (Maggie Lane) and Jane Austen and the Body (John Wilshire).

12 comments:

  1. I had heard of this one - it sounds like something I'd like. Maggie Lane's book on Jane Austen and Food was fun to read (in a similar vein, I think).

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    1. It's been several years since I read the book on food, and I've forgotten a lot of it. It might be time to reread!

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  2. I love that cover, too, and it sounds like a fun read... as does the food book. Will check the library.

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    1. I'm always interested in food history. The course with Austen I think of Mr. Woodhouse and his thin gruel, and not wanting anybody else to eat anything, encased disagreed with them :)

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  3. It sounds very interesting. I remember when I read Jane Austen's letters that a lot of women friends and neighbours died in childbirth. She obviously thought that that reality was best avoided in her fiction.

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    1. Yes, and two sisters-in-law as well - one after her 11th delivery! I think the only child born in the novels (on-stage, so to speak) is Anna Weston, in Emma.

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  4. I read What Matters in Jane Austen recently, and it discussed how few people die in Jane Austen's novels. It was really interesting, actually -- the author talked about the omnipresence of the specter of death in the Austen novels, and how contemporary readers would have understood which characters were in mourning dress when, and how frightening those minor illnesses could be. Super interesting. This sounds good too!

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    1. I rushed to order that book, and it still sits unread on my shelves. I need to fix that! It's scary to read about medical treatment in those days, or the lack of it, how people died from things we can fix so easily today.

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  5. This book sounds fascinating and all the England title you mention.

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    1. The book on England is at the top of my TBR list, with Middlemarch, and I really need to get to those two (very different) books.

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  6. There are so many books on Austen these days, but this is an angle that is so interesting. I would like to read it--I hadn't thought about the lack of grandparents of the main characters. I always thought Mrs. Bennet had a problem with her own aging--that "little sea-bathing would set me up" comment always seems so telling to me.

    Great review!

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    1. There really are, Jane! I prefer the books like this one, that explore particular elements of life in Austen's time (and in her own life).

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Thank you for taking the time to read, and to comment. I always enjoy hearing different points of view about the books I am reading, even if we disagree!