Jane Austen

If you haven’t noticed – and if you haven’t it means you take no notice that to the right I list what I’ve been reading these days, and for that I say shame on you because reading is (aside from dreaming) a perfect way to escape, relax, chill, look smart…

So if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been dousing myself in a shower of Jane Austen novels, Jane Austen bios, and Jane Austen critiques. I’m scared that if I say I like Jane Austen, I’ll get stacked into the neat little pile of other Jane-adoring women, most of whom are just 1 inch away from the Harlequins.

But alright, I admit it, I like romance, and the movies on the BBC and A&E are really romantic. There’s something about a guy in high boots and seven layers of clothing that send a flush to my cheeks. But you know, the novels are not very romantic. They don’t kiss for instance. There are descriptions of tormented passion, but nothing explicit like modern day romances. No, instead her endings are wrapped up nice and neat, a marriage and then usually a synopsis of what was to come. The passionate endings of the movies are the genius of scriptwriters, God Bless ‘em.

So for that, I like the novels even better. Intelligent novels with deep characters, living in a world that we hope the movies have portrayed accurately, one of propriety, of astute language, where money passed through men’s hand and married women end up like cattle.

Oops, did I say that? Well, I’m just finishing up the Jon Spence Jane Austen Bio Becoming Jane Austen**, and towards the end he talks a lot about marriage in the early 19th century. Mostly he speaks of the realities of marriage and that Austen’s books usually end at the wedding ceremony and not beyond. What if we were to go beyond, what would we find? Marriage meant pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy. That is, if you and your husband got along. If a marriage had no children, it was seen as an unhappy marriage. Ha! More like a smart marriage.

Jane Austen had several brothers; all except one had wives who died in childbirth. Two of them had more than 10 children by the time they died, in their mid thirties, having worn out their bodies to the brink of death. Spence notes that Austen witnessed all of this. She witnessed her niece becoming pregnant not two months after having given birth, and seeing her sisters-in-laws broken down by not having, in one instance, 1 year in 17 years where they are not pregnant.

The outcome of all these children meant that these were “happy” couples; couples who still enjoyed each other’s company. But the physical toll on their bodies was almost cruelty. Jon Spence says that Jane Austen's last book (uncompleted) may have indicated her own "confrontation with her own brothers... The problem she had to grapple with was, quite bluntly, why her own brothers did not respect their wives enough to restrain their sexual desires."

Someone wrote on Amazon.com, that with the risk of childbirth, it was amazing that any of the women even wanted to be married. But what was the alternative to marriage? In Jane Austen’s family, two of her brothers inherited money from childless relatives. They never would have given any of the money to the girls, so automatically Jane and her sister are not as well off as the brothers. For them to have money to live on, they need to marry – and marry as best as they could. Just like younger sons risked their lives in the military, so did all the daughters by marrying and getting pregnant.

Maybe Jane Austen didn’t have to write about what happens after marriage because her contemporaries knew what happened and probably didn’t need to be reminded when they read her novels for the same reason we do – for pleasure, for escape, for relaxation, and maybe to look smart.

** This biography was the basis for the movie Becoming Jane, which is obviously much more passionate than the bio. I suggest a rental, it's really good. There's even a blog dedicated to the movie