None of these three new biographies swells the evidentiary record, which has always been wiry, thanks to a diet of rumor and estimate. She wrote the first draft of “Pride and Prejudice” in 1796 before she was 21, but would wait 17 years for it to be published.

As a girl, she was already putting out fresh, sharp, leafy sentences. Almost as soon as she started writing playlets, squibs and family sketches as a teenager, she began to find new ways of representing fictional characters: In “Lesley Castle,” written when she was only 15, she produced an astonishingly accomplished portrait of a trivial narcissist, a woman more interested in the contents of her kitchen than in the content of her character. Although fluttering mythologies have been let loose-the small letter-table in the parlor, the creaking door that alerted the novelist to unwanted visitors-we know almost nothing about how and when she wrote.īut she was a natural revolutionary in fiction one can tell that. We have only 160 letters by her, and most are rather tedious: the futile daily plow of seedless social events. On the one hand, she made the great decisive leap forward in fiction from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary mode on the other, she left behind barely an exegetical word about her aesthetics, her idea of fiction or her religion. This tells us something about the elusive mixture of application and instinct in her working life.

These literary truths are apt to be loyally forgotten by Austen’s traditional worshipers: the filmgoers, the churchgoers, the antiquarians gardening for lost ideological roots, the little Englanders and little Anglophiles.Īusten was a ferocious innovator, and her innovations were largely achieved by the time she was 24. Yet at the same time, the first stirrings of what would become Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness are also found in Austen’s novels she invented a new semaphore for signaling a person’s thought as it is happening. From her, Forster learned that characters do not have to change to be real they must merely reveal more of their stable essences as the novel progresses.

From her, Dickens learned that characters can survive on one attribute and still be fat with life. She founded character and caricature at the same time, which is the essentially satirical, essentially English approach to fictional people. English fiction flows from Jane Austen’s pelisse as surely as Russian fiction does from Gogol’s overcoat.

Jane austen a life claire tomalin