Jane’s fame

Did Jane Austen want people to read and admire her work? Of course; she was a writer. Did she like making money from writing? Yes. She wasn’t the wispy angel that her family biographers tried to make her out to be.

To this extent Claire Harman ( Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World ) offers a helpful rebuttal to some portayals of Austen. But Harman’s book is married by what seems to me a humorless and tone-deaf use of some of her evidence.

When Jane writes to her brother Frank that she has made 250 pounds and adds, “which only makes me long for more,” are we to take that comment at face value?

And what about her comment, also to Frank, that she’s willing to let out the secret of her authorship so long as she gets paid: “I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can make of it. People shall pay for their Knowledge if I can make them.” Harman finds that a “remarkably hard-nosed remark,” but I’d guess that Frank laughed at it.

When Mansfield Park did well, she wrote to her niece, “I am very greedy & want to make the most of it.” Again, Harman seems to take this straight. There may be people who write in private letters about their own greed – to their nieces! – but Jane Austen was not one to do so. Harman knows that Austen’s novels are overlaid with ironic poses; but Jane rarely if ever let up the irony, and her pose as a money-grubbing authoress is a pose.

“I write only for Fame” is the quotation from Austen on the back cover. But she wrote that in a private letter, to her sister, and she was talking about writing letters, not novels.

Didn’t Harman laugh at some of these lines? There’s no evidence that she did.

Should we take these comments seriously? Yes and No. Both the Yes and the No are necessary to getting Jane right, I think. There are several layers here: Yes, she wanted to make money and win praise; daughter of a country parson, I suspect that she was slightly appalled at the intensity of her greed for both, so she covered it over with irony; but she didn’t cover her wants with self-deprecation and denials, which would have been both dishonest and trite, but instead covered herself by admitting to it all with shocking bluntness.

Harman’s is not a debunking biography, but since she tends to stop at the first layer, she leaves an imbalanced impression of Austen’s motivations, her tactics for navigating her life as a writer, and her character.