Relying to a large extent on the letters - and boy, did these people write letters! - David Nokes has written what is no more or no less than a new Jane Austen novel. Here are the people she wrote about in fictionalised form writing about themselves, their hopes, their fears, their motivations, the very stuff of their every-day existences in a manner as revealing as if they were in a confessional.
Using Jane as the centre, he builds a kaleidoscope of colourful lives about her, as parents, sister, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and acquaintances dance to the tune of all kinds of drums, most of them beating out odd rather than ordinary refrains.
Take Jane's aunt, Philadelphia Austen. She journeyed to India to marry Surgeon-Extraordinary Ty soe Saul Hancock, had an illegitimate daughter with Warren Hastings, who was Governor of Bengal at the time, came back to London and lived a merry old life, while her elderly husband stayed on in India to provide for her comforts. The daughter, Eliza, married a French aristocrat, who was beheaded in 1894, and then took as her second husband Henry, Jane Austen's brother.
Then there was another aunt, Jane Leigh-Perrot, one of the most upstanding citizens of Bath, who was accused by unscrupulous shopkeepers of stealing a card of lace, had to serve six months of semi-incarceration, then endured a trial in which she was forced to listen to all kinds of vituperation, and barely managed to be acquitted on the strength of what was left of her good name.
Amazing, really, how people who on the surface appeared to lead such mundane and genteel lives could take the eccentric, the bizarre and the downright salacious in their strides. A neighbour of the Austens was known for his "infamous puns", while another acquaintance, a Mrs Stent, enjoyed "farmhouse ribaldry about ejaculating cocks".
Jane herself spent some time at the Abbey School, where the headmistress, Mrs La Tournelle, had a wooden leg; at the age of fifteen Jane could include a play on the word "carpet" in one of her letters - "My first is what my second was to King James the 1st, and you tread on my whole." Robert Carr was indeed the homosexual James's pet, and the doubleentendre in the remainder of the sentence needs no explaining.
In the midst of the rich panoply of colour and movement that he weaves, our author never loses sight of his quarry. His main thesis is that, in spite of the efforts of succeeding Austen relatives down through the years, and of many of her biographers, to idealise Jane's posthumous reputation, there is no doubt that she believed in frankness and openness, and possessed a scabrous and invective wit.
Her sister, Cassandra, who outlived her by twenty-eight years, burned a number of her letters, and other nieces and nephews did their best to gloss over unpalatable facts about their aunt. However, in many of her letters that are still extant, it is plain to see Jane's rather jaundiced view of the people she met: girls with bad breath, with fat noses; women who emitted foul odours, who chattered nonsensically; men who were fops, who drank, gambled, suffered from gout.
The great love of her life appears to have been Tom Lefroy, who came to visit his aunt in the next parish to Jane's. But said aunt packed him off back to Ireland, believing that Jane was not sufficiently well-bred to be a fitting wife for her nephew - he later became Chief Justice of his native country.
The scope and intent of Mr Noke's work can in no way be done full justice in a review. The book cries out to be read, not alone by fans of Jane Austen, but by anyone who enjoys a great, witty, gossipy read. Desolation to arrive at the last page, but I'll soon be turning back to the start again.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic; on Saturday, Brian Fallon will write on another Austen biography, by Claire Tomalin
