This book is one of a series of biographies by literary writers which has so far given us Edna O'Brien's highly-acclaimed James Joyce, among other valuable works. Like O'Brien's, Carol Shields's study of an author she loves testifies to the potential of this particular publishing strategy, probably market-driven, to produce original and perceptive biographies.
Shields's book is literary rather than scholarly. The ghost of Austen's style hovers over it, as she admits, and so the story unfolds in elegant sentences and with exceptional clarity of purpose. Clutter is avoided. She seldom resorts to the stratagem of many modern biographers, of padding the narrative with details about their subject's historical period or distant relations. Her attention is firmly centred on Jane Austen herself, and her task is the novelist's, namely to reveal character.
It's not easy. Jane Austen left us her novels, 160 letters, and little else in the way of data. (There is no reliable portrait: even the colour of her hair is in dispute). But using previous biographies, Shields brings her subject vividly to life: Austen is presented as a precocious child, member of a parson's happy family, who wrote for their entertainment from an early age. She became a witty woman, idealistic, and with an occasionally sharp tongue. Her tragedy was that she was under intense social pressure to marry for money, having none herself, but believed she should marry for love - a Marianne, not an Elinor. Although she had a few offers from rich unsuitable men, the one she loved was snatched from her grasp by his prudent relations; she remained single and economically dependent on her father and brothers.
Her family were supportive of her literary talent, but impractical. Her father tried to interest a publisher in a novel in 1895, when she was 20. But he did not send the publisher a copy of the book, and his letter was unanswered. In 1803, a version of Northanger Abbey was accepted by another publisher, who sat on it for six years! During that period, the Austen family never contacted him. This absurd wait seems to have been partly responsible for a writer's block which consumed almost 10 of Austen's 42 years. Eventually, when her father died, she herself tackled the culprit, who refused to print but would not return the book unless she repaid the advance (£10 - she did not have it). Her brother then asked Egertons to publish Sense and Sensibility. It enjoyed quiet success and was quickly followed by Pride and Prejudice, an immediate hit. Shields's commentaries on the novels are in a liberal humanist mould. She eschews technical language, responding to the works as an ordinary reader, and as a writer. Novelists of course read like other people, for pleasure, knowledge, insight. But they also automatically judge the craft elements of a work: its structure, its pacing, the success of its characterisation. Shields's views on these aspects of Austen's novels will interest any writer of fiction.
She claims that Austen's "little piece of ivory", her intense focus on the emotional lives of girls and women was a conscious choice, but that her sense of the larger sweep of politics and history is implied by, say, references to the militia. According to Shields, Austen did not - as critics sometimes claim - ignore such momentous events as the French Revolution or its ideologies, or the Napoleonic wars. This case is overstated. Official historical events seem to me to belong to the enormous category of things that Austen simply left out. If ever there was a writer who worked on the principle of exclusion, it was she. Almost everything that does not serve the purpose of exposing characters and their inter-relationships is not admitted to the gleaming drawing-rooms of her novels.
Carol Shields works on a slightly more inclusive principle in this short biography. But she, too, focuses on the essentials, and on what interests her: the character of Jane Austen, woman and writer. The result is a warm and eminently readable story, a cross between a novel and a history. It is riveting. I could not put it down.
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne is a writer. Her latest book, the short story collection The Pale Gold of Alaska, was recently published by Blackstaff