Essay: Confidence in Her Own Success
A reflection on Virginia Woolf's 1925 essay simply & boldly titled "Jane Austen."
Born December 16, 1775, Jane Austen turned 247 years old last Friday. I failed to come up with a worthy birthday post, so I stayed silent.
On that day, Facebook also reminded me of a painful memory from 7 years ago: The day I learned Vladimir Nabokov didn’t think much of Jane Austen. To help me grieve, I posted a screenshot of what Nabokov wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson about Jane Austen. I have to say, it was one of those “don’t-meet-your-heroes” moments for me.
I love Nabokov; I’ll never deny his genius. But I have to question his intelligence after a comment like that. To not see “anything” in Jane Austen’s work betrays his mere surface reading. It’s a finely polished surface she gives us, but it contains much. The benefit of reading Jane Austen comes from reading deeply.
Virginia Woolf understood this about Austen, according to her 1925 biographical essay simply & boldly titled, “Jane Austen.” I was pleased to find that Woolf wrote admiringly of Austen’s work, not as a fangirl but as a woman writer looking for a role model. In 1925, Virginia Woolf was 43 (by 1941 she would be dead) & published Mrs. Dalloway & The Common Reader. I’m not sure where this essay was published & why it was written, but it’s not the only essay she wrote about Austen & her work—there was “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” in 1924, a review of Austen’s Love and Friendship in 1922. The British academic & scholar Janet Todd has shown that Austen was a continuity in Woolf’s life, letters, essays, & fiction. But I don’t mean this to be a biography of a biographical essay of Austen, or of Woolf herself.
It was interesting to find this biographical essay of Austen after reading Woolf’s Orlando (1928), a “biography” of a noble person named Orlando (influenced by real-life Vita Sackville-West) that begins in the year 1500 & continues until present day 1928. Woolf is mocking the form of the biographical narrative with the playful way she blurs fiction & biography. An anonymous narrator interjects throughout Orlando’s story with asides that are meant to remind us of their role as a biographer: To relay the history of Orlando’s transition from a man to a woman, and the history of England from age to age. Woolf believed the biography needed to break away from its Victorian stuffiness & transform into something new. So one has to wonder why she chooses to write a biography of Jane Austen.
I think it’s because there comes a point for every Austen admirer when the novels are no longer enough. We desire to know the writer better, as well. I normally fall on the side of a writer’s biography having no place interfering with the reader’s interpretation of their work, but knowing more about Austen has always given me a deeper understanding of her novels. It’s because Austen set clear boundaries with her sentences & never transgressed them. As Woolf puts it, she chose “her kingdom” & mastered it. Any trace of new information a reader can derive about Austen could only add depth to the world she wrote about.
Woolf begins her biography with a comment on how little knowledge we have of Austen because “if Miss Cassandra had had her way, we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels.” To Cassandra, her older sister, Jane did “write freely” of her hopes, desires, & disappointments, all things Cassandra wanted to keep from strangers & scholars as her dead sister’s fame grew. So Cassandra burnt the letters Jane sent her, “spar[ing] only what she judged too trivial to be of interest.” And as Cassandra predicted, Woolf goes on in her essay to make scholarly speculations based on the “little gossip,” “few letters,” & novels we have. From the (sometimes conflicting) observations friends & relatives made of Austen (“not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve…Jane is whimsical and affected,” says cousin Philadelphia Austen; “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly,” says family friend Mrs. Mitford) & the “second-rate work” (The Watsons) she “left…unfinished,” Woolf attempts to write the story of Jane Austen.
A story as fictional as it is true, for in her essay about “The New Biography” (1927) Woolf suggests the aim of biography should be “the search for truth and personality.” It was important for Woolf to create the origin story for how Austen came to write the books she did. In this sense, Jane Austen became a character the way Vita Sackville-West became Orlando. Woolf scholars speculate that she saw in Jane Austen the character of a “Woman Writer” who she could trace all women’s writing back to.
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf looks to establish a “female literary tradition,” in which, Judith Lee writes, Austen holds an equal position with Shakespeare. While Woolf desires “to make Jane Austen representative,” she does so “without idealizing her” and even, at times, “victimizing” her. This could be why Woolf emphasizes the limited boundaries of Austen’s world, her ability to evade scenes in her novels that go too far beyond her “province,” her realm of understanding. It also allows Woolf to position herself as the writer who results from this lineage. Had Austen lived to keep writing (“she died at the height of her powers” at 42), would she have come to write novels like Virginia Woolf? Would she have transformed (the way Orlando transforms into a woman) into a 20th-century woman writer?
Woolf draws our attention to Persuasion (“the last completed novel”) in her biography of Austen as a transition for the writer:
“There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly.”
For Woolf, Persuasion marks Austen’s boredom with the vanities and trivialities of daily life, but it also hints at what further novels would have been had she kept writing, & she most certainly would have kept writing. Persuasion is different from Austen’s other works because “she is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed,” Woolf writes. It’s true that Persuasion lacks the certainty of Austen’s other works—the narrator isn’t as certain, doesn’t seem to be observing humanity with the same level of amusement. Rather, there’s sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others. Of course Woolf & I are assuming that Austen & her narrators are one.
But that’s because when you read Austen’s novels the worlds the narrators guide us through suddenly feel like our own. In Orlando, Woolf claims that from age to age, gender to gender, something essential remains about the subject of her biography. There’s a continuity, which is what Woolf recognizes in Austen. Jane Austen is one of our greatest satirists because she knew from a young age “that there is something eternally laughable in human nature.” And the ballroom was always the best place to bring this comedy to life. Even as she came to know more and “her comedy would have suffered,” she would have found a “deeper and more suggestive” method “for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is.” Her flavor of satire would have changed, but the human comedy always stays the same.
Virginia Woolf admits this is speculation. Jane Austen’s books may be immortal but the writer isn’t. She died before the transition was complete and “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success.”
“She would have been a forerunner of Henry James and of Proust,” Woolf writes. And Nabokov. Is it too much of an assumption to make that, had she lived, Austen would have kept writing, would have felt confidence in her own success, and would have found amusement in the opinions of writers like Nabokov? She would have found the right way to keep laughing at human nature.