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BOOK REVIEWS Circumventing the Biographical Subject: Jane Austen and the Critics Brian Dillon Eastern Montana College Jane Austen's critics construct biographically-based arguments from relatively slight material: a volume of censored letters, a brief biographical statement penned by one of her brothers a year after her death, a memoir by a nephew recollected in tranquility over half a century after her death, and, of course, her works of fiction. The overwhelming majority of her published letters went to her sister Cassandra and imply rather than reveal a bond of intimacy between them. Jane and Cassandra apparently understood one another so well that the author's self-revelations are muffled by news of her neighborhood or her brothers' quickly increasing families. The less an author appears to examine herself, the easier it is for her readers to have faith in her stability and personal continuity and to imagine her life as a simple unity. The publications of Austen's brother and nephew, in their creation of a woman devout and kind, full of common sense and propriety, presented a self unified and whole to her readers.1 Consequently, Austen's readers share a knowledge of a few facts about her personal life and the image of an unmarried, devoted sister and aunt who was endowed with extraordinary artistic talent. In her 1984 essay on Austen biography, Deborah Kaplan complained that the creation of the "Aunt Jane" implied author "has contributed to the reduction in the stature of the novelist's life for her subsequent readers" ("Disappearance" 138). But has it? Kaplan's new book, Jane Austen Among Women, seems to challenge this assertion: the smoke and mirrors of "Aunt Jane" have made the novelist more mysterious, more impenetrable to her readers, who wonder how this simplified biographical subject could have authored such powerful, challenging novels. Consider one issue from Austen's own life that colors the response of biographically-based critics to her fiction . Readers are often troubled by the apparent gap between her life and her art when it comes to the issue of marriage. As one Austen biographer, Jane Aiken Hodge, states, "A husband may not have been Jane Austen's recipe for herself, but she always provided them for her heroines" (21). Little foresight was required for women of Austen's status to understand the consequences of rejecting a marriage proposal: "She was condemning herself to a lifetime as a second-class citizen, an object of contemptuous humour , an old maid" (Hodge 83). Jane Austen knew this, Elizabeth Bennet knew this, and Charlotte Lucas knew this. How each of them acted, or should have acted, on this knowledge is a critical sticking-point. 213 214Rocky Mountain Review That the alternative—marriage—is inevitably better is not a truth universally acknowledged. Marriage brings the dangers of childbirth and the noisy, time-consuming distraction of children, as Austen witnessed with her various sisters-in-law and numerous nieces and nephews. Harris BiggWither , whose marriage proposal Austen accepted one night and rejected the next morning, went on to father ten children (Honan 198). Of more immediate concern is the risk of a marriage of unequal minds. In Pride and Prejudice, though only slightly more than a week passes between Mr. Collins' arrival at Longbourn and his proposal to Elizabeth, she can foresee the inequality in the match as clearly as she sees the impossibility of his possessing genuine feelings for her. Indeed, his most genuine expression to her is a rebuke for her refusal to marry him: "in spite of your manifold attraction, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications" (PP 108). Elizabeth must see that the plight Mr. Collins rudely describes accurately denotes her limited options. Although Charlotte Lucas enjoys the friendship of Elizabeth Bennet, a "friendship [the latter] valued beyond that of any other person" (PP 23), and she possesses many of Elizabeth's intellectual virtues, she marries a man whom Elizabeth spurned. Modern readers find the character of Elizabeth refreshing because she pushes against early nineteenth-century...

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