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As a new film about Jane Austen's life opens, Frances Wilson explains why Austen irritates her.
The suggestion that Jane Austen might be tiresome, irritating or just plain bad is the equivalent of not finding Stephen Fry endearing or Dawn French funny.
But those
who Hate Jane are in good company. Apparently Charlotte Bronte thought her depictions of love cold, unconvincing and lifeless. Bronte acknowledged the "heresy'' of her position because she was, as I am, that rare thing - a woman who is irritated by Austen. Mark Twain was also unable to see the point of her: "Why, I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.''
These days, no library is complete without its Jane Austen section. In fact, you can't throw a stone without hitting something to do with the virgin of the vicarage. Throwing stones at Jane Austen often doesn't seem such a bad idea, particularly if the target could be that fun-free zone, Mansfield Park's Fanny Price. And if Edmund Bertram, her equally humourless cousin, should find himself in the line of fire, so much the better. Is there a less attractive exchange in any Austen novel than the one in which Fanny and Edmund sermonise over the faults of the dazzling Mary Crawford, who suggested Edmund's sister Maria might not have been entirely unwilling to elope with Mary's dishy brother, Henry?
And can anyone really blame Henry Crawford for giving up on his flirtation with Fanny and going for Maria instead, who at least fancied him? The best that can be said of the novel's grim conclusion, in which Edmund declares his love to Fanny by telling her she is his "sister'' now, is that the Crawfords are saved from throwing themselves away on the pious and prating inhabitants of Mansfield Park.
While we're at it, how about slinging a boulder in the direction of the joyless Colonel Brandon, in Sense and Sensibility. What was Austen thinking of when she yoked poor Marianne Dashwood, her most spirited heroine since Elizabeth Bennet, to this corpse-like man, who, twice her age, "still sought the constitutional safe-guard of a flannel waistcoat''?
Austen's smugness at the end of Sense and Sensibility has about it more than a drop of schadenfreude: "Instead of falling a sacrifice to an irresistible passion,'' Austen explains of her decision to deprive Marianne of the love of her life, she found herself, "at 19, submitting to new attachments, entering on new duties, placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, the patroness of a village.'' Lucky old her.
My problem with Jane Austen is more to do with pride than prejudice. As a child, I consumed her novels as my own daughter now consumes JK Rowling. Only now do I see how nasty she is and how much of her nastiness I once celebrated as wit. The novels I once thought bright and breezy are in fact weighed down by ceaseless moralising and joyless value judgements.
Austen's mockery of garrulous, middle-aged women such as Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Miss Bates in Emma is less funny than embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as the fact that the only love Austen finds acceptable is incestuous. Because Fanny Price cannot actually marry her brother William, she marries a man who she sees as a brother. Both Emma Woodhouse and Elinor Dashwood, who deserve a bit of passion, are consigned to a lifetime with their brothers-in-law. Just what is Austen's problem with sex outside the family?
The most sexually attractive characters in her books - the Crawfords, Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, Frank Churchill in Emma, and Emma Woodhouse herself - are punished for their appeal. The worst that can be said of Mary and Henry Crawford is they find country life quiet. Ditto Emma, while Wickham is at least a laugh and gives Lizzy Bennet a better run for her money than the patronising Mr Darcy, whom she summed up correctly the first time he proposed: "I felt you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.''
The figures we are expected to admire in Austen's novels - Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey and her equally uninspiring paramour, Henry Tilney - are the ones who have the least sexual energy. The plot of Persuasion, Austen's last and nastiest novel, proves my point. Anne Elliot is allowed to marry Captain Wentworth only when she has lusted after him for so many years her desire has exhausted her and she is grateful to be married at all.
Of course, Jane Austen might not have been dealt such a good hand herself, but you know what they say about people in glasshouses...
- The Daily Telegraph
Becoming Jane opens on Thursday.
