Jane Austen was "pretty bitchy about an awful lot of people", her biographer says. Photo / Getty Images
Jane Austen was "pretty bitchy about an awful lot of people", her biographer says. Photo / Getty Images
Jane Austen would be cancelled in the US if her letters had survived, her biographer has claimed.
Austen’s sister, Cassandra, burnt almost all of the author’s correspondence after her death.
Academics have despaired that the letters were lost but Gill Hornby, biographer and author of Miss Austen, which was recentlyturned into a BBC One drama, said we should be grateful.
“We can thank Cassandra for having burnt so many letters and sanitised so much of the evidence of her life that we know so little about her. She has become this very vague, hazy figure, like God and Shakespeare, and she can be whatever we want her to be,” Hornby said.
“I mean, she was pretty bitchy about an awful lot of people. Cassandra destroyed that, sensibly.
“She [Austen] was fortunately an abolitionist, but who knows, she might have said something dodgy about something or other in a letter. Thank God we haven’t got it – you know how happy they are to cancel people on American campuses, and we wouldn’t be celebrating her today if she had.”
The letters that did survive contain little of consequence.
Hornby, who is married to the novelist and former journalist Robert Harris, said: “The great complaint about the letters is that they’re all about trimming a bonnet and making a soup, because that is what we are left with.
“It is enough to know the type of life she led, but not really to know the knots in her behaviour and her character, of which I think there were quite a lot. They’ve all vanished, so she can be anything to anybody.”
Appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Hornby was asked to name the greatest villain in Austen’s novels and came up with a surprising answer: Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.
Gill Hornby told the Cheltenham Literature Festival that Austen was "a vague, hazy figure" so she can be "whatever we want her to be". Photo / Getty Images
“Mrs Bennet is the heroine of the novel and this is something else that we get wrong.
“I agree she says daft things but we open the novel with Mr Bennet talking down to her and I think that really sets the tone for us thinking down on her,” Hornby said. “Mr Bennet, who is always played by the most twinkly, intelligent-looking actor, is a feckless, awful, irresponsible, vile husband and negligent father.
“Because he spends all his time in his study, we presume he’s clever. But you’ve got to interrogate these books. Jane doesn’t tell us anything lightly and if he was in that study doing something intelligent she would tell us what it was.
“He’s not doing anything. He’s shirking. He’s hiding from these six women, all of whom are his responsibility. He knew he was marrying a stupid woman but, if he’s so clever, why isn’t he looking after them and preparing them for this world in which they are totally unprotected?”
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