Director’s Notebook
July, 2009
There’s a problem with dead authors. They can’t write any more books. This is especially frustrating when you really love an author, as I, and countless millions love Jane Austen. Unless someone discovers some previously unknown manuscript of Jane Austen’s (and what a literary sensation that would be!) we have to rely on modern day authors who use the popular literary device of “discovering” a novel or a diary or “finishing” one of Jane’s incomplete works if we want to continue feeding our Jane Austen addiction.
Some of these modern attempts are more successful then others, depending on the modern author’s skill, research, and knowledge of all things “Jane”. I just enjoyed a quick read through a successful “memoir” of Jane’s Austen’s, entitled The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James.
Over the years there has been much speculation about Jane Austen’s romantic experiences. She writes with such conviction, good humor, and clarity about love and romance, it’s hard to believe that she was never in love herself. Yet no letters or journals have been found that record any long term romance in Jane’s life. In fact, it appears that some letters may have been sent to her beloved sister Cassandra, but those letters were destroyed intentionally after Jane’s death. Perhaps Jane agreed with the genteel belief that a lady’s name should appear in print only 3 times: at her birth, her marriage and her death? Remember that Jane Austen’s novels were published anonymously during her lifetime.
In these fictional memoirs, Jane falls in love with the appealing Mr. Ashford, who would seem to combine the wisdom of Mr. Knightly (Emma), the weath of Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice) and the good humor of Mr. Tilney (Northanger Abbey). The path of love is not smooth for Jane, but it fills her with powerful emotions that make her feel alive and hopeful. Throughout the memoirs she writes sentences and expresses opinions that devoted readers of Jane Austen’s novels will recognize as close paraphrases from her much-beloved novels. The need to marry for love rather than for convenience, the importance of shared values and beliefs, the value of looking below the surface of social manners, all pay a part in Jane Austen’s novels, as the right men and women find each other and overcome any and all obstacles to their happiness.
Yet we know that Jane Austen did not marry, and so the course of true love cannot triumph here. And what of Jane’s passion for writing? Is it just a poor alternative to love, or is writing and the expression of her thoughts and feelings as important to her as breathing? These themes are dealt with in a light but perceptive way throughout the book, and what emerges is a Jane Austen every bit as intelligent, opinionated and lively as her many fans have come to expect.
If Jane had left her memoirs, who knows what suprises we might have learned! Short of that, The Memoirs of Jane Austen provides a very pleasant addition to the ever growing canon of books by and about the inimitable Jane.
