There is a marked difference between the Jane Austen we find in her letters-confident, sharp, and witty, especially in the letters to her sister-and the Jane Austen presented by various of her family members after her death-pious, kindly, and unambitious, having led what her brother Henry called “a life of usefulness, literature and religion” (29). One can try to reconstruct a personality from Austen’s letters and from the recorded opinions of those who knew her, always allowing for the effect that context has on these personal remnants. Knowledge of any historical figure can never be more than partial. In this paper I will take up Oberman’s challenge and consider the techniques that Austen uses to signal the distance between her own authorial persona and her heroines’ perspectives in the three Chawton novels, with a brief look at the surviving fragment of her last work, Sanditon. The two voices are frequently at odds, despite their shared vocabulary and style. As Rachel Oberman writes of Emma,Īlthough the similarity between the two voices may fool the reader into misreading Emma’s opinions as authorial statements at crucial points in the novel, careful attention to whose voice we are actually hearing helps the reader to find the places where Emma lacks narrative authority. There are subtle signs that even those heroines who seem most like her are distinguished from her in some ways. Why should a perceived resemblance between Mary Crawford and Jane Austen be disturbing? It seems that Austen, perhaps more than many other authors, is an object of admiration, even veneration, among readers and literary scholars, and anything that might complicate her status as a secular saint is potentially troubling.įor this reason it is a useful exercise to re-examine the evidence on which we base our beliefs about Austen’s identification with her characters. Yet-disturbingly-Mary shares Jane Austen’s own kind of wit,” writes Margaret Doody in her latest book, Jane Austen’s Names (9). “Mary Crawford may be officially rebuked by the outcome of Mansfield Park.
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