Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius began by saying that ‘getting into her mind isn’t easy’ – something you’d never have guessed from the rest of the episode, where both the narrator and the talking heads were able to tell us exactly what Austen was thinking and feeling at any given time.
Like many Austen biographies, this one laments her sister Cassandra’s decision to burn most of her letters, but then takes full advantage of how little we consequently know about her to portray (or possibly make up) a woman whose attitudes are spookily close to its own. In a previous era, this might have meant presenting Austen as a gentle and contentedly domestic aunt. Now of course it means that ‘at a time when women were supposed to know their place, Austen ripped up the rulebook’. Equipped with its privileged access to her mind, Monday’s programme further explained that after ‘feeling a lack of autonomy’, she decided ‘to pursue the route of being an independent woman’.
Some irksome pedants (me, for instance) might suggest that in order to make Austen a proper feminist heroine, the programme has to contort even the little we know to fit a preordained narrative. Either that, or ignore it completely. Need Austen to be a pioneering female voice in the male world of novel-writing? Simply erase all the other women – Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe etc. – who were already successful novelists.
Occasionally, too, we had the strange sight of Austen biographers contributing to accounts different from the ones in their own biographies. In 2013’s The Real Jane Austen, Paula Byrne describes cousin Eliza arriving at the Austens’ Steventon rectory in 1786 and visiting periodically after that, including for several months in 1792-3.
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