Jane Austen

Jane Austen is one of the most renowned English authors of her time, her works continue to be loved and adapted to this very day with her most recent adaption being Persuasion starring Dakota Johnson, which was the last novel published in her lifetime and it shows. It’s a more mature and solemn novel because she was so; being unmarried at 41 in 1817 was both for societal and personal reasons with her personal beliefs of self-sufficiency and worth. This is on the lighter end of the spectrum in which her works were handled with care by a beloved family member, but even then they still altered her image.

Most of her letters to her sister Cassandra were burned after her death, and other family members abridged the remaining letters to keep her image as clean as possible. It was a sign of the times, after all, being unmarried and unabashed about her life could have been a great source of shame for them. We hardly know anything of her, not what she struggled with or what made her tick, and while the attempt to figure it out to enhance her novels can be genuine it still is just speculation. And at what point do these speculations cross over from reality into fictionalizing the woman behind the books? In the film, Becoming Jane, it is said that the makers used what little knowledge known about her love interest combined with inspiration from her books, and it is likely to conclude that they did the same for Jane. In a surviving letter, Jane tells her sister “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved … Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.”

She was just a young woman and deserved to act as such, but her family did not trust her in life or death. Like with my point about Van Gogh, people will push their personal beliefs onto a figure they relate to, and because of the ambiguity in their actual lives, it’s almost as if they are the perfect templates to do so. A woman who was unmarried until her death at 41 years old, wrote potentially proto-feminist works–proto-feminist in the way that Charlotte Bronte, someone who disapproved of her works, was “proto-feminist” which her sister Anne moreso was–when her novels could’ve been about a young woman behaving as such and observing the people around her.