Click Here To Purchase Becoming Jane Austen

Author: Jon Spence
ISBN: 13 978-1-84725-046-9


After reading Jane Austen's hilarious and poignant novels, where true love
and virtue always win the day, her basic biographical facts appear quite
pale in comparison.  Born into the large family of a country clergyman,
Austen had an education considered sufficient for her time, experienced a
flirtation in her early twenties which came to nothing, lived in genteel
poverty most of her life, had one economically advantageous marriage
proposal which she refused approximately  24 hours after having accepted
it, wrote six novels which brought her some fame, if not fortune, and then
died at the age of 41 from what was probably Addison's Disease.

Dull stuff?  Not when presented within the pages of Jon Spence's biography,
Becoming Jane Austen.  Spence's detail-filled biography (from which the
film "Becoming Jane" was somewhat loosely based) is filled with a myriad of
facts, suppositions and, most enlightening of all, a plethora of apparent
connections between Austen's biography and her fiction.

Austen's most popular work is indisputably Pride and Prejudice, largely
because the characters of Darcy and Elizabeth - and their subsequent
romance - are so utterly appealing.  Where did this winning romantic comedy
originate, seeing that Austen had little actual romance in her own life?

Most biographers agree that the novel had some connection to a brief
flirtation between Austen and Tom Lefroy and they hold this opinion because
the actual relationship coincided with the initial writing of the book.
What biographers generally do not agree on, though, is the depth of that
relationship.  The recent film, "Becoming Jane," portrays the Austen-Lefroy
romance as so serious that it verged on matrimony, but many biographers
dismiss it as a brief, superficial, youthful encounter.  Spence's opinion
of the relationship is that it was a relatively serious one, at least where
Jane's heart was concerned, and he takes pains to prove this.  Although
some of his postulations are fascinating, others are clearly overreaching.

While most biographers suppose the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy to be
modeled on Tom Lefroy, Spence presents an interesting new twist to this
line of thought, posing the idea that Austen switched the gender roles of
her actual romance for her novel, pouring some of her own reserved
character into Darcy and modeling the lively Elizabeth Bennet on someone
who could have easily been the sister of the witty Tom Lefroy.

Some of Spence's assumptions regarding the depth of the Austen-Lefroy
romance are presented as fact, which occasionally gives the book a somewhat
quixotic feel.  For instance, at one point he states that First Impressions
(the original working title of Pride and Prejudice) "was to be a gift of
love for Tom Lefroy." Really?  Seeing that Cassandra burnt most of the
letters that might have shed some light on  Jane's true feelings for
Lefroy, how can Spence present his statement as a fact?  It is an
interesting speculation, but it is not a fact.

Although Spence's exhaustive research sometimes unearths little more than
interesting suppositions, because he is such a dogged detective, he
occasionally discovers items that other biographers might overlook. For
instance, he points out that Mrs. Lefroy, Tom's aunt and Austen's friend,
was distinctly remembered by her children as having disliked her nephew Tom
"because he had behaved so ill to Jane Austen."  Mrs. Lefroy wouldn't have
been angry with Tom had Austen not been hurt in some way from their
flirtation so Spence easily deduces from this that the Lefroy-Austen fli
rtation at least appeared serious at one point, serious enough at least to
possibly wound Austen's heart.

But Spence's most powerful - and fascinating - case for his theories can be
found in the chronology of Austen's writing as it corresponded to her own
biographical plot points and it is here that his book absolutely shines.
For instance, he establishes that when Austen was supposedly waiting for
Lefroy to come back to her with a marriage proposal, she began to create
characters who found themselves also waiting in vain hope for their lovers:
i.e., Jane Bennet for Bingley and Marianne Dashwood for Willoughby.

And although Spence obviously spills a lot of ink on the Austen-Lefroy
romance, he also discusses many other biographical facts as they relate to
Austen's other novels.  One of the more interesting of these connections is
between Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park and Eliza Feuillide, Austen's
cousin and eventual sister-in-law.  Others before him have made this obv
ious link, but Spence spends more time on it than most, noting in great
detail Austen's evolving opinion of Eliza, which, as Spence points out,
eventually relegated Mary Crawford to an unhappy ending in Mansfield Park.
 In other words, had Austen ultimately developed a favorable opinion of her
sister-in-law, Mary Crawford may have married Edmund Bertram and Fanny
would have married Henry Crawford.

All in all, Spence's book is an illuminating read and in its best moments
clearly shows the multitudinous and startling connections between Austen's
biographical facts and her fiction.