TeachingWritingMothering

May 2, 2008

The phrase “Felicitations on your grand match,” sounds out in Kiera Knightley’s accent, spat out and indignant. When I pop in the DVD of her version of “Pride and Prejudice”, I can’t find the scene where she says this. But as I watch this film that I know so well, the details of Eliza Bennet’s life blur with the fictional and historical accounts of Jane Austen’s life, as told in the film “Becoming Jane” and Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence.

Abashedly, I have been watching Anne Hathaway embody the wish-fulfillment version of one of my favorite authors. While doing so, I have been rereading parts of Jon Spence’s autobiography of Austen which proposes to wrest her from the spinster-like sketch of Austen that has survived, and according to him misrepresented, the passionate and bold author. Then, although I tell myself I’m crazy, I consult the internet (teeming with Austen-o-philes, I’m sure) for answers to my questions about what really happened in her life.

Just as I marvel at how Austen constructs a complex love affair through letters, dances, and networks of acquaintances strengthened by hearsay, I am amazed at how her biographers craft a portrait of her from her juvenilia, letters of her family, and her own letters to family and friends. With an eye for tone, irony, and allusion, these biographers tease out of her non-fiction meaning and purpose, just as they would do with her fiction. The author herself has made us greedy; her own happy endings have taught us to want resolution, definite answers, and closure. After complex trials and tribulations, we want to know that love can be glorious, and that it will survive.

It all makes me wonder about what we do as readers and what we do as writers. It is a documented fact that Austen began Pride and Prejudice at the time she met the “love of her life” Tom Lefroy. According to Spence, there are enough parallels between Lefroy and aspects of P and P to assume that he inspired this great novel. His parents’ marriage for love, the fact that they had five daughters before their first son (Tom, on whom all their economic hopes depended) was born, indeed mirror the Bennet’s family. Henry and Jane Austen’s juvenilia show they wove events from their own family into fiction to both honor and perhaps secretly poke fun at them.

It is a strange alchemy, writing. Austen codes the drama of her 20-year old self into her novel. Readers and historians in return want to write her into being. Or, we want to decode how she has written her life for us. It makes me wonder what we do when we write. It makes me wonder how landscapes and characters, etc. become the combination of dramas we have lived. In writing like this, do we relive them on another plane?