The Jane Austen Mystery

A great writer like Virginia Wolfe defined her as “the most perfect artist among women” while a master of poetry like DH Lawrence considered her “truly English, in the most mediocre and snobbish sense of the term”. Rudyard Kipling dedicated a story to her while Mark Twain had no half measures: «Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I feel like digging up Jane Austen and bashing her in the skull with her tibia».

Among fans and detractors, one thing is certain: two hundred years after the death of the great English writer, no one has influenced the way of telling feelings and relationships in feuilletons, serial novels and then in cinema and TV like Jane Austen . It is no coincidence that in 1996 the magazine Vanity Fair wrote that "the most fashionable writer in show business is not John Grisham and Michael Crichton, but Jane Austen". Jane Austen would be very rich today thanks to the royalties for the exploitation, both overt and covert, of her novels. The English writer inspired, for example, Helen Fielding in the creation of the Bridget Jones saga and even Sophie Kinsella's books are often a modernized version of Austen's masterpieces. And let's not even talk about cinema and TV...

Austen's popularity shows no signs of diminishing with the passing of time, but it clashes with another reality that is plain for all to see: Jane Austen is a mystery. Very little is known about her and her life. Adding to the enigmas is the fact that her beloved sister Cassandra burned most of the letters written by the novelist. A bonfire, according to many, to hide Jane's soul, her passions, her ideas from the world. An excess of prudishness that led one of Austen's nephews to begin the biography of his now famous aunt with this uninviting incipit: "Her life was singularly uneventful. Its quiet course was interrupted by few changes and no great crisis."

But was Jane Austen's life really so flat, despite having lived the 41 years of her existence (1775-1817) in one of the most turbulent times in world history, given that the French Revolution and Napoleon were shaking Europe? And is it possible that an author who was able to investigate the contradictions of the human soul and English society so well has nothing to say to us as a person?

Diego Saglia, professor of English Literature at the University of Parma, in his essay I mondi di Jane Austen (Carocci editore, 2024, pp. 240) tries to fathom the elusive personality of the great writer by tracing the boundaries of her world, or rather of her worlds . He explores the reality known and represented by the novelist and identifies useful paths and traces to retrace it.

In the footsteps of Jane Austen, the book offers insights into the historical context, institutions, international and global horizons, the local sphere, religious practices, the idea of national identity, cities and countrysides, ways of moving and traveling, men and women in their social environment, money, leisure and culture, and finally the literary and publishing field. It is impossible, for example, to understand the great author if we do not investigate her origins, from her birth in 1775 in a small village in Hampshire , in that English province far from the splendors of London that would later be the stage for her books. Her father was an Anglican pastor and took direct charge of Jane's early education, anticipating in this Mr. Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" who in turn in the novel dedicates himself to the education of the girls of the house. Furthermore, Jane's family belonged to the English bourgeoisie and Austen will deal with this world and its human types in all her novels . Some personal events then shaped the writer after her early youth, events that then return once again in her writings. Her father died suddenly in 1805 and she, her sister and her mother found themselves without means and at the mercy of the somewhat hairy generosity of their closest relatives. The women of the Austen house had to move to a cottage even more in the province, as happens to Mrs. Darshwood and her three daughters in Sense and Sensibility.

In Austen there was also much of the pride and prejudices that were inevitable in a class society such as the English one at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her days after the age of twenty began to pass as in her novels, between walks, visits for tea, women's work and writing. Perhaps the moments in which the most intimate and passionate Jane shone through were the moments of celebration, the balls of the winter season when the whole neighborhood gathered in a room and women and men mingled for once.

A more detailed knowledge of these areas not only helps to better understand the reality evoked by the author, but also to refine a reading ability, as Austen herself requires of us, attentive to the details, even imperceptible, that are dotted throughout her narratives and letters. In investigating the Austen/world binomial, Diego Saglia therefore suggests new ways to discover and rediscover a figure and a narrative universe strongly rooted in their time and, at the same time, always current.