David Cecil. A Portrait of Jane Austen (1978)

     David Cecil. A Portrait of Jane Austen (1978) A charming introduction to Jane Austen’s life for anyone who has fallen under her spell. Cecil certainly has, for he finds practically no warts at all on the amiable Jane. He contends that Austen found her fulfilment as an artist, and if he feels he has to defend comedy generally and hers in particular against the charge of lack of seriousness, that merely reflects the lingering influence of Leavisite stupidity. Leavis explicitly renounced his chapel faith and upbringing, presenting himself as a modern man, but could never escape its suspicion of the imagination and its playfulness. He has had a pernicious effect on a whole generation of scholar-critics.
     The illustrations support the text, especially since many of them show watercolours and drawings made by the Austens, who seem to have been not only a very loving but also a very accomplished family. The maps date from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
     The Austen family sounds almost too good to be true; but then we have limited documents on which to base any judgments, as Cassandra destroyed a large part of her correspondence with Jane. Cecil, bless his adulatory heart, thinks the missing letters deal mostly with deeper and more personal feelings, the kind that the Austens (and their class generally) did not exhibit in public and rarely in private; but I think that Jane’s “realism” gave rise to rather harsher judgments of friends and relations than Cassandra was willing to leave as a memorial to her much-loved sister.
     Still, the portrait of Jane Austen that emerges has the ring of truth, largely because Cecil is careful to place her in her time and culture, a time and culture that he presents with admirable thoroughness heightened by an equally admirable conciseness. I enjoyed this book, and now want to read all Austen’s novels, something I have promised myself I would do in the past, but never with real conviction. Some serious printing errors mar the book a little. ***½ (2003)