The family tradition was calculated to say nothing of such events as the guillotining of Jane Austen’s beloved cousin Eliza’s first husband, of her aunt’s affair with Warren Hastings, or her brother’s involvement in the India-China opium trade. It was equally silent over her knowledge of the Prince Regent’s goings-on at Kempshott Manor (just down the road from her home) and her attentive reading of Thomas Clarkson’s great history of the abolition of the slave trade. Similarly, her brother Henry’s insistence that Jane “never uttered a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression” is belied by the caustic wit of the juvenilia in which a quite different, often shockingly funny and irreverent, authorial voice emerges. It is understandable that a bereaved brother should have remembered only the very best qualities of a beloved sister, but it was unhelpfully reductive to depict her as a writer who was pious, reserved, and did not tell rude stories, joke about adultery or engage with her historical and political context. Nokes’s attempt to draw attention to some of these more shocking circumstances was not well received. His book bombed; Tomalin’s more comfortable and comforting version of Austen’s life was the one that people wanted in the era of the hugely popular BBC dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice.
Besides, when it came to structure, not even Nokes broke the mould. The running-headers of his 600-page book followed the old biographical practice of giving the span of years covered by the narrative of the chapter in question, in strict chronological sequence.
In 2006, Deirdre Le Faye, who has devoted her whole adult life to the study of Austen, published another doorstopper, this one of 800 pages. Entitled A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family, it was what it said on the cover: a list, without any authorial narrative intervention, of every known fact about the life of Jane Austen and her extended family. Every dinner party guest. Every purchase of wallpaper at Ring Brothers’ department store in Basingstoke. Every guinea in bank charges. Every elm tree blown down in the garden. An amazing work of scholarship, incredibly informative and totally unreadable, it could perhaps be said to be the book that renders obsolete the genre of “comprehensive cradle to grave” Jane Austen biography. Barring a miracle such as the discovery of a cache of lost letters, if future biographers are to say anything new about Austen, they will have to be innovative in their methods. But innovation often has a way of looking back as well as forward.
Richard Holmes, the most imaginative of late 20th-century literary biographers, wrote a pioneering volume of memoirs and personal reflections on the art of life-writing, in which he literally walked in the footsteps (or, in the case of Robert Louis Stevenson, the donkey tracks) of his subjects. Entitled Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), it remains a classic of its kind. But Holmes was not the first to “footstep” in the name of biography. In 1901 Constance Hill and her sister Ellen set off on a literary pilgrimage to walk in the footsteps of Jane Austen. Ellen drew sketches of places now demolished, such as Steventon Rectory and the Assembly Rooms in Lyme Regis where Austen danced in 1804. They brought to life a lost world. Constance’s Jane Austen: Her Home and Her Friends (1901), illustrated by her sister, showed that the cradle-to-grave narrative was not the only possible approach and that the family, who had published the first authorised biography in 1870, did not have a monopoly on Austen’s life.
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