LADY JANE

Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra on the tenner
(to be issued in July)

You have surely heard of Jane Austen but maybe not of Caroline Criado-Perez who led the campaign for more representation of women in public life.  As a result, we will soon be seeing that rather mousy portrait of Jane by her sister Cassandra on the new plastic £10 note which, as they last two to three times as long as the old paper ones, will be for quite a while.  The British government gave Criado-Perez an OBE for her campaign while a bunch of morons hassled her on Twitter with death and rape threats.

What is it with men who threaten women with rape and murder?  Like many Englishmen I am routinely rude to friends and polite to strangers.  I usually tell people from abroad that, if we are rude, it usually means we like you but that they should be suspicious of the super-polite.  It means they either hate or are out to cheat you – or both.  Banter, the usual excuse of morons, can work if you know someone well, but to threaten total strangers because you disagree with their views?  Grow up, guys.

Rape threats are from another world to that of Jane Auasten, where the worst thing that happens is Emma Wodehouse making a catty and cruel remark to the nice but dim Miss Bates. Jane led a sheltered life without husband, lover, job or home of her own.  Born the daughter of that pillar of the establishment, a Church of England vicar, she must have been aware of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the wars against Napoleon (which her brothers were involved in) and the ending of slavery.  So what did she write about in her six novels?  The importance of finding a husband with five hundred pounds a year and all his own teeth, of course.  Let’s get our priorities right here, girls.

She never found this man except in the books.  There was Tom LeFroy who would have fitted the teeth qualification but did not have the five hundred a year and was quickly whisked away by his family to marry into money.  Then there was Harris Bigg-Wither, who had the five hundred and more but whose name seemed to sum up his character.  She accepted him but, after a sleepless night, decided that she did not want to wake up next to a Bigg-Wither for the rest of her days and opted out, thank goodness.  Otherwise we would not have had more than one or two of those novels, especially Persuasion, my favourite and her last book.  It is set mostly in Bath the city where she had been brought by her parents when her father retired.  They moved from the Hampshire village of Steventon where the Austens took part in amateur dramatics and listened to Jane’s early attempts at writing.   This dried up in Bath where there was an endless round of irritating social events but no chance to write. If brother Edward had not come into money she would never have been able to go back to Hampshire to live in Chawton where the writing came back and that squeaky door which warned her that visitors were coming was never oiled in case people should discover that she had a mind of her own and was using it to write.

Only two other women have been depicted on British banknotes.  The first was Florence Nightingale who took to her bed and became a professional invalid in her later years after she returned from the Crimea so she could manage her campaigns more efficiently without having husband and children to look after.  Elizabeth Fry, however, was the very model of a modern multi-tasker giving birth to eleven children while running her prison reform campaigns.  When Churchill replaced Fry on the fiver there were no women on our banknotes apart from the Queen, who would not even have made it if she had had a brother.  As I wrote in my last post I think you need to earn equality rather than have it granted automatically, but there are surely enough high-achieving women to mean we never go without one on our money again.

Can we call Jane a feminist today?  I think so, despite the dependence on men.  Most of the males in her books are actually pretty two dimensional.  You never hear them talking to each other about anything except hunting and shooting.  There is none of that interior life of the man which you get in George Eliot’s Lydgate or Ladislaw, two men who want to change the world.  Austen’s heroes just want to hold on to their five hundred a year.  It is interesting that Maryann Evans felt the need to use a man’s name when she wrote.  She was born two years after Austen died and there were more opportunities for women in Victorian times but it was still not the done thing to think too much if you were a female.  The Bronte sisters, that other trio of female writers, left the question hanging by using the names Curer, Acton and Ellis Bell, which matched their initials but left their gender uncertain, male or female take your pick. 

Jane Austen made the best of limited circumstances, the only employment opportunity being as a governess, the role for impoverished gentlewomen like Charlotte Bronte.  She never put her name on her books which were written ‘By a Lady’.   Read all six and you can call yourself a ‘Janeite’, like me.  There is little curiosity where the five hundred a year comes from as long as it keeps the beast of poverty at bay.  Austen is concerned with virtues like loyalty and decency which we associate with the more feminine side of our natures.  There would have been no point in putting a male name to her books because there could never be any doubt that they were written by a woman – or ‘a lady’ if you prefer.

(Thanks to Wendy Hammerston for much of the information on Jane Austen which she gave in a recent talk.)

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com