Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  Without a good and flattering image of the author, taken from life and documented as being reasonably like, people will continue to find ingenious alternatives. In the 1960s, a direct descendant of one of Austen’s brothers, Mrs Diana Shervington, was said to bear such a ‘strong family likeness … to the sketch of Jane Austen’ (a dubious distinction!) that it was felt very appropriate to make a photographic record of her, in Chawton Cottage, wearing a pelisse believed to have belonged to the novelist and which had been handed down in the family to a great-grand-niece, a Mrs Jenkyns. Unfortunately, Mrs Shervington was the wrong size for the pelisse, so when she was pictured gazing thoughtfully into the lid of her great-great-great-aunt’s workbox, the costume she was wearing had to be provided by a theatrical hire firm. However, the pelisse fitted a great-great-great-grand-niece, who posed by a window in Chawton Cottage. The concept was, presumably, that the combination of garment, descendant, house and photographic verisimilitude would work a mild magic, and allow us to ‘see’ Jane Austen. Miss Jenkyns’s face, not being the one with the supposed resemblance, was turned away from the camera, so in a way the committee’s objective was achieved as well as it could have been, for the picture does inadvertently recall that only verifiable image of Jane Austen, the one of her in a pelisse and bonnet, out of doors on a summer day, with her back to the viewer.

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  Just as Austen’s novels had appealed strongly as candidates for illustration in the last years of the nineteenth century, so it was only a matter of time in the twentieth before the film industry would turn to them, too. Classic novels were powerfully fashionable in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Wuthering Heights all became big box-office hits, and though Austen’s books lacked the drama and sensationalism of Dickens and the Brontës, they had perfect credentials for light romantic comedy. Pride and Prejudice had emerged as the ‘representative’ Austen novel; there had been stage adaptations, one by A. A. Milne in 1936, one-act plays and ‘scenes’ for amateur and school performances. The book seemed to lend itself to dramatisation more readily than the other Austen texts (there was only one attempt at adapting scenes from Mansfield Park for stage performance, and none whatsoever of Persuasion). With its strong female lead, handsome hero, witty dialogue and ‘screwball’ comic minor characters, it was an easy choice for Hollywood. After an initial plan by Irving Thalberg to produce a film version starring his wife, Norma Shearer, and Clark Gable, the project went ahead from MGM in 1939 with a different cast and directed by Robert Z. Leonard.

  The ‘horrid scratch’ of Jane by Cassandra, made circa 1810, that her nephew and nieces thought too ugly to put before the public.

  A watercolour makeover of the same picture, commissioned from James Andrews in 1869 to create a more attractive image of the author.

  Andrews’ picture engraved by the firm of Lizars for publication in the Memoir of Jane Austen – ‘Divine Jane’ emerges.

  Another version of Cassandra’s sketch from an 1873 publication by an unknown artist, known as the ‘Wedding-Ring Portrait’ for its whimsical addition to the subject’s ring-finger.

  A silhouette, said to be of Jane Austen, very similar (but not identical) to the one bought by the National Portrait Gallery on R. W. Chapman’s advice in 1948. It could be evidence of a small souvenir industry around Austen starting up in the mid-to late nineteenth century.

  Mr and Mrs Bennet drawn by Hugh Thomson for the 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice. The illustrations were judged ‘lamentable’ by E. M. Forster, but gave a huge boost to Austen’s sales.

  Félix Vallotton’s woodcut portrait of Jane Austen for the Revue Blanche, which accompanied the serialisation of Félix Fénéon’s Catherine Morland in 1898.

  Maximilien Luce’s lithograph of the writer and anarchist Félix Fénéon awaiting trial in Mazas Prison in 1894. One of the books on his desk could be Northanger Abbey, which he was translating into French.

  The cover of the magazine which first published Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Janeites’ in 1924, showing Humberstall reading Persuasion at the edges of the battlefield.

  Girl magazine’s version of Jane Austen’s early writing career in an issue from 1954, drawn by Eric Dadswell.

  The Royal Mail commemorative stamps issued to celebrate the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s birth in 1975, showing Mr Darcy, Emma and Mr Woodhouse, Catherine Morland, and Henry and Mary Crawford.

  Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy (with Frieda Inescort as Miss Bingley) indulge in a little target practice in Robert Z. Leonard’s 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice.

  James McAvoy and Anne Hathaway as Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen decide that their elopement is too fictional to proceed. A still from the 2007 bio-pic, Becoming Jane.

  Jane Austen hits the big time in 1995: Entertainment Weekly’s amusing send-up of the ‘Austen-mania’ effect.

  When the war broke out, many of the British expats in Hollywood had wondered whether or not to return home, but were encouraged not to by a cable from the ambassador, Lord Lothian, who pointed out that ‘the continuing production of films with a strong British tone is one of the best and subtlest forms of British propaganda’.30 Leonard’s 1940 Pride and Prejudice certainly had a ‘strong British tone’. Bringing Austen’s beloved novel to the screen for the first time, and stuffed with British actors and accents, it both fed off and enhanced the cachet of British culture and tradition at a time when both were under threat.

  Aldous Huxley was working on the script in November 1939, in an airless cubicle on the MGM lot in Hollywood. In a letter to Eugene Saxton, he described it as ‘an odd, cross-word puzzle job. One tries to do one’s best for Jane Austen; but actually the very fact of transforming the book into a picture must necessarily alter its whole quality in a profound way…. The insistence upon the story as opposed to the diffuse irony which the story is designed to contain, is a major falsification of Miss Austen.’31 Huxley’s scruples about the adaptation didn’t count for anything, it hardly needs mentioning; the producers insisted on simplifying the plot, dropping parts of the dialogue that were ‘too literary’ and inserting odd bits of new material. Huxley could hardly keep up with the transformations which the director demanded for ‘Pee and Pee’, as he was soon calling it, and complained to Grace Hubble, ‘I barely stopped my director from having Bennet fight a duel with Wickham!’32

  ‘The story’ was conveyed mostly intact (with some significant deviations: Lady Catherine de Bourgh is made to relent her meanness and give Darcy and Elizabeth’s match her blessing) and the emphasis was firmly on the archness of Elizabeth Bennet, as played by Greer Garson, and the comic potential of characters such as Mrs Bennet, Mary Bennet and Mr Collins. Whether it was Aldous Huxley or his co-writer Jane Murfin who penned phrases such as ‘There’s no one as dignified as a mummy’ [Elizabeth] and ‘Shall we not call it quits and start again?’ [Darcy] is not recorded. Both utterances occur in an invented scene where the characters do a little target practice with bows and arrows at a garden party: fictions within fiction.

  One completely arbitrary change was of the period of the action, which Leonard moved on forty years from that of the book, to justify more elaborate costumes. Edith Head, the designer, influenced by her colleague Walter Plunkett’s costumes for Gone with the Wind, felt that the fashions of 1815 didn’t afford her enough scope. The resulting dresses were fantastically extravagant; the Bennet women hardly fit in the milliner’s shop of the opening scene, they are wearing such huge hats and crinolines, and when Darcy and Elizabeth sit together on a bench, it is not pride nor prejudice which seems to keep them apart, so much as their clothes.

  The finished film had the comforting, theatrical look of many movies of the time, shot almost entirely in the studio, with painted backdrops suggesting the views from a terrace or through a window. The titles emphasised this staginess, by featuring lists of dramatis personae, but no actors’ names – ‘Those living at Meryton Village’, ‘Tho
se living at Longbourn’, etc. – and opening with a sort of verbal curtain: ‘It happened in OLD ENGLAND.’ The fact that it was an American production of a British classic gently reflected the relation of the Allies in the war, and the heritage that both countries were jointly defending. Audiences on both sides of the Atlantic could feel nostalgic for a period when the British army and navy beat off the threat of invasion while genteel life went on at home uninterrupted, and the landed classes could meet and mate in peace. The one overt reference in the screenplay to a battle is inserted to indicate the imagined new historical period: Mrs Bennet greets the information that Bingley has £5,000 a year with ‘That’s the most heartening piece of news since the battle of Waterloo!’ but some other lines were slipped in to reflect the wartime situation of 1940 too. In the assembly scene, Elizabeth remarks to Charlotte Lucas, ‘Oh why is England cursed with so many more women than men?’ And, as Karen Morley, the actress who played Charlotte Lucas, later recalled, the whole cast was preoccupied during filming with the news from Europe of Hitler’s advance through the Netherlands and Belgium.

  Greer Garson went on from her role as Lizzie Bennet to play Mrs Miniver in the patriotic weepy of that name that was a runaway success for William Wyler and MGM in 1942. The association – as between Laurence Olivier’s roles as Darcy in 1940 and Henry V in 1944 – was probably not deliberate and may never have been acknowledged, but is exactly the sort of connection – of one middle-class English heroine with another, and with a beautiful actress; of a great interpreter of Shakespeare with Austen’s proudest gentleman and the nation’s most valiant king – which works most powerfully in the collective unconscious. There is something viral about fame: heartless, predatory, proliferating. The first film of Pride and Prejudice may not have affected Jane Austen’s literary standing one jot, but impressed millions of people with a complex sense of her importance.

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  A strange satiric novel of 1938, The Impregnable Women, by Eric Linklater, not only predicted the coming European war and London being ‘annihilated’ by air-borne bombs, but depicted the Prime Minister of this near-future England retreating after an international conference for a period of solitude in the company of Jane Austen: ‘when he woke up he refused to see anyone till six o’clock, because he was reading Pride and Prejudice’.33 Something oddly similar happened in real life in 1943 when Winston Churchill, then Minister of Defence, arrived in Tunisia in early December on his way to the conference at which he, Roosevelt and Stalin were going to plan their final strategy against Hitler, and set dates for Operation Overlord. The minister was already voiceless and feverish, and soon developed pneumonia. By the end of the month, he was confined to bed in great discomfort, as he recalled in his memoir:

  Fever flickered in and out. I lived on my theme of the war, and it was like being transported out of oneself. The doctors tried to keep the work away from my bedside, but I defied them. They kept on saying, ‘Don’t work, don’t worry’; to such an extent that I decided to read a novel. I had long ago read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and now I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice. Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed. I had always thought that it would be better than its rival. What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.34

  This recalls R. H. Hutton’s remark in 1890 about Austen’s novels having such charm for ‘statesmen and thinkers’ on account of their quality of being ‘like enough to the real world to be for a time eagerly lived in’.35 It is strange to think of the planning of D-day beginning with this respite among the ‘calm lives’ of Longbourn and Meryton, a powerful reminder of an idyllic England governed by manners and cultured explanations. A 1930s biographer of Austen, Beatrice Kean Seymour, had written, ‘in a society which has enthroned the machine-gun and carried it aloft even into the quiet heavens, there will always be men and women – Escapist or not, as you please – who will turn to [Jane Austen’s] novels with an unending sense of relief and thankfulness’. But, as Churchill was painfully aware, the calm depicted in Pride and Prejudice was no longer retrievable on the home front.

  Back in bomb-shattered London, the film and stage heartthrob Robert Donat was preparing to take his touring company around the country with a production of Emma, starring the young Anna Neagle. It was to be ‘a wonderful tonic for the hard-pressed provinces which had suffered greatly from enemy bombing’.36 Rugby, Glasgow, Manchester and Bristol all got their dose of Highbury; Bristol even got two, as there was a rival Emma on stage there already when the Donat troupe arrived. Perhaps some elements of the ‘national’ themes in Emma which Lionel Trilling later identified made that novel particularly appealing during the war. ‘It seemed to me … perfect escapist entertainment,’ the leading lady recalled later. ‘For a couple of hours, anyway, our audiences could leave behind the horrors of the mid-20th century for the leisurely calm of the early 19th.’37 The London run of the play opened at the St James’s Theatre on 6 February 1945, just before a new wave of doodlebug bombing began. The theatre attempted to save the show by starting as early as possible, to avoid the raids, as Neagle recalled:

  There was no doubt that the V-2s were bad for business. One matinee, when the theatre was packed with ladies (mainly elderly), there was a tremendous crash, a V-2 rocket had actually landed not far from the theatre. Everything rocked. Mr Weston, one of the characters in the play, burst on to the stage crying, ‘Oh, a terrible thing has happened, my love.’ ‘What is it, my love?’ his wife asked in alarm.

  ‘A catastrophe. Someone has broken into the turkey house. Not a turkey left!’

  A momentary pause – then a roar of laughter swept through the theatre … We learned later that we had, in fact, had a lucky escape.38

  The war years also saw the formation of the first literary society devoted to Jane Austen, which was to become one of the most well-organised and serious institutions of its kind, eventually spawning subsidiaries all around the world. The Jane Austen Society lagged some way behind the Brontë Society, founded in 1894, which had proved such an amazing innovation in author-worship, with its huge crowd-pulling potential and the thriving museum at Haworth. Austen’s club started very modestly, with just a handful of enthusiasts gathering in the home of the founder, Miss Dorothy Darnell. She had chanced to drive through Chawton one time and thought she recognised the house at the corner. Enquiring of the AA man on road duty if it had been Jane Austen’s house, he replied rather irritably, ‘Yes – she’s the plague of my life!’39

  At the period when Miss Darnell first drove by, in the 1930s, Chawton Cottage was still owned by the Knight estate and divided into three parts, as it had been after Cassandra’s Austen’s death, when the contents of the cottage had been dispersed. The corner rooms housed Chawton Village Library (a development that would have amused Jane), but there was no one left in the village who could say how the rooms of the original building had been disposed. Darnell’s vision of restoration therefore involved not just trying to buy and repair the building, but to reinvent the structure, layout and contents of the interior.

  Darnell displayed an intense, proprietorial watchfulness over the welfare of the property. She got to know, for instance, when one of the old Austen fireplaces ended up among nettles on the local blacksmith’s scrapheap, ‘wrenched out’, in the report’s emotional language, to make way for a gas fire. She got Hugh Curtis, curator of the Curtis Museum in Alton (and a direct descendant of Jane Austen’s Alton apothecary), to take the fireplace into protective custody until such time as she could return it to its rightful situation. The incident proved a spur to the small group of like-minded enthusiasts, which included Darnell, her sisters, Elizabeth Jenkins and the newly co-opted Mr Curtis, to form a committee and launch the Society, specifically ‘to promote or procure the acquisition of the residence of Jane Austen, at
Chawton in Hampshire, as a national memorial to the novelist’.40

  The Society’s first objective, to persuade the Knight estate to sell the property, was gained with remarkable ease, even though the current owner, Major Edward Knight, was on wartime active service. However, the price he was asking for the freehold – £3,000 – was entirely beyond the Society’s means, and they had to resign themselves to a long-term, possibly endless, campaign of fund-raising, as they saved up a trickle of half-crown subscriptions and waited for word of mouth to spread awareness of a national treasure under threat from neglect.

  It was a difficult time to be trying to elicit large donations from individuals or institutions, when everyone was so preoccupied and impoverished by the war, and before the National Trust had extended its remit to such projects (the first writer’s house it took over was Beatrix Potter’s in 1943, and that only because she had willed it to them), but salvation came from a local gentleman, T. Edward Carpenter, who in 1947 offered to buy Chawton Cottage outright and vest it in a trust for the benefit of the nation. Carpenter was so thorough in his generosity that he was also prepared to buy property in Alton to rehouse the sitting tenants and went on, in the words of the brief obituary in the Society’s Report for 1970, to make the ‘upkeep, improvement and enrichment’ of the house his life’s work. He also restored the graves of Cassandra Austen and her mother in the parish churchyard, and was ready to step in promptly whenever a relic emergency occurred. In the mid-1950s, a keen-eyed Austenite spotted a miniature of George Austen’s sister, Philadelphia Hancock, for sale in a New Bond Street shop and reported it to Carpenter, who paid ‘a somewhat high price’ in order to save the piece for the house. His devotion to the cause paid off, as the seller, a descendant of Francis Austen, was moved not only to reimburse him, but subsequently donated the miniature to the Austen Trust.