Jane Austen: A Life.

David Nokes sets out to debunk the "pictures of perfection" promulgated by Jane Austen's relatives, particularly her sister Cassandra, after Jane's death. Poor Cassandra - she would have writhed at the publicity she has attracted to herself for loving her sister! Nokes expresses instead a disapproval not uncommon in biographers thwarted by relatives of writers: "Cassandra contrived to turn the house into a kind of shrine to her dead sister. She carefully preserved every scrap of manuscript which might do honor to dear Jane's memory, while burning anything that might tend to suggest a less perfect picture. She copied out Jane's prayers but destroyed her most malicious letters." We have the juvenilia, Lady Susan, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Emma, Persuasion, and a section of Sanditon, but what are we to do without the most malicious letters? Sufficient scraps of wickedness survive for Nokes to succeed in depicting a Jane Austen who could have plausibly written Jane Austen's novels, and that's a significant accomplishment. But if a reader of these novels can't catch the note of malice unassisted by private letters to her sister, then I despair of novel-readers altogether!

In fact, Cassandra's destruction of so much of the evidence of the private Jane Austen's nasty side does not entirely conceal it, as Nokes's biography demonstrates. Rude remarks, dismissive descriptions, and sneers have survived. Despite Nokes's efforts to make the Victorian generation of nieces and nephews who remembered Aunt Jane seem unreliable, the nice, kind person they recalled seems pretty plausible. But if he has not succeeded in entirely replacing the angelic Aunt Jane with her wicked double, Nokes has recreated with exemplary flair the familial and cultural context of Austen's life. It is a rare experience to feel disappointed when the biographer dispenses with the ancestors and arrives at the birth of his subject, but that's how I felt when Nokes left behind the drug-and-gem smugglers, the Indian adventurers, the savage adherents to primogeniture, as well as those kinder, drabber ancestors left to cope with the consequences of their relations' decisions and misadventures. Luckily for a reader craving characters and incident, several brilliantly drawn female relations - an embarrassing kleptomaniac aunt; and the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings - stay on the stage for another generation.

Nokes needs this diverse cast of family and friends to make a substantial biography out of a pretty patchy set of documents. Indeed, as he sometimes in frustration admits, Cassandra has entirely obscured whole years of her sister's life from our view! Having adopted from the start a frankly novelistic technique (converting quotations from letters into "thoughts" in characters' minds), he has left himself room for a little speculation about what Jane might have been up to, but he scrupulously flags the sometimes meager facts. No reader will be misled, and the novelistic approach to his material adds some drama to the telling. For instance, when Aunt Leigh-Perrot is imprisoned and tried for stealing lace (a character defense based on the lady's status wins the day), Nokes tells the tale without benefit of hindsight. We know only how Jane and Cassandra and other relations reacted at that time. Only later, when the same lady gets into further trouble for snitching greenhouse plants, does Nokes let on that her own family members privately fret that Aunt Leigh-Perrot might have been guilty of the lace theft.

Potential reader, let me not lead you astray with this sensational example. Most of Jane Austen's life is extremely boring! Her writing career as a published author, who earns money for her work, occupies a small slice of the biography. When she finally gets First Impressions out of the drawer, dusts it off, renames it Pride and Prejudice, and (following on the success of Sense and Sensibility) publishes it, the reader heaves a sigh of relief, and not only because it means a paycheck. The money matters: one of the best things in Nokes's Life is his catching the unwavering note of anxiety about fortunes, bequests, investments, and promises to support dependent relatives. The sensible marriage of the pragmatic Charlotte Lucas to odious Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice can be read as a normal response to this inescapable financial pressure; the awarding of real love and the richest catch in the story to the smart-mouthed, independent-minded Elizabeth Bennet (who has, like her maker, refused proposals) represents with full force the wish-fulfilling fantasy of Austen's fiction. Nokes shows very clearly how Austen works out happy endings for her protagonists, while avoiding the consequences of a merely sensible marriage (and a succession of pregnancies) for herself. Though not poor, as a dependent female Jane cannot always control where she lives, what she does, in whose company, or for whose reasons. The frustration and anxiety understandingly depress her.

It does seem a little unfair, therefore, when Nokes takes all but the richest of the Austen siblings to task for the abandonment of George Austen, their mentally impaired brother, to a paid caretaker. Admittedly, the life-term served by an evidently uncomprehending George Austen in a remote cottage will strike modern readers as a cruel sentence to be made by parents, especially when it was unmitigated by any signs of sisterly affection. It is hard to imagine, however, what Jane Austen was supposed to do about it. Nokes is right to draw attention to the facts, for they underline his point that a ruthlessly pragmatic willingness to focus resources where they will do the most good means that every generation has its disappointed hopes, its casualties, and its complement of the embittered.

My only serious complaint about this otherwise engrossing biography is that Nokes's somewhat dismissive treatment of Mansfield Park may dissuade readers from tackling one of the canon of not-so-famous-but-still-great works of the nineteenth century. (Other works on this list include George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.) Nokes shows that Mansfield Park disappointed its contemporary readers, for it wasn't really very much like Pride and Prejudice. Nonetheless, Mansfield Park remains an excellent novel, full of the anxieties about money, about the adoption of a single lucky child by a rich relative, and eloquent in its depiction of the discomforting position of the person who is always on the receiving end of others' generosity. Though she is quiet, pious, averse to playacting, and resolutely unwitty, Fanny Price has a lot of Jane Austen in her. And Nokes's reservations about that, notwithstanding, the darker social analysis and moralistic tone of Mansfield Park can be detected on many pages of Jane Austen: A Life.

Suzanne Keen teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.