It is a fiction that should be universally acknowledged: The old yarn that Jane Austen hid her writing, and was reluctant to claim credit for it, is an improbable story based on flimsy evidence. “Private,” “secret,” “mysterious” and “hidden” stick to her legacy like a wet white shirt on Colin Firth’s torso. In this, the bicentennial of her death, it’s time we tossed them out.
Interest in Austen is once again waxing, with fans organising celebrations of her fiction, life and legacy on almost every continent to mark the 200th anniversary of her death on July 18. It’s no wonder. She’s one of the best (and for some, the best — period) of our classic novelists. She’s among the most revered authors writing in English who also happens to be female.
Whether or not you think calling her a woman novelist is a good idea, her gender matters deeply. Austen was the female face selected for new British coins and bills, after feminist activists pressed for the change. In elementary schools, costumed Jane Austens are found alongside another inaccurately mythologised historical giant, George Washington, on ever-popular “impersonate a famous dead person” days. Children share the famous story of Austen’s hiding her writing, still included in many juvenile biographies, despite the fact that its status deserves to be downgraded to that of cherry tree chopping. The myth of a great woman writer’s overwhelming dread of being caught in the act of writing shouldn’t outlast a male president’s supposed childhood confession of hatcheting a tree.
The origins of the hiding-her-writing myth are dubious, and I’m certainly not the first to say so. Many critics have tried, over the course of many years, to get us to look at the evidence with a sceptical eye. Still, the tale respawns — and not just in the most conservative accounts of her as a polite lady writer. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf muses on whether Pride and Prejudice would have been a better novel if Austen “had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors.” Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex mentions Austen as a cultural-victim woman author who was forced to hide herself to write.
Conventional literary history would have it that Austen wrote her novels using a portable desk perched on a small table in the sitting room at Chawton Cottage. (These objects still exist as relics — the little desk at the British Library and the table at Jane Austen’s House Museum, both prominently on display.) We’re told she concealed her writing from anyone who approached that parlour. Her secrecy was made possible because, in a stroke of good luck, the door to the room creaked. Austen implored that it not be fixed. With that sound as a warning, she could cover up telltale signs of her authorship.
But this narrative didn’t come from her own pen. The tale appears 50 years after her death, in A Memoir of Jane Austen, the first biography of Austen by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. He was the youngest mourner at Austen’s funeral and wrote never-published fiction in his teens. Jane Austen once teased him that his stories were, in contrast to hers, “strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow.” He didn’t publish any books until old age, however. The “Memoir” of his Aunt Jane was his second, following a soporific memoir of a local fox hunt.
Austen-Leigh’s “Memoir” has been well studied, with the hiding-her-writing story among its most famous passages. There he suggests his aunt’s writing “must have been done” in the general sitting-room. He claims Austen “was careful that her occupation not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party.” He describes “a swing door which creaked when it was opened” and “gave her notice when anyone was coming,” helpfully warning her to hide her work. He concludes, “I have no doubt that I, and my sisters and cousins, in our visits to Chawton, frequently disturbed this mystic process.”
Austen-Leigh spins his own dreamy mysticism here. These seem the musings of a man looking back on his childhood and not remembering ever seeing his famous author-aunt in the act of writing. If so, this sensational story fills his gap in memory with a Gothic novel-worthy anecdote of creaking doors and surreptitious writing. Despite its all sounding very “Northanger Abbey,” Austen-Leigh’s “must-have-beens” and “have-no-doubts” morphed into fact.
There are a few corroborating details. Some of Austen-Leigh’s information was taken from an account written by his sister, Caroline Austen. She remembered that her aunt’s writing desk “lived in the drawing room” and that letters and novels were written on it “sitting with the family.” Still, this doesn’t sound much like secrecy.
Let’s give Austen-Leigh the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s repeating an account he heard from some other family member. Even then, his story’s Swiss-cheese-size holes deserve our scepticism. We’re asked to believe that Jane Austen set out to write surreptitiously in the parlour, the most active room of the house. Some versions add that she wrote near a window looking right out onto the busy Winchester Road, travelled by mail coaches and carriages. This was the best spot Austen could find to hide herself in the act of writing?
It couldn’t have been close family she feared would discover her. Many knew she wrote fiction; some helped her try to sell it. They produced their own literary work, too. It’s implausible that she set out to hide her writing from servants, who would have had greater access to her habits, conversations and possessions than some visiting family members.
Then there’s the creaking door. How exactly would Jane Austen have asked not to have it fixed? What possible reason could she have used that wouldn’t have raised further suspicion? “Oh, I quite like the creaking door. I prefer its sound to any other. Do leave it be.” Actually, that may be the most plausible part of the whole fishy story.
Dramatic new flourishes to the story continue to pop up, too. The Telegraph recently referred to Austen “stuffing her scrawled pages into her dress whenever someone entered the room” — a detail straight out of Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740-41. Imagining Austen shoving papers into a flimsy Regency frock in front of a parlour window may well be your idea of a good time. If so, enjoy the imaginary peep show, but don’t call it history.
Yes, it’s true that Austen published her fiction without putting her name to it. But that was a common practice in her day, for men and women. New data suggests that 60 per cent of novels published in this period didn’t carry the name of the author. To be a woman novelist publishing without your name on the title page was perfectly conventional.
There’s some evidence to suggest her anonymity was short-lived. Her niece Caroline Austen records that her aunt “had at first published her novels with a great desire of remaining herself unknown,” but “it was found impossible to preserve a secret that so many of the family knew.” As a result, “she had given up the attempt — and her name had been made public enough.”
Evidence from her own pen points to Austen’s being a deliberate, careful, proud author who shared her writing with family and friends and recorded their opinions about it. She does not describe herself as a reluctant, shame-filled, reticent novelist. Nor was she a brave sufferer, with an unsupportive family, whose works were produced under daily duress. These are moving circumstances that apply to many writers, past and present, including many women. But when it comes to Austen, there’s little to suggest either version fits her circumstances.
We no longer need the myth of female self-abnegation or palatable feminine reticence to revere her as an author, a woman or a woman author. The fact that she wanted to give her stories to the public, and that they continue to resonate so profoundly, is what’s crucial. Let’s put the fanciful story of Austen’s hidden writing to rest. Let’s fix that creaking door.
–New York Times News Service
Devoney Looser, a professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of The Making of Jane Austen.
