Tiny brush working on a small broach

It was the 190th anniversary of Jane Austen's death yesterday. I'm still reading Mansfield park and revelling over the the elegance of the language and pining for the story to end well, as of course it must. Jane Austen is meant to have loved her characters so much that she had constructed 'after lives' for them, holding in her mind details that she didn't happen to include in the book, such as what really happened afterwards. This seems excessive and yet it is perhaps the kind of dedication that gives her characters the authenticity that they have. It seems wrong to love fictional charcaters and yet it seems that this is what is required to flesh them out in their full humanity as she does. She is as astute a psychologist as she is loving a friend to her characters. And the philosophy that may be read in her books is all the more beautiful and penetrative for being implied, and rather than being dogmatic is demonstrated through the various responses of her characters to events. What is most distinctive about the expression of her thoughts, even the most noble and abstract, is that they are all shown through the particular goings on of individual lives. Perhaps no writer other than Chechov comes close to expressing such entirely applied wisdom, rather than soliloquising philosophically.

And to think she did most if not all of her writing in snatched moments of privacy, in such a way as didn't interefere with the rest of her household duties. If a member of her family was to enter into the same room, she would put her writing away and get on with her needlepoint. She was humble about her acomplishment. To a relative who wrote great epic stories, she responded that she could not compete with this grandness, for she was describing a scene of domesticity so small that, instead of an expansive picture, it was like painting a design on a broach. It is consoling to know that whatever happens throughout life, I will always have these books of hers to fall back on for pleasure, for wisdom and, though in a strange way, for companionship - not with her characters, but with her. I remember once thinking after reading one of her novels that only a saint could have written anything that was so beautiful and so moral at the same time. I think this is the proper test for anything that treats of moral themes. It never seems she is moralising, and yet her stories are exercises in the belief that virtue is its own reward, but still is otherwise rewarded.

In a sense, her books are about what we all have to some extent or another - a small life. No matter how important we think we are, how much money we make, how much power or prestige we pretend to have, at the end of the day (and life) we are always living this individual life here and now and there is the smallness of the particular that must come with that. Rather than laughing this off and pretending to a worldly greatness, Jane Austen was happy to dwell where she was, with the people she had and love them in that littleness of the moment. What someone trying to trace the great political and sociological movements of an age would have missed she saw, such as the way one silence symbolised indifference, while another symbolised love. But if Jane Austen was here she might wish that I didn't just look back and love her, but that I might also think about her characters, and wonder what they're doing now.