Book Review: Parson Austen's Daughter

Title: Parson Austen’s Daughter

Author: Helen Ashton

Publisher: Dodd Mead

Date: 1949

ISBN: none

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “Cassandra Austen was born in 1773, so that she was only in her third year when her sister Jane, a winter child, first blinked her bright eyes at the light, on the sixteenth of December, in the year 1775.”

This is a novelized biography of Jane Austen, 1775-1817, whose closest friend was probably her sister Cassandra, 1773-1845. All eight of Parson George Austen’s children seem to have been fairly close to each other. That is how we know much of what we know about their lives. They were widely separated in age and, after growing up, in physical space; so they wrote lots of newsy, chatty letters, which Ashton reworked into the details of this book. Though Jane and Cassandra were born less than three years apart their parents managed to squeeze a brother, Frank, in between them. Still, Jane and “Cassy” had something else in common: though they were popular girls, the young men they fancied (or those men’s parents) didn’t think they had enough money to be good prospects, so neither of them ever married.

While British society generally snubbed “old maids” and “poor relations,” and the Austen sisters were both, they seem to have found ways to enjoy being those things. Five of the six brothers married; the sisters evidently enjoyed being aunts. They had friends, went to parties and dances, though the older they got the more likely other people were to write that (both sisters, but Jane much more than Cassandra) seemed a little too pretty, witty, and bright to suit their opinions of how “old maids” and “poor relations” ought to behave. They lived mostly in charming country houses with lots of space for long walks, which both sisters enjoyed. They had all kinds of books to read. Jane started adding to the world’s supply of books at a very early age, but made her important contributions in her thirties.

Possibly because they walked so much, both sisters resisted infectious diseases for several years. Cassandra even achieved what was then considered old age. Jane barely made it into middle age before succumbing to some unknown infection.

Ashton finds hints of autobiography in Jane Austen’s romances…and something less endearing. I suspect it was not her fault. In the early twentieth century, when Ashton was learning to write, the fashionable thought was “We girls can do anything!” In the early 1940s it was actually fashionable for young women to have full-time jobs outside the home, and to think of their single-adult years as time for lots of other things, regardless of whether they ever married. Then in the late 1940s, as the soldiers came home, there was a push for women to give up their careers and choose to be housewives for the rest of their lives. I seriously doubt whether, in 1949, anyone would have published a book about Jane Austen that didn’t fit the prevailing line of propaganda: “Well, girls, if you’re very talented and don’t find anyone you want to marry, you could do worse than have lives like Jane Austen’s, that poor little thing. She was pretty and nice and popular and a Major Talent…and she died young…a-a-a-alllll aloooone” (usually this phrase would be uttered with some vibrato, as if dying alone were worse than dying, e.g., in a maternity ward with a half-dozen medical students peering at the cause of death). “And she was constantly alienating even her women friends,” (then stereotyped as unreliable, second-rate friends) “by being too witty and intelligent, you know. I’ve always felt that it was more feminine to laugh at a man’s jokes rather than make jokes.” The well documented result of which was that masses of talented, educated, promotable young women swallowed the whole line, tried being full-time housewives, and were bored out of their minds, and turned to drugs and became the stereotyped homeless seniors of the 1980s, or left their husbands and became the less conspicuous very poor seniors of that era...

Well…to be fair…I grew up among quite a few women who’d survived the late 1940s and 1950s. Most (not all) of them were related to me. And what they did was make a choice pop culture ignored: they ignored both of the stereotypes pop culture was pushing, They chose careers that were compatible with motherhood, worked, took time off when their children were actually babies who needed constant mothering or took the babies to work with them, and lived more or less happily ever after. Not that all of them were uniformly happy all the time. Some had serious illnesses; some were seriously scared by some eager-beaver doctor’s telling them they had serious illnesses when they didn’t. Despite modern hygiene and antibiotics, some of the husbands and children died. Sometimes they disagreed with their husbands. At least one couple did eventually divorce, in their sixties, so the disabled one could collect a pension while the healthy one continued to work. I saw some of them cry and heard some of them swear. Nevertheless they seemed much happier than any of the women who believed that they could have either paying jobs or marriage but not both.

Who knows how Jane Austen really felt about the course her life took. Feelings come and go, and the Austens’ whole generation had been taught that letters should be written when people had worked off their emotions and were thinking logically. Even in Austen’s novels emotions are expressed more in the details of “manners” than in the histrionic outbursts the next generation of writers loved to describe. Ashton would not have been allowed to publish a novel that presented Jane Austen as completely satisfied with the decision to forget the silly boys who’d passed briefly through her “friendzone” and enjoy being an aunt and a writer—and it would be hard to prove that she was, anyway, from her letters. (What her lettters do make clear was that both sisters were cheerful people who managed to find things to enjoy and to laugh about, even during sad times.) Today Ashton might have an equally hard time publishing a novel that suggested that Jane Austen cared how many people thought she ought to be sad and dull, or ever even wanted to marry any of her spineless suitors.

What we do know is that Jane Austen didn’t try to change her behavior…and encouraged a favorite niece who seemed to be growing up just like her, though the niece never became a famous author. If she could have known how much time she had, she might have said that her life could have been better than it was, but it could more easily have been worse.