Extracting Enchantment From the Austen and Brontë Production Industries

‘Jane Austen: The Life of a Literary Titan’By Caroline SandersonThe History Press, 128 pages‘Emily Brontë: A Life in 20 Poems’By Nick HollandThe History Press, 316 pagesTwo new welcome paperback editions of biographies provide wonderful contrasts between a novelist who attracted relatively little notice in the polite society she graced, and a poet who shunned that society and tenaciously held on to a complete sense of herself that for her time was supposed to be beyond the capacity of a woman to achieve.As Caroline Sanderson understands, Jane Austen at one time was thought to inhabit a constricted world, with themes set out on such a small canvas that she had little to offer to the hectic expansiveness of the modern world. Austen’s times were turbulent (just think of the Napoleonic Wars), yet they get no attention from her.Nowadays the Austen industry (biographies, novels, parodies, perpetual screen adaptations) remains in full production. The reason, Ms. Sanderson argues, is that Austen still captures the “complexities of human beings, and the nuances of their relationships, with all their joys, tensions, contradictions and ironies.”Rather than trying to outdo other biographers by claiming to draw on new material or on dramatically new interpretations, Ms. Sanderson engages in what might be called a culling of the biographical literature. She will quote an older source, if it is most apposite: “Sir Walter Scott, the most popular novelist of his day, was one of the first to recognize Austen’s talent . . . declaring himself envious of her ‘exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and sentiment.’”That Austen won over Scott is significant, given that his own recipe for popularity and greatness was to deal with major historical events such as the Jacobite rebellions. She asks questions that remain pertinent, Ms. Sanderson points out: “Is this man all he seems to be? Is my friend true? Am I really in love?” The case for Austen is presented so succinctly that Ms. Sanderson’s biography is a model of what it seeks to understand.Jane Austen The Morgan Library & MuseumAs different as Emily Brontë may seem in regard to Jane Austen, Nick Holland shares a problem with Caroline Sanderson — that of dealing with a circumspect subject who left relatively few traces of herself in the documentary record. In a new introduction, he reflects on how he wrote his biography in 2017, deciding to begin each chapter with a poem “relevant to a particular period of her life.”As with Austen, Brontë’s popularity continues to grow, most recently thanks to Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of“Wuthering Heights.” Like Ms. Sanderson, Mr. Holland incisively sums up the longevity of his subject: “Emily Brontë was, after all, no coward soul, but a visionary woman who refused to conform to anything other than her own ideas of what was right and what was wrong,” which is part of what makes her “timeless,” in her biographer’s opinion.Although the style of Brontë’s poetry is quite different from Emily Dickinson’s, the first poem and chapter in Mr. Holland’s biography, signal a similarly cosmogenic mind, uniting the nature of a child to that of a “young bird . . . gathering its power, / To mount and fly away,” provoking a question: “And what is the future happy one?”The poet was 21 when she wrote the poem, “Past, Present, Future,” and Mr. Holland treats it as a “remembrance of herself.” He notes that the Emily of legend, “downcast, morose even” was not, in fact, the poet in her infancy, but rather “a smiling, happy child, a pretty girl doted upon by a loving family.”The poem and Mr. Holland’s invocation of it help explain those passages in Mrs. Gaskell’s classic biography of Charlotte Brontë, in which Charlotte’s overpowering need to succor Emily, to nurture her poetic vocation, become paramount. Whereas Charlotte and Anne tended to play by the rules of Victorian society, the “free-spirited and independent-minded Emily,” did not, and both of her sisters valued her for precisely that vision that is incipient in “Past, Present, Future,” as the bird flies away into the blue: “A sea beneath a cloudless sun / A might, glorious dazzling sea, / Stretching into infinity.”Biographies are sometimes deplored for digging too deep, for piling on pages of detritus because it is all there to be collected. Here are two examples of biographies that have rid us of the clutter.Mr. Rollyson is the editor of “British Biography: A Reader.”

Extracting Enchantment From the Austen and Brontë Production Industries

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