Pretty is as pretty does

The New York Times has two editorials today that touch on the Rice portrait auction and the “prettying up” of Jane Austen for a new edition of the Memoir.

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a link to a piece by Charles McGrath, which discusses the various likenesses and pseudo-likenesses of Jane Austen, mostly in relation to the Rice portrait auction but also touching on the new drawing.

Whether or not buyers believe the picture is of Austen will make a big difference to the sale, of course, and so Christie’s is auctioning the painting in its New York salesroom, presumably on the theory that Americans are less apt to get bogged down in historical nitpicking

HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAA! Oh, stop, you’re killing us.

From the few letters that her family did not succeed in burning, we have just a few tantalizing clues: that though she received one marriage proposal (which she first accepted, then turned down) Austen was generally unlucky in love, and suffered from sibling rivalry and bouts of depression and writer’s block.

Uh-oh…somebody’s been reading the John Halperin biography…tsk tsk tsk!

Austen’s relative lack of interest in exterior appearance may itself be a clue of sorts. She probably wasn’t much of a looker.

Au contraire, sir; many of her relatives and those who knew her described her as pretty or handsome.

And why we care must have something to do with might be called the BBC-ification of Austen — the way that her books have, over and over, been transformed into successful movies and highbrow TV series.

We’ve watched them so often that we think we really do know what Austen’s people looked like, and the men — the good ones, anyway — are all hunks

So are the bad ones!

and the women are all adorable, with just a hint of gingham-gowned sexiness.

Gingham?

That their creator might not be part of this club seems unfair. We can accept that Austen might have been a Cinderella — underappreciated, with an elusive beauty of character and intellect that maybe took a little getting used to — but the dreary spinster of the Cassandra sketch isn’t anyone we recognize.

Only if we overvalue “beauty.” Fortunately, another writer for the Times gets it, we think. Alert Janeite Sarah sent us a link to a truly wonderful editorial by Verlyn Klinkenborg about how we should not care what Jane Austen looked like.

Austen’s cheeks have been rouged a little, her nightcap has been removed, and she now looks like a stern cross between the logo for Columbia Pictures and the head on a Roman coin.

This is only the beginning of the Jane Austen makeover. A new film about her will come to this country in August. It is called “Becoming Jane” and stars Anne Hathaway, who was last seen in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Ms. Hathaway is indeed a becoming Jane. Publishers of “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice” and the rest of Austen’s works should simply reprint a still from the film — Ms. Hathaway in Georgian costume, superbly blushed and coiffed and playing cricket — and call it “Jane Austen,” with the quotation marks. The novels would be so much richer if only we could believe they were written by a looker.

Ah, yes; not Jane Austen, but “Jane Austenesque.”

I reread “Emma” recently and found myself wondering, what if we knew as much about Shakespeare’s life as we do about Austen’s? And what if we knew as much about Austen’s life as we do about Virginia Woolf’s? No one would give up the chance to have 150 letters by Shakespeare or 26 years of copious diaries by Austen.

But the work always stands apart from the life, no matter how much we know. No amount of biography — no grasp of the details of the life as it was lived — ever accounts for the transfiguration that takes place in the work itself. You can search all you want in the life, but you will never find the ghostly separateness, the act of imagination, in which the work emerges.

Precisely! We can know Jane best by reading her books.

I never wish I knew how pretty Austen was or how she dressed or how her voice sounded. (On the other hand, I wish intently that modern publishers did not care how handsome or beautiful their authors are.) But let me put it a different way. I would like to know how anyone who lived 200 years ago talked or sounded or dressed or ate or felt.

I would recover all the unrecoverable details about any life that passed in those days just to come to terms with the distance and the difference of the past — and I do mean any life, not just those of the writers or the statesmen.

It is a failing to read Shakespeare and feel impoverished by the lack of biographical detail. It is no less a failing to read Austen and wonder what the mirror said when she looked into it. I cannot think of anything that would make “Emma” richer than it is.

Hear, hear! We really have nothing to add to this, but we’re sure the controversy and comment will continue.