Becoming Jane Austen
The True Love Story That Inspired
the Classic Novels
by John Spence
Part of a continuing series.
Edward's style is informal and conversational, the flow of his sentences natural and unaffected. At his best, he is playful and, like Jane, enjoyed giving a comic turn to an otherwise pedestrian observation by dropping in an unexpected word or phrase: "Walked in town in the morning, which is by far the neatest I ever saw, and kept constantly well cleaned by a set of malefactors who chained two and two are condemned for a certain number of years, sometimes for life, daily to clean the streets and remove whatever rubbish may offend the eyes or the nose."
Jane Austen
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He describes a not unusual night's accommodation during his rambles in Switzerland: "We had the comfort however of having a longer sleep than usual, which notwithstanding the badness of the beds, the closeness of the room, and the quantity of the fleas, we most of us took occasion to "profit of." He could also laugh at the discomfort he brought on himself. "I continued my walk a few hundred yards farther to a large heap of snow, being curious to make a snowball in August. I paid [for] my curiosity by getting perfectly wet in the feet and then went contented back and found dinner already served." He conjures a scene with deft assurance and gives it a humorous turn:
By way of dinner, we found some excellent curds and whey of goats milk and tolerable bread, which we eat in an open part of the hut that served as a pigsty and at that moment a fine old sow was lapping up her whey in one corner whilst we with two or three dirty Germans were lapping up ours in the other…After having dined in our pigsty we took a nap in the open air.
His comments are not just straightforwardly comic. He could direct his irony against his readers. He takes a bit of wicked delight in debunking what he knew must be his family's idea of their rich son's Grand Tour. He eats swill in a pigsty with a sow and sleeps in a stifling room on a bad bed infested with fleas. So much for his coddled and luxurious life abroad.
Evidence of Edward's talent only survives in his journal but is a slight foretaste of Jane's gift, a gift that in her was to develop into genius. Soon after she came home to Steventon at Christmas 1786, she began to write.
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