Free Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon Page A

generation, can be seen to be, say, a neurotic bully and a potential alcoholic. I know such observations will annoy you very much: but arranged marriages are normal in great areas of the world today — and the record of the modern West in marriage matters is not so hot. But I can already hear you say ‘but marriage is an outmoded institution, anyway, what is she talking about…’ I’ll desist.
    Anyway, at the age of fifteen Jane Austen seemed happy enough. She wrote The History of England and dedicated it to her sister Cassandra in these terms:
…by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian. To Miss Austen, eldest daughter of the Revd. George Austen this work is inscribed with all due respect by
    The Author
    N.B. There will be very few dates in this History.
    The young Miss Austen encompassed three hundred years of England’s past in fifteen pages, in a kind of early 1066 and All That. She shows herself as very clever, very funny, exhilarated and exhilarating and impatient.
The Events of this Monarch’s reign…(Charles 1st) are too numerous for my pen, and indeed the recital of any Events (except what I make myself) is uninteresting to me.
    You see! The born novelist. She is raising invention above description; what she makes herself above what the real world has to offer. She will put up with writing a history so long as she doesn’t have to get the dates right, and mocks those who take the whole thing seriously, and so long as she can be biased:
My principal reason for undertaking the History of England being to prove the innocence of the Queen of Scotland, which I flatter myself with having effectually done, and to abuse Elizabeth, tho’ I am rather fearful of having fallen short in the latter part of my scheme —
    — and also so that Cassandra — at the time eighteen — could be involved, could illustrate the History, in the form of kings and queens, which she did, with evident pleasure, but in a manner which would nowadays be thought to be the work of someone far younger. (She would never, these days, have got to art school.) History, of course, was seen as the story of monarchs; the notion that it concerned the development of society is comparatively new. I doubt that you could reel off the dates of the Kings of England, Alice, as I still can.
    In the same year Jane Austen wrote an unfinished novel — Lesley Castle — also in the form of letters, but with a bigger cast of letter-writers — and dedicated it to her brother Henry in these terms:
To Henry Thomas Austen Esqre.
    Sir
    I am now availing myself of the liberty you have frequently honoured me with of dedicating one of my Novels to you. That it is unfinished, I grieve: yet fear that from me, it will remain always so: that as far as it is carried, it should be so trifling and so unworthy of you, is another concern to your obliged humble
    Servant — The Author.
    Messrs. Demand & Co. — please pay Jane Austen, spinster, the sum of one hundred guineas on account of your Humble Servant
    £105.
    H. T. Austen
    There! You see, already conscious that writing is worth money, deserves money, that pleasure for one is work for another, and must be compensated for in financial terms. And Lesley Castle was, increasingly, work, as she got herself embedded deeper and deeper into the pit she’d dug for herself; that is, too many characters, and too much peripheral event, and no apparent central drive or purpose — which is why she simply stopped writing it — she’d bored herself.
    I hate this kind of cold conclusion; these sweeping assessments of motive with which, in the present, we look back at the past. I despise it in biographers, and yet find I am doing it myself. Put me in a pulpit and I know I too would soon be saying: ‘God wants us to do this, that and the other because God means us to be this way, that way or the other way…’ As if I knew: as if I had a special Hot Line to Him.
    Do be warned, Alice. The reason Jane Austen joked about charging