Feminists vs the Reality of Jane Austen

Today program podcast 30/10/13: 'It perpetuates the myth of the safe Jane Austen'
(on the portrait of her used on a bank note)

"The warm cozy consensus has been shattered by an argument over the picture that is going to be used of her. Joining us now is Paula Byrne, a biographer of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Proudman who's chairman of the Jane Austen Society which worked with the Bank of England in fact on the selection of a picture for the note...

'There's only one authentic sketch but really we don't know what Jane Austen looked like and the authentic sketch was done by her sister Cassandra in eighteen ten and it's not a particularly attractive picture. All you really know about what Jane Austen looked like was she had very expressive dark eyes and that her hair curled naturally around her forehead'...

'It was by people who did have some connection to Jane Austen.'

'They were people who knew her and it seems to me this is the best, really the best image of her we could have'

'It's a Victorian highly sentimentalized makeover. She looks like a doll. Her eyes have been, her eyes are over large. It is honestly, it's like a Katie Price makeover of the funniest writer who walked this planet. And she's made to look dim witted'

'And it's a kind of frilly little bonnet kind of thing'

'Exactly. And it just perpetuates this image that Jane Austen is a safe cozy writer. She's not. She's a subversive writer, she is a feminist, she writes about social class. And it perpetuates this ridiculous myth of the safe Jane Austen and to make her look like a doll honestly I find it unforgivable'...

'It seems to me that she is looking out of some fairly fairly appraising eyes. She is looking out with a fairly sharp look I think'

'Elizabeth, do you agree with Paula's interpretation of who Jane Austen was and what she represented. This biting person of a feminist and all these feisty characteristics'

'No I don't. I think she was a very, a critic, very much critical of the mores of her age but she was not a feminist. I don'-'

'She was. She wrote about women. She wrote about women's situation, she wrote about female consciousness, she wrote about women's status, limited power'

'She wrote the gray heroine centered novels. She put the novel on the map. How could she not be a proto feminist? I simply can't understand how anybody who reads Jane Austen can think that she's not writing about women'

'Oh she's certainly-'

'Well that's proto feminism!'

'She's certainly writing about women but I don't think she's a fighter. She was- *feminist gasps* She was describing what she saw and I am not sure that she wanted to change necessarily what-'...

'When they thought they were going to put Jane Austen on the banknote they thought it was an uncontroversial decision. They thought it was safe'...

'Well, come off it. What, I mean there is no other portrait they could have used of her. I would say that it's prettified and she's wearing a bonnet and so on but of course she always did, she did always wear it'


This is yet another instance of how feminists are eager to make up stuff to push their agenda.

It's okay for feminists to fem-splain non-feminists apparently (though maybe not if a male feminist does it to a non-feminist female).