My grandmother has a lipstick she’s been using for thirty years. The younger me used to watch, fascinated and a little perplexed, as she pulled the gold case out of her vintage Chanel handbag and applied it without a mirror (my generation preferred Jolly Rancher–flavored lip gloss). Nor did I understand why, when my mother smelled a talcum-powder scent, she would start speaking about my great-grandmother and her wartime adventures in South Africa.
The idea that someone’s possessions are an outward manifestation of the inner life is one Kathryn Sutherland discusses in her new volume Jane Austen in 41 Objects. Sutherland, a professor at Oxford and a confirmed admirer of Austen, has written several books and articles on the author and is a trustee of the Austen house museum in Chawton. She lovingly searches for the figure of Jane as she was then and is now, discussing objects (one for each year of her life) from clothes and household items to manuscripts and modern-day memorabilia.
Sutherland begins by describing Jane as a girl, using a pair of dancing shoes, some early manuscripts, her music books, and a few other items to sketch the budding author. This Jane is nothing like the character in Pride and Prejudice of the same name—she wakes up early to pound out a tune on the family piano and writes risqué novels about adventure and romance. These stories were not Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women; they were about “boys, gambling, and strong drink.”
The two portraits of Jane included in the book, however, give the impression that she took life rather seriously. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, sketched these portraits of Jane in adulthood, the only likenesses by one who actually knew her that have been preserved. The first shows her sitting under a tree looking out at an undrawn view. Half her cheek is visible, and her blush makes the viewer think it is a blustery day in Hampshire. The other portrait depicts her with arms crossed, sitting, gazing somewhere to her right. She has a slightly downturned mouth, brown eyes, and a subtle flush to her cheeks. Jane looks annoyed about something. Whether these sketches do the author justice is unknown, but the letters and manuscripts make one think that perhaps her lively spirit is missing from these two depictions.
After her sister’s death, Cassandra wrote, “I have lost a treasure. . . . She was the sun of my life.” She became the keeper of Jane’s estate and with ferocious solicitude kept much of the author’s life from the public eye. Many of the author’s letters were hidden or destroyed, and in the ones that remain a careful observer can see where Cassandra took a razor blade to conceal private details or perhaps pointed social criticisms from prying eyes. In more ways than one, it was Cassandra who crafted the picture we now have of Jane. One chapter uses Cassandra’s silhouette—the only likeness of the woman that remains—to illustrate how the two sisters were counterbalances for each other. If Jane was sunlight, Cassandra was shadow.
A viewer walking through “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250” at the Morgan Library & Museum (reviewed by Alexandra Mullen in the September 2025 issue of The New Criterion)might stumble across a replica of a piece of clothing Jane is believed to have worn. The brown-silk pelisse is featured in chapter 25 of Sutherland’s biography: it has a high collar, an empire waist, and a gold oak-leaf pattern. The dress must have been an expensive piece of clothing; Sutherland explains that the intricate cut of the gown suggests it was made by a seamstress and not by Jane or a family member.
As we would expect, however, it is the written word that lets us see Jane in a way that her clothes and portraits cannot reveal. Much of Sutherland’s book is dedicated to letters, receipts, notes, and manuscripts from the author or those related to her. Sutherland calls Jane’s letters a “shadow life of her novels”; in one letter to Cassandra, Jane describes house-hunting in Bath, the gift of a topaz cross necklace from her naval-officer brother, and the latest news about the debonair “Mr. Evelyn” who dashed about town in a fashionable carriage. Here is Jane in technicolor—she loves family news, local gossip, and the latest fashions, and she filled her books with these elements, an outpouring of her own experience.
Sutherland discusses Jane’s continuing legacy through the objects in the latter portion of the book, touching on items ranging from the Jane Austen–themed plate in Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Famous Women Dinner Service (1932–34) to the costume designs for the 1936 play of Pride and Prejudice. While Jane’s books have sometimes been interpreted as solemn, moralizing tracts, recent developments such as the 1995 BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice have played to Austen’s lighter side. Audiences were shocked (and in many cases, delighted) when the miniseries’s writers diverted from the original text and had Mr. Darcy jump into his small pond at Pemberley and meet Elizabeth Bennet in an artfully bedraggled state. Although (or because) he was spritzed and gelled to look that way, the scene soon went down in period-drama history. Mr. Darcy’s shirt—yes, it receives its own chapter in the biography—did in fact go on a tour of England (although it was one of six used to get the shot), where fans could gaze adoringly at the garment.
Sutherland’s final chapter focuses on the last words Jane Austen wrote before her death. They were a part of her novel Sanditon, which Jane never completed. The words are “—fire constantly occupied by Sir H. D.” and the date, “March 18.” A cryptic final line, indeed. Sutherland calls her life “an unfinished portrait.” Like Sanditon, it remains incomplete, shadowy. Sutherland has given us a brief glimpse of the elusive Jane, a figure disappearing over a hill, smiling at a joke that we only partially understand.
