Dear Jane, What Did you Look Like? Love, Laurie

Reading Jane Austen’s four greatest novels (P&P, S&S, Emma, and Persuasion) at least 20 times each over the course of my life, dipping almost daily into their delights, and memorizing whole passages of these novels by heart, fail to qualify me as a Janeite. For that honor, I would need to have memorized much more than such obviously revered passages as the opening line to Pride and Prejudice or Darcy’s chastened second proposal to Elizabeth Bennett. I’d need to know about Austen’s snarky remarks about neighbors with fat necks and bad breath, and how she preferred her brother Henry to her other brothers (once exclaiming, “Oh! What a Henry!”) I’d also have had to prove myself worthy of being asked to join the Janeite club by trekking to every location where Jane Austen once sucked in a molecule of air or her characters took a morning walk. Even so, I was atingle at the news that Paula Byrne, a British Jane Austen scholar, claims as authentic a portrait of Austen she received as a gift from her husband.

Until now, there’s been only one genuine portrait of Jane Austen—an unfinished oval sketch, made by Austen’s sister Cassandra (dated 1810, it’s in the National Portrait Gallery in London). The pinched look on the face, along with the crossed arms, add up to a peevish Jane Austen. The new portrait shows a very long-nosed woman in a Regency dress, writing backwards (Leonardo style), while seated at a desk next to a window that looks out over London. The woman looks elegant, intelligent, wise and confident—perhaps even edgy. It’s a portrait that makes Austen modern.

The new portrait is dated 1815 (two years before Austen’s death). Before Byrne’s husband purchased it at auction, the picture had been in a private collection for the past hundred years and was considered an “imagined” portrait of Austen. Byrne, who is writing a biography on Austen due out in 2013, argues that the face (especially with its long nose, a feature known to have marked the faces of some of Austen’s relatives), along with the words “Miss Jane Austen” inscribed on the back of the drawing, suggest the portrait is not imagined, but genuine. The BBC, knowing its audience is full of Austen-lovers, will air a TV show on the topic this January. It should go without saying that there’s a whiff of pre-publication publicity for Byrne’s forthcoming book in all of this.

The debate about whether this new Austen portrait is authentic or not must be left up to art historians and Austen scholars. Yet anyone with half an eye can see that the new Jane Austen looks decidedly more interesting than the old one. Perhaps this lies partly in the fact that older faces, having experienced more life than younger ones, generally reflect more depth of character than younger ones.

Yet I caution all Janeites, art historians, Austen scholars and lovers alike—including me. We must remember that the way we view portraits reveals more about us viewers and our longings than about likeness per se.

For artists, capturing likeness—imitating the parts of a face and fitting them into the whole in the “correct” manner—is the easy part. Lots of hack portrait artists earn money whipping up likenesses for tourists in less than 10 minutes. Although these function well when measured as a “likeness,” most people, even if they can’t put their finger on it, can tell something is missing. No, the hard part for artists isn’t to capture likeness. It’s to capture something deeper—what used to be thought of as a unified whole that we now talk about as two separate things—"character” and “personality.”

To make a given subject truly come alive requires an artist who goes not for mere likeness, but for the personality and character of the sitter—the charm, loveliness, liberality, tolerance, good humor, intelligence, vanity, pride, pusillanimity, pomposity, grandeur, corruption, wickedness, suspiciousness or cruelty (did I cover everything?) that define people as they move about in the real world. These things are often hidden from view at first glance, but great or even good artists know how to ferret them out and bring them into a protrait—making them lurk in such things as the way a mouth is set or the body holds itself.

Although I’m as curious as full-blown Janeites to know if this portrait is authentic or not, I easily see that this is nothing but more Austen hoopla. By all accounts, Jane Austen was a fairly plain woman possessed of a charm and wit that, for a few shining years before she settled into spinsterhood, propelled her into the realm of the pretty where she attracted a couple of suitors.

Although Austen did not reveal her full depth of insight into the human condition in Pride and Prejudice, her words about Elizabeth Bennett in this novel stay with me. They are all we need to know about the looks of either Jane Austen or Elizabeth: “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”