The team at Exisle Publishing is thrilled to add Jane Austen’s Notebook by Sophie Collins to our 2025 publishing collection, celebrating the 250th anniversary of one of the world’s most celerbated authors. To commemorate the release of this book and Jane Austen, author Sophie Collins provides poignant insights about the writing of the book and Miss Austen herself.
Sophie Collins is a writer and editor specializing in history, culture and lifestyle. Her work includes biographies of writers and artists, gardening books for the Royal Horticultural Society, and pet care guides.
Two hundred and fifty years after her birth, Jane Austen remains a prominent figure in the literary world and beyond. They are even making a new Pride and Prejudice series again. But perhaps there is much that people don’t know about the woman herself. What is an insight you can share as you researched for Jane Austen’s Notebook that surprised you about her?
There were quite a few surprises. I had thought that I was familiar with Austen’s work and had a good overview of her life before I began to research in earnest, but I quickly realized that there was a lot to discover.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that, for the first part of her life at least, Jane Austen was surrounded by boys and young men. Many Austen lovers will have a maiden-auntly mental image of her writing at a teeny table in Chawton Cottage in an all-female household. But while this may have been true of her later life, it isn’t at all an accurate reflection of her child- and young adulthood. Not only did she grow up with five brothers at home, all but one older than her, but her parents also ran a small boys’ school from Steventon for most of her childhood.
Her eldest brother, James – for a long time considered the writer of the family – even started and ran a student newspaper and the ‘home news’ aspects of her juvenilia were probably inspired by his work, although their anarchic quality was all her own.
Not only could she hold her own in the company of boys, but, as her brothers grew up, she was also engaged with and knowledgeable about their careers – which stretched across army, navy, church, banking, and even, in the case of Edward, the brother who was adopted by rich relatives, managing large family estates. All this detailed knowledge would prove invaluable in her novels (you only have to consider her handling of Captain Wentworth and his fellow naval officers in Persuasion, or her depiction of Mr Knightley’s hands-on estate management in Emma to realize how useful for material her brothers were). Before writing the book, I hadn’t realized how closely she would have been able to observe a whole range of careers then available only to men.
Are there any particular Austen quotes that you think are interesting/poignant/thought-provoking?
There are so many – probably more from the letters than from the books, simply because I wasn’t so familiar with them. There are only 161 surviving letters, and many are very dense – thick with family news, in-jokes and gossip. Most Austenites have probably read – and been slightly shocked by – her comments (in a private letter to Cassandra) about a neighbour’s stillbirth, but I found the odd shocker like this interesting, because they do rather blow apart the idea of sweet Aunt Jane with her lovely romcom novels. Clearly the reality – just like the books – was much tougher and more complex than a quick glance might convey.
Her nieces clearly confided in her and her letters to them are full of good common sense. I particularly liked one letter to her niece Fanny, when the latter was growing up and starting to go into society and to notice young men, in which Jane exclaims (in a rather rare outburst of feeling):
‘You are the delight of my life. Such letters, such entertaining letters, as you have lately sent! Such a description of your queer little heart! Such a lovely display of what imagination does!’
We don’t know what Fanny had shared to elicit this, but you do get the impression that Jane was a stellar aunt.
The handful of business letters that survive – to her publishers and to the Prince Regent’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke, with whom she had some dealings – are interesting too, because she sounds quite hard-headed and is clearly someone who values her writing as she ought: a refreshingly straightforward woman of business. She confidently writes to John Murray, the star publisher of his day, asking him to call on her rather than exchange any more letters, without any genteel apologies for taking his time. ‘A short conversation may perhaps do more than much Writing’, she says – and of course, she’s quite right.
What was the most challenging aspect of compiling and writing this book?
Definitely all the things I had to leave out, particularly the minutiae of Austen’s everyday life. There’s an incredible amount of material on her world, a lot of it dealing with intriguing small aspects of Georgian times – I would get thoroughly absorbed in, say, the ways in which publishing and bookselling worked in the early 19th century, only to realize that I’d have to squeeze the most interesting bits in as succinctly as possible!
I would have liked to include more, and longer, quotes from the letters, but there just wasn’t space. Quotes from the novels fitted around their writing history. When it came to quoting from the letters, though, the structure of the book is quite closely chronological, and the surviving letters come in bursts – for example, we don’t have any at all before Jane is 21 years old, and after that, they’re very spotty – sometimes there will be loads for one year, then nothing for another two years. (Famously, Cassandra burned anything that she thought wouldn’t reflect creditably on the Austens, although, given some of the sharper comments that survived, one does wonder a bit about what was in the ones she destroyed!) The quotes I chose had to tie in with the biographical story, and also had to be easy to explain – some of the best letters are absolute forests of detailed gossip, for which you’d need tons of footnotes. I’d strongly recommend any Austenites who haven’t read them to get hold of a copy of the collected letters, though – once one’s placed the key characters, family nicknames, etc, they’re completely engrossing.
What takeaways can female authors and creators today glean from Jane Austen’s legacy?
Two things come to mind. The first applies to any writer, really – but it’s to use the material you know and that you’re familiar with. Again and again it’s clear to the reader that Austen has used her own experience and surroundings to create completely convincing settings for her books. One of my favourite quotes is from a letter she wrote to her niece Anna.
Jane was already a published author, and teenage Anna was trying to write a novel of her own in which the plot demanded that some characters go away for a while: ‘Let the Portmans go to Ireland’, advises Jane, ‘But as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them.’ She knew very well that to be convincing you must stick to what you know.
The second thing that rewards close attention – and does seem to me to be specifically feminine, at least in the context of her time, is the subtlety of her layering. The novels are so widely read and so familiar that it’s easy to forget quite what an innovator Austen was; she was one of the first novelists to adopt multiple points of view, although she uses them so assuredly that you’d never guess that she was using a new style of writing – she’s the mistress of showing rather than telling. There are some obvious examples: Wickham, Pride and Prejudice’s great charmer, is set up to be unquestioned in the first half of the book – everyone finds him perfection – but is gradually unveiled as a consummate villain over the second half; his reported manner never really changes, but we come to see him completely differently. In Emma, Mr Knightley is a solid, valued friend to Emma for most of the novel; the reader gradually gathers the clues that he is an appropriate suitor long before the penny drops with Emma herself. I think that Virginia Woolf’s much-quoted view that it’s hard to catch Jane Austen in the act of genius supports the idea that it’s this very fine and minute building of nuance that makes for some of her most satisfying plotting.
If you had to summarize Jane Austen’s influence in one sentence, what would it be?
I think she’s probably a model for many aspirant writers – she’s that rare thing, a literary genius with pretty much universal appeal.
The rare person (I’m looking at you, Charlotte Brontë!) who finds her a bit too genteel hasn’t read her closely enough, and should go back and have another go.