Katie Lee writes...
This week sees a much-disputed painting go on sale at Christie's in New York. The portrait is possibly the only oil painting of Jane Austen in existence, and - if it's real - proves once and for all that Austen was no where near as plain as her sister Cassandra had led us all to believe. This painting is of a round-faced, pert lipped girl with soft eyes and rosy cheeks - a far cry from Cassandra's inept sketch of a plain old spinster with hunched shoulders and a pinched face.
But why all this sudden obsession over what Jane Austen looked like? Wordsworth Classics recent decision to give Austen a bum-clenchingly bad fakeover (which apparently consisted of daubing her in make-up and giving her a breast enlargement) and Anne Hathaway's every-so-pretty heroine in Hollywood fairytale, Becoming Jane, all speak of a desire to make Jane Austen as pretty as Marianne Dashwood.
When I was a teenager, I was always disappointed to learn that Jane Austen wasn't particularly beautiful and that George Eliot was renowned for her ugliness as much as her novels. Then something strange happened to me...
I got older, made my way into adulthood and learned that not everyone in this life is a looker. So Jane Austen couldn't compete in a beauty pageant, so what? She wrote some of the best literature in existence, composed some wickedly delicious letters and was a great sister to Cassandra. What more can you ask of a person? And George Eliot looked like a man. Big deal. Her intelligence was legendary, Dickens, Thackeray, George Lewes and Tennyson all delighted in her company, and she had her fair share of adoring admirers, all captivated by her mind and soft voice without a thought for her big old nose.
This obsession over whether Jane Austen was pretty or not is not only offensive for all the usual reasons [insert your own standard feminist rant in here] it's also just simply quite pathetic. What does it say about us all if we're still suffering with the same teenage fixation for beauty? Are we really all that childish that we need our heroes to be beautiful as well as brilliant? I don't think any of you will be shocked to learn that some of the most stunning people in the world also tend to be the dreariest. And on those occasions you hear a funny AND beautiful movie star, you can bet they didn't get their looks until they'd left school. Any girl who's breezed through life on her lovely face usually has very little cause to crack jokes.
But why do I even need to say all that? It's not like it hasn't been said and acknowledged many times before. There's a very good chance that a plain woman wrote some excellent books. I'm sure we're all grown up enough to deal with it... or at least we should be.
Trashionista, our popular fiction/chicklit blog, is celebrating Jane Austen week this week. They've got lots of goodies to give away, so if you fancy some books and Austen DVDs, head over there to find out more.
