“The ‘writing life’ is a life of crime,” Margaret Drabble argues in an essay called “The Wickedness of Fiction” (129). “Perhaps writing is theft,” she suggests, “and the using of the lives of others is morally, if not legally, criminal” (135). Reading Drabble, I thought of the thefts committed by the heroine of Jane Austen’s novel The Beautifull Cassandra, which Austen wrote when she was very young—probably about twelve. I’m calling it a “novel” because Austen says it is “a novel in twelve Chapters” (Minor Works 44), but of course it is under 400 words, and although readers are seeking shorter and shorter books in these days of ever-more-limited attention spans,1 we aren’t (yet) living in a world in which a 400-word manuscript is considered a novel. Nevertheless, since Austen herself borrowed—or stole?—the term “novel” for this early literary work, let’s keep it.
Jane Austen, like all writers and artists, took titles, names, places, dramatic incidents, elements of plot, and aspects of character from the literary, political, and cultural world around her, to make use of them in her work—to explore and draw our attention to the things that mattered to her. Like the Beautifull Cassandra, Austen takes what she wants without explanation or payment, performs for her audience, and effectively runs away, leaving us in awe of what she has done.
I’m curious about Austen’s process, as she gathered ideas and prepared to make use of them in the stories, poems, and plays she produced as a teenager and then in the novels that are traditionally referred to as her “mature work.” Did she think of herself as a thief, I wonder, “stealing” from life to create art? I’ll draw from a range of perspectives on writers and their sources, including essays and stories by Drabble, T. S. Eliot, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Eudora Welty, and other writers, along with examples from Austen’s early and mature writing, to explore questions about the creative process and the ethics of fiction.
“Consequence free”
In Jane Austen’s story, the Beautifull Cassandra falls in love with “an elegant Bonnet” (45) created by her mother, “a celebrated Millener in Bond Street” (44). She places the bonnet “on her gentle Head” and sets out “to make her Fortune” (45). Has she stolen the bonnet? Or is she borrowing it, with the intention to return it to her mother’s shop? We don’t know. We do know that she intends to “make” her fortune, not seek it: it’s clear she is not seeking a rich husband, for when she meets a young viscount, she simply “curtseyed & walked on” (45). She’s much more interested in food. At the “Pastry-cooks,” she “devoured six ices” and “refused to pay for them.” In lieu of payment, she metes out violence: she “knocked down the Pastry Cook & walked away” (45). This heroine, quite unlike the heroines of Austen’s six most famous (full-length) novels, simply takes what she wants and keeps going, apparently without regard for anyone who stands in her path.
“She placed her bonnet on his head & ran away,” by Juliet McMaster, from The Beautifull Cassandra (© 2021). Courtesy of the Juvenilia Press, UNSW Sydney, Australia.
After she’s taken a hackney coach to Hampstead and back again, and the coachman has “demanded his Pay” (45), the Beautifull Cassandra “placed her bonnet on his head & ran away” (46). She has no money in her pockets, and, thus, just as she has stolen the bonnet and the six ices, she has effectively stolen her round-trip journey. Yet although the coachman is unlikely to be satisfied with the bonnet as payment, he doesn’t chase her. On her return home, without the bonnet, she “was pressed to her Mother’s bosom by that worthy Woman” (47). As far as we can tell, she faces no consequences for having swiped the bonnet from the shop, or for having refused to pay for the ices, or for having struck the pastry cook, or for having left the coachman unpaid. At the end of the story—that is, novel—“Cassandra smiled & whispered to herself ‘This is a day well spent’” (47).
Let’s imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if Jane Austen’s other novels followed this pattern. What if Elizabeth Bennet, after reading Darcy’s letter of explanation, skipped the moment in which she realized “‘Till this moment, I never knew myself’” (PP 208) and continued to judge people based on first impressions, insisting, as she does when her sister Jane is trying to interpret the characters of Darcy and Wickham, that “‘one knows exactly what to think’” (86)? What if, confronted by Lady Catherine de Bourgh and told to confirm that she is not engaged to Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth “knocked down” her adversary “& walked away”? What if Emma Woodhouse, after having insulted Miss Bates at Box Hill, instead of going home “to think and be miserable” (E 134), returned home whispering to herself with glee: “This is a day well spent”?
It’s fascinating to watch young Jane, and then the older Jane, experimenting with character and plot: what happens in a novel in which the heroine thinks only of herself; what happens in a novel in which the heroine learns to see the complexities of the lives of others, to think of her own life in relation to theirs?
Watching Jane Austen exploring thefts and their consequences, or lack thereof, is equally fascinating. What happens when a young woman breaks the rules? What if she could break them without any repercussions? When I read The Beautifull Cassandra, I often think of a song by the Newfoundland band Great Big Sea called “Consequence Free,” which imagines a world free from conscience and guilt, in which our actions don’t matter. It’s an easy step from the lyrics of “Consequence Free” to John Mullan’s wonderful book What Matters in Jane Austen? and the answer he gives to that question, which is “everything.” I think he’s right that everything matters in Jane Austen. Not just everything but, I would add, everyone. Heroine, anti-heroine, protagonist, antagonist, and minor characters, too: part of what makes Austen a great novelist is that everyone matters and is worthy of the reader’s attention and understanding. (Except, perhaps, for poor Dick Musgrove in Persuasion. But that’s a topic for another day.)2
“A life of crime”
In her early writing and her later novels, Jane Austen was keenly interested in rules and repercussions, choices and consequences, in who does what and why, and in the effects of an individual’s actions on other people, the way these decisions and actions matter. She was also keenly aware of the literary tradition she inherited, and of the ways in which the writing of others shaped her own work. Many critics have explored her engagement with her contemporaries and writers from previous centuries, tracing influences, allusions, and other ways in which she draws on sources.3
When we talk about Austen’s use of sources in her fiction, we tend to speak about her engaging with, drawing on, alluding to, being influenced by sources. We don’t usually say, for example, that she “stole” the phrase “pride and prejudice” from Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia.4 The plot of Pride and Prejudice was probably influenced by the plot of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. But did Austen “steal” it? For that matter, did Shakespeare steal from other writers for his own plots? He was famously denounced by a contemporary as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” accused of mimicking or stealing or both.5 In speaking of her novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding admitted that “I just stole the plot” and the book “increasingly began to mimic and nick stuff from Pride and Prejudice.” She explained, “I thought Jane Austen wouldn’t mind and anyway she’s dead.” How quickly we can move from questions about whether a writer is a thief to questions about whether she is the victim of theft!
In our present moment, one could even argue that life steals from writers as much as or perhaps even more than writers steal from life. We live in a world that expects us to pay high prices for the phones and other devices on which we read and watch stories, and at the same time encourages us to think that the content, the stories themselves—fiction, non-fiction, journalism, movies, television, songs—ought to be free, or at least as cheap as possible. Publishing is in crisis; copyright protections have been eroded; authors are sometimes pressured to sign away control over their work to publishers or the public; advances (if they exist at all) are lower than they used to be (unless the writer is already a star); writers (told that attention is a form of payment) have long been expected to write for free to promote their work (thus decreasing the amount of time they can spend on new creative projects); and now artificial intelligence, trained on works by writers past and present—not always with their permission—is capable of telling stories for us. Do we even need writers anymore? Our world has been stealing from them (us) for a long time, and that trend seems only to be increasing. Who would want to be a writer in this complex, ever-changing environment? I think of something fiction writer and memoirist Isabel Huggan said at a literary festival a few years ago: asked what advice she’d give to an aspiring writer, Huggan responded, “Think again!”
Let’s look at what’s been borrowed, taken, or stolen from Jane Austen over the past two and a half centuries. Her work is now part of a literary citizen’s “‘constitution,’” to borrow Henry Crawford’s description of Shakespeare’s plays. Her “‘thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where’” (MP 338). I wonder if she would be surprised that we’ve taken so much from her novels, and her life, adapting, reimagining, recreating, transforming material that once belonged to her. Would she feel honored by the attention? Would she feel shocked, perhaps even violated, knowing that her work and her private life have been not only scrutinized but also in some cases rewritten, possibly distorted? Then again, as Rachel Beswick argues, anyone who objects to the way contemporary writers play with Austen’s novels needs to consider the way that in Northanger Abbey she “cheekily swipes the ideas of other writers and has fun with them” (34).
The idea that writers, poets, and artists in general steal—and are stolen from—echoes through the years. T. S. Eliot, for example, famously says, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (206). He writes of the mind of a poet as “a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (19). Mark Twain similarly speaks of collecting and then uniting old ideas to create new ones: “There is no such thing as a new idea,” he once claimed. “It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages” (qtd. in Paine, ch. 251). Greta Gerwig says that in making the Barbie movie, she knew many people had strong opinions about the topic, and thus instead of “tiptoe[ing] around” it, the trick was to step right in: “the whole undertaking was definitely like ‘Drive it like you stole it.’ Go, go, go. Don’t tell them, don’t tell them where we’re going” (qtd. in Crosley 83).
In a short story called “The Listener,” by Budge Wilson, the narrator watches a writer who is listening attentively to a woman at a party: “Oh, be careful, be careful, my heart cried out to that woman. If you’re telling about your failed marriage, your wicked uncle, your past sins, stop before it’s too late. Worse still, if you’re a rising young writer discussing your work, keep your plots to yourself, lest you discover them on someone else’s pages. Beware, beware” (140). Perhaps, as Drabble says, “[w]riters are a treacherous crew, be they novelists or biographers, and it is wise not to tell them too many secrets” (132). Perhaps Janet Malcolm is right that “[e]very journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible” (3).
In Alice Munro’s story “Family Furnishings,” the narrator says that planning to write fiction “seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories” (239). It’s an intriguing image, and I suppose it’s possible to see in this approach a kind of freedom for the writer. Invoking Munro’s work now is more complicated than it was last fall, when I proposed this paper and began to reflect on what it might mean to “grab” a story from the air. At the time, Munro was still alive, and the world hadn’t yet heard her daughter Andrea Skinner’s story. As you probably know, less than two months after Munro’s death on May 13, 2024 (which had been followed by countless eulogies and tributes to the Nobel Prize-winning author), Skinner revealed in an essay published in the Toronto Star that as a child she had been sexually abused by Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, and that Alice Munro knew about the abuse but chose to stay with her husband rather than support her daughter. Fremlin was convicted of indecent assault in 2005, but the family kept the abuse and the conviction a secret.
While this paper is not the place for an extended discussion of the deeply disturbing choice Munro made, or of her family history in relation to her stories, these revelations raise compelling questions about who gets to tell which stories, and when. To whom do stories belong? Who is listening, and who is silenced? And they raise questions about the sources of inspiration for art. As Tracy Ware and others have pointed out, Munro’s story “Vandals,” which features a woman who knows her husband is abusing neighbourhood children but does nothing about it, was published in The New Yorker the year after Munro learned from her daughter that Fremlin had abused her (qtd. in Maimann). We can’t know if Munro felt that, like the narrator of “Family Furnishings,” she was “grabbing something out of the air” when she wrote “Vandals.”
I wonder if the teenage Jane Austen saw herself as finding stories in the air and the family life around her when she wrote of romance between characters named Henry and Eliza, in Henry and Eliza: A Novel, or Henry and Eloisa, in Lesley Castle, and of an older woman seducing a much younger man, in the epistolary novella that was eventually given the title Lady Susan. Jane Austen was working on Lady Susan, Lesley Castle, and Henry and Eliza in the years after 1787, when her older cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, started flirting with Jane’s brother Henry during theatrical productions put on by the Austen family, when Henry was sixteen and Eliza was still married to her first husband. Deirdre Le Faye notes that “it is probable that their mutual attraction, which was to culminate in their marriage ten years later, dated from this period” (60).
We could speculate about what young Jane thought of the flirtation, the ten-year age gap between her cousin and her brother, and the fact that Eliza was married to someone else. It seems unlikely that the repeated use of the names Henry and Eliza in her stories is just a coincidence. If she was indeed thinking of the real Henry and Eliza when she was writing, might she have seen herself as “stealing” the story of their flirtation, or as attempting to tell the world that something was wrong with the balance of power in the relationship? Might she have seen herself as betraying Eliza, or as attempting to protect Henry? Or perhaps the flirtation was simply a source of amusement for an imaginative teenager.
“An invasion of social proprieties”
Are Drabble, Eliot, and others right that all writers and artists are thieves, who betray their—our—families, friends, and readers? When we read, are we being tricked as we watch “the same old pieces of colored glass” being moved around, or as we watch a writer or director drive the plot as if it’s a stolen car, or a hackney coach headed to Hampstead and back? I’m deeply interested in these questions, as a literary scholar and critic, and also because in recent years I’ve been writing fiction that explores and reimagines the lives of Jane Austen and other members of the Austen family.
Not all writers see their work as a form of literary theft. Eudora Welty, for example, says that “[t]he fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there” (Beginnings 114). She suggests that fiction is influenced by something that already exists, and yet once the thing is incorporated into the story, it is no longer the same thing. Welty says, “In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about—these become our characters and go to make our plots” (“Crusade” 150). While she acknowledges that she draws on life for her fiction, she says, “I don’t write by invasion into the life of a real person” (Beginnings 134).
L. M. Montgomery claims that “[a]ny artist knows that to paint exactly from life is to give a false impression of the subject.” She maintains that while it’s essential to “[s]tudy from life,” “The writer must create his characters, or they will not be life-like” (72–73). In his Preface to “The Aspern Papers,” Henry James acknowledges that this fiction was inspired by a true story, but he maintains that he prefers “‘facts,’ bare facts of intimation,” to be “in an early ‘state,’” because “[n]ine tenths of the artist’s interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and how he shall turn them” (xxx). Lorrie Moore similarly insists on the importance of the way the writer remakes, “turns,” real experiences: “Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them” (qtd. in Gaffney). George Saunders writes, “I’d prefer to have no real people in my stories, just shadows of imagined people, so I can use them to talk about human tendency (and be as rough and truthful and cruel with them as needed to make my point).”
If we can trust G. D. Boyle’s account of the friendship between Jane Austen and Mrs. Ann Barrett, Austen’s attitude toward her work sounds like that of Welty. She even uses the same term, “invasion,” and similarly speaks of not invading the lives of others. Mrs. Barrett told Boyle that when Austen was accused of having drawn a portrait of an individual in fiction, “in recurring to the subject afterwards she expressed a very great dread of what she called ‘such an invasion of social proprieties.’” While Austen “said she thought it fair to note peculiarities, weaknesses, and even special phrases, . . . it was her desire to create not to reproduce.” Mrs. Barrett reported that Austen also said, “‘I am much too proud of my own gentlemen ever to admit that they are merely Mr. A or Major C’” (Austen-Leigh 196).6
Does Austen, in this reported exchange with her friend, protest too much? Do Welty, Montgomery, and James, or Moore and Saunders? Maybe some writers do steal freely to create art, while others are more cautious and strive to avoid “invasion” and theft, preferring to work, as Saunders says, with “shadows.” Perhaps focusing on sources and influences doesn’t allow enough room for the tremendous powers of the imagination to transform reality into fiction.
“Something that’s never been said before”
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard about writing came from my niece, Helen Rose, when she was six, talking about a story she was working on: “You just take something from real life, and then you say something that’s never been said before.” I believe her insight is key to understanding Jane Austen’s use of sources.
Even if the writer is inventing an entirely new fictional world, she is still working with, adapting, revising, resisting the world as we know it. So, yes, every artist takes something from real life. Helen’s phrase, “something from real life,” sounds to me very much like what Sir Edward Denham in Austen’s Sanditon calls the “‘tissues of ordinary Occurrences’” when he is dismissing the fiction found in a “‘common Circulating Library’” (MW 403). As Susan Allen Ford points out, Austen’s own novels “are constructed of the ‘tissues of ordinary Occurrences’ that he disdains” (237). Whether the artist is working with “tissues,” or “particles,” or “pieces of colored glass,” her intentions matter. Is she invading and stealing, or observing and imagining? However you describe what happens, it is an active process. If the art is to become anything beyond a simple copy, an imitation, an authorized or plagiarized reproduction, the artist must then, in Helen’s words, “say something that’s never been said before.”
It’s both that easy, and that difficult. You just take it, and then you transform it. In that process lies the magic of art. If it isn’t your story to tell, if you’re not allowed to take it, or if telling the story causes harm, there may be consequences, no matter how firmly the writer believes that “[t]his is a day well spent.” Certainly there are many reasons to be uneasy. Drabble is right that writing is a dangerous business.
NOTES
1Kate Dwyer writes: “Thanks to factors like dwindling attention spans, less leisure time, and price hikes across paperbacks and hardcovers, short texts—novellas, standalone short stories, poetry collections, plays, and experimental cross-genre works—are finally getting their due.” At the same time, in recent years, Austen’s juvenilia, or teenage writings, have also been receiving renewed attention: see, for example, the Teenage Writings Hub on the Jane Austen’s House website (https://janeaustens.house/teenage-writings/) and Jane Austen, Early and Late, by Freya Johnston.
2In Persuasion, Dick Musgrove’s death is “scarcely at all regretted” (50), but many have suggested that Austen might well have altered the narrator’s uncharitable description of him if she had lived long enough to revise the manuscript of Persuasion. One could also argue that Austen is interested in the fact that his death doesn’t seem to have affected his parents and siblings deeply.
3See, for example, Barchas, Doody, and Ford.
4Or from one of the other sources where these words appear; we can’t be sure Austen was thinking of this passage from Cecilia when she chose her title: “remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination” (930).
5The line appears in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte (1592), a pamphlet attributed to Robert Greene (Schoenbaum 115–19).
6Intriguingly, even while making the case that Austen did not “steal” the lives of real people to put them into her novels, Mrs. Barrett also asserted that “Anne Elliott was herself; her enthusiasm for the navy, and her perfect unselfishness reflect her completely” (Austen-Leigh 197).
