Rachel Cohen: Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels

Jane Austen’s novels conjure up images of country ball rooms, empire waist dresses and teatime in the parlor---not grief. Yet Rachel Cohen’s biblio-memoir, Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels, does just that. Cohen looks at the well-loved British novels through the lens of grief, mirroring Cohen’s own in her in the death of her father. Walking through Austen’s work with Cohen, one will wonder why they never looked at this literature in this way before.

For several years, during the decline and death of her father and then the birth and nurturing of her children, Rachel Cohen read nothing but Jane Austen’s novels. She found solace in them, especially in Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, which both deal with the theme of grief. Sense and Sensibility is “about two sisters, who are going through the first year after their father’s death” (11) much like Cohen and her own sister. “The Dashwood sisters are grieving as no other characters in Austen do, and their grief recurs in their experiences of being abandoned by the men they had thought were their suitors,” (51) Cohen writes. Sense and Sensibility no longer becomes a novel about finding love but shared grief.  Each Dashwood sister “judges the other’s grief.” (51)

In Persuasion “nearly everyone in her book is in mourning, in different ways.” (31) “Persuasion is a melancholy book,” Cohen writes, “Anne is still in mourning for her mother. I loved its odd mixture of sorrow and hope” (5)

Cohen found comfort in the novels. She writes “I suppose I kept reading Austen in part because, on a night when my father’s death was becoming real to him, she and Gilbert Ryle had made him laugh.” (20) Austen’s story becomes part of her own as if she is a friend present and supportive during a challenging time of life.  This extends to the way Cohen writes about Austen’s characters,

I didn’t know her [Anne Elliot] at the time her mother died, when she was fourteen, and I didn’t know her when she was first in love with Captain Wentworth, and when she was nineteen, that summer of 1806, when he was briefly on land. I’ve only known her since after that…”(31)

She writes about Anne as if she was an old friend who she knows about her life previous to the beginning of the novel, because the novel itself tells us about it but it is in the confines of the pages that Cohen and Anne are friends. “When I first knew Anne Elliot, I often thought of my own history,” (34) Cohen writes before interjecting a story about herself at nineteen.

Another way she moves between her life and the novels is by talking about when she was reading a certain book. “I turned forty-one Somewhere in there I began with Pride and Prejudice. In November our son was born.” (21)

Because Cohen submerged herself in only reading Austen during these years, her transitions between her life and Austen’s text move effortlessly:

Here is a passage I look for at night. After Anne finishes her conversation with Captain Benwick, which for her has been stimulating and pleasant, she goes back to her hotel room. A hotel room. For me, and for a few other women I know, the liberty of a hotel room, since having children, is like nothing else. Really alone with my thoughts and made aware by every unfamiliar impersonal bit of the surrounding that I am unto myself. (39-40)

As fluid as these transitions between Cohen, Austen’s characters and Austen own life, the book could have been helped with a clearer structure. Each chapter is very loosely connected to one of Austen’s novels and a theme such as Chapter Three and Sense and Sensibility and letters. Cohen writes that six weeks before her father died, he sent her a letter. She uses this connection to write about the Dashwood sisters and the confines and freedoms of letter writing and then the documentation of Austen’s own life through the preservation of letters. This is the tightest chapter in the book. In Chapter Eight Cohen looks at the theme of friendship, in her own life, in Emma and in Austen’s own friendships. The reason why this structure does not work is that Cohen jumps around in chronological order in between all three threads. She neither presents the novels in the order they were written, neither does she tell the story of Austen’s own life in order and we moved in her personal narrative from when he father was ill, to when he has died and back. It is difficult to follow or make sense of and could have benefitted from a stronger structure. Perhaps focusing on just one or two of Austen’s novels would have given the memoir the focus needed.