The original Jane Austen and the new, improved version. Image: Tony Collins,
The Design House, Ware.
Jane Austen has had a makeover. Wordsworth Editions, which has been selling cheapo versions of the classics for decades, has decided that for its new, "deluxe" edition of her novels, Jane's author pic needs sprucing up.
Until now Austen has always been known by the surviving sketch executed by her sister, in which she appears to be pretty enough, though hardly a babe: bushbaby eyes and chestnut curls are paired with a small, pinched mouth and something that looks like a giant shower cap perched on the back of her head.
At least Wordsworth Editions has refrained from turning the new Austen into an Anne Hathaway lookalike. Instead, their improved version is wearing a pretty blue dress (this season's colour), over what must surely be a padded bra. For while Austen's bust is nonexistent in Cassandra's sketch, she now sports a handsome rack; the bath cap has disappeared altogether; and while her lips are still thin, she has made the most of them with a colour that I reckon is Bobbi Brown Nude.
Wordsworth Editions has airbrushed Austen's image because they want to use it on the front of their new editions - and they reckon the unreconstructed, flat-chested, purse-lipped Jane won't exactly appeal to the punters. In doing so, they are, of course, only following current publishing practice, in which authors - female novelists especially - are promoted on their looks as well as their talent.
I'm a judge on the Orange prize this year, and it has been fun looking at the way the entrants have been visually marketed in their author pics: all artfully ruffled hair and meaningful stares. I suspect that when I finally meet some of them at the final award ceremony, several will be hard to recognise.
Of course, Austen isn't the only 19th-century lady novelist to get the equivalent of the Trinny and Susannah/10 Years Younger treatment. A few years ago, I published a biography of George Eliot. Now, if Austen was average looking, it's only fair to say that Eliot was a bit of a dog: a huge nose, mannish chin and crumbling teeth did not make for a great look.
When it came to deciding on a cover for the book, my publishers gave me no option: there was one passable portrait of Eliot, painted by a man who probably had a crush on her, which would form the basis of the cover image. Even then, the image would be touched up: out came the Bobbi Brown lipstick again, not to mention a bit of Touche Eclat. By the end, she looked like a proper princess.
All harmless enough you might think. Except several readers wrote to complain. Surely, they said, the whole point about Eliot's life and work was that she had from a very young age felt ugly and therefore unloved by other people. It was this inner shame about her looks that had led her to rush after every man who showed her any attention, often with disastrous consequences.
It was this low self-esteem that, in part, led her into a scandalous 20-year relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, one of the few people generally considered uglier than she was. Most importantly, it was this acute awareness of what looks mean to women (and men) that led Eliot to create a series of extraordinary characters, including Maggie Tulliver, with her rough hair and dark skin and Hetty Sorrell, the chocolate-box milkmaid whose vanity leads her so terribly astray.
In Austen's case, there is less sense that prettying her up constitutes some sort of artistic and philosophic violation. Even so, however, the fact that she was a very average-looking woman who never married bears heavily on the fact that her novels deal obsessively with the issue of whether good looks or a good heart are most likely to win you a husband. So, to turn Jane Austen into a glamour girl as a way to entice readers into her very particular world seems something akin to an own goal.
