Families Made and Families Found -- Then and Now

It all comes around to Jane Eyre, perhaps -- or to those lovely posters that I've been seeing in the train stations, of the beautiful young actress Mia Wasikowska as Jane, in the forthcoming movie. Prompting me to take a smart and lovely book off my shelf: Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres, by Ruth Brandon.

Brandon writes eloquently about the embarrassments and discomforts of the governess life -- the loneliness of this particular state of upper servanthood, of being in the family but not of it, denied even the downstairs camaraderie and shared resentments of the servants' hall. The loneliness and the anger, expressed so passionately in Jane Eyre and lived by the real-life governesses, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Bronte, Claire Clairmont, and others.

All of which, of course, takes place in the context of family life among the upper classes of a society where status and much of wealth was based upon the transfer of land, title and inheritance to an eldest son. Where in 99% of the cases, women of the landed (and even the middle, classes could only achieve real status by marrying into the system) and who needed some training in the ladylike graceful arts and accomplishments to pull it off. Which is, of course, why they had governesses.

For men, meanwhile, inheritance mattered -- most particularly for older sons. At the upper reaches of society, legitimate claims to a title mattered. As in the earliest extant romances (from second-century Greece) paternity mattered.

But what if a landowning family had no legitimate heir? If the estate wasn't entailed (most horrifically to a Mr. Collins) such a family without an heir might take in an affable, attractive boy. And if he remained affable, attractive, might settle the estate upon him.

Jane Austen's brother, Edward Austen Knight (as he became), was evidently such a boy. This is silhouette of Jane Austen's father presenting his son to the Knight family. And we should thank heaven that he was such a boy, that the Knight family did adopt him, and that the estate he inherited included Chawton Cottage, where in 1809 he installed his widowed, financially hard-pressed mother and spinster sisters Jane and Cassandra, and where Jane unpacked the manuscripts she'd been carrying around for a decade, and got to the serious, sublime work of creating Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey.

Perhaps remaining affable and attractive was a simple matter for Edward Austen Knight. Certainly we have no knowledge to the contrary. Still, I can't help wondering what the pressures might have been upon a boy who'd been sent away at age twelve from a crowded if loving home (eight children to support on the Reverend Mr. Austen's small living!) to charm his way into an estate. There isn't any evidence to suggest any difficulties -- except, perhaps, the portrait his brilliantly perceptive (and far less affable) sister Jane drew of another such boy -- Frank Churchill in Emma.

Not only is Frank constrained to dance attendance upon the difficult, querulous aunt who holds his fate in her hands, but he's managed to further complicate his life by falling in love with a young woman of no property of her own -- one of the angriest governesses (or would-be governesses) in all of fiction, Jane Fairfax.

Bringing us back to the humiliations of living one's life preparing other ladies (perhaps far less smart or talented or even handsome than oneself) to enter the marriage mart. To be a governess was to be an unsuccessful (because unmarried) lady never quite at home in the house of a successful lady and her potentially successful daughters.

The darkness of a love between a too charming adopted boy and a furious and furiously accomplished orphaned girl, neither of them with secure assurances of an eventual home is, to my mind, one of Austen's great understated moments of social criticism, and one that leads me to muse upon the misshapings of family life under the dominance of property and inheritance. Not strictly or simply a romantic couple in Austen (their problems are solved too abruptly by a providential offstage death) Jane and Frank continue to haunt my imagination, to make me hope that they do find their way, somewhere beyond the covers of Emma.

While as for the complexities of family life that more often than not overflows strict biological boundaries, of governesses in homes not of their making, and all the secrets and lies of identity and inheritance. The more I think about it, the more contemporary these issues begin to seem. Think of blended families (on your street, among your relatives, perhaps in your own home). Think of working mothers and of their nannies whose own children are sometimes halfway around the world.

The idealized postwar mid-century "nuclear family" was doubtless the exception instead of the rule. And so, I'm thinking, perhaps the impetus for this post didn't entirely originate with Jane Eyre, but with the actress who will play her, and who also played another touching young woman, Mia Wasikowska as Joni in the Oscar-nominated The Kids are All Right.

Which movie has also been in my mind, perhaps because of my own sister Robin and her partner Barb's family (much like the one in the movie, although their daughter and son are still too young to meet their biological dad). Or because my son has recently fallen in love with a lovely women who's brought with her Sasha, a ready-made two and a half year old granddaughter for us.

And because I'm rather awed to realize (if only after the fact of writing it) how important the idea of a network of relationships that creates a family were for me when I wrote another complicated story of families finding themselves in The Edge of Impropriety, which will be reissued in mass paperback this May.

There's my new cover.

And HERE (indulge me, please, just this once) is Sasha's first representational drawing -- eyes, nose and mouth, in the lower right hand corner of the pic.

And let me know what some of your favorite new-style, old-style, blended or created families are in romance (or in the movies, too)

(and thanks again to romance blogger Tumperkin, for her lovely, insightful comments on EDGE)