Alert Janeite Marian sent us a link from the Guardian with an article about a miniature of Tom Lefroy–reproduced in several biographies of Jane Austen–that will go on sale this week at the Grosvenor House art and antiques fair in London. The miniature is expected to fetch £50,000, presumably not because of Mr. Lefroy’s distinguished legal career and achievements, which included becoming the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, but because he was the guy Jane Austen went steady with for a fortnight.
This tiny watercolour portrait, which is expected to fetch £50,000 when it goes on sale next week, was painted two years after a brief but highly charged dalliance between Austen and law student Tom Lefroy. They met at a ball, danced over and over, sat together and talked about their love of books and Henry Fielding.
We are tempted to retire to Bedlam, clutching our Official AustenBlog Titanium Spork™ and a metric ton of chocolate, but being a glass half full kind of girl, we shall look on the bright side and point out that the Guardian at least stopped at “Jane Austen’s Lost Love” and didn’t go fully to the dark side, except for the photo caption, which can be overlooked (and in fact we did at first). Too bad we can’t say that about the Independent!
Thomas Langlois Lefroy is thought to have inspired the Jane Austen’s best-known hero. As a portrait of him is auctioned, Ciar Byrne charts a youthful flirtation that became immortalised on the page
They had to go there, didn’t they?
This early experience of romance, coupled with the ensuing sense of injustice, may have provided Austen with the inspiration for the love affair between Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – although the novel, of course, has a much happier outcome. To add fuel to the speculation, d’Arcy was a well-known name in Anglo-Irish legal circles at the time.
Conspiracy! Conspiracy! Where’s Agent Scully when you really need her? And yet the author commits actual journalism by speaking with real live Jane Austen Experts (in other words, didn’t ring up well-known Austen scholar Anne Hathaway to ask her about her corset).
However, the biographer Claire Tomalin, author of Jane Austen: A Life, believes that, while Tom Lefroy undoubtedly influenced the novelist’s fiction, he was not the model for Mr Darcy. “The first letter that has survived of Jane Austen’s is all about meeting Tom Lefroy. He was the nephew of close friends and neighbours of the Austen family. He came for a few days’ holiday and he and Jane went to the same dances and really liked one another. What seems to have happened is alarm bells rang – Jane Austen had no money, he had no money – so he was sent smartly back to London.
“This is how writers work. I think that she was in love with him and I think that she felt humiliated by what happened. She then used this emotional knowledge when she could to write about similar things in her novels. All writers draw on their own experiences, but Darcy was a landowner and Tom Lefroy a penniless law student. There’s no connection.”
Huzzah! (Though we should point out that Ms. Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen could be read as supporting the theory of Tom Lefroy being Jane Austen’s Lost Love That She Never Got Over, and indeed it was invoked by some of the people involved with a couple of the recent films when making specious claims.)
Professor Janet Todd of the University of Aberdeen believes that Lefroy was nothing more than a youthful flirtation for Austen. She said: “She obviously did flirt with him, and she obviously felt pained at losing him, but I feel certain that he’s not the main love of her life. There’s somebody a bit later who is clearly really important. She talks about it with a lightness that makes it unlikely she was smitten. The letters suggest a flirtation, but she’s rather proud of the fact that she seemed to be a bit in love and lost. She sees herself as a fictional heroine.”
Professor Todd agreed with Tomalin: “Mr Darcy is everybody’s idea of the silent, passionate hero. I can’t see there’s anything in Tom Lefroy that seems like that. He seems more like Frank Churchill [a character in Emma, who flirts with the heroine, but is betrothed to someone else], very pleasant and talkative.”
Precisely! The whole idea just beggars common sense. And yet after all this, the writer, having started with a conclusion that would be seen through to the bitter end despite all evidence, goes on to describe other incidences of “literature imitating real lives.” Elvis wept. And of course the “portrait of Mr. Darcy” meme was picked up by the Herald and the Scotsman.
We suspect that, since the Lefroy!Darcy idea is so ubiquitous across the press coverage, the sellers might be partly at fault; call it marketing gone amok. But if the authors of the pieces at least took the time to consult reasonably knowledgeable experts, one would think they would at least listen to them.
ETA: HA! Just after we posted, Alert Janeite Lisa sent this along from The Sun. Depend on the tabloids!
THE real-life inspiration for TV sexbomb Mr Darcy has been revealed – as a skinny GEEK.
[. . .]
But now it seems the man writer Jane Austen based the character on, Irishman Thomas Lefroy, was more a wet lettuce.
A mini-portrait of Lefroy on sale in London this month shows him as a pale wimp.
One expert said: “He looks a bit girlish with rather wispy, curly hair. He certainly does not appear to have any of Mr Darcy’s rugged qualities.”
Uh…was Janet Todd just very badly misquoted?
