Miniature of Tom Lefroy to be auctioned this week
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?
June 10th, 2008 at 4:19 am
These auction articles in newspapers always make me nervous as they never say anything about the present circumstances: who the current owners of are and sell the apartment in Bath, the Anne Sharp’s copy of “Emma” and now the portrait of Tom Lefroy.
Tom Lefroy was nobody then, a penniless young man, a student, but he had a miniature portrait painted and it seems it was not difficult and expensive for a person of that class to have it. It is unbelievable that among the people of Austen family only Jane and her backward brother George had not portraits. There must be a portrait of Jane Austen except the one painted by her sister Cassandra but it is not discovered yet.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Poor Tom Lefroy– the bulk of his life and accomplishments are reduced to a mere footnote; instead he appears doomed to be immortalized as Jane Austen’s bit of eye candy….
June 10th, 2008 at 11:11 am
I’m glad someone else said what I’ve been thinking all along. What the heck does Tom Lefroy have to do with Mr. Darcy??? I don’t know Tom Lefroy well but I do know Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy from our authoress and these two gentleman do not seem similar in any light. In fact, it’s highly unlikely Mr. Darcy would have even been friends with a Tom Lefroy since he was a penniless Irishman studying to earn his living as a lawyer. :-P. I wonder who it was that first decided to compare Tom to one of Jane’s literary heroes???
June 10th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I wonder who it was that first decided to compare Tom to one of Jane’s literary heroes???
That would be Jon Spence.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
When I read “THE real-life inspiration for TV sexbomb Mr Darcy has been revealed – as a skinny GEEK.” I was hoping it was going to be revealed that it was David Tennant.
Just think of the potential. Jane Austen’s one year long sojourn in the TARDIS (where she visited the 21st century and learned about the feisty modern, romantic heroines and wet shirt clad men who abound in her books (er…)) inspired all of her novels without exception. Tom Lefroy was actually the Doctor. Mr. Darcy is actually the Doctor. *conspiracy conspiracy*
June 10th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I agree that Lefroy is not the model for Darcy. Give her some credit for having an imagination, please. The source for this “truth” is of course “Becoming Jane Austen”. A model biography if ever there was one. Ahem. Funny how a ridiculously fictional film surrepticiously mutates into “fact” eh?
I agree with Tomalin though he did mean more to her than her light hearted (and playfully ironic) comments in her letters might suggest.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Jon Spence eh? Well who died and made him the first and last word on JA’s personal romances??? Why are all these foolish journalists and Hollywood-types so apt to feast on the rubbish he served them??? OK rant over. LOL
June 10th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Mags ‘misspoke’. Jon Spence does NOT compare Tom Lefroy to any Austen HERO. He suggests that Lizzy Bennet’s personality might have been a feminine version of Lefroy’s.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
True enough; but his “theories” spawned Becoming Jane, which in turned spawned Tom-Lefroy-as-Darcy becoming an accepted truth amongst lazy journalists.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:39 am
National Nine News (its Australian) has one too: “Mr Darcy the dweeb,” reads the headline, “Austen’s real-life Mr Darcy a ‘frail wimp.’” I think they’re quoting the Daily Mail on that one.
*snort*
I won’t even bother to rant
June 11th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Only a note: the biographer Claire Tomalin is a female, she can be seen in these videos on YouTube “Pride and Prejudice - Documentary” in three parts giving opinions as an expert consultant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_PDPSJ8q0I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erDzwEOVUxE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AHUrLIGI50&feature=related
Literature ignorant people (like journalists, for instance) deal with “who is this or other hero based in real life on?”; people who have a little bit idea of literature deal with another question: “what is the author trying to tell us by this or other hero?”.
Jane Austen is a great author not because she described people and events having stricken her in real life (everybody can do it). There were many such people and events and stories in the neighborhood where she lived (and this is very well explained in “A Memoir of Jane Austen” by James Edward Austen-Leigh and Claire Tomalin in “Jane Austen - A Life”) but none of them had found place in any of her novels, instead, heroes of no consequence in real life like Katherine Molland, Mr. Collins, Fanny Price etc. we see very interestingly described in her novels. A hero was made up and put in the novel only if she, the author had noticed something interesting and original (not visible for others) to be extracted from reality and to be generalized and idealized and to be conveyed to and strike the audience, not herself. That is genius’s doing, that is what a genius does and is not in everybody’s power to.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
If indeed Mr. Tom Lefroy was an inspiration for the wonderful Ms. Austen, he was certainly not the inspiration for Mr. Darcy. If we are to believe that it is true that they were in love and caused a “scandal” dancing and talking all night, etc etc etc, and then formed an attachment to each other - then when he left her for a rich woman - due to his “rich side” of the family’s insistence - he would most likely have been the inspiration for WILLOUGHBY in Sense and Sensibility.
Run-on sentence and all….That is just my two-cents!