In my new practice of audiobook listening, I have included books about Jane Austen which I would like to read…but alas…kids, pets, house, yard, work, and life. Yep – these are the things for all of us, right? So again, audiobooks. Delightful!
Currently, one of the many I’m listening to is Paula Byrnes’ The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. One of the fabulous structural elements of this book is its abandonment of traditional chronological narratives and instead a focus on how individual artifacts from Jane’s life illuminate our understanding of her life and her times.
One such revelation was a connection between Jane Austen and an artist who is from the very same town where my family moved a year and a half ago – Benjamin West and Swarthmore, PA (on the campus of Swarthmore College).
Benjamin West is likely a well-known name amongst many as he is, perhaps, one of the most famous landscape, portrait, and religious painters of America and certainly of the mid 18th – early 19th century – he was an international name, folks. Here’s more on Benjamin West if you are so interested: National Gallery of Art.
Now, the delightful connection between myself, Jane, and West is that Jane saw one of West’s paintings during a visit to Henry in London and, writing home to Martha Lloyd, a close friend of the Austens who had come to live with them, said this:
“I have seen West’s famous Painting, & prefer it to anything of the kind I ever saw before. I do not know that it is reckoned superior to his “Healing in the Temple”, but it has gratified me much more, & indeed is the first representation of our Savior which ever at all contented me. His “Rejection by the Elders”, is the subject.–I want to have You & Cassandra see it.”
“Christ Rejected” by Benjamin West, obtained from Wikimedia Commons
That painting currently resides at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts…which means…I will be able (you know, once I get all my shtuff together) to stand and gaze at the exact same painting that Jane Austen herself stood before and gazed upon and was so moved by.
Now, you may have noticed, but I’m just a tiny bit of an Austen nerd, so while this many not seem like a terribly big deal to some (none of you of course, whom I know are currently toggling between this exceptionally fascinating post and looking up flights to Philadelphia), but it’s kind of a major deal to me.
It also reminds me how small the world is. Or maybe it’s just another of those “signs” we’re always looking for to confirm that whatever choice we’ve made was the right one afterall. Or maybe it’s just the randomness of a perfectly beautiful and random universe. I dunno. But it made happy things happen in my heart and that’s always a good place to be.
What do you think?
A Life in Austen 
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