Fashionable though similar questions have become in literary criticism, nobody seems to have wondered about Austen until Terry Castle, professor of English at Stanford, lit the fuse. Reviewing “Jane Austen’s Letters,” a new edition compiled by Deirdre Le Faye, Castle analyzes Austen’s relationship with Cassandra. The two were devoted; neither married, and they shared a home and a bed until Jane’s death at 42. At the time there was nothing unusual about such a close same-sex relationship, but Castle suggests that its very normality functioned as a “necessary screen” for the sisters’ “unconscious” homoeroticism. Cassandra destroyed many of the letters. Those that remain are about as racy as a gooseberry pie, but in Jane’s descriptions of dressmaking, or of ladies’ bare shoulders at a party, Castle discerns a “kind of homophilic fascination” with women.
In Austen circles, those are fighting words. “Total nonsense,” says Brian Southan, chairman of the Jane Austen Society in Britain. If Austen wrote about dressmaking, he says, it’s because the sisters made their own dresses. Jean Bowden, curator of Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, Hampshire, says many same-sex couples shared beds in Austen’s day. “I think a Californian can’t possibly have a conception of how cold an English bedroom can be in midwinter,” she says. Cassandra undoubtedly acted as Jane’s muse and her best reader, says Susan Gubar, co-editor of “The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.” “But when you know as little as we do about earlier women writers, they can become a Rorschach test on which we project anything we want.”
Castle emphasizes that she didn’t write the “Gay” headline, and that her article never claimed the sisters had sex. But she objects to the view of Austen as an asexual English spinster. “I don’t think her novels support that stereotype; I find them full of passion and emotional engagement,” she says. “What gave her such insight into the ways desire operates? I think it was this primary relationship with her sister.” She’s right about the emotional heat in Austen’s novels, but to tease it out of the letters seems a stretch. And why forage for sex in her writing now, with movies of “Sense and Sensibility,” “Emma” and “Persuasion” in the works? Whatever she left to the imagination may well show up in color, on screen.
