What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Our fiftieth book,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The gentle yet probing questioning, the lightness of touch, the accuracy of statement, the keen moral awareness, the constant intelligence—finally, it’s only Jane Austen’s irony that is missing from this excellent look at her life by Carol Shields, which is fitting since a fair-minded biography isn’t the most suitable place for broad irony. Otherwise, without any attempt at imitation or pastiche, this book is so much in the spirit of its subject, so intimately concerned with the meaning of being a writer, that one can nearly imagine that one is reading Carol Shields: A Life, by Jane Austen. Not that Carol Shields intrudes on the text in an unseemly way. Not at all. Aside from the brief prologue, the personal pronoun I to designate the biographer never appears. This book is entirely a biography of Jane Austen. But the spirit of the two, of the English novelist who lived between 1775 and 1817 and of the Canadian novelist who lived between 1935 and 2003, are so kindred that the book exudes a feeling of friendship rather than of analysis.

The illusion of complicity is helped by the fact that not very much is known about Jane Austen, despite her being the author of six novels that sit with full rights in the library of great English literature. She wrote Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion in unremitting rural obscurity. She became a published writer only six years before her death and the four novels that came out during her lifetime were published anonymously, the author being described only as “a Lady”. And even when it became widely known after her death that the lady in question had been one Jane Austen, resident of the village of Chawton, in Hampshire, posterity didn’t find out much more about her. Jane Austen never met another published writer, was never interviewed by a journalist and never moved in a literary circle beyond the completely personal one of her family, who were her first and most loyal readers. What we might have found out about her through her letters is partial, since many were destroyed by her sister Cassandra. In other words, Jane Austen lived among people who hardly took note of her, and I mean that literally: except for some few family members and friends, very little was written about Jane Austen during her lifetime that might have allowed us to become acquainted with her. A biography of such an elusive person will therefore have more the character of a spiritual quest than of a factual account. Therein lies the excellence of Shields’s biography. It is not cluttered by facts. It is rather a meditation on the writerly existence of Jane Austen—and who better to do that than a writer who can be viewed as a modern incarnation of her? Carol Shields had a similar interest in the female perspective and was as comfortable as Jane Austen in exploring the domestic and the intimate, plumbing its depths until the universal was revealed. The intuitive rightness of her biography amply makes up for the dearth of hard facts. 

The eleventh book I sent you was a Jane Austen novel, though a minor one because unfinished, The Watsons, if you remember. If that’s the only Austen you’ve read, you don’t have to worry that you will be left in the dark by this biography. It’s called Jane Austen: A Life, after all, and not Jane Austen: Her Books. Of course, her books are discussed, but only to the extent that they shed light on their author. The reader doesn’t have to have an intimate knowledge of them to appreciate what Shields is discussing.

This book is a real pleasure to read, I must emphasize that. It is intelligent in a most engaging way, not only making Jane Austen better known to us, but also bringing the reader in on the alchemical process of writing. Jane Austen, unlimited by her tightly circumscribed life, composed novels that still speak to readers today, whose lives, especially that of her female readers, have changed vastly. Carol Shields, for her part, unlimited by the poverty of source material, composed a biography that speaks to everyone, male or female, devoted Austen reader or neophyte. I hope you will enjoy it, this, the fiftieth book that we have shared.

I was in Bath recently, where Jane Austen lived for a few years. She was miserable while there, but it’s a lovely town nonetheless. I took two pictures for you (first photo, second photo), which I include with this letter.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book and two photos

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