Austen×Wilde

Two masters of wit reconsider their twenties—one spent in Hampshire anonymity, the other in Oxford indolence.

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legend · A

Jane Austen

1775–1817

Will not raise her voice to do it

corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters

Jane Austen speaking

I wonder, Mr Wilde, whether you found your twenties as remarkably unproductive as I found mine. Though I suppose you were occupied with prizefighting and Greek verses at Oxford, which must count for something.

legend · B

Oscar Wilde

1854–1900

Would rather be clever than correct

corpus9.4k pages · plays, letters, criticism

full transcript

Jane Austen
I wonder, Mr Wilde, whether you found your twenties as remarkably unproductive as I found mine. Though I suppose you were occupied with prizefighting and Greek verses at Oxford, which must count for something.
Oscar Wilde
My dear Miss Austen, Oxford was where I learned that education is an admirable thing, though it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. I spent those years cultivating my genius and my wardrobe in roughly equal measure. The wardrobe, I confess, received slightly more attention.
Jane Austen
How very practical of you. I spent mine sitting in a parsonage, writing novels no one would publish and attending assemblies where the conversation rarely rose above the price of muslin.
Oscar Wilde
But surely you were perfecting that devastating clarity of yours? That surgical precision with which you dissect human folly?
Jane Austen
I was writing 'First Impressions,' which became 'Pride and Prejudice' fifteen years later, when I was nearly forty. Fifteen years, Mr Wilde. A publisher rejected it without reading it, and my father's letter went unanswered. I put it away in a drawer.
Oscar Wilde
How perfectly dreadful. Though I must say, rejection in one's twenties builds character. I myself faced no such rejections at that age, which may explain certain deficiencies in my character.
Jane Austen
You faced no rejections because you were writing nothing but letters and epigrams to amuse yourself.
Oscar Wilde
Letters and epigrams are not nothing, Miss Austen. They are civilization itself. But yes, I take your point. I published my first book of poems at twenty-seven, and it was reviewed by the Athenaeum as 'Swinburne and water.' Which was cruel, though not inaccurate.
Jane Austen
At twenty-seven I had written three novels. All unpublished. All sitting in drawers or returned in parcels. I began to think perhaps it was not the world that was wrong, but my estimation of my own abilities.
Oscar Wilde
Oh, surely not. Self-doubt is so very middle class.
Jane Austen
Self-doubt is what one feels when one has three younger brothers to compare oneself to, all of whom are out in the world making their way, while one sits at home hemming handkerchiefs and revising sentences no one will read.
Oscar Wilde
But would you truly change it? Would you have become the woman who wrote 'Emma' if you had not spent your twenties in Hampshire obscurity, observing the fine gradations of provincial society? Genius requires material, and material requires patience.
Jane Austen
That is a kind way of saying I wasted a decade of my life. I might have appreciated it more at the time if I had known the obscurity would end. As it was, I merely felt obscure.
Oscar Wilde
And I felt brilliant, which was almost as bad. I drifted through my twenties like a beautiful ghost, attending the theatre, giving speeches to undergraduate societies, writing nothing of consequence. I thought conversation was enough. I thought being Oscar Wilde was a career in itself.
Jane Austen
It rather became one, did it not?
Oscar Wilde
Eventually, yes. But I did not publish a play until I was thirty-seven. Thirty-seven! 'Lady Windermere's Fan' made me famous overnight, but imagine if I had written it at twenty-seven. I might have had twenty years of fame instead of eight.
Jane Austen
Or you might have written something inferior and been forgotten by thirty. Early success is not always a blessing. Look at Lord Byron.
Oscar Wilde
Lord Byron woke up famous and stayed famous until he died in Greece at thirty-six, which seems rather a good innings to me. Though I grant you the dying part was excessive.
Jane Austen
You are being flippant, but you know what I mean. You needed those years to become who you are. I did not enjoy my twenties, Mr Wilde, but I am not certain I would change them. I learned to observe. I learned to wait. I learned that being clever on the page matters more than being noticed in society.
Oscar Wilde
How very noble of you. I would change mine entirely. I would tell my younger self to stop posing and start writing. To treat art as a vocation, not a decoration. To understand that wit without work is merely noise.
Jane Austen
Would your younger self have listened?
Oscar Wilde
Absolutely not. I was far too busy being charming. But one can regret the charm, even if one knows it was inevitable.
Jane Austen
I cannot imagine you regretting charm. You wielded it like a weapon.
Oscar Wilde
And you wielded silence like one. But silence does not pay the bills, Miss Austen. If you had made more noise in your twenties, published under your own name, cultivated patrons, perhaps you would have lived to see fifty instead of forty-one. Perhaps you would have enjoyed some years of actual comfort.
Jane Austen
I published anonymously because a woman's name on a novel was a liability, not an asset. And I lived in my brother's house because unmarried women do not have independent incomes, however many novels they write. These are not choices, Mr Wilde. They are circumstances.
Oscar Wilde
You might have married, though. In your twenties. You had offers, did you not?
Jane Austen
One offer, which I accepted and then rejected the following morning. Harris Bigg-Wither. He was kind and wealthy and very nearly tolerable, and I could not bear the thought of waking beside him for forty years. So yes, I suppose I do regret that, in a sense. I regret that marriage was the only door to independence, and that I could not bring myself to walk through it.
Oscar Wilde
I married at twenty-nine. I loved Constance very much, though I loved other things more. If I could change my twenties, I would tell myself that marriage for security or respectability is a form of slow suicide. But then, I did not marry for security. I married because I genuinely believed I could be both artist and husband, which was naive.
Jane Austen
You had children.
Oscar Wilde
Two sons. Whom I loved and failed in equal measure. I was thirty when Cyril was born. By then I was already dividing myself into pieces—husband, father, writer, lover. If I had begun writing seriously in my twenties, perhaps I would have understood sooner that division is fatal to art.
Jane Austen
Division is fatal to most things. I divided myself between family duty and private ambition, and the division left marks. But I am not certain one can avoid it. One lives in the world one is given.
Oscar Wilde
The world I was given included champagne and adulation and an allowance from my dear, long-suffering mother. I squandered it all on pleasure. Which was delightful at the time, but rather a thin legacy.
Jane Austen
You wrote plays that will be performed for centuries. That is not a thin legacy.
Oscar Wilde
Yes, but I wrote them in my late thirties and forties, in a desperate scramble to pay debts and maintain appearances. If I had spent my twenties working instead of lounging, I might have had time. Time to write more, to refine more, to leave something genuinely perfect behind instead of a handful of brilliant things and a great deal of wreckage.
Jane Austen
Time is not something one acquires by wishing for it. You had the time you had. I had the time I had. We used it as we could.
Oscar Wilde
But that is precisely what I would change, Miss Austen. I would not wait for urgency to force my hand. I would begin at twenty instead of thirty-seven. I would treat my gift as a responsibility instead of a parlour trick.
Jane Austen
And I would find a way to publish sooner. To insist on my name. To demand acknowledgment instead of waiting politely for it to arrive. But I do not know if I had that in me at twenty-five. Perhaps no one does.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps we needed to fail our twenties in order to succeed in our later years. Though that is a rather cruel pedagogy.
Jane Austen
Life generally is. I might have preferred a tutor with better manners.
Oscar Wilde
And I might have preferred one with lower fees. But here we are, two people who found their voices too late and too briefly, sitting in eternity wishing we had started sooner.
Jane Austen
I am not certain I wish I had started sooner. I wish I had known I would be read. That is a different thing.
Oscar Wilde
Yes, I suppose it is. I knew I would be read. I simply thought I had unlimited time to be worth reading. By the time I realized time was finite, I had perhaps five years of real work left. And then Reading Gaol, and exile, and the long decay.
Jane Austen
We are not given to know our limits, Mr Wilde. Which is perhaps a mercy. If I had known I would die at forty-one, I might have spent my twenties in despair rather than quiet persistence.
Oscar Wilde
And if I had known I would die disgraced in a Paris hotel at forty-six, I might have drunk less champagne and written more plays. Though I doubt it. Self-knowledge is rarely enough to change behaviour. We are what we are.
Jane Austen
Then what precisely are we regretting?
Oscar Wilde
The gap, I think. Between what we knew we could be and what we allowed ourselves to become. I wasted my twenties being decorative. You wasted yours being invisible. Neither of us had the courage to simply be ourselves and do the work.
Jane Austen
Courage is expensive when one has no income, no independence, and no guarantee that the work will matter. I did what I could with what I had. Which was very little.
Oscar Wilde
And I did far less with far more, which is the greater sin. Very well, Miss Austen. You have convinced me. I would change everything about my twenties. You would change nothing. And we are both probably lying to ourselves.
Jane Austen
Of course we are lying to ourselves. That is what regret is. A story we tell to make sense of what cannot be changed.
Oscar Wilde
How perfectly dismal. And how perfectly true.