A statue at last of Jane Austen... but you might need Persuasion it’s REALLY her
IT HAS taken 200 years, but Britain is finally erecting its first statue of Jane Austen. But there is a tiny flaw in the plan to immortalise the great writer in bronze: no one really knows what she looked like. The only portrait from her lifetime is a sketch that her sister Cassandra drew in 1810. However, that portrait was dismissed by her niece Anna as being ‘hideously unlike’ the author.
Sculptor Adam Roud has just unveiled his design for the £100,000 artwork and admits he’s had to ‘read between the lines’ to create her face. ‘There isn’t a recorded image of her apart from that little glimpse of what maybe she looked like from her sister’s drawing,’ he admitted. ‘It isn’t a fabulous drawing so you have to take that with a pinch of salt.
‘It’s going to be a case of using what I know from the descriptions of Jane Austen, the possible silhouette that was in a book that she gave to her cousin, and the drawing that Cassandra did.’
The life-size statue is destined to be erected in July in Basingstoke, near the Hampshire village of Steventon where Austen was born. Local MP Maria Miller, the former Culture Secretary and current chairman of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, said it was ‘staggering’ that there were no permanent public statues of Austen.
‘Across the country fewer than one in five statues are of women,’ she added. ‘That has got to change.’
Mr Roud admitted that the ‘three-dimensional sketch’ of the Persuasion and Pride And Prejudice author that he unveiled on Friday is still a work in progress.
But he said: ‘It needs to be a believable person.’