Jane Austen erased the details of her private life from history. Maybe she was right.

Every time it seems we have reached peak Jane Austen, a fresh movie adaption comes out and a new generation of fans is born. With the release comes a flurry of renewed interest in the author herself, as historians mine for every detail of her short life. 

They are always left wanting. We have her six iconic novels (and her later-published works), but Austen’s personal life is largely cloaked in mystery. 

As the author of swoon-worthy happy endings and sharp-witted social commentary, we know little of her inner thoughts. What of her creative process? Where did the inspiration for her characters come from? We are left with bare threads, hardly enough to create a tapestry. Her biographer Claire Tomalin called Austen “elusive as a cloud in the night sky.” 

We know that Austen went through bursts of literary output, but even this was kept under wraps. So clandestine was her writing habit that she hid her pages under blotting paper when guests came to visit. 

Before she died, Austen appointed her sister Cassandra as executrix of her estate. In that role, Cassandra not only ushered “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey” into the world, she also destroyed most of Austen’s letters, the very little evidence we have of her interior life. If Austen kept journals, they no longer exist.

She wanted her work to stand alone. Or maybe she just wanted to stand alone. She gave the world her exquisitely crafted stories. That didn’t mean she wanted to give the world her life. 

It seems almost unfathomable in today’s oversharing era, where people brush their teeth for the camera and bleed in real time. We show our scars, our bedrooms, our bras. There are no secrets. More is always better.

And yet, to share so much can leave us hollowed out, to the point that maybe one of the last bastions of groundedness in this strange time is discretion, to live quietly behind a wall or between the bound pages of a diary.

I was given my first journal, white with silver embossing, at the age of 8. I wrote sporadically at first, then hit my stride around age 11, filling page after page, then journal after journal. A corner of my attic is now dedicated to the stacks of journals from my young years.

I have schlepped these journals with me through 25 years of marriage and a dozen moves. I’ve always joked that if our house caught fire, my journals would be the only thing worth taking. As I prepare for another cross-country move and look to downsize, I’ve decided to take on the task of digitizing them, perhaps compiling them into a multivolume set to pass on to my children and grandchildren.

The diary of a middle-class girl growing up in the 1980s and ’90s is as you’d imagine it: largely facile descriptions of my day, the fretting over an A minus, fights with siblings, road trips to Mount Rushmore. And boys. So much about boys. But there are also glimmers of insight, where I muse on spirituality or sit huddled in a basement while a Midwest tornado rages overhead. 

I wrote through college. My studies in St. Petersburg. My roommate friendships. I have a dashed-off list from the winter of 2000 about all the boys I liked, the last one being a brand-new acquaintance who would one day become my husband. These memories are priceless — flecks of gold amid the silt.

They are also utterly private. Even as I read over their pages, I am conflicted about sharing them with anyone outside my own brain. Because I did so once, by accident, and with memorable results.

Many years ago, while attending church, I handed my son a pencil and notebook from my bag. It was intended to keep him occupied during the long service. As song director, I sat at the front, getting up every few minutes to direct the music. 

I could see some sort of commotion going on in the pew where my family sat, the spiral notebook being passed back and forth. My husband had a strange look on his face when I went to join him. He leaned over, took my hand and said, “We need to talk.” 

I had unwittingly given my 9-year-old son not a blank notebook, but my journal. He opened randomly to an entry in which I was raging about my husband. I wrote that he was clueless and self-absorbed. I was doing everything around the house while he dashed off to work. The screed went on for three pages.

Sitting in the pew on that Sunday, my son read the entire entry, then whispered, “Dad, I think you need to read this.”

We laugh about it now. It’s a good story for dinner parties, because anyone in a partnership understands what it takes to keep things going amid the struggle.

Did Austen keep a cathartic journal? Did she have great secrets that she wanted buried with her? Maybe. More likely, as the creator of such characters as Mrs. Bennet, Miss Bates and John Thorpe, she was keenly aware of human nature. Maybe she knew history would pick her apart like meat off the bone, devouring each detail, chewing and spitting her out in some unrecognizable form. The dead cannot offer a rebuttal.

I’m sure there are people who measure the impact of every word they write. I am not one of those people. My journals have never been for anyone but myself. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up my pen at 8, or what keeps me going, except that writing is how I process the world.

But I am also an unreliable narrator, given to whimsy and strong emotion. What is not included in my rage entry from years ago is perspective. It was the dead of winter in Minnesota. We had four spirited kids under the age of 11. My husband was hustling to get tenure and commuting to his job at the University of Minnesota.

The commute was an hour each way and involved car, city bus and walking a mile to his office. More than once he came home with the first stages of frostbite on his toes. I have so much grace for both of us during this period. 

When I read my journals, I see a young girl and then a woman, working through her anxieties and fears. My opinions have changed, my empathy deepened, my mind expanded. I would never want to be preserved in the amber of my earlier years.

And so, when I think about sharing my journals, I am tugged in two directions. One, to be intimately known and understood. Life isn’t always nasty or brutish, but it is short. We cook oatmeal, raise children, go to work, make and lose friends, worship God, pull weeds, wrinkle and die. This can all feel very small.

Our outward-facing lives, the ones we put in front of the masses, can give the illusion of something more expansive and permanent, like carvings on a cave wall: I was here. I left a footprint.

There is such allure to being seen, even if it comes with the abuse and verbal shaming of online comments, the voyeuristic masses all weighing in. But the counterweight to being known is to being misunderstood or misrepresented. 

To live a private life, one that we know will fade into obscurity in just a few generations, takes something akin to faith. 

I haven’t decided yet what I will cede to posterity. I don’t delude myself into thinking that historians centuries from now will be clamoring for my life story. But I wonder if I will have the courage of our beloved Jane Austen to tell my own sister, “Seize upon the scissors as soon as you possibly can.”