Constance Pilgrim

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Constance Pilgrim
Occupation writer
Employer  
Organization  
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Known forwriting imaginative biographies of Jane Austen
Notable credit  
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Notable work
  • Dear Jane: a Biographical Study
  • This Is Illyria, Lady
Opponent  
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Partner  
ParentExpression error: Unrecognized punctuation character "[". 

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Constance Pilgrim was an author best known for a fictional biography of Jane Austen, the author of Persuasion, and five other influential novels.

Her book, Dear Jane: a Biographical Study, was published in 1971, and scholars, and dedicated Jane Austen fans, differed as to the extent it should be taken seriously.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

Her central premise seems to have been that Jane Austen's Persuasion contained strong autobiographical elements.[3][7][8] Pilgrim argued that the fictional relationship between Persuasion's heroine, Anne Elliot, and her love interest Frederick Wentworth, parallels a real but clandestine tragic romance between Jane Austen herself and John Wordsworth, a maritime Captain in the service of the East India Company.

Wordsworth was the brother of the famous poet William Wordsworth. He died when the ship he commanded, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked in 1805.

Those who examined the historical record all agree - there is no evidence that Jane Austen ever met John Wordsworth.[3][9] In particular, this is the opinion of Carl Ketchum, a scholar who specialized in John Wordsworth's life. But Pilgrim's book suggests they met, and were secretly in love, and had arranged to meet again, when he returned from India, only for her to learn he died at sea.[4][7]

Pilgrim wrote at least one other book, This Is Illyria, Lady, another book that seems to be based on Jane Austen's life.[10][11] Its title is a phrase from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Several online book sellers have written about used copies of the book as if it should be considered to contain real biographical information. This book was just 129 pages, and appears to have been published in 1991, twenty years after Dear Jane.

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Tony Tanner (2017). Jane Austen. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 20. ISBN 978-1-137-06457-8. Retrieved 2025-01-19. Disregarding the boundaries between fiction and reality with equal abandon, in Dear Jane (1991), Constance Pilgrim claimed on no special evidence that Persuasion is based on an extended, clandestine, and hopeless romance with William Wordsworth's brother, John, which ended when he was drowned at sea.
  2. ↑ Lawrence W. Mazzeno (2011). Jane Austen: Two Centuries of Criticism. Literary Criticism in Perspective Series. Camden House. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-57113-394-6. Retrieved 2025-01-19. Constance Pilgrim's Dear Jane: A Biographical Study of Jane Austen (1971) is actually an extended argument attempting to prove that Austen's great novels were all inspired by the secret love of her life, a man she met in the late 1790s who died before the two could ever declare their love publicly.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Carl Ketcham (1989 P). "The Still Unknown Lover". Persuasions. 11: 7–12. Retrieved 2025-01-19. In an article entitled “The Unknown Lover” (Persuasions, no. 9, pp. 37-40), Constance Pilgrim offers new evidence intended to support her thesis in Dear Jane (London, 1971) – that Jane Austen met William Wordsworth’s sailor brother, John, in Devon, while John’s ship was delayed by contrary winds, and that John Wordsworth was the mysterious lover mentioned in several accounts originating with Jane’s sister Cassandra. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Constance Pilgrim (1987 P). "The Unknown Lover". Persuasions. 9: 37–44. Retrieved 2025-01-19. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ↑ Jonathan Roberts (2002). "Alethea Hayter. The Wreck of the Abergavenny: One of Britain's Greatest Maritime Disasters and its Links to Literary Genius. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002. ISBN 0-333-989171. Price: £14.99". Romanticism on the Net. Consortium Erudit (27). doi:10.7202/006568ar. ISSN 1467-1255. Retrieved 2025-01-19. This is made clear in her treatment of Constance Pilgrim's entirely speculative biography of Austen, Dear Jane (London, 1971), which conjectures a relationship between John Wordsworth and Jane Austen as the basis for the Wentworth-Anne relationship in Persuasion. Hayter dismisses Pilgrim's argument as "preposterous" and "foolish" because she fails to produce the supporting evidence, yet Hayter is equally wary of scholarly fastidiousness, and in her own work, eschews footnotes, endnotes, and even the names of critics.
  6. ↑ Natalija Jurišić. Mr Darcy as Symbolic Capital in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones" Novels (PDF) (Thesis). University of Zagreb. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-05-30. Retrieved 2025-01-19. For many biographers, the novels themselves became the main source for information about the novelist`s emotional life under the assumption that the «air of reality» which so many passages convey indicates their origin in autobiographical experience (Wiltshire, 2003:13). The perfect example of such an attempt of satisfying the reader`s hunger for a sense of Austen`s inner life is Constance Pilgrim’s book Dear Jane: a Biographical Study published in 1971.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Imagining Jane Austen's life". Recreating Jane Austen. Cambridge University Press. 2001-08-02. p. 13–37. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511484704.004. Retrieved 2025-01-19. It tells a story that is mentioned in all lives of the novelist. When she was very old Cassandra Austen recalled that she and her sister had met a personable young man on holiday in Devonshire sometime in the first years of the century. He was attracted to Jane, and the feeling was apparently reciprocated. The Austens expected to hear from him again, arranged even to meet him the next year, but instead the news came of his sudden death. Pilgrim's book concerns this ‘mysterious romance’ and its disappointing denouement. She set herself to uncover the identity of Jane Austen's admirer, with remarkable results.
  8. ↑ Azar Hussain (Winter 2024). ""Nameless and Dateless": Jane Austen's Unknown Suitor » JASNA". Persuasions On-Line. Retrieved 2025-01-19. In the twentieth century, Constance Pilgrim confidently asserted the identity of the unknown suitor to be none other than Captain John Wordsworth (1772–1805), younger brother of the poet, publishing an entire book, Dear Jane (1971), to support the claim. This version has been discredited by, among others, Carl Ketcham, editor of John Wordsworth’s letters.
  9. ↑ Joan Garden Cooper (2011-01-01). Austen, Byron, and Scott: Domestic Virtues and Fashioning History—Britain 1805 Through 1819 (PDF) (Thesis). University of Denver. p. 56. Archived from the original on 2025-01-19. Retrieved 2025-01-19. Yet, according to Carl Ketchum, there is "not a scrap of evidence" that "Jane" ever met "John" not is there any indication that Wordsworth had time to engage in a love affair during the ship's delay in Tor Bay.
  10. ↑ "Vintage Jane Austen Book This is Illyria Lady Rambles Friends Constance Pilgrim 1st Ed". Kittys Tales. 8 October 2024-10-08. Retrieved 2025-01-19. Characters who were only previously briefly mentioned in Jane Austen's correspondence and perhaps even never previously identified have been tracked down and researched meticulously to add new light to the Friends and Influences in Jane's life. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  11. ↑ "This is Illyria, Lady. Jane Austen - Life - Rambles - Friends". Jane Austen Books. 7 August 2023-08-07. Retrieved 2025-01-19. She finds that her close friendships with Anne Sharp, Harriet Hales, Charlotte Barrett, and Elizabeth Hall, Austen had a social reforming influence that carried on well into the Victorian age. Check date values in: |date= (help)


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