LONDON In her beguiling comic plots, Jane Austen often ridicules characters who fuss excessively about the state of their health.
The novelist would therefore be perplexed - and perhaps amused - to discover that nearly 200 years after her death, the precise nature of her mysterious final illness has become a subject of enduring literary fascination.
Fresh, retrospective analysis of her symptoms, published on Tuesday, suggests the author of Pride and Prejudice may have died prematurely of tuberculosis caught from cattle.
Examination of Austen's correspondence and the recollections of her family prove, it is claimed, that she was not, as previous medical experts hypothesised, a victim of Addison's disease, a once-fatal hormone-disrupting condition.
Austen's very private life still intrigues her modern readership, while physicians and biographers have been in dispute for the last 40 years about the precise cause of her death in 1817.
Writing in the British Medical Journal's Medical Humanities magazine, Katherine White, of the Addison's disease self-help group, presents evidence aimed at exploding one of the more widely accepted medical theories of her demise.
“Jane Austen died at the age of 41, leaving her seventh novel, Sanditon, unfinished,” White says. “While she outlasted many of her peers in Regency England - she saw four of her sisters-in-law buried from childbirth complications - the cause of her death ... remains tantalisingly open to posthumous speculation.”
In her youth and throughout most of her adult life, Austen enjoyed a relatively robust constitution. While still a young teenager, she wrote her first satirical, comic novel, Love and Friendship, in which the protagonists are repeatedly mocked for their indulgent, emotional fainting fits.
Austen travelled in May 1817 to Winchester, Hampshire, in southern England, to seek medical help but died in the city two months later. As one of the many literary websites dedicated to her life and works records “Jane Austen died in the dawn of Friday 18 July 1817, her head cradled on a pillow on Cassandra's lap; her sister had kept a vigil by her bedside for most of the night.”
White writes “In 1964, [the surgeon Sir] Zachary Cope proposed that tubercular Addison's disease could explain her two-year deterioration into bed-ridden exhaustion, her unusual colouring, bilious attacks, rheumatic pains and the absence of more specific indicators of disease.”
By contrast, one of Austen's most recent biographers, Claire Tomalin, suggested in 1997 that lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system) would be a better fit for the novelist's reported symptoms.
White agrees Cope's diagnosis of Addison's disease could be correct, but notes “Most patients with the disease experience mental confusion, generalised pain, weight loss and loss of appetite. None of these symptoms appears in Miss Austen's letters.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
