What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved Read online

  In memory of Tony Tanner

  Contents

  A Note on References

  Introduction

  1 How Much Does Age Matter?

  2 Do Sisters Sleep Together?

  3 What Do the Characters Call Each Other?

  4 How Do Jane Austen’s Characters Look?

  5 Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?

  6 Why Is It Risky to Go to the Seaside?

  7 Why Is the Weather Important?

  8 Do We Ever See the Lower Classes?

  9 Which Important Characters Never Speak in the Novels?

  10 What Games Do Characters Play?

  11 Is There Any Sex in Jane Austen?

  12 What Do Characters Say When the Heroine Is Not There?

  13 How Much Money Is Enough?

  14 Why Do Her Plots Rely on Blunders?

  15 What Do Characters Read?

  16 Are Ill People Really to Blame for Their Illnesses?

  17 What Makes Characters Blush?

  18 What Are the Right and Wrong Ways to Propose Marriage?

  19 When Does Jane Austen Speak Directly to the Reader?

  20 How Experimental a Novelist Is Jane Austen?

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  A Note on References

  Quotations from Jane Austen’s fiction are taken from the Oxford University Press edition of The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman, 3rd edition (1965–6). References are given within the text, by volume and chapter number. References to Lady Susan and Sanditon are given by chapter number. The aim has been to enable readers easily to locate passages, irrespective of the editions they might be using.

  Quotations from Jane Austen’s letters are taken from the Oxford University Press edition, edited by Deirdre Le Faye. As pagination differs between the third (1995) and fourth (2011) editions, references are given within the text by letter number.

  Introduction

  Did Jane Austen know how good she was? It is a question often asked by her aficionados, struck on each new reading by the intricate brilliance of her fiction and perhaps aware that many of her first readers just did not see it. Contemporary reviewers might have been generally complimentary, but their very compliments show their failure to grasp what they were reading. ‘Whoever is fond of an amusing, inoffensive and well principled novel, will be pleased with the perusal of Emma.’1 ‘If Emma be not allowed to rank in the very highest class of modern Novels, it certainly may claim a least a distinguished degree of eminence in that species of composition.’2 Though she compared herself confidently with other novelists, especially other women novelists, of her times, there is no evidence that Austen herself dreamed of posterity. Her famously modest description of her own art in a letter to her brother James – ‘the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush’ (Letters, 146) – is so arch that some have taken it as a kind of boast: surely she did not think her work was such a small thing. Yet there is something incongruous about her latter-day status. Shakespeare and Dickens, the only other English authors who can rival her continuing, international appeal, were successful candidates for fame in their own day. They were also conscious innovators in the forms they used, whose audacity was widely – by rivals, grumpily – recognised. Here is the reason why that question about Austen’s creative self-awareness is irresistible: she did things with fiction that had never been done before. She did things with characterisation, with dialogue, with English sentences, that had never been done before. Is it possible that she had no particular idea of how singular her novels were? Or did she have some hunch that her fiction was unlike that of any of her contemporaries, and would duly outlive all her rivals?

  ‘Few so gifted were so truly unpretending,’ wrote Henry Austen in his posthumous Biographical Notice of his sister.3 Critics and biographers of recent times have tended to bridle at the version of the author that came down from her family: a woman who wished nothing of fame and whose writing was undertaken more to amuse her relations than to reach out to any public. Yet the widespread resistance to the image of a modest lady has been allowed to obscure an important truth: she was in some ways the most surprising genius of English Literature. She lived in an age distinguished by its literary intimacies and exchanges: we cannot think of the so-called Romantic period without thinking of the networks of friendship among its leading writers. Jane Austen knew not a single notable author, even distantly. Her most renowned female predecessor, Fanny Burney, had conversed with men and women of letters, and had been befriended by Samuel Johnson, no less. Her best-known female contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, may have lived in seclusion in Ireland, but when she did come to London she consorted with Jeremy Bentham and Walter Scott. The thoroughly eccentric William Blake, much of whose work was produced in very limited editions for a small number of patrons, was still known by a circle of London artists and literati, and his writings were discussed by fellow poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Even the so-called peasant poet John Clare became acquainted with Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb, and had his high season in the salons of literary London. Not Austen. There are a couple of poignant passages in her letters where she looks forward to the possibility of meeting the poet George Crabbe – then acknowledges that she has missed her chance of doing so. In his memoir, Henry Austen recalls a planned meeting with the French novelist and intellectual Germaine de Staël, which duly never took place.4 Though her books sold well in her lifetime, Jane Austen was utterly unknown to her great literary contemporaries. Her one encounter with a leading author came when Emma was reviewed at length in the Quarterly Review by Walter Scott. Yet the review, while admiring, was anonymous. In a letter to her publisher John Murray, Austen expressed regret that ‘so clever a Man’ as the reviewer should have left Mansfield Park out of his survey of her work (Letters, 139). It is unclear whether this means that Austen knew she was reading the considered response of the novelist who had burst on to the scene with Waverley less than two years earlier.

  Jane Austen’s obscurity among her contemporaries is all the more striking when one considers her technical audacity. There was nothing so surprising about the fact that she wrote novels. There was something miraculous about the fact that she wrote novels whose narrative sophistication and brilliance of dialogue were unprecedented in English fiction. She introduced free indirect style to English fiction, filtering her plots through the consciousnesses of her characters. She perfected fictional idiolect, fashioning habits of speaking for even minor characters that rendered them utterly singular. She managed all this with extraordinary self-confidence and apparently without the advice or expert engagement of any other accomplished writer. She had had access to books, of course, and the conversations of a bookish family, but no circle of fellow authors. It might be a wrench to think of Austen, the conservative literary genius in a revolutionary age, as an experimental writer, but such she was. This has nothing to do with her subject matter: indeed, provide some bare plot summaries of her novels, and they can be made to sound rather less daring than those of contemporaries such as Maria Edgeworth or Mary Brunton. Her brilliance is in the style, not the content. Even when it comes to her characters, her success is a matter of formal daring as much as psychological insight. We hear their ways of thinking because of Austen’s tricks of dialogue; their peculiar views of the world are brought to life by her narrative skills.

  Virginia Woolf, a reader completely alive to Austen’s fictional intelligence, said that ‘of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatn
ess’.5 Woolf meant that it was nearly impossible to take a single scene, or single paragraph, as an epitome of that greatness. The apparent modesty of Austen’s dramas is, though, only apparent. Look closely, and the minute interconnectedness of her novels is a bravura achievement. This interconnectedness is the reason why, when you re-read her novels, you have the experience of suddenly noticing some crucial detail that you have never noticed before, and realising how demanding she is of your attention. One of the special delights of reading Jane Austen is becoming as clever and discerning as the author herself, at least for as long as one is reading. And when you do notice things it is as if Austen is setting puzzles, or inviting you to notice little tricks, which do justice to the small, important complications of life. Readers of Austen love quiz questions about her novels, but the apparently trivial pursuit of the answers invariably reveals the intricate machinery of her fiction. Are there any scenes in Austen where only men are present? Who is the only married woman in her novels to call her husband by his Christian name? How old is Mr Collins? Among the pleasures of knowing Jane Austen’s novels is trying to answer such questions, but in this book I hope to show that doing so also reveals the true depths of her fictional world.

  This book tries to catch her in the act of greatness, by scrutinising the patterns and puzzles that she builds into her novels. ‘I hope somebody cares for these minutiae,’ she wrote in a letter to her sister Cassandra, joking about the particulars of a recent journey – the distances and the times – with which she found herself filling her letter (Letters, 84). In life, such details may be inert; in Austen’s novels, never. How far is it from Kellynch to Uppercross in Persuasion? The answer, three miles, is significant because Anne Elliot’s short journey from one place to the other is ‘a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea’ (I. vi). What time do John Thorpe and James Morland set off from Tetbury to Bath in Northanger Abbey? Ten o’clock: we need to be clear because John Thorpe is an absurd braggart obsessed with the unlikely speed of his horse, and his bending of every fact to his purpose (‘It was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke’) is the essence of his character. Little things matter, not because Austen’s interests are trivial, but because the smallest of details – a word, a blush, a little conversational stumble – reveal people’s schemes and desires. Austen developed techniques that rendered characters’ hidden motives, including motives that were hidden from the characters themselves, and gave the novel reader new opportunities to discern these from slight clues of dialogue and narrative. The talk of Austen’s ‘miniature’ art should not be a way of shrinking her achievement, but of drawing attention to its beautiful, exacting precision (which is why the metaphor of the ivory and the fine brush is indeed a boast). Almost a decade after her death, Walter Scott recorded in his journal that he had just read ‘Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice’ for at least the third time, and marvelled at her unmatched ‘talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life’. ‘The Big Bow wow strain I can do myself like any now going but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.’6

  ‘Exquisite touch’ is a generously precise appreciation of Jane Austen’s precision. Accuracy is her genius. Noticing minutiae will lead you to the wonderful connectedness of her novels, where a small detail of wording or motivation in one place will flare with the recollection of something that went much earlier. This is one of the reasons they bear such re-reading. Every quirk you notice leads you to a design. The boon of Austen’s confidence is that the reader can take confidence too, knowing that if he or she follows some previously neglected thread it will produce a satisfying pattern. Look at the presence of the weather in her novels and you will find her circumstantial exactitude, but also a carefully planned insertion of chance into her plots. Attend to her descriptions of her characters’ blushes and you are shown how they become interpreters – often misinterpreters – of each other’s unspoken thoughts. To follow one of these topics is to catch her narrative technique in action. Over and over again, it has seemed to me that as I have pursued some theme through Austen’s fiction I have been finding a pattern that she has made to please and amuse us. So when I look at the characters in her novels whose speech is never quoted, or at scenes from which her heroines are absent, I am discovering what the novelist designed, not exercising my ingenuity but revealing the author’s.

  My book asks and answers some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, in order to reveal their cleverness. The closer you look, the more you see. This sometimes means discerning what the author would have taken for granted, so this book tries to make explicit some of the matters of fact that, after two centuries, do need some explaining. Reading Austen it is important to know how much money was worth, or what conventions of mourning might have been, or how polite people addressed each other. I hope that I interestingly illuminate some of these matters of social history. A little knowledge will reveal the peculiar role that Austen gives to seaside resorts, or her expectation that we register the presence of servants, even when they are not mentioned. Yet it is also easy to lose yourself in scrutiny of the mores of Regency England. It is salutary for the Austen researcher in need of historical background to find, over and over again, that Austen’s novels are themselves consistently invoked by social historians as ‘evidence’ of this or that custom. It is doubly salutary, as Austen invariably uses conventions, rather than merely following them. A book about the customs of the time will tell you that a young lady would not normally walk out alone, but we are surely not to side with Miss Bingley in her disapproval of Elizabeth Bennet’s walk across the fields to visit her ailing sister at Netherfield. We can still sense that Elizabeth was doing something unconventional, and that Austen’s contemporaries, like Mr Bingley, would have relished her doing so.

  The themes that I have pursued are trails of the author’s intent. How did she manage to produce such complex yet unified novels? The sparse manuscripts that have survived from Jane Austen’s mature years as a published novelist – some cancelled chapters of Persuasion, the beginnings of a novel called Sanditon – give us few clues as to her methods of composition. Except that they suggest that she did have a design to follow when she wrote. We do not have the equivalent of Dickens’s number plans or Nabokov’s card indexes, but any attentive reader will feel that final intent is encoded in early beginnings. We will never know whether Austen made plans on paper, or whether she simply had a great writer’s ability to hold in her head the details of what she had already written. The lack of evidence about her habits of composition has allowed a long tradition of condescension to her. Henry James seemed to think that Austen had not known what she was doing, technically speaking. While conceding that her stature was assured – she was ‘one of those of the shelved and safe’ – he thought that she ‘leaves us hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough’.7 She had all the ‘grace’ of ‘her unconsciousness’, he thought, finding for her process of composition the metaphor of a woman with her work basket, making her tapestry flowers and occasionally dropping stitches as she ‘fell a-musing’. There has hardly been a novelist more conscious of his methods than James, whose prefaces to his novels are evidence – and are meant to be evidence – of the rigour of his art. He knew just what he was doing, but then what he was doing was built on Jane Austen’s fearless innovations. It was Austen who had taught later novelists to filter narration through the minds of their own characters. It was Austen who made dialogue the evidence of motives that were never stated. It was Austen, a Jamesian avant la lettre, who made the morality with which her characters act depend on the nice judgements of her readers. Why should she not know what she was doing?

  In truth, literary critics who admire Austen rather relish the many examples of great literary min
ds who have been baffled by her hold over intelligent readers. ‘What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?’ wrote Joseph Conrad to H.G. Wells in 1901.8 This book might take its motto from Vladimir Nabokov, who said in his lecture on Mansfield Park that ‘the beauty of a book is more enjoyable if one understands its machinery, if one can take it apart’.9 Yet this great, thoroughly sophisticated novelist had initially failed to understand Austen’s greatness, confessing his antipathy to her and, apparently, all women novelists in a letter to his friend, the critic Edmund Wilson. ‘I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class. Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice.’10 Wilson explained to him that he was entirely ‘mistaken’ about her.11 ‘Jane Austen approaches her material in a very objective way.’ Under his influence Nabokov was soon studying Mansfield Park. Wilson knew that Austen was an entirely conscious artist, believing that she shared with James Joyce ‘the unique distinction in English novels of having a sense of form’.12 When we see how good she is, we can hardly doubt that she knew it herself. This book was written in the firm belief that Austen rewards minute attention, that hardly anything in her novels is casual or accidental. Discussing Pride and Prejudice in a letter to Cassandra, Jane Austen adapted a couple of lines from Scott’s narrative poem Marmion: ‘I do not write for such dull Elves / As have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves’ (Letters, 79). That ingenuity is the subject of this book, and worth examining because Austen hoped (or is it expected?) that her reader would share it. The self-indulgent purpose of the book has been to convey my own pleasure in reading Jane Austen. Its less selfish aim is simply to sharpen the pleasure of other readers of her novels.

  ONE

  How Much Does Age Matter?

  . . . she was fully satisfied of being still quite as handsome as ever; but she felt her approach to the years of danger . . .