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

  Elsewhere in Austen’s fiction, marriages between middle-aged women and older men look less commendable. In Sanditon Mr Parker tells Charlotte the full marital history of Lady Denham, who married her first husband, ‘an elderly Man’ with ‘considerable Property’, when she was ‘about thirty’. We are to infer that her husband, Mr Hollis, might have been in his sixties, and it seems that from the beginning her duty was to ‘nurse him’ (Ch. 3). ‘After a widowhood of some years, she had been induced to marry again.’ Her wealth attracts Sir Harry Denham; his title attracts her. Her age at marriage is left unspecified, but we could guess that she was in her forties. Resourceful women are certainly able to find husbands once they themselves are middle-aged. Persuasion relies on our knowing this, for Sir Walter Elliot, in his mid-fifties, is the prey of Mrs Clay, who is called ‘a clever young woman’ and is a widow in her thirties. Anne thinks of her as ‘between thirty and forty’ (II. v). When she does so she is comparing her with her friend Mrs Smith, who is just thirty, so we might suppose that Mrs Clay is not so much older. Yet no one in the novel cites age as a reason for thinking their marriage unlikely. Both Anne and Lady Russell fear that it might be entirely possible, and even Elizabeth scorns the idea not because of the age disparity but because Mrs Clay has freckles. Meanwhile it is clear to the reader that Mrs Clay and her father, Mr Shepherd, are calculating on her catching the vain Baronet.

  Age matters very much to women, but to men too. Henry Crawford’s reflection is characteristically self-regarding, when he tells his sister that he is staying in Mansfield not only for the hunting. ‘I am grown too old to go out more than three times a week; but I have a plan for the intermediate days’ (II. vi). (His plan is to make Fanny fall in love with him.) He is called ‘young’ by the narrator and must still be in his early twenties, but likes to talk as if his youth were fled. Mr Knightley feels his age in Emma with better reason. There is a light suggestion of how a man’s age does and does not matter in the very manner of telling us about his age at the beginning of Emma, when we are introduced to him as ‘a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty’ (I. i). The narrator sounds as if the character has got beyond precision in these matters. Yet he himself is rather accurate about years and dates. He smiles when he points out that he is sixteen years older than Emma, as if this means that he will always be right in their differences of opinion (I. xii). The disparity in their ages has made some readers feel uncomfortable about their eventual marriage, though Mr Knightley himself likes to draw attention to it. After they have become engaged, he mocks himself for his past censure of Emma, the only good of which was to fix his affections on her: ‘by dint of fancying so many errors,’ he says, he has been ‘in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least’ (III. xvii). It is an unsettling declaration, but evidence that the novel is determined to exploit and not try to forget the age difference between these two eventual lovers. The sixteen years between them allowed them not to notice what they felt towards each other. They have behaved as if the gap between their ages precluded romance, but we know that they should have known better. Age does shape their relationship, but not at all as they expected.

  TWO

  Do Sisters Sleep Together?

  At night she opened her heart to Jane.

  Pride and Prejudice, III. xvii

  Are sisters not more intimate, more truly confiding, than any of Austen’s lovers? Jane Austen’s own most intimate relationship was with her sister, Cassandra, and a few years ago this gave rise to one of the peculiar controversies that periodically bubble up around Austen. In August 1995 a review essay by Professor Terry Castle of Stanford University on Deirdre Le Faye’s new Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters appeared in the London Review of Books (LRB). It was concerned mostly with the evidence in surviving letters of the closeness between the two Austen sisters, including their physical closeness. That issue of the LRB carried the question ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’ on its cover. Largely because of this surely mischievous headline, the review became the focus of a public controversy about the nature of the sisters’ relationship that spilled into magazines and newspapers and other broadcast media. For several months the correspondence column of the LRB was able to rely on freshly provoked contributions from academics and Austen enthusiasts. In a letter of her own to the journal, Professor Castle denied that she had ever suggested that the novelist was ‘gay’, but pointed out that the two sisters shared a bed for the whole of their adult lives.

  What did such intimacy mean? Sisterly chat, of which there is so much in Austen’s novels, would surely be peculiarly significant for a writer who would have talked to her own sister in bed. Except that those academics earnestly debating the implications of bed-sharing were, like Emma Woodhouse, ‘imaginists’. The LRB debate was brought to a resounding close by Bonnie Herron from the University of Alberta who wrote to point out that Edward Copeland had given a paper at the annual conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America in 1993 showing, from the records of Ring Brothers of Basingstoke, a home furnishing store, that Austen’s father had bought the sisters two single made-to-order beds when they were young adults. ‘Jane and Cassandra each had her own bed’.1 The disputants would have been better focusing on the novelist Fanny Burney, Austen’s most important female predecessor, whose fiction is notably devoid of sisterly intimacy, but who certainly did share a bed with her own sister, Susan. Their bed-sharing was clearly of some significance to them. Three weeks before Susan’s marriage in 1782 to the ominously dashing Captain Molesworth Phillips, Fanny Burney wrote a letter to her expressing some of her mixed feelings about the forthcoming happy event. ‘There is something to me at the thought of being so near parting with you as the Inmate of the same House – Room – Bed – confidence – life, that is not very merrifying.’2

  Jane and Cassandra Austen did share a compact bedroom, which they occupied until the ailing Jane left the family home in Chawton for Winchester in May 1817, aged forty-two. Surely it was a place for sotto voce confidences at the end of the day. Any visitor to Jane Austen’s house in Hampshire will be struck by the small sleeping space occupied by two middle-aged women. Indeed, so restricted is this that only one single bed is now placed in the room; if there were the original two, visitors would scarcely be able to enter. Jane and Cassandra might not quite have shared their bodily warmth, as Terry Castle had liked to imagine, but they would have ended and begun each day in intimate isolation from all others. What about the sisters in Austen’s novels? Did the novelist assume that they too would have this place of joint retreat where talk would be intimate? The immediate answer is, sometimes – and that where they do, this intimacy is at the heart of the novel.

  Most of Austen’s sisters have their own bedchambers. There is no need to share bedrooms at Mansfield Park or Kellynch Hall, for instance. This is a fact of wealth and domestic architecture in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, but it is more than this. Both these novels are stories of sisterly alienation. Emma lets us infer a comparable history of sibling separation. Emma’s older sister Isabella is long gone from Hartfield, but we know that it is a house large enough always to have allowed the sisters separate rooms. Would the distance of outlook and temperament between Emma and Isabella be imaginable if they had spent their teenage years sharing a bedroom? The Morlands in Northanger Abbey, with their ten children, would have to have a remarkably capacious rectory at Fullerton not to make some room-sharing necessary, and we might presume that Catherine shares at least a bedchamber, if not a bed, with Sarah, who, a year younger than her, has become her ‘intimate friend and confidante’ (I. ii). Sisterly communication, however, might have been limited to family matters or the pleasures of the latest Gothic novel. Catherine’s dizzying encounter with Henry Tilney is her first romance and her three months away from home, first in Bath and then at Northanger Abbey, have transformed her. She has had some fond illusions expelled and she has fallen in love. Sarah’s inability to grasp what has happened to her erstwhile confidante is sign
alled in the penultimate chapter, when Henry Tilney has unexpectedly arrived at the Morlands’ rectory and, after initial conversation has given way to awkward silence, has asked if Catherine might show him the way to the Allens’ house, that he might pay his respects to them. Sarah blurts out that their house can be seen from the window, producing ‘a silencing nod from her mother’ (II. xv). Sarah has no idea why Henry and her sister might need an excuse to be alone together.

  What about Sense and Sensibility? Barton Cottage has four bedrooms as well as the garrets for the servants, so the Dashwood ladies could have a room each (I. viii). Yet we know that one of the bedrooms is ‘spare’ and unused, so Elinor and Marianne might indeed be sleeping in the same room. When the two sisters stay in London they are certainly sharing a bedroom. The morning after the party at which they meet Willoughby after his long separation and silence, and at which we witness his coldness to Marianne and his apparent attachment to another woman, Elinor is ‘roused from sleep’ by Marianne’s ‘agitation and sobs’ and sees her sister ‘only half dressed . . . kneeling against one of the window-seats’ and writing a letter by the dim early morning light (II. vii). She begins to ask a question, but Marianne stops her short. ‘No, Elinor . . . ask nothing.’ The refusal to tell her anything presses all the more on Elinor because of the intimacy of their situation. It is in this shared bedroom that the revealing conversation between the sisters takes place a few hours later, when Elinor comes up after breakfast and finds her sister ‘stretched on the bed’ clasping Willoughby’s terrible letter, in which he dishonestly professes surprise that Marianne should have imagined ‘more than I felt, or meant to express’. Now Marianne can tell her that ‘there has been no engagement between them’, and can show her the increasingly anguished letters that she has sent to him. It is hard to imagine the conversation taking place anywhere but a bedroom. The bedroom is commonly Marianne’s retreat. She has taken to this sisterly sanctum when the Steele sisters later arrive on a visit, and Elinor is nettled by Miss Steele’s suggestion that, if Marianne is ‘laid down upon the bed, or in her dressing gown’, she and Lucy might go up to see her (II. x). ‘Elinor began to find this impertinence too much for her temper’ and the elder Miss Steele gets a ‘sharp reprimand’ from Lucy. Only Marianne’s sister can visit her in their bedroom.

  We know that Elizabeth and Jane Bennet also share a bedroom. In Pride and Prejudice (I. xxi) Jane receives a letter from Miss Bingley announcing the Bingleys’ indefinite absence from Netherfield and she looks for an opportunity to tell Elizabeth about it: ‘a glance from Jane invited her to follow her up stairs. When they had gained their own room, Jane, taking out the letter, said, “This is from Caroline Bingley . . . You shall hear what she says”.’ In their shared room, unhampered talk is natural. Jane tells Elizabeth everything. ‘I will read you the passage which particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves from you.’ Shut away together from the rest of their family, the two sisters can talk to each other quite explicitly of the prospect of Jane becoming Mr Bingley’s wife. When Mrs Bennet talks to her daughters of this prospect, it is painfully embarrassing for them and comic for the reader; when Jane and Elizabeth discuss it in their bedchamber, we hear the truth of their feelings and uncertainties. Later, as the end of the novel approaches, with Lydia already married and Jane betrothed, Elizabeth tells Jane of her engagement to Mr Darcy in their bedroom. ‘At night she opened her heart to Jane’ (III. xvii). Confidences flow across the gap – as we might imagine – between their beds. ‘All was acknowledged, and half the night spent in conversation.’

  The bedroom is a sanctum, and only special people may enter. In all Austen’s fiction, we never encounter a husband and wife together in a bedroom. We know that General Tilney and his wife had separate bedrooms because Catherine is caught by Henry Tilney sneaking a look at Mrs Tilney’s bedroom.3 Admission to a bedroom is a rare privilege, for the reader as well as for a character. For the sake of some show of ‘tenderness’, the baleful Bingley sisters visit Jane Bennet in her bedroom during her illness – but it is a Netherfield bedroom, and not Jane’s personal domain. Solicitous though he is about her state of health, Mr Bingley does not visit Jane Bennet in her bedroom during her illness. When she is able to come down to the drawing room for a while, Mr Bingley sits with her and talks to almost no one else. But only his sisters are permitted to entertain Jane with their conversation in the bedroom. Elizabeth, meanwhile, signals her closeness to her sister by spending much of her time in the bedroom. When she is first tending Jane, she passes ‘the chief of the night’ in her room (I. ix).

  Sisterly closeness is not necessarily to be admired.

  Think of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet and we might suppose that unreserved sisterly talk is admirable. But Austen knows that such confidential talk can allow malign confederacy too. Think of the conversations between sisters that we do not hear – the sisterly chat going on just off stage, perhaps in bedrooms that we never get to visit. In Sense and Sensibility, the Steele sisters talk together, and have always lived in close proximity, even though they are peculiarly divided associates. Miss Steele – Anne – is ‘nearly thirty’ and ‘very plain’; Lucy Steele is ‘two or three and twenty’ and ‘pretty’ (I. xxi). There is a special friction that has come from their life together and that is evident when they first converse with Elinor. With superb crassness Miss Steele asks Elinor if she had ‘a great many smart beaux’ in Sussex, while Lucy looks ‘ashamed of her sister’. Anne always says something tactless or inapposite, so Lucy ‘generally made an amendment to all her sister’s assertions’ (I. xxi). Privately, however, in exchanges that we must imagine, they tell each other things. This is crucial to the plot of Sense and Sensibility, for clever, dishonest Lucy makes the mistake of sharing with her sister the secret of her engagement to Edward Ferrars. Anne (or ‘Nancy’, as Mrs Jennings likes to call her) lets Mrs John Dashwood know, prompting the latter’s ‘violent hysterics’ (III. i). Her mistake (for she has none of the subtlety of calculation that Lucy possesses) is characteristic of the Steele sisters’ twisted intimacy. Even what the two do not share still gets shared. During a stroll in Kensington Gardens, Anne Steele cheerfully tells Elinor about the lovers’ chat between Edward and Lucy. Elinor is surprised that this exchange should have taken place in her presence.

  ‘La! Miss Dashwood, do you think people make love when any body else is by? Oh, for shame!—To be sure you must know better than that.’ (Laughing affectedly.)—‘No, no; they were shut up in the drawing-room together, and all I heard was only by listening at the door.’ (II. ii)

  When Elinor expresses her dismay at this behaviour, the elder Steele assures her that such eavesdropping is more or less what her sister would expect. ‘I am sure Lucy would have done just the same by me; for a year or two back, when Martha Sharpe and I had so many secrets together, she never made any bones of hiding in a closet, or behind a chimney-board, on purpose to hear what we said.’ Theirs is a relationship of mutual espionage. The Steele sisters have lived so close to each other that such prying has become their way. Only when she has been badly bitten by her sister’s indiscretion does Lucy change her policy of confiding in her sister. She conceals her engagement to Robert Ferrars from Anne, and even takes some money from her under false pretences before disappearing with her new paramour.

  Sisterly closeness is not necessarily to be admired. Perhaps the closest sisterly conversationalists in Austen’s fiction are Kitty and Lydia Bennet. They are habitual companions, a cameo of their companionship given us when they wait in the upstairs room of an inn for Elizabeth’s return from Kent. As they travel back from there to Longbourn, Lydia gossips and jokes, ‘assisted by Kitty’s hints and additions’ (II. xvi). Kitty’s talk is hooked to Lydia’s. Later, when Elizabeth is trying to explain her sister’s elopement, she comments on Lydia’s preoccupation with ‘love, flirtation, and officers’: ‘She has been doing every thing in her power, by thinking and talking on the subject, to give greater—what shall I call it? suscep
tibility to her feelings, which are naturally lively enough.’ This ‘talking’ has largely been with Kitty. Kitty is unsurprised at the news of Lydia’s elopement and Jane’s letter tries to excuse her for having ‘concealed their attachment’ (III. iv). Kitty knew about their being ‘in love’ – but not (Jane thinks) before they went to Brighton (III. v) – she knows from letters, not talking. Talking about it would have made her Lydia’s abettor. Once Lydia has been rescued from disgrace, the chat between the sisters must be brought to an end. ‘From the further disadvantage of Lydia’s society she was of course carefully kept’ (III. xix).

  More poisonous sisterly confederates are Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst. Caroline Bingley is the more powerful, but they come as a pair. In Chapter viii of Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth leaves the company after dinner to attend to her sick sister, they speak with peculiarly unified intent.

  ‘She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild.’

  ‘She did indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very nonsensical to come at all!’ (I. viii)

  This is a performance for the benefit of their brother and Mr Darcy. Listen to this almost rehearsed unanimity and you know that these sisters have already been talking, agreeing about their efforts to denigrate Elizabeth. Discussing with Jane Mr Bingley’s later neglect of her, Elizabeth certainly takes for granted that both sisters are behind it: ‘“You persist, then, in supposing his sisters influence him.” “Yes, in conjunction with his friend.”’ (II. i). They are quite a pair. In Miss Bingley’s original invitation to Jane to come to Netherfield, she refers to the amount of time that she and Mrs Hurst spend together, and pretends that they are often at loggerheads, ‘for a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never end without a quarrel’ (I. vii). But this is a blind. The sisters are always together and always of a mind.