“Jane Austen: A Woman for the ’90s,” says the Everyman’s Library ad in Publishers Weekly. “She’s sensible, she’s persuasive, she’s proud. And she’s the hottest film property since E. M. Forster.”

Nineteen ninety-five is a bumper year for Austenites. A film of Sense and Sensibility, starring Emma Thompson, is slated to appear this autumn. The BBC is putting out a new version of Pride and Prejudice and has collaborated with Sony in an ungraceful adaptation of Persuasion (in their attempts to purify the movie of Hollywood sheen and give it an air of naturalism, the producers of Persuasion have too zealously ripped away the romantic gauze: the distressing results are an unappealing Anne Elliot, a pockmarked Captain Wentworth, a greasy-locked Benwick, and a slovenly-looking Lady Russell). And, in the season’s most offbeat film adaptation, Austen’s meddling heroine Emma Woodhouse has been charmingly resurrected as a dizzy Beverly Hills babe in the new teenage movie Clueless.

It is heartening to see that the works of Jane Austen live on in the mainstream of our culture. She is indeed a woman for the Nineties and for every decade. Though her books are almost two hundred years old, they gleam with an immediate freshness that no previous or subsequent novelist has quite achieved. They are entirely free, for example, of the lumbering contrivances and verbosity of her major predecessors, Fielding and Richardson; the novels of her successful contemporaries, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and even Walter Scott, have badly withered in the intervening centuries; her immediate heirs the Brontës, for all their qualities, lack her universal and timeless appeal. The great Dickens must finally be reckoned an inferior artist to Austen, because while she addressed her readers as intellectual equals, he too often did so in the spirit of a conjuror manipulating an audience. And the heavy-hitting moderns like James, Woolf, and Joyce were disproportionately concerned with aesthetic problems over moral ones. Shortly before his death Anthony Burgess stated his opinion, arrived at after a lifetime of studying Joyce, that “probably the novel is a middlebrow form and both Joyce and Woolf were on the wrong track.” If he is right, then this middlebrow form has produced its most perfect practitioner in Jane Austen, and, in Pride and Prejudice, the greatest expression of sheer joyfulness in our language.

It is easy to love Austen, and easy to love her blindly. E. M. Forster ridiculed the Austen-idolator in a 1925 essay:

Austen fans perusing their idol’s masterpieces, Forster wrote, have a tendency to fall into a “primal stupor.” There is a great deal of truth in this little squib. Austen’s accessibility, her wit and her jokes, the reader’s confidence that there will be happy endings for all his or her favorite characters, has led to a widespread perception of Austen as a cozy novelist whose role is to provide a comforting illusion that all’s right with the world. This incomplete assessment has become so widely accepted that in an article in The Times Literary Supplement earlier this year Joyce Carol Oates made the bizarre statement that in Jane Austen’s novels

Can Ms. Oates and I be reading the same novelist? No sin? What about Maria Rushworth, Henry Crawford, Willoughby, Wickham, Mrs. Norris? On a finer, more ambiguous level, what about Mr. Bennet, Sir Thomas Bertram, Frank Churchill, Mrs. Dashwood, Mr. Price? Even some of Austen’s ostensible heroes are not without sin: what reader not caught in the Austenite’s “primal stupor” can hold Edmund Bertram or Edward Ferrars to be spotless or even wholly deserving young men?

As for blemishes on the complexion, who can fail to be moved by Anne Elliot’s faded bloom? And Jane Austen is of all her contemporaries the very least inclined to give us lovingly detailed interiors or descriptions of dress. With the possible exceptions of Northanger Abbey and Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley, very few particulars of interior decoration are offered, and how many readers can say with certainty whether their favorite heroine is dark or fair, or even what color Elizabeth Bennet’s fine eyes might be? Gardens and exteriors are described in rather more detail than are interiors, but this is always for the purpose of indicating subtle points of character in the house’s owner or its visitor (as with Darcy and Elizabeth at Pemberley, or the various members of the Bertram family at Sotherton Court) and not for description’s own sake. Far from lavishing her books with minutiae, Austen streamlined them in a manner that was almost revolutionary for her day, and she was proud of her ruthless cutting: “I have lopt & cropt so successfully,” she said of Pride and Prejudice, “that I imagine it must be rather shorter than [Sense and Sensibility] altogether,” and it is surely the verbal constraint, the tight focus upon character and motivation, that keep her novels living and breathing in a world whose exterior aspect is changed almost beyond recognition.

Oates’s thoughtless assertion that Austen’s characters make no fatal mistakes fails to take into account the fact that Austen was a highly religious woman with a stoic cast of mind. Maria Rushworth, Henry and Mary Crawford, John Willoughby are the possessors of souls, souls which are eventually lost through the characters’ own actions. Willoughby’s own eloquent words to Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility show him to be fully aware of the evil in his decision to marry a rich woman rather than the portionless Marianne, for whom he had come to feel something approaching love: “To avoid a comparative poverty, which her affection and her society would have deprived of all its horrors, I have, by raising myself to affluence, lost everything that could make it a blessing.” Even a paragon of good intentions like Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bingley is capable through sheer passivity of doing irreparable damage: as Elizabeth points out, “without scheming to do wrong, or make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other people’s feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business.” In Austen’s novels mistakes, fatal mistakes, are frequently made. It is the real possibility of disaster that gives Emma and Persuasion, for example, their power; things could so easily have turned out differently, tragically. Austen’s biographer Park Honan wrote that she viewed life “as a struggle never won.” Even her Cinderella endings imply a lifetime of sustained moral effort beyond the longed-for marriages.

Even her Cinderella endings imply a lifetime of sustained moral effort beyond the longed-for marriages.

The fate of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice is an example of just how ambiguous Austen could make her characters’ choices, how carefully she asked her readers to consider and judge. Charlotte, hitherto a sensible young woman, decides to accept the ridiculous Mr. Collins’s offer of marriage and defends herself with a reasoned, though chilling, display of what her contemporaries called Sense. We are invited to consider Charlotte’s decision in the light of her possibilities and even, perhaps, to condone it; Charlotte is not made an object of judgment by the author. Yet to what extent does Austen actually sympathize with Charlotte? Is Charlotte in fact guilty of an unforgivable sin against nature and truth? In 1814 Austen herself was urging her own niece, Fanny Knight, not to think of accepting her suitor “unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

Thus Anne Elliot’s final speech to Captain Wentworth, which has startled so many readers, should by no means be taken as Austen’s final judgment on the issue of persuasion. “I must believe that I was right,” Anne says, “much as I suffered for it, that I was perfectly right in being guided. . . . I was right in submitting to [Lady Russell], and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up”—quite a contrast with Austen’s own advice to Fanny: “Your affection gives me the greatest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion. Your own feelings & none but your own, should determine such an important point.” How reliable in fact is Anne as a mouthpiece for the moralizing author? It is such tantalizing ambiguities that keep Austen’s novels alive for every generation.

Oates’s weirdest opinion on Austen is her assertion that “irony is not a principle of discourse.” On the contrary, irony is probably the most consistent and pervasive principle of discourse in Austen’s work. For the most part it is an irony that delicately adheres to the story and the characters, so much a part of the structure that it melts into its background, requiring a certain quickness of response from the reader. (To her sister she joked: “I do not write for such dull Elves/ As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.”) It is not the heavily constructed irony of situation of the Conrad or Hardy type; Austen’s meanings, her moral dichotomies, tend to be elusive. By the end of Sense and Sensibility we realize that the two sisters are not opposites, but complementary—at times Marianne displays more sense than Elinor, Elinor more sensibility than Marianne. Elizabeth Bennet may be prejudiced, but she is also far more perceptive than most of the society around her. Darcy is proud, yet at the same time curiously humble.

It is when Jane Austen lets her irony become too obvious—when she demands the reader’s concurrence without earning it, explicitly instructing her readers as to how they ought to think—that she occasionally fails. In the very first chapter of Mansfield Park the omniscient narrator reveals as much about the characters of Sir Thomas, Lady Bertram, and Mrs. Norris as we learn in the entire novel: they are described, summed up, and dismissed, and from that moment they can offer no further surprises. Maria and Julia Bertram, too, on whose behavior so much of the psychological drama of the novel is to depend, are served up on a platter very early in the story. “Their vanity was in such good order,” the narrator states, “that they seemed to be quite free from it, and gave themselves no airs.”

How different, and how much less effective than the slow unfolding, the almost imperceptible growth of a character like Darcy’s, or Elizabeth’s, or Emma’s. The reader loves them because his susceptibilities are beguiled and his good judgment is appealed to—but Austen tells us to love Fanny, and in spite of all the author’s obvious partiality, many readers are not convinced. In the same manner Henry Crawford is said by the narrator, again and again, to be charming. Northanger Abbey’s Henry Tilney, on the other hand, has no need for his author’s recommendations: his own conversation demonstrates his real charm beyond a doubt.

Films are not the only item on the Jane Austenite’s agenda. Nineteen ninety-five has also seen a new edition of Austen’s letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye.¹ This is the third edition of the complete letters, following up the work of the great Austen editor R. W. Chapman, who originally published the letters in 1932 and twenty years later revised them in a second edition containing five new letters. Several new fragments have turned up since then, and additional family manuscripts have also been made available. Accordingly a number of the letters have changed places in the sequence, and Le Faye has effected some textual alterations.

The new edition, with its extensive notes on matters like provenance, watermarks, and postmarks, is of interest to scholars and is the most comprehensive edition we have—yet the general reader would probably do better to get his hands on a copy of Penelope Hughes-Hallett’s 1990 selection, which is lavishly illustrated and introduces each letter with a generous measure of background material. The format favored by both Chapman and Le Faye is extremely difficult for any reader who does not already know quite a lot about Jane Austen and her large extended family and circle of friends: there are endnotes rather than footnotes, so that the reader must turn to the rear of the book several times per page in order to find out to whom the often cryptic comments refer, and while these notes are heavy on recondite editorial information, they contain very little about the personalities Jane Austen is writing about, which will naturally be the principal point of interest for most readers. These are gossipy letters, and need gossipy footnotes, which Le Faye, a serious scholar, is not in the business of supplying.

Even by an Austen-idolator it must be admitted that Jane Austen was not one of the world’s great letter-writers. One cannot criticize her for not addressing posterity—indeed, her modest assessment of her own claim to literary immortality is one of her more attractive qualities; it never occurred to her that anyone other than the recipients might read her gossip and household chat. Nevertheless the mundanity of her usual subject matter is not encouraging, and although, as she said, she herself found the purchase of a sponge-cake interesting and she might well be able to make it interesting in a novel, she seldom troubles to do so in her correspondence. Here is a typical excerpt:

And so on, and so on. There is a great deal of talk about clothes and food, clothes predominating in the author’s early years, food in the later ones.

The fact is that Jane Austen led an uneventful life. She was the seventh child in her family, which consisted of six sons (James, a clergyman; Francis and Charles, both naval officers; Edward Austen Knight, who was adopted by a rich couple who made him their heir; Henry, the most colorful of the siblings, who pursued a number of careers; George, who was an epileptic and deaf-mute and lived apart from the family) and two daughters, Cassandra and Jane. The Austens were a harmonious family and remained close to one another throughout their lives. Neither of the two girls married; they lived with their parents in the village of Steventon, where their father was rector, until 1801 when Jane was twenty-five years old, then moved to Bath when Mr. Austen retired. Upon his death in 1805 the mother and two sisters settled in the Hampshire village of Chawton, on the estate of Jane’s brother Edward Knight. Jane died at the age of forty-one of Addison’s disease, which was at that time incurable.

Jane Austen was shy about her writing, and tried to keep the fact of her authorship a secret.

Jane Austen was shy about her writing, and tried to keep the fact of her authorship a secret. Her books were published with “By a Lady” in place of the author’s name on the title page. Eventually the well-meaning boasts of her proud brothers and friends blew her cover; by 1813 she was writing that “the Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now . . . I beleive [sic] whenever the 3rd appears, I shall not even attempt to tell Lies about it.—I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can of it.”

In the last three or four years of her life she achieved a modest degree of celebrity, even receiving an invitation to the Prince Regent’s Carlton House and a request from the Regent that she dedicate Emma to him (she felt it was an offer she could not refuse, though she had always held him in contempt as a rake and a profligate). Though Austen’s works never sold on the scale of Maria Edgeworth’s or Fanny Burney’s, both Mansfield Park and Emma did well (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were not published until after Austen’s death), and Pride and Prejudice, the most popular of her books during her lifetime, went into a third edition. She earned a grand total of £685 during her writing life—not a fortune, even by the standards of the day, and she complained that “People are more ready to borrow & praise, than to buy—which I cannot wonder at;—but tho’ I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewter too.”

Austen took pride in her abilities, and knew when she had done well (of Elizabeth Bennet she wrote, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know”); she enjoyed reading her works in progress to her family; but writing was strictly a private activity for her, and the face she presented to the world was not that of an authoress but of a rural gentlewoman. To everyone, including her family, she played down her writing as secondary in importance to her role within the household and the community. Her letters, accordingly, are much richer in domestic detail than in insights into her creative life. A reader of the correspondence who happened to be unacquainted with her novels would think her to have been a sharp, acidly amusing woman but hardly one of the immortals.

Not that the letters that survive would present her much scope for aesthetic or philosophical speculation; a few were written to her young nieces Anna and Fanny, but the vast majority were short, newsy bulletins to Cassandra during one or the other sister’s absences from home, missives that Le Faye likens to telephone calls. It should be said that it is high time readers stopped maligning Cassandra Austen for destroying some of her sister’s letters (mostly, it turns out, ones that contained references to ill-health or hurtful comments that might have wounded the feelings of Jane Austen’s survivors). Cassandra in fact deserves posterity’s gratitude for preserving the vast majority of the letters her sister sent her; none of Austen’s other correspondents did. The six Austen brothers and their parents kept none of Jane’s letters, her nieces only a few.

Cassandra merits praise not only for retaining her sister’s correspondence but, even more importantly, for taking on the lion’s share of the household work, leaving Jane enough free time in which to write—a boon of which Jane must have been very sensible. In the last year of her life she wrote of a fellow-authoress, “how good Mrs West cd have written such Books & collected so many hard words, with all her family cares, is . . . a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb.”

Much has been made of the fact that in neither her novels nor her letters did Jane Austen discuss the really momentous events that were being played out upon the world stage during her lifetime. In actuality Austen was alert to political events and also to the intellectual currents of her age, one in which ideas, as the historian J. Christopher Herold has written, “were in marvelous disorder, in a veritable orgy of cross-fertilization. . . . [T]hings of the mind mixed freely for a brief moment, heedless of former labels and classifications, dressed up in a riot of fantastic new fashions.” Austen was the contemporary of Napoleon, Beethoven, Constable, Wordsworth, Turner, Schiller, Blake, and Byron; she was an avid reader of poetry, particularly her favorites, Crabbe and Cowper; she followed with interest the wild roller-coaster of contemporary politics.

But her genius stood peculiarly apart from the genius of her age. In the period of nascent romanticism she remained wedded to a Johnsonian ideal of common sense; while her contemporaries courted the spark of divine madness, she was and is perhaps the sanest writer in the language. She was a faithful communicant of the Church of England and an unswerving Tory during the ascendance of liberals and reformers. The few political reflections to which she makes her correspondents privy seem remarkably commonplace for a woman capable of such subtle reasoning in the area of human relations: in 1814, during the war with America, she wrote to a friend, “If we are to be ruined, it cannot be helped—but I place my hope of better things on a claim to the protection of Heaven, as a Religious Nation, a Nation in spite of much Evil improving in Religion, which I cannot believe the Americans to possess”—sentiments, and prose, which point ahead to those of Queen Victoria.

Austen’s recoil from serious matters was a marked characteristic. Even her own personal crises—the defection of Tom Lefroy, a young man she was growing to love, the death of Cassandra’s fiance, the death of another young man that the family believed Jane would marry, Jane’s acceptance, then almost immediate rejection, of a friend’s proposal—are not touched on in these letters. Austen makes light, for example, of the great dangers that threatened her two sailor brothers in the English navy’s struggle against Napoleonic France; she much preferred to crack jokes rather than discuss painful feelings with any degree of gravitas.

Austen’s recoil from serious matters was a marked characteristic.

It is interesting to observe the way in which the distrust of emotional display shown in her letters became a major theme in her novels, for not just Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility but all of Austen’s fiction, from the farcical Love and Freindship [sic] which she wrote at the age of fourteen for the amusement of her family, right through Persuasion, can be seen as a rebuttal of the contemporary convention of sensibility whereby society measures intensity of emotion, and moral worth itself, by visible demonstrations of feeling. Many of Austen’s finest characters—Darcy, Fanny Price, Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot, Jane Fairfax, Mr. Knightley, Jane Bennet— struggle not to express but to hide their emotions, and Austen often indicates, by contrast, that emotional transparency springs from an essential vulgarity and light-mindedness, as the easy confidences of Harriet Smith, Lydia Bennet, Wickham, Lucy Steele, Mary Crawford, and even Edmund Bertram show.

In her letters Austen’s dislike of sentiment could reveal a hardness that has repelled many readers. As a clever young woman of twenty-two she wrote to Cassandra, “Mrs Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband”—a crack that can seem either funny or appalling, depending on the reader and his mood. Recounting a ball two years later, Austen ran through her fellow-revellers:

Such brittle, bitchy humor amuses for a while but palls quickly without the complementary virtues (always present in the novels) of balance, fairness, and even—yes—sentiment, or at any rate respect for the genuine feelings that underlie sentimental demonstrations. As a fictional character even fat Mrs. Musgrove is allowed her measure of real grief for her worthless son, but all too often Austen, at least in confidence to her sister, denies that right to the actual people around her.

Yet as Austen matured and aged she gained markedly in compassion, and in any case the cruel jokes between the sisters were very much a private affair; by her family and friends Jane Austen was overwhelmingly remembered as a kind woman. Her elder brother Francis described her as “cheerful and not easily irritated, and tho’ rather reserved with strangers so as to have been accused by some of haughtiness of manner, yet in the company of those she loved the native benevolence of her heart and kindliness of her disposition were forcibly displayed.” After Jane’s death Cassandra mourned her as “the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.”

It is this essential kindness, allied with the famous wit, that made Jane Austen the artist she was.

It is this essential kindness, allied with the famous wit, that made Jane Austen the artist she was. “Nobody ever feels or acts, suffers or enjoys, as one expects!” she exclaims in 1813, a few months later writing, “After having much praised or much blamed anybody, one is generally sensible of something just the reverse soon afterwards”—the very foundation of her gift for irony and surprise. A trip to two London museums inspires “some amusement at each, tho’ my preference for Men & Women, always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight.”

This says everything about Austen’s particular outlook: well-read and cultured though she may have been, hers was a mind to which every pleasure of the intellect and spirit—art, literature, even nature—was subordinated to her essential interest, the vagaries of the human animal. Like Barbara Pym, a novelist often compared with Austen, she uses cultural references purely in order to illuminate her characters. The fatuity of Sir Edward, in Austen’s fragment The Watsons, is fatally exposed by his passion for Robert Burns: “His soul was the altar in which lovely woman sat enshrined,” gushes the foolish baronet, “his spirit truly breathed the immortal incense which is her due.” And just as Pym has her characters either rhapsodize or yawn over a visit to Keats’s Hampstead house in The Sweet Dove Died, Austen has Captain Benwick and Anne Elliot speak of Scott and Byron not in order to weave the works of the poets into her own thematic pattern but to enrich her characterization of Anne and poke gentle fun at Benwick:

In spite of the tedium of much of the correspondence, it does give us some marvelous insights into the mind of a woman who was a great artist without, perhaps, being a great thinker. Her advice to her young niece Anna, an aspiring authoress, is valuable in that it contains all we possess of Austen’s ideas on fiction-writing; in other letters we catch glimpses of the distinctive humor that marks her own work (one can detect the author of Northanger Abbey in Austen’s laughter at Fanny Knight’s love life: “Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively.—The dirty Shaving Rag was exquisite!—Such a circumstance ought to be in print”). And there are gems, such as the little correspondence between Austen and the Rev. James Stanier-Clarke, the Regent’s Librarian and an ardent Austen fan. Clarke, a delicious mixture of obsequiousness and innocence, showers Austen with his ideas on potential subjects for her genius: perhaps a novel about an English clergyman “Fond of, & entirely engaged in Literature—no man’s Enemy but his own,” or “a Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg.” Austen’s graceful refusals are models of tact. “I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem. . . . No—I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

And occasionally there are moments of pure delight—as when Jane Austen accompanied her brother Henry to a picture gallery in London and caught a glimpse there of one of her own characters:

But Elizabeth Darcy was to remain elusive even after Jane and Henry visited two more exhibitions. “There was nothing like Mrs D. at either,” she wrote. “I can only imagine that Mr D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like that it should be exposed to the public eye.—I can imagine he wd have that sort of feeling—that mixture of Love, Pride, & Delicacy.”

Notes
Go to the top of the document.