What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (2 page)

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 minds 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 . . .

Persuasion
, I. i

So reliable are the misjudgements of casting directors as to the appropriate ages of actors chosen to perform in film and TV adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels that new conventions have been established. Even in the minds of many who have read
Pride and Prejudice
, an impression of the age of Mrs Bennet, say, or of Mr Collins has become settled. It would surprise many to be told that Elizabeth Bennet’s mother is probably only a little way past her fortieth birthday (her eldest daughter is twenty-one, and it is likely that she married when not much more than eighteen). The matter is significant early in the novel, when Mr Bennet makes a joke about the risk of Mr Bingley being attracted to her instead of one of her daughters (I. i). The joke would be empty if his wife were in her fifties or sixties. Instead, Mrs Bennet’s easy dismissal of his suggestion (‘I do not pretend to be any thing extraordinary now’) bespeaks her confidence that she does still possess allure. Equally, many admirers of
Pride and Prejudice
think of Mr Collins as middle-aged. In the 1940 Hollywood film the role was taken by British character actor Melville Cooper, then aged forty-four. The trend was set. In Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC adaptation Mr Collins was played by David Bamber, then in his mid-forties. In the 2005 film the role was taken by a slightly more youthful Tom Hollander, aged thirty-eight. Yet Mr Collins is introduced to us as a ‘tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty’ (I. xiii). Adaptors miss something by getting his age wrong. His solemnity and sententiousness are much better coming from someone so ‘young’. Middle-aged is what he would like to sound, rather than what he is.

Age naturally matters to characters in Austen’s novels because these novels are about getting married, and the age of a young woman (but perhaps also a man) will determine her (or his) marriage prospects. Age matters to the novelist because she uses it to shape the reader’s expectations. The facts that Austen gives us about her characters’ ages are like dramatic instructions. Take
Sense and Sensibility
. In Ang Lee’s 1995 film, Emma Thompson, then aged thirty-six, played Elinor Dashwood; Gemma Jones, then aged fifty-two, played her mother. But Elinor is nineteen. Readers have long differed over whether her composure is admirable or unsettling, but it is all the more striking given her age. Austen’s own phrasing acknowledges the prematurity of Elinor’s ‘strength of understanding, and coolness of judgement’ (I. i). These qualify her, ‘though only nineteen’, to guide her mother. Equally, Mrs Dashwood is just forty, a fact that matters a good deal in the novel’s dialogue. In the second chapter of the novel, Mr and Mrs John Dashwood discuss how much Mrs Dashwood might cost them if they settle an annuity – an annual payment for the course of her life – on her. ‘She is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty’, points out Mrs John Dashwood (I. ii).

Later, after we and the Dashwoods have first met Colonel Brandon, a ‘silent and grave’ man who is ‘the wrong side of five and thirty’, Marianne and her mother discuss Mrs Jennings’s jokes about a possible romance between him and Marianne. Mrs Dashwood, ‘who could not think a man five years younger than herself, so exceedingly ancient as he appeared to the youthful fancy of her daughter’, tries to convince her daughter that Mrs Jennings is not actually ridiculing his age (I. viii). When Marianne talks of Colonel Brandon’s ‘age and infirmity’, her mother laughs at the apparent ‘miracle’ of her own life having been ‘extended to the advanced age of forty’. We know from Mrs Dashwood at the end of Chapter iii that Marianne is ‘not seventeen’. She is youthfully absurd in her sense of the importance of age, going on to say that a twenty-seven-year-old woman could only marry a thirty-five-year-old man in order to perform ‘the offices of a nurse’, in return for financial security. Elinor, even while she disagrees with her sister, concedes that ‘Perhaps . . . thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together.’ It is an unnecessary fragment of dialogue if Austen had not wanted the reader to feel some sense of compromise at the end of the novel. We are supposed to remember this judgement when Marianne and Colonel Brandon do eventually marry, so that we know just how far Marianne has been aged, metaphorically speaking, by her errors and her sufferings.