What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (21 page)

Some games are for clever people, and some are for the empty-headed.

A little later in
Mansfield Park
, the Parsonage is the setting for another after-dinner card game, the most carefully choreographed in all Austen’s fiction. Fanny and her recently arrived brother William accompany the Bertrams to dinner with the Grants. After dinner there is to be a whist table again, with enough people left over for ‘a round game’ (a game accommodating any number of players). Sir Thomas takes to whist with Mrs Norris and the Grants; the others play speculation (II. vii). As ever, the novelist’s purpose is to separate some players from others. Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris are evidently absorbed in their play: they win a game by the odd trick, ‘by Sir Thomas’s capital play and her own, against Dr. and Mrs. Grant’s great hands’. This is Mrs Norris’s triumphant self-vaunting, mingled with her sycophancy to her brother-in-law. Whist is the perfect chance to combine her aggression and her pretence of allegiance to her sister’s rich family, and it is the chance to win some money. Meanwhile, unnoticed by these players, the remaining characters play a game that elaborately enacts the different competitors’ undeclared wishes.

Speculation is a complicated game that is no longer familiar to us. It might have been a private joke to make Mary Crawford the self-thwarting conqueror of the speculation table in
Mansfield Park
, for it was a game that the author herself championed in her family. When Edward Austen’s bereaved sons Edward and George travelled from school in Winchester to stay with Aunt Jane and her mother in Southampton, after the death of their mother in October 1808, they had to be diverted from grief, as she told her sister Cassandra. ‘We do not want amusements; bilbocatch, at which George is indefatigable, spillikins. Paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed’ (
Letters
, 60). Speculation worked best. ‘I introduced
speculation
, and it was so much approved that we hardly knew how to leave off’ (
Letters
, 60). Two months later, when the boys had returned to their father in Kent and had Cassandra staying with them, Jane Austen was writing to her sister saying, ‘I hope Speculation is generally liked’ (
Letters
, 64). Evidently Cassandra wrote back saying that they preferred brag: ‘it mortifies me deeply, because Speculation was under my patronage’ (
Letters
, 64). ‘When one comes to reason upon it, it cannot stand its ground against Speculation.’ She even composed some doggerel verses in praise of speculation to be conveyed to her nephew Edward (
Letters
, 65).

It was a relatively new game, which Austen had to explain to her nephews just as the Crawfords had to explain it to Fanny and the entirely uncomprehending Lady Bertram. In
The Watsons
, composed in 1805, Mrs Watson testifies to its fashionable standing in her suburban world: ‘
Speculation
is the only round game at Croydon now’.
²
Dickens mentions it in
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839), where it is made analogous with the financial risk-taking that ruins Nicholas’s father. ‘Speculation is a round game; the players see little or nothing of their cards at first starting; gains MAY be great—and so may losses.’
³
The joke of the analogy suggests the author’s confidence that readers will know of the card game. Fanny has no previous experience of it, but quickly grasps its principles – well enough to try to play for her brother to win. In her playing of the game we see a paradox of her character distilled: she is an ingénue who quickly perceives the subtleties that more worldly characters miss. Every player emerges in character. In particular, the game is a carefully arranged vignette of the Crawfords’ schemes and efforts at manipulation. The comic summary of this is Lady Bertram’s: ‘I am never to see my cards; and Mr. Crawford does all the rest’ (II. vii). He is the arch-manipulator, while his sister is the restive gambler, staking more on victory than it can ever be worth. In speculation, players may bid to buy what they suppose might be a winning card in the possession of another player. So a player may ‘buy’ a card that does not win, or may pay more for a card than it gains.

It is not exactly a proper competition at all, as Mr Crawford intervenes to prevent Fanny selling her queen to her brother William for a low price and to try to ensure that she will win. ‘The game will be yours, turning to her again—it will certainly be yours’: this is more insistence than prediction. Henry Crawford is ingratiating himself with Fanny; Mary Crawford is testing herself against Edmund. The point of the game for the novelist is that it allows two simultaneous activities (for those with the wits): playing and talking. We keep noticing this because the dialogue calls attention to it via the instructions that Crawford gives in parentheses to Lady Bertram; he can keep two activities in his mind, where she can hardly manage one. He is playing the game and, for his sister’s benefit, asking Edmund about his future home at Thornton Lacey. Mary Crawford is playing – and listening. The card game and the topic of Edmund’s future are intimately connected, though the Bertrams cannot see this. Indeed, in little flashes of audacity the Crawfords glancingly declare themselves. ‘I never do wrong without gaining by it,’ says Henry (about losing his way); ‘No cold prudence for me,’ announces Mary (of her play). Everything really is a game for them, and all the better if they can flaunt their schemes in front of those whom they deceive.

Speculation is the electricity that courses through the company, and seems a good word too for the activity of the reader – for the engagement of not just our interest but our intelligence. Austen herself uses the word for what is going on the minds of her characters. Sir Thomas tells Henry Crawford of Edmund’s aspirations to dedicate himself to his duties as a parish priest, considerably irking the listening Mary Crawford. ‘All the agreeable of
her
speculation was over for that hour. It was time to have done with cards if sermons prevailed, and she was glad to find it necessary to come to a conclusion and be able to refresh her spirits by a change of place and neighbour.’ Her speculation, about the possibility of marriage to Edmund, has been rather thwarted than encouraged. ‘If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it,’ she announces, as if she really is saying something about herself rather than the game. Yet it is the treatment of all her social exchanges as subtle game-playing that robs her of any final triumph. ‘The game was hers, and only did not pay her for what she had given to secure it.’ Speculation, which she and her brother are using for their manipulative purposes, becomes a metaphor for what she loses by being so manipulative. She wins by paying more than she can gain.

Some games are for clever people, and some are for the empty-headed. In
Emma
, the clever and the empty-headed play together. Mr Woodhouse loves games – his piquet with Mrs Goddard (II. vii) and, especially, his backgammon. Backgammon is just right for him, relying enough on chance to offer him the occasional opportunity of victory, especially if the other player is guileful enough to help him win. No wonder it is also the game that Mr Bennet plays with Mr Collins (
Pride and Prejudice
, I. xv). We learn from Miss Bates that during the Highbury balls Mr Woodhouse passes the evening with ‘a vast deal of chat, and backgammon’ with Mrs Bates (III. ii). When, late in the novel, a chastened Emma looks back to the trip to Box Hill, considering it as a morning ‘totally bare of rational satisfaction’, she thinks that ‘a whole evening of backgammon with her father was felicity to it’ (III. viii). Here at least she is doing something unselfish, ‘giving up the sweetest hours of the twenty-four to his comfort’. The hours and hours of backgammon with Mr Woodhouse lie in wait for her if she really is committed to avoiding marriage, as she claims.

This image of an almost eternal backgammon game with Mr Woodhouse is all the more powerful because of Emma’s native love of intriguing play.
Emma
is a novel in which game playing is exciting enough to seem dangerous. ‘A most dangerous game’ is just the phrase that Mr Knightley chooses to describe Frank Churchill’s flirtation with Emma, designed to distract her from his attachment to Jane Fairfax. Game playing is an activity into which Mr Elton, ‘invited to contribute any really good enigmas, charades, or conundrums that he might recollect’, is disastrously recruited (I. ix). Perceiving the game-playing ethos of Highbury, he submits his notorious puzzle (a ‘charade’, in the vocabulary of the day). Harriet duly fails to understand it; more dangerously, Emma duly misinterprets it. In a letter of 1816 Austen describes friends ‘taking kindly to our Charades, & other Games’, and she and her family enjoyed just the word games to which Mr Elton takes with such alacrity (
Letters
, 145).
4
Harriet has enjoyed ‘merry evening games’ with the Martins, but her games with Emma will be rather more hazardous. Emma likes to treat life as a game or puzzle. ‘She is a riddle, quite a riddle!’ she says to herself about Jane Fairfax, amazed that she should be willing to spend time with Mrs Elton (II. xv). Emma draws other characters into games; even her slow-witted father tries to join in the business of charades. On Box Hill Mr Weston foolishly tries to please Emma with his fatuous word game, the answer to which is a pun on her name, before Frank Churchill, ‘ordered by Miss Woodhouse’, proposes the game of clever utterances that end in such ill feeling (III. vii). At the novel’s heart is the anagram game played at Hartfield, in which messages are being sent by Frank Churchill to Jane Fairfax, and misdirecting signals being sent by him to Emma. The game is Frank Churchill’s idea – ‘We had great amusement with those letters one morning. I want to puzzle you again’ – but Emma is ‘pleased’ with the suggestion (III. v). In fact, Frank Churchill is playing a ‘deeper game’ than Emma knows. The judgement is Mr Knightley’s, for the whole game chapter is narrated from his point of view. He sees the players and watchers round that table – Emma, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, Miss Bates, Harriet Smith, Mr and Mrs Weston, Mr Woodhouse – and sees how little most of them understand of what is going on in play. As ever, the game brings characters together precisely in order to divide them.

ELEVEN

Is There Any Sex in Jane Austen?

‘We both know that he has been profligate in every sense of the word . . .’

Pride and Prejudice
, III. v

Keith Nearing, the twenty-year-old protagonist of Martin Amis’s novel
The Pregnant Widow
, spends a summer at a luxurious Italian castle having somewhat unenthusiastic sex with his girlfriend, Lily, dreaming of having sex with his girlfriend’s friend, Sheherazade, and reading his way through the English Novel. One week is spent on Jane Austen, the sexual implications of whose plots become the matter of his pillow talk. With the apparent licence of his creator, he tells Lily about the sex that actually takes place between the lines of these supposedly prim books. At the end of
Northanger Abbey
, according to Keith, Frederick Tilney beds Isabella Thorpe. ‘She persuades herself that he’s somehow going to marry her. After.’
¹
‘So she’s ruined. She’s lost,’ suggests Lily. ‘Utterly,’ confirms Keith. Later he goes on to other Austen novels. ‘
Mansfield Park
’s got
two
fucks. Henry Crawford fucks Maria Bertram. And Mr Yates fucks her sister Julia. And he’s an Honourable.’
²
Amis’s novel doubles as an
hommage
to the Great Tradition of English fiction, and Keith’s curt summaries are declarations that Austen’s novels are not the proper and passionless affairs that some have thought.

There
are
characters who have sex in Austen’s novels, but not all these ones. Catherine Morland’s brother James is jilted by her ‘friend’ Isabella Thorpe, who thinks Captain Frederick Tilney a more alluring prospect. Henry and Eleanor Tilney tell Catherine, however, that Frederick would be unlikely to marry an impecunious girl like Isabella. And sure enough he soon abandons her to flirt for a couple of days with one Charlotte Davis, before going back to his regiment. Isabella returns from Bath to Putney, writing Catherine a letter that is designed to prepare the ground for a revival of her relationship with James. Catherine now realises that Isabella is ‘a vain coquette’ (II. xii), but she does not for a moment think her ‘ruined’. Henry Tilney confirms that his brother undertook the flirtation ‘for mischief’s sake’, but expresses none of the dismay that would have been excited by a sexual liaison. If they have had sex, the author knows nothing of it. As for Julia Bertram, she does elope with the Hon. John Yates – to Scotland, where she can marry her paramour without parental consent. She has certainly slept with him by the end of the novel, but as a wife with her husband.