What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (23 page)

We should not assume that sex is always part of marriage. We are given reason to think that Dr Grant does not have a physical relationship with Mrs Grant. ‘He had a wife about fifteen years his junior, but no children’ (I. iii). His pleasure principle seems centred on food and drink. Watching the couples dancing at a ball, and seeing Mrs Grant with Mr Yates, Tom Bertram tells Fanny, ‘between ourselves she, poor woman! must want a lover as much as any of them. A desperate dull life her’s must be with the doctor’ (I. xii). His ‘sly face’ tells us of
his
reading of the Grants’ marriage. But who knows what goes between husband and wife? The final chapters of
Sense and Sensibility
and
Mansfield Park
, which notionally cover the first months of their heroines’ marriages, allow both novelist and reader to avoid thinking about sex. We are on the way to the Victorian habit of jumping from courtship to epilogue, in which a group of merry children sport at the feet of a couple who were merely on the brink of consummation when we last saw them. There is just one instance where we seem provoked to ask what happens to a woman after marriage: the case of Charlotte Lucas. She writes regularly to Elizabeth after her move to Kent, and we hear that ‘Charlotte’s first letters were received with a good deal of eagerness’ (II. iii). There is ‘curiosity’ to know all sorts of things, including ‘how happy she would dare pronounce herself to be’. The sexual implication is both entirely absent and pressing here. Surely Elizabeth, surely even a modest nineteenth-century reader, thinks about the consummation of this union? Charlotte writes ‘cheerfully’ and mentions ‘nothing which she could not praise’. We and Elizabeth, wondering how she can bear it, must think about what it is she has to bear. It is likely that Charlotte is pregnant before the end of the novel. Mr Bennet tells Elizabeth that, in his letter, Mr Collins has talked about ‘his dear Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch’ (III. xv). The puzzling thing is the absence of any strong reaction from Elizabeth. Perhaps she has been less guilty than many a reader of suppressing an awareness of what marriage to Mr Collins involves. Charlotte has, after all, given her the grand tour of the Collins’s parsonage, which presumably includes the newly married couple’s bedroom. While Elizabeth shrewdly appreciates Charlotte’s clever arrangement of domestic space to keep her husband away from her during the day, she knows she must have to join him at night.

In Austen, as in the eighteenth-century novels from which she learned, pre-marital sex happens because a young woman gets into the hands of a rakish man, not because two people simply cannot resist each other.

Naturally, none of Austen’s heroines would have sex before marriage, but sex before marriage is not unimaginable to her. Her most naive characters know that it happens – even Jane Bennet, though she is determined to believe otherwise. ‘My father and mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him’ (III. iv). And it happened in Austen’s world. In a letter of 1808 to her sister, she seems to be referring to the known fact that her distant cousin Fanny Austen is getting married after a sexual indiscretion with her husband-to-be. ‘I am sorry she has behaved so ill. There is some comfort to
us
in her misconduct, that we have not a congratulatory Letter to write’ (
Letters
, 55). This hints at a reality never encountered in her fiction: two self-possessed adults who simply cannot wait for marriage. In Austen, as in the eighteenth-century novels from which she learned, pre-marital sex happens because a young woman gets into the hands of a rakish man, not because two people simply cannot resist each other. There are would-be rakes about. Sir Edward Denham in
Sanditon
has read the novels of Samuel Richardson and has decided that he will ‘seduce’ Clara Brereton (Ch. 8). But this is comedy. ‘Clara saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced.’ She will not be a character in one of the novels he favours.

‘She is lost forever,’ says Elizabeth to Darcy, but it is not so (
Pride and Prejudice
, III. iv). Lydia is saved by marriage, into which Wickham is bribed. Sex before marriage, however, is different from sex outside marriage. Fanny Price thinks of her cousin Maria’s adultery as ‘this sin of the first magnitude’ (III. xv). Lady Bertram, not usually a person for forceful judgements, acknowledges ‘the loss of a daughter, and a disgrace never to be wiped off’ (III. xvi). Duly divorced, Maria is sent off to some Sartrean hell of confinement in a distant county with Mrs Norris for company. In
Sense and Sensibility
, the adultery of Eliza, Colonel Brandon’s sister-in-law, also leads to her husband divorcing her, but has to be narratively justified. She is victim rather than agent. ‘My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly’ (II. ix). We take the middle phrase to mean that he was sexually dissolute (Colonel Brandon is speaking to Elinor, so some polite euphemism is necessary). The implication is confirmed when, a few sentences later, we hear that he was ‘a husband to provoke inconstancy’. Is it surprising that ‘she should fall’?

Adultery was not unknown among Jane Austen’s acquaintances. In 1801 she wrote to Cassandra about a ball at the Upper Rooms in Bath where she had seen the notorious Hon. Mary-Cassandra Twistleton, divorced by her naval husband two years earlier on the grounds of adultery. ‘I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for tho’ repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the
She
, I fixed upon the right one from the first’ (
Letters
, 36). Adultery may have been heinous in Austen’s eyes, but it appears that a woman disgraced for this sin could still comport herself with pleasure at a smart social gathering. The evidence of Austen’s correspondence is that sexual irregularity was thought of as an aristocratic habit, and that aristocrats seemed able to be shameless about it. Writing to her niece Fanny in March 1817, she commented on the notable engagement of Caroline, daughter of Lord Paget, to the Earl of March, heir to the Dukedom of Richmond. Lord and Lady Paget had been divorced after the former had eloped with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, sister-in-law of the Duke of Wellington. She had in turn been divorced by her husband, Sir Henry Wellesley. ‘If I were the Duchess of Richmond, I should be very miserable about my son’s choice. What can be expected from a Paget, born & brought up in the centre of conjugal Infidelity & Divorces?—I will
not
be interested about Lady Caroline. I abhor all the race of Pagets’ (
Letters
, 153). The sexual imbroglios of high society were public entertainment. Writing to Cassandra, Austen responds to the ‘sad story’ of a married woman, Letitia-Mary Powlett, who had eloped with the 2nd Viscount Sackville. ‘A hint of it, with Initials, was in yesterday’s Courier’ (
Letters
, 53). The aggrieved husband, Colonel Powlett, won £3,000 in damages from the philandering Viscount.
⁸
Mrs Rushworth’s adultery with Henry Crawford is similarly revealed in the newspaper that Mr Price is reading in his Portsmouth parlour. It reports, with hardly concealed relish, the ‘matrimonial
fracas
in the family of Mr. R. of Wimpole Street’ (III. xv). Lots of ‘fine ladies’, observes Mr Price, are ‘going to the devil now-a-days’: his implication is that these are loose times, a satisfying condemnation of his dissolute social superiors from an irresponsible drunkard.

Jane Austen and her readers lived in an era of considerable sexual licence among the elite. Not just the Prince Regent, but his brothers the Duke of York, the Duke of Clarence (later William IV) and the Duke of Kent (Queen Victoria’s father) were notable for their sexual irregularities. No newspaper reader of the time could have been unaware of the tone they set. Listening to the Crawfords in
Mansfield Park
we sometimes hear the accents of a libertine Regency sub-culture. Mary Crawford jests lightly about how her ‘friend’ Flora Ross has chosen ‘that horrid Lord Stornaway’ (presumably for his title), even though he is as foolish as Mr Rushworth and uglier – and comes ‘with a blackguard character’ (III. v). The last fact sounds like a hint of a sexual history, dismissed with the sophisticated tone of one who has seen these things before. Flora Ross becomes Lady Stornaway, and Mary Crawford dares tell Fanny that her husband seems now not ‘so very ill-looking’ as she had previously thought him. He has at least bestowed a title on her friend. The adulterous relationship between Maria Rushworth and Henry Crawford is brewed in the circle – under the eyes – of Lady Stornoway and her sister Mrs Fraser, Mary Crawford’s London companions. We are reliably told by Edmund that the latter is ‘a cold-hearted, vain woman, who has married entirely from convenience’ (III. xiii). Mrs Rushworth then goes to stay in Twickenham with Mrs Aylmer, credited by Mary Crawford for sending her husband off to Bath to fetch his mother. ‘The Aylmers are pleasant people; and her husband away, she can have nothing but enjoyment,’ Mary Crawford has blithely told Fanny (III. xiv). There Henry Crawford has ‘constant access’ to her (III. xvi). A fashionable, loose-living social group is hinted at in these references to characters we never meet. We might remember Mary Crawford recalling, ‘Three years ago the Admiral, my honoured uncle, bought a cottage at Twickenham for us all to spend our summers in; and my aunt and I went down to it quite in raptures’ (I. vi). Twickenham – in reach of London yet out of its sight – is just the place to pursue liaisons. Mary Crawford has known just what was happening, mentioning in a letter to Fanny that her brother has been in Richmond and seen Mrs Rushworth. ‘Now do not make yourself uneasy with any queer fancies, because he has been spending a few days at Richmond’ (III. xiv).

In her sexual morals Mary Crawford is made a puzzle, both to Edmund Bertram and perhaps to some readers. She has left the house of her uncle, Admiral Crawford, because he is ‘a man of vicious conduct’ who, upon his wife’s death, ‘chose . . . to bring his mistress under his own roof’ (I. iv). Edmund knows all about this, and credits Miss Crawford for being offended at his conduct (I. vii). Yet Austen makes Mary Crawford reveal her own loose morals in her jokes. Privately she teases her brother about being ‘spoiled’ by ‘the admiral’s lessons’, half-acknowledging his own libertine inclinations (I. iv). When talking of admirals, her extraordinary jest to a solemn Edmund – ‘Of
Rears
, and
Vices
, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat’ (I. vi) – is a moment of sexual flippancy that suggests she is used to rather different company.
⁹
The milieu in which she has grown up has had its influence. Her brother later tells her that he will not consult his uncle about his plans to marry Fanny Price. ‘The Admiral hated marriage, and thought it never pardonable in a young man of independent fortune’ (II. xii). There are men out there who choose to cohabit or to keep a mistress, and some, like Admiral Crawford, have even invented a code to recommend their behaviour. Jane Austen knew men like this. In 1801 she wrote of her sister-in-law Eliza finding the manners of Lord Craven ‘very pleasing indeed’, before adding, ‘The little flaw of having a Mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park, seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him’ (
Letters
, 30). But then aristocrats are different. In another letter she reports that ‘Ld Lucan has taken a mistress’ (
Letters
, 50).

Given this trait of the social elite, it is ironical that Emma Woodhouse convinces herself that Harriet Smith must be ‘a gentleman’s daughter’ (I. iv). When Robert Martin makes proper enquiries of Mrs Goddard, after he and Harriet have become engaged, she is found to be the daughter of a mere ‘tradesman’, who is rich enough to maintain her and ‘decent enough to have always wished for concealment’ (III. xix). Emma shares in that judgement of what is ‘decent’. If a man gives way to his passions, he should have the decency to hide, as well as pay for, the consequences. This is the heroine’s thought, acknowledging what all sorts of men get up to, but also the propriety of keeping it concealed. Emma, who denies her own desires for much of the novel, half-imagines a world of sexual appetites and illicit liaisons. Earlier in the novel, wondering why Mr Weston is dragging her to Randalls for a conference with Mrs Weston just after the announcement of Mrs Churchill’s death, she dreams up disturbing revelations about Frank Churchill’s adoptive father: ‘Half a dozen natural children, perhaps—and poor Frank cut off!’ (III. x). It is a self-amusing notion, but exaggerates a real possibility. It is Emma’s habit to evade a truth by indulging in a fancy. As she does so, Austen is requiring the reader again to recognise what she has sometimes been accused of denying: that humans are driven by sexual appetites.