What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (29 page)

For such a psychologically astute person, soon able to play the Bertrams at will, Mary Crawford’s tendency to blunder towards Fanny is extraordinary. She imagines, for instance, that she will win Fanny to her brother’s favour by telling her about all the London ladies who have been desperate for his attentions. ‘He has now and then been a sad flirt, and cared little for the havock he might be making in young ladies’ affections’ (III. v). When she sees Fanny blush at being told that she is the only young woman who ‘can think of him with any thing like indifference’, she imagines that she sees that she is not after all ‘so insensible’. The reader knows that the blush comes from embarrassed indignation. When she later lets Fanny know by letter that her brother has been seeing Mrs Rushworth in Twickenham, it is with some purpose that she wryly signals, ‘Now do not make yourself uneasy with any queer fancies . . .’ (III. xiv). She must think that she is making Fanny jealous, rather than outraging her. What a miscalculation to suppose that her insinuations would actually pique Fanny’s romantic interest in her brother. Miss Crawford’s blunders reveal her – to the reader as much as to the heroine – but perhaps they go some way to explain the preference for Mary Crawford over Fanny that readers have expressed down the years. We like people who make mistakes.

Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
is all blundering, of a thoroughly sympathetic kind. When solicited by Captain Tilney for an introduction to Isabella Thorpe in order to ask for a dance, she assures him through Henry Tilney that Isabella would not be interested (being engaged to her brother James). ‘Your brother will not mind it I know . . . because I heard him say before, that he hated dancing’ (II. i). Her naivety is complete: Captain Tilney’s disdain for dancing is an affectation that he will drop for any pretty girl, and Isabella will prove perfectly open to the attentions of a handsome new dancing partner. ‘How very little trouble it can give you to understand the motives of other people’s actions,’ comments Henry, smiling. Her mistakes please him. The parody plot of this novel all derives from Catherine’s egregious error in supposing that life might follow the plot of a Gothic novel. Yet most of her mistakes about other people are the consequences not just of naivety but of good nature. She misunderstands people who are mean-minded or selfish in ways that are foreign to her. Her blunders are charming and disarming.

Redundant blunders can feel like penalties for Austen’s heroines, destined for happiness but given an extra twist of pain first.

Mistakes and misunderstandings are central to
Northanger Abbey
, but Austen elsewhere likes to create them where they are surplus to her plots. In
Sense and Sensibility
there is a peculiar little episode where Mrs Jennings is allowed to make an unnecessary mistake about Elinor’s relationship with Colonel Brandon. In the most extraordinary shift of viewpoint in the novel, we see him suggesting to Elinor that he might offer Edward Ferrars ‘the living of Delaford’ through the eyes of Mrs Jennings, who can hear only fragments of what is being said (III. iii). She has ‘hopes’ that the Colonel will propose to Elinor, and believes that she is witnessing this happen (while rather disapproving of his ‘unlover-like’ manner of addressing her). For much of a chapter she and Elinor manage to talk at perfect cross-purposes, Mrs Jennings assuming that she has just become engaged to Colonel Brandon, before the misunderstanding is cleared up. It is a little narrative cul-de-sac – wholly unnecessary to the plot – but perhaps comically irresistible in a novel so concerned with the pains of waiting for the right proposal. In
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth is summoned into her father’s library to be told something astonishing. A letter from Mr Collins has suggested that she will soon be marrying Mr Darcy. ‘Now, Lizzy, I think I
have
surprised you’ (III. xv). Mr Bennet jokes with Elizabeth about the very thought of Mr Darcy being in love with her. ‘Never had his wit been directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.’ He has completely misunderstood her. ‘It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.’ She is not yet sure of Mr Darcy’s affection, and so finds Mr Bennet’s jests peculiarly painful. She is being ‘mortified’, punished for the prejudice against Mr Darcy that has given her father good reason for his blunder. It is a special taste of the intimacy between the father and his favourite daughter. This relationship is about to be displaced by Elizabeth’s intimacy with her husband-to-be and the scene is a kind of rehearsal for this.

Redundant blunders can feel like penalties for Austen’s heroines, destined for happiness but given an extra twist of pain first. One example comes near the end of
Sense and Sensibility
and is a mistake that is produced by Lucy Steele’s contrivance. The Dashwoods’ manservant, Thomas, has just returned from Exeter with news. ‘I suppose you know, ma’am, that Mr. Ferrars is married’ (III. xi). Elinor turns pale and Marianne falls back in her chair ‘in hysterics’. While Marianne is helped into another room, Elinor questions Thomas, who has met Lucy and her new husband in a chaise. He punishes her more by recounting how well and ‘vastly contented’ Lucy looked. Now Elinor knows what it is to relinquish all hope. ‘Day after day’ passes (III. xii). And then Edward suddenly appears, ‘white with agitation’, and clears up the torturing misunderstanding by explaining that Lucy has in fact married his brother Robert. Elinor almost runs from the room and bursts into ‘tears of joy’. The misunderstanding has been Lucy’s parting gesture. ‘That Lucy had certainly meant to deceive, to go off with a flourish of malice against him in her message by Thomas, was perfectly clear to Elinor’ (III. xiii). She told Thomas to give Elinor and Marianne ‘her compliments and Mr. Ferrars’s’, apparently confident that the message would be misinterpreted. It may seem a little far-fetched to the modern reader, but Lucy knows well how a servant will report things. A mistake about a name, as we know from Austen’s own letters, is the commonest kind of blunder.

On inquiring of Mrs. Clerk, I find that Mrs. Heathcote made a great blunder in her news of the Crooks and Morleys; it is young Mr. Crook who is to marry the second Miss Morley—& it is the Miss Morleys instead of the second Miss Crooke, who were the beauties at the Music meeting.—This seems a more likely tale, a better devised Impostor. (
Letters
, 27)

Elinor’s Lucy-induced misconception, which dispirits her for days, is a peculiar narrative trick, surplus to the requirements of the plot. Elinor has to be taught how powerful were her only partially acknowledged hopes of marriage to Edward – by having them dashed. It is reminiscent of the mistake in
Persuasion
, when Anne meets Captain Wentworth’s sister, Mrs Croft, who asks her if she knows that her brother is now married. ‘She could now answer as she ought; and was happy to feel, when Mrs. Croft’s next words explained it to be Mr. Wentworth of whom she spoke, that she had said nothing which might not do for either brother’ (I. vi). Anne is made to wait only a moment before her false impression is corrected. Austen likes to create these secret bubbles of feeling, which we experience with the heroine for some brief span before the mistake is corrected and relief floods in. Except that here she does something even cleverer. Anne has been defending her feelings so effectively that she is able to ‘answer as she ought’, even at the moment when the death sentence to her love for Captain Wentworth is pronounced. In imitation of her suppression of her feelings, the sentence goes on, after the tiniest of pauses at a semicolon, to register her mistake, and the relieving fact that it is Captain Wentworth’s brother of whom she speaks, with the barest flicker: ‘happy to feel’. She has managed to deny the stab she must experience when she briefly thinks he is married.

Misconceptions drive
Persuasion
. In one telling use of the title word near the novel’s end, ‘persuasion’ becomes a synonym for misunderstanding. Meeting Captain Wentworth at the White Hart, Anne recalls how, at the previous day’s encounter, ‘the same unfortunate persuasion, which had hastened him away from the concert room, still governed’ (II. x). This ‘persuasion’ is his idea that she is becoming attached to Mr Elliot. The misconception stirs him into acknowledging the force of his own love and Anne begins to see it. For much of the novel she has interpreted the man she loves wrongly. Yet the only true mistake is that made by Mrs Smith, nexus of all Bath gossip, who assumes wrongly that Anne has fallen for the attentive Mr Elliot. When Anne postpones their next meeting because she wants to go to the concert, Mrs Smith speaks to her ‘with an expression half serious, half arch’, predicting that she will not be getting many more visits from her friend (II. vii). Why does Austen allow this mistake? To let us see that, despite Mrs Smith’s knowledge of her suitor, the marriage would have gone ahead if he had been minded and she had been receptive. After the concert Anne visits her friend and finds her reading her face. ‘I perfectly see how the hours passed . . . Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person, whom you think the most agreeable in the world’ (II. ix). Anne is amazed at her penetration, imagining that she is talking about Captain Wentworth. What is the point of this error? Partly to cement the internalisation of Anne’s drama of feeling: truly, no one knows of her love, of what is going on between her and Captain Wentworth. Though it takes place entirely in the view of others, though they are never alone together until he has finally declared himself to her, it is completely hidden. But it is also to push Anne and her friend to the realisation of what could have happened. The blunder – licensed by Mrs Smith’s correct inference that love is in the air – has chilling implications. Mrs Smith is self-interested enough to have hoped that her friend might influence her new husband, Mr Elliot, to regain her inheritance. Anne cannot understand why she spoke so favourably of him. ‘My dear . . . there was nothing else to be done’ (I. ix).

The most powerful example of such brief misunderstanding, happily corrected, occurs in
Emma
, when Mr Knightley struggles to declare himself to the heroine. ‘I must tell what you will not ask’ (III. xiii). Emma thinks that he is about to tell her of his love for Harriet and stops him: ‘don’t speak it, don’t speak it’. He complies, in ‘deep mortification’, and for just a moment Austen lets you see how a misunderstanding might end hopes of a happy ending. Only some better instinct – ‘Emma could not bear to give him pain’ – makes her change her mind, allowing the revelation that ‘Harriet’s hopes had been entirely groundless, a mistake, a delusion, as complete a delusion as any of her own’. Mr Knightley is allowed to declare himself, but not before we have known that hesitation, that possibility of failure. Austen loves blunders because they show the difference between what we can understand of her characters, and what they can understand of each other. This final near-blunder allows Emma, for once, to understand everything, while Mr Knightley never grasps and will never grasp that Emma imagined him as Harriet’s future husband. ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.’ It might be the motto of Austen’s fiction.

FIFTEEN

What Do Characters Read?

‘He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.’

Emma
, I. iv

In Ang Lee’s 1995 film version of
Sense and Sensibility
, scripted by Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, in the character of poetry-loving Marianne Dashwood, reads Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds . . .’) aloud with Willoughby, played by Greg Wise. Shakespeare’s paean to lovers’ constancy (in fact addressed to a young man) is a popular choice for contemporary wedding services and must have seemed a natural choice for the screen Marianne. Lee and Thompson clearly thought it even more significant given Willoughby’s later inconstancy. To push the point home, they had Winslet recite it again later in the film, her love now disappointed, as she looks at Combe Magna (the marital home that never was) through the rain.

The film-makers were on to something. Austen’s novel is much concerned with the influence of reading, and Marianne puts a premium on literary discernment. Willoughby is qualified to be her partner by his ability to talk in the right way about the right books. In her first conversation with him, she excitedly discovers their shared tastes: ‘her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before’ (I. iii). Willoughby happily agrees with her every literary opinion. He has quite enough ‘sensibility’ to respond in the right way to books, or to know that this beautiful girl rates such responsiveness very highly. Perhaps he senses what Austen’s first readers were expected to infer: that Marianne’s ‘sensibility’ – apparently all instinct and spontaneity – was itself learned from her reading. Books instruct her strongest feelings. As far as Marianne is concerned, Willoughby has himself walked out of a book. ‘His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story’ (I. ix).