What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (4 page)

Elsewhere in Austen’s fiction, marriages between middle-aged women and older men look less commendable. In
Sanditon
Mr Parker tells Charlotte the full marital history of Lady Denham, who married her first husband, ‘an elderly Man’ with ‘considerable Property’, when she was ‘about thirty’. We are to infer that her husband, Mr Hollis, might have been in his sixties, and it seems that from the beginning her duty was to ‘nurse him’ (Ch. 3). ‘After a widowhood of some years, she had been induced to marry again.’ Her wealth attracts Sir Harry Denham; his title attracts her. Her age at marriage is left unspecified, but we could guess that she was in her forties. Resourceful women are certainly able to find husbands once they themselves are middle-aged.
Persuasion
relies on our knowing this, for Sir Walter Elliot, in his mid-fifties, is the prey of Mrs Clay, who is called ‘a clever young woman’ and is a widow in her thirties. Anne thinks of her as ‘between thirty and forty’ (II. v). When she does so she is comparing her with her friend Mrs Smith, who is just thirty, so we might suppose that Mrs Clay is not so much older. Yet no one in the novel cites age as a reason for thinking their marriage unlikely. Both Anne and Lady Russell fear that it might be entirely possible, and even Elizabeth scorns the idea not because of the age disparity but because Mrs Clay has freckles. Meanwhile it is clear to the reader that Mrs Clay and her father, Mr Shepherd, are calculating on her catching the vain Baronet.

Age matters very much to women, but to men too. Henry Crawford’s reflection is characteristically self-regarding, when he tells his sister that he is staying in Mansfield not only for the hunting. ‘I am grown too old to go out more than three times a week; but I have a plan for the intermediate days’ (II. vi). (His plan is to make Fanny fall in love with him.) He is called ‘young’ by the narrator and must still be in his early twenties, but likes to talk as if his youth were fled. Mr Knightley feels his age in
Emma
with better reason. There is a light suggestion of how a man’s age does and does not matter in the very manner of telling us about his age at the beginning of
Emma
, when we are introduced to him as ‘a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty’ (I. i). The narrator sounds as if the character has got beyond precision in these matters. Yet he himself is rather accurate about years and dates. He smiles when he points out that he is sixteen years older than Emma, as if this means that he will always be right in their differences of opinion (I. xii). The disparity in their ages has made some readers feel uncomfortable about their eventual marriage, though Mr Knightley himself likes to draw attention to it. After they have become engaged, he mocks himself for his past censure of Emma, the only good of which was to fix his affections on her: ‘by dint of fancying so many errors,’ he says, he has been ‘in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least’ (III. xvii). It is an unsettling declaration, but evidence that the novel is determined to exploit and not try to forget the age difference between these two eventual lovers. The sixteen years between them allowed them not to notice what they felt towards each other. They have behaved as if the gap between their ages precluded romance, but we know that they should have known better. Age does shape their relationship, but not at all as they expected.

TWO

Do Sisters Sleep Together?

At night she opened her heart to Jane.

Pride and Prejudice
, III. xvii

Are sisters not more intimate, more truly confiding, than any of Austen’s lovers? Jane Austen’s own most intimate relationship was with her sister, Cassandra, and a few years ago this gave rise to one of the peculiar controversies that periodically bubble up around Austen. In August 1995 a review essay by Professor Terry Castle of Stanford University on Deirdre Le Faye’s new Oxford edition of
Jane Austen’s Letters
appeared in the
London Review of Books
(
LRB
). It was concerned mostly with the evidence in surviving letters of the closeness between the two Austen sisters, including their physical closeness. That issue of the
LRB
carried the question ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’ on its cover. Largely because of this surely mischievous headline, the review became the focus of a public controversy about the nature of the sisters’ relationship that spilled into magazines and newspapers and other broadcast media. For several months the correspondence column of the
LRB
was able to rely on freshly provoked contributions from academics and Austen enthusiasts. In a letter of her own to the journal, Professor Castle denied that she had ever suggested that the novelist was ‘gay’, but pointed out that the two sisters shared a bed for the whole of their adult lives.

What did such intimacy mean? Sisterly chat, of which there is so much in Austen’s novels, would surely be peculiarly significant for a writer who would have talked to her own sister in bed. Except that those academics earnestly debating the implications of bed-sharing were, like Emma Woodhouse, ‘imaginists’. The
LRB
debate was brought to a resounding close by Bonnie Herron from the University of Alberta who wrote to point out that Edward Copeland had given a paper at the annual conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America in 1993 showing, from the records of Ring Brothers of Basingstoke, a home furnishing store, that Austen’s father had bought the sisters two single made-to-order beds when they were young adults. ‘Jane and Cassandra each had her own bed’.
¹
The disputants would have been better focusing on the novelist Fanny Burney, Austen’s most important female predecessor, whose fiction is notably devoid of sisterly intimacy, but who certainly did share a bed with her own sister, Susan. Their bed-sharing was clearly of some significance to them. Three weeks before Susan’s marriage in 1782 to the ominously dashing Captain Molesworth Phillips, Fanny Burney wrote a letter to her expressing some of her mixed feelings about the forthcoming happy event. ‘There is something to me at the thought of being so near parting with you as the Inmate of the same House – Room – Bed – confidence – life, that is not very
merrifying
.’
²

Jane and Cassandra Austen did share a compact bedroom, which they occupied until the ailing Jane left the family home in Chawton for Winchester in May 1817, aged forty-two. Surely it was a place for
sotto voce
confidences at the end of the day. Any visitor to Jane Austen’s house in Hampshire will be struck by the small sleeping space occupied by two middle-aged women. Indeed, so restricted is this that only one single bed is now placed in the room; if there were the original two, visitors would scarcely be able to enter. Jane and Cassandra might not quite have shared their bodily warmth, as Terry Castle had liked to imagine, but they would have ended and begun each day in intimate isolation from all others. What about the sisters in Austen’s novels? Did the novelist assume that they too would have this place of joint retreat where talk would be intimate? The immediate answer is, sometimes – and that where they do, this intimacy is at the heart of the novel.

Most of Austen’s sisters have their own bedchambers. There is no need to share bedrooms at Mansfield Park or Kellynch Hall, for instance. This is a fact of wealth and domestic architecture in
Mansfield Park
and
Persuasion
, but it is more than this. Both these novels are stories of sisterly alienation.
Emma
lets us infer a comparable history of sibling separation. Emma’s older sister Isabella is long gone from Hartfield, but we know that it is a house large enough always to have allowed the sisters separate rooms. Would the distance of outlook and temperament between Emma and Isabella be imaginable if they had spent their teenage years sharing a bedroom? The Morlands in
Northanger Abbey
, with their ten children, would have to have a remarkably capacious rectory at Fullerton not to make some room-sharing necessary, and we might presume that Catherine shares at least a bedchamber, if not a bed, with Sarah, who, a year younger than her, has become her ‘intimate friend and confidante’ (I. ii). Sisterly communication, however, might have been limited to family matters or the pleasures of the latest Gothic novel. Catherine’s dizzying encounter with Henry Tilney is her first romance and her three months away from home, first in Bath and then at Northanger Abbey, have transformed her. She has had some fond illusions expelled and she has fallen in love. Sarah’s inability to grasp what has happened to her erstwhile confidante is signalled in the penultimate chapter, when Henry Tilney has unexpectedly arrived at the Morlands’ rectory and, after initial conversation has given way to awkward silence, has asked if Catherine might show him the way to the Allens’ house, that he might pay his respects to them. Sarah blurts out that their house can be seen from the window, producing ‘a silencing nod from her mother’ (II. xv). Sarah has no idea why Henry and her sister might need an excuse to be alone together.

What about
Sense and Sensibility
? Barton Cottage has four bedrooms as well as the garrets for the servants, so the Dashwood ladies could have a room each (I. viii). Yet we know that one of the bedrooms is ‘spare’ and unused, so Elinor and Marianne might indeed be sleeping in the same room. When the two sisters stay in London they are certainly sharing a bedroom. The morning after the party at which they meet Willoughby after his long separation and silence, and at which we witness his coldness to Marianne and his apparent attachment to another woman, Elinor is ‘roused from sleep’ by Marianne’s ‘agitation and sobs’ and sees her sister ‘only half dressed . . . kneeling against one of the window-seats’ and writing a letter by the dim early morning light (II. vii). She begins to ask a question, but Marianne stops her short. ‘No, Elinor . . . ask nothing.’ The refusal to tell her anything presses all the more on Elinor because of the intimacy of their situation. It is in this shared bedroom that the revealing conversation between the sisters takes place a few hours later, when Elinor comes up after breakfast and finds her sister ‘stretched on the bed’ clasping Willoughby’s terrible letter, in which he dishonestly professes surprise that Marianne should have imagined ‘more than I felt, or meant to express’. Now Marianne can tell her that ‘there has been no engagement between them’, and can show her the increasingly anguished letters that she has sent to him. It is hard to imagine the conversation taking place anywhere but a bedroom. The bedroom is commonly Marianne’s retreat. She has taken to this sisterly sanctum when the Steele sisters later arrive on a visit, and Elinor is nettled by Miss Steele’s suggestion that, if Marianne is ‘laid down upon the bed, or in her dressing gown’, she and Lucy might go up to see her (II. x). ‘Elinor began to find this impertinence too much for her temper’ and the elder Miss Steele gets a ‘sharp reprimand’ from Lucy. Only Marianne’s sister can visit her in their bedroom.

We know that Elizabeth and Jane Bennet also share a bedroom. In
Pride and Prejudice
(I. xxi) Jane receives a letter from Miss Bingley announcing the Bingleys’ indefinite absence from Netherfield and she looks for an opportunity to tell Elizabeth about it: ‘a glance from Jane invited her to follow her up stairs. When they had gained their own room, Jane, taking out the letter, said, “This is from Caroline Bingley . . . You shall hear what she says”.’ In their shared room, unhampered talk is natural. Jane tells Elizabeth everything. ‘I
will
read you the passage which particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves from
you
.’ Shut away together from the rest of their family, the two sisters can talk to each other quite explicitly of the prospect of Jane becoming Mr Bingley’s wife. When Mrs Bennet talks to her daughters of this prospect, it is painfully embarrassing for them and comic for the reader; when Jane and Elizabeth discuss it in their bedchamber, we hear the truth of their feelings and uncertainties. Later, as the end of the novel approaches, with Lydia already married and Jane betrothed, Elizabeth tells Jane of her engagement to Mr Darcy in their bedroom. ‘At night she opened her heart to Jane’ (III. xvii). Confidences flow across the gap – as we might imagine – between their beds. ‘All was acknowledged, and half the night spent in conversation.’

The bedroom is a sanctum, and only special people may enter. In all Austen’s fiction, we never encounter a husband and wife together in a bedroom. We know that General Tilney and his wife had separate bedrooms because Catherine is caught by Henry Tilney sneaking a look at Mrs Tilney’s bedroom.
³
Admission to a bedroom is a rare privilege, for the reader as well as for a character. For the sake of some show of ‘tenderness’, the baleful Bingley sisters visit Jane Bennet in her bedroom during her illness – but it is a Netherfield bedroom, and not Jane’s personal domain. Solicitous though he is about her state of health, Mr Bingley does not visit Jane Bennet in her bedroom during her illness. When she is able to come down to the drawing room for a while, Mr Bingley sits with her and talks to almost no one else. But only his sisters are permitted to entertain Jane with their conversation in the bedroom. Elizabeth, meanwhile, signals her closeness to her sister by spending much of her time in the bedroom. When she is first tending Jane, she passes ‘the chief of the night’ in her room (I. ix).