What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (42 page)

The language of this is very close to Elinor’s own reasoning process, but in following this it fails to mention the subtext: that Elinor loves Edward, and that moving to Devon means moving away from him. The narrative has taken on all her slightly chilly self-control.

As well as allowing the narrative to be shaped by a character’s thoughts, Austen also had a technique for the suggestive avoidance of those thoughts. In
Mansfield Park
Edmund and Mary Crawford are discussing the character and occupation of clergymen, with the latter using the example of Dr Grant to show that members of the clergy are often not admirable men. Miss Crawford wishes Fanny a better fate than to be married to such a man, ‘quarrelling about green goose’ all week.

‘I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny,’ said Edmund, affectionately, ‘must be beyond the reach of any sermons.’

Fanny turned farther into the window; and Miss Crawford had only time to say, in a pleasant manner, ‘I fancy Miss Price has been more used to deserve praise than to hear it,’ when being earnestly invited by the Miss Bertrams to join in a glee, she tripped off to the instrument, leaving Edmund looking after her in an ecstasy of admiration of all her many virtues, from her obliging manners down to her light and graceful tread (I. xi).

Fanny turns into the window, and turns away from us too, for Austen absents herself from knowing, or anyway from telling us, what her heroine feels. The turning away dramatises the pitch of Fanny’s feeling. Mary Crawford senses something, and covers the awkward moment graciously, but she does not know the half of what Fanny feels. The narrator’s own reserve about Fanny’s feelings enacts the character’s own tenderness on the subject of her love for Edmund. She hardly dare admit to herself her impossible passion. Austen’s audacious narrative technique allows Fanny’s feelings to be the undercurrent of the narrative, without becoming its subject. Any novelist can tell us what a character feels; Austen developed a means of declining to tell us. In doing so she bequeathed new technical possibilities to later novelists. Catch the dramatic and narrative subtley of what Austen is doing as Fanny turns away from us and we indeed catch her in what Virginia Woolf called ‘the act of greatness’. Characteristically, this moment of audacious fictional experiment is also an instance of the most perfect reticence.

Notes

Introduction

 
1
       
British Critic
, July 1816, in Brian Southam, ed.,
Jane Austen. The Critical Heritage 1811–1870
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 71.

 
2
       
Gentleman’s Magazine
, September 1816, ibid., p. 72.

 
3
       Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, in J. E. Austen-Leigh,
A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections
, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2002), p. 140.

 
4
       Henry Austen, ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’, ibid., p. 150.

 
5
       Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen at Sixty’,
Nation and Athenaeum
, 15 December 1923, reprinted in
The Essays of Virginia Woolf
, Vol. IV, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 155.

 
6
       
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
, ed. W.E.K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 14 March 1826, p. 114.

 
7
       Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (1905) in Brian Southam, ed.,
Jane Austen
, pp. 229–30.

 
8
       Ibid, p. 300.

 
9
       Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Literature
, ed. Fredson Bowers (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1982), p. 13.

 
10
       
The Nabokov–Wilson Letters
, ed. Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letter of 5 May 1950, p. 241.

 
11
       Ibid., letter of 9 May 1950, p. 243.

 
12
       Ibid., cited in Karlinsky introduction, p. 17.

Chapter 1: How Much Does Age Matter?

       
1
       See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield,
The Population History of England 1541–1871. A Reconstruction
(1981; reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 255.

 
2
       R. A. Austen-Leigh, ed.,
Austen Papers 1704–1856
, introduction by David Gilson (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1995), pp. 156–7.

 
3
       William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh,
Jane Austen: A Family Record
, rev. Deirdre Le Faye (London: The British Library, 1989), p. 134, and Hazel Jones,
Jane Austen and Marriage
(London: Continuum, 2009), p. 39.

Chapter 2: Do Sisters Sleep Together?

 
1
       
London Review of Books
, 17. 24 (14 December 1995), p. 4. For Terry Castle’s original article, see
LRB
, 17. 15 (3 August 1995), pp. 3–6. For the evidence, see Edward Copeland, ‘The Austens and the Elliots: A Consumer’s Guide to
Persuasion
’, in Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel (eds),
Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and Her Profession
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 137.

 
2
       Quoted in Kate Chisholm,
Fanny Burney: Her Life
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 117.

 
3
       See Amanda Vickery,
Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
(London: Yale University Press, 2009), for contemporary evidence of husbands and wives having separate bedrooms.

Chapter 3: What Do the Characters Call Each Other?

 
1
       Just one of the peculiarities of terms of address in Austen’s fiction observed in Isaac Schapera,
Kinship Terminology in Jane Austen’s Novels
(London: The Royal Anthropological Institute, 1977), p. 2.

 
2
       The novels in which they feature are Samuel Richardson,
Clarissa
(1747-8), Fanny Burney,
Evelina
(1778),
Cecilia
(1782) and
Camilla
(1796), and Charlotte Smith,
Emmeline
(1788).

 
3
       Maggie Lane,
Jane Austen and Names
(Bristol: Blaise Books, 2002)., pp. 12–13.

 
4
       See E. G. Withycombe,
The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names
(1950; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 199.

 
5
       Lane,
Names
, p. 33.

 
6
       Ibid., p. 35.

Chapter 4: How Do Jane Austen’s Characters Look?

 
1
       Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy
, ed. Melvyn and Joan New (London: Penguin, 1997), Vol. VI, Ch. xxxviii, p. 388.

Chapter 5: Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?

 
1
       Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones
, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1996), Vol. II, Ch. viii, p. 95.

 
2
       See Anne Buck,
Dress in Eighteenth-Century England
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1979), pp. 60–6 and 82–5.

 
3
       Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas,
Costume for Births, Marriages and Deaths
(London: A & C Black, 1972), pp. 244–5.

 
4
       Buck,
Dress
, p. 60.

 
5
       Cunnington and Lucas,
Costume
, p. 268.

 
6
       Fanny Burney,
Evelina
, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1982), p. 53.

 
7
       Alison Adburgham,
Shops and Shopping 1800–1914
(1964; reprinted London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 59.

 
8
       Linda Bree, introduction to
Persuasion
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), p. 13.

 
9
       Jane Austen,
Catherine and Other Writings
, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford: World’s Classics 1993), p. 234.

 
10
       See Wrigley and Schofield,
The Population History of England
, p. 249.

 
11
       See Deirdre Le Faye’s biographical index to
Jane Austen’s Letters
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 495.

Chapter 6: Why Is It Risky to Go to the Seaside?

 
1
       Allan Brodie, Colin Ellis, David Stuart and Gary Winter,
Weymouth’s Seaside Heritage
(Swindon: English Heritage, 2006), p. 9.

 
2
       David Selwyn,
Jane Austen and Leisure
(London: Hambledon, 1999), p. 47.

 
3
       See Roger Sales,
Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England
(London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 141–2.

 
4
       John K. Walton,
The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), p. 17.

 
5
       Ibid., pp. 126–7.

 
6
       Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh,
A Family Record
,
p. 134.

 
7
       Alain Corbin,
The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750–1840
(1994; reprinted London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 66–7.

 
8
       Ibid., p. 272.

 
9
       Tony Tanner,
Jane Austen
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 262.

 
10
       Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh,
A Family Record
, p. 124.

Chapter 7: Why Is the Weather Important?

 
1
       
Nature
, No. 388 (10 July 1997), p. 137.

Chapter 8: Do We Ever See the Lower Classes?

 
1
       Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh,
A Family Record
, p. 155.

 
2
       See Pamela Horn,
Flunkeys and Scullions:
Life Below Stairs in Georgian England
(Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), pp. 213–16.

 
3
       
Jane Austen Society Collected Reports 1949–1965
, p. 251.

 
4
       J. J. Hecht,
The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 7.

Chapter 9: Which Important Characters Never Speak in the Novels?

 
1
       Ben Jonson,
Timber
,
or Discoveries Made upon men and matter
, in
Ben Jonson
, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 574.