What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (5 page)

Sisterly closeness is not necessarily to be admired.

Think of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet and we might suppose that unreserved sisterly talk is admirable. But Austen knows that such confidential talk can allow malign confederacy too. Think of the conversations between sisters that we do not hear – the sisterly chat going on just off stage, perhaps in bedrooms that we never get to visit. In
Sense and Sensibility
, the Steele sisters talk together, and have always lived in close proximity, even though they are peculiarly divided associates. Miss Steele – Anne – is ‘nearly thirty’ and ‘very plain’; Lucy Steele is ‘two or three and twenty’ and ‘pretty’ (I. xxi). There is a special friction that has come from their life together and that is evident when they first converse with Elinor. With superb crassness Miss Steele asks Elinor if she had ‘a great many smart beaux’ in Sussex, while Lucy looks ‘ashamed of her sister’. Anne always says something tactless or inapposite, so Lucy ‘generally made an amendment to all her sister’s assertions’ (I. xxi). Privately, however, in exchanges that we must imagine, they tell each other things. This is crucial to the plot of
Sense and Sensibility
, for clever, dishonest Lucy makes the mistake of sharing with her sister the secret of her engagement to Edward Ferrars. Anne (or ‘Nancy’, as Mrs Jennings likes to call her) lets Mrs John Dashwood know, prompting the latter’s ‘violent hysterics’ (III. i). Her mistake (for she has none of the subtlety of calculation that Lucy possesses) is characteristic of the Steele sisters’ twisted intimacy. Even what the two do not share still gets shared. During a stroll in Kensington Gardens, Anne Steele cheerfully tells Elinor about the lovers’ chat between Edward and Lucy. Elinor is surprised that this exchange should have taken place in her presence.

‘La! Miss Dashwood, do you think people make love when any body else is by? Oh, for shame!—To be sure you must know better than that.’ (Laughing affectedly.)—‘No, no; they were shut up in the drawing-room together, and all I heard was only by listening at the door.’ (II. ii)

When Elinor expresses her dismay at this behaviour, the elder Steele assures her that such eavesdropping is more or less what her sister would expect. ‘I am sure Lucy would have done just the same by me; for a year or two back, when Martha Sharpe and I had so many secrets together, she never made any bones of hiding in a closet, or behind a chimney-board, on purpose to hear what we said.’ Theirs is a relationship of mutual espionage. The Steele sisters have lived so close to each other that such prying has become their way. Only when she has been badly bitten by her sister’s indiscretion does Lucy change her policy of confiding in her sister. She conceals her engagement to Robert Ferrars from Anne, and even takes some money from her under false pretences before disappearing with her new paramour.

Sisterly closeness is not necessarily to be admired. Perhaps the closest sisterly conversationalists in Austen’s fiction are Kitty and Lydia Bennet. They are habitual companions, a cameo of their companionship given us when they wait in the upstairs room of an inn for Elizabeth’s return from Kent. As they travel back from there to Longbourn, Lydia gossips and jokes, ‘assisted by Kitty’s hints and additions’ (II. xvi). Kitty’s talk is hooked to Lydia’s. Later, when Elizabeth is trying to explain her sister’s elopement, she comments on Lydia’s preoccupation with ‘love, flirtation, and officers’: ‘She has been doing every thing in her power, by thinking and talking on the subject, to give greater—what shall I call it? susceptibility to her feelings, which are naturally lively enough.’ This ‘talking’ has largely been with Kitty. Kitty is unsurprised at the news of Lydia’s elopement and Jane’s letter tries to excuse her for having ‘concealed their attachment’ (III. iv). Kitty knew about their being ‘in love’ – but not (Jane thinks) before they went to Brighton (III. v) – she knows from letters, not talking. Talking about it would have made her Lydia’s abettor. Once Lydia has been rescued from disgrace, the chat between the sisters must be brought to an end. ‘From the further disadvantage of Lydia’s society she was of course carefully kept’ (III. xix).

More poisonous sisterly confederates are Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst. Caroline Bingley is the more powerful, but they come as a pair. In Chapter viii of
Pride and Prejudice
, when Elizabeth leaves the company after dinner to attend to her sick sister, they speak with peculiarly unified intent.

‘She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild.’

‘She did indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very nonsensical to come at all!’ (I. viii)

This is a performance for the benefit of their brother and Mr Darcy. Listen to this almost rehearsed unanimity and you know that these sisters have already been talking, agreeing about their efforts to denigrate Elizabeth. Discussing with Jane Mr Bingley’s later neglect of her, Elizabeth certainly takes for granted that both sisters are behind it: ‘“You persist, then, in supposing his sisters influence him.” “Yes, in conjunction with his friend.”’ (II. i). They are quite a pair. In Miss Bingley’s original invitation to Jane to come to Netherfield, she refers to the amount of time that she and Mrs Hurst spend together, and pretends that they are often at loggerheads, ‘for a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never end without a quarrel’ (I. vii). But this is a blind. The sisters are always together and always of a mind.

When Jane visits Miss Bingley in London, she is made to realise that she cannot stay long ‘as Caroline and Mrs Hurst were going out’ (II. iii). The implication, unperceived by Jane, is that Caroline Bingley has pre-arranged with her sister to extract her from a tricky interview. Again, they have been talking together. When Elizabeth and her aunt, Mrs Gardiner, arrive at Pemberley to visit Georgiana Darcy, she is in the saloon, ‘sitting there with Mrs Hurst and Miss Bingley’ (III. iii). They have clearly arranged to try to fight Elizabeth off. Miss Bingley confesses the confederacy when she deplores to Mr Darcy the supposed alteration in Elizabeth’s appearance since their last meeting. ‘She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again’ (III. iii). The fact that this malign pair are always scheming together should allow us to correct what is surely a printer’s error in all the standard editions of
Pride and Prejudice
. In Volume III Chapter xiii, where Jane recognises how she and Bingley were kept from meeting each other while both were in London, she explains, ‘It must have been his sister’s doing’ (III. xiii). But she immediately adds, ‘They were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me.’ ‘They’ were up to something: she and Elizabeth are thinking of both sisters, who have always been scheming together, and Austen must surely have meant ‘sisters’’ (plural possessive) not ‘sister’s’ (singular possessive).

Sisterly togetherness can be deceptive. Maria and Julia Bertram seem to come as a pair, until we see that they are really rivals. They have ‘their own apartments’ at Mansfield Park (I. xvi) – all the grandeur that space can provide – and true apartness becomes natural to them. They begin in concert, alternating in their reports of Fanny’s ignorance (I. ii). They go out together as ‘belles of the neighbourhood’ (I. iv). But then come the Crawfords, and the casting of that play. The intimacy between the sisters is what allows Julia to know that she is being fobbed off with an undesirable part. When Henry Crawford asks her to play Amelia, she looks at Maria. ‘Maria’s countenance was to decide it; if she were vexed and alarmed—but Maria looked all serenity and satisfaction’ (I. xiv). Theirs is an antagonistic union: they know each other, as we say, all too well.

The sister with whom she was used to be on easy terms was now become her greatest enemy . . . With no material fault of temper, or difference of opinion, to prevent their being very good friends while their interests were the same, the sisters, under such a trial as this, had not affection or principle enough to make them merciful or just, to give them honour or compassion. (I. xvii)

These are sisters reared together as a proud pair who have long since ceased to talk to each other.

Persuasion
offers us the one hint of sisterly talk that excludes the heroine but is neither conspiratorial nor rivalrous. Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove may be fairly empty-headed girls, but Anne envies them ‘that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters’ (I. v). Close in age (nineteen and twenty) and schooled together, they have an easy – we might imagine somewhat giggly – closeness. When Captain Wentworth becomes a regular visitor to the Musgrove home and the dancing begins, we glimpse the possibility of a Bertram scenario: ‘as for Henrietta and Louisa, they both seemed so entirely occupied by him, that nothing but the continued appearance of the most perfect good-will between themselves could have made it credible that they were not decided rivals’ (I. viii). But the potential rivalry evaporates exactly because of their habit of talking to each other. On the walk with Anne, Mary Musgrove, Charles Musgrove and Wentworth, they find themselves suddenly in sight of Winthrop, where Henrietta’s discarded suitor Charles Hayter lives. Mary, disliking this liaison, wants to turn back.

Henrietta, conscious and ashamed, and seeing no cousin Charles walking along any path, or leaning against any gate, was ready to do as Mary wished; but ‘No!’ said Charles Musgrove, and ‘No, no!’ cried Louisa more eagerly, and taking her sister aside, seemed to be arguing the matter warmly. (I. x)

This moment of pressing sisterly talk – of witnessed intimacy – enables Henrietta’s change of heart. We naturally assume from the exchange that Louisa knows her sister’s true feelings: Henrietta has talked to her of them before now. Her awkwardness conquered, Henrietta goes with her brother to call on the Hayters and her future is happily decided.

All Austen’s heroines have sisters.
Sense and Sensibility
is unique is giving us, at first, the thoughts of both of them when they talk privately together. Marianne smiles ‘within herself’ when Elinor says that Edward has a taste for drawing (I. iv). Then later in the same conversation Elinor ‘was sorry for the warmth she had been betrayed into, in speaking of him’ (I. iv). This is confidential talk indeed: the sisters discuss Elinor’s feelings for Edward, and Marianne finds out that they are not engaged. Yet despite the movement between viewpoints the conversation is unbalanced. Elinor’s measured sentences are set against Marianne’s histrionic exclamations: ‘Cold-hearted Elinor!’ It will not be long before private speech between the sisters is reported entirely from Elinor’s point of view. In a novel so concerned with secrecy, it is telling that, while Elinor and Marianne are often alone together, attempts at conversation are often stopped short. ‘“Marianne, may I ask?”—“No, Elinor,” she replied, “ask nothing; you will soon know all.”’ (II. vii). When Marianne does finally tell Elinor the truth about her relationship with Willoughby, it is an outpouring that permits no actual exchange between the two. After her recovery from her near-fatal illness, Marianne has, notoriously, learned to talk to her sister in an entirely new way. Back in Devon, the two sisters go for a walk together, Marianne ‘leaning on Elinor’s arm’ (III. x). The younger sister embarks on a flow of self-reproval couched in balanced Johnsonian sentences such as she would once have scorned.

There are, in fact, only five significant conversations between Elinor and Marianne in
Sense and Sensibility
. In
Pride and Prejudice
we are given twelve private conversations between Elizabeth and Jane. Their retreat into each other’s company is a recurrent feature of the novel. Volume II Chapter xvii begins, ‘Elizabeth’s impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could no longer be overcome . . .’ (the news is Darcy’s proposal and Wickham’s perfidy). This is typical. The sisters are constantly looking for opportunities to be alone together. Jane is Elizabeth’s ‘willing listener’ (II. xvii), even if their conversations commonly stage the clash between Elizabeth’s candour (in our sense of unsentimental truth telling) and Jane’s ‘candour’ (in Austen’s sense of thinking the best of people). In their crowded house, they have to spend time finding places to talk. One of their haunts is the shrubbery, where Elizabeth tells Jane about Darcy’s supposed cruelty to Wickham in the shrubbery (I. xvii). They take their moments in what spaces they can, sometimes simply having to ‘walk out’ from the house in order to be able to communicate with each other (III. vii).

Such communication is unusual in Austen’s fiction, even where sisters like each other. In
Mansfield Park
Fanny Price returns to her family home in Portsmouth, to find, as well as much discord, a new ‘intimacy’ with her sister Susan (III. ix). ‘Susan was her only companion and listener’ (III. xiii). But Austen strangely muffles the relationship. Before this conversational kinship is established, we do hear Susan speak, complaining mostly about the running of the household. Once she and Fanny become companions, no word of dialogue between the sisters is given us. There is some sisterly talk similarly missing from
Emma
. When Emma’s sister Isabella visits Hartfield for Christmas, she speaks a good deal, but from Chapters xi to xvii she says no word of directly quoted dialogue to Emma herself. The sisters speak at opposite ends of a crowded room, or through intermediaries. Emma, we have been told, has had seven years without Isabella’s company since her sister got married. The sisters are not well matched, but the separation is also a narrative requirement: in this novel Austen needs to isolate her heroine from advice and confidences and private conversation.