What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (6 page)

In the end, in
Persuasion
, Austen has abandoned the idea that sisterliness might permit the warmest kind of intimacy. Though its plot is as sister-influenced as that of
Pride and Prejudice
– it too turns on an estate that will go to a more distant relative because a father has produced only daughters – its heroine has just one reported conversation with her elder sister, Elizabeth. This is when Anne warns her that Mrs Clay might have designs upon their father. Sisterhood makes the conversation possible, but also difficult. Anne is coldly rebuffed, though she hopes that her sister might be ‘made observant’ by this private exchange (I. v). With her other sister, Mary, in contrast, there is no shortage of one-to-one conversation, though this usually casts Anne as a tactful therapist, listening to Mary’s complaints and talking her round into cheerfulness. It is Mary, naturally, who causes her sister peculiar pain when she happily reports Wentworth saying, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again’ (I. vii). No wonder that sisterly chat holds no allure for Anne. It is often remarked that
Persuasion
marks a new departure – taking its heroine off to sea and leaving the landed gentry to their houses and their fates. It is also the end of sisterhood. When Anne becomes engaged once more to Wentworth, she cares ‘nothing’ about the ‘disproportion in their fortune’, but a different imbalance does pain her:

to have no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will to offer in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity. She had but two friends in the world to add to his list, Lady Russell and Mrs Smith. (II. xii)

Anne has escaped her family and can feel a melancholy relief. There is no more need for talking to her sisters.

THREE

What Do the Characters Call Each Other?

. . . in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them.

Sense and Sensibility
, I. xii

Only one married woman in all Jane Austen’s novels calls her husband by his Christian name. The wife in question is Mary Musgrove (née Elliot) in
Persuasion
. Not only does she refer to her husband as ‘Charles’ when talking to her sister Anne, she calls him ‘Charles’ when she speaks to him directly.
¹
Are we to take this as a commendable modern intimacy? Or is it an unwonted breach of domestic decorum? It is likely that anything Mary says will be a little wrong, and we note that she first addresses him as ‘Charles’ to oppose his wish to leave her with her sick child in order to go to meet Captain Wentworth. ‘Oh! no, indeed, Charles, I cannot bear to have you go away’ (I. vii). Such informality seems to make dispute all the easier for Mary, as when her husband tells Anne that Captain Benwick is full of her virtues. ‘Mary interrupted him. “I declare, Charles, I never heard him mention Anne twice all the time I was there”’ (I. ii). She is always ready to make an objection. ‘Good heavens, Charles! how can you think of such a thing? . . . Oh! Charles, I declare it will be too abominable if you do . . . But you must go, Charles. It would be unpardonable to fail’ (II. xxiv). Charles Musgrove in turn addresses his wife as ‘Mary’ when he wishes to contradict her. ‘Now you are talking nonsense, Mary’(I. ix); ‘Now Mary, you know very well how it really was. It was all your doing . . . Now Mary, I declare it was so, I heard it myself, and you were in the other room’ (II. ii).

Any keen reader of Austen will register, though perhaps only half-consciously, the weight of this. For even the fondest of Austen’s other wives find some alternative to using their husbands’ Christian names. Mrs Croft may be ‘Sophy’ to her husband, but he is ‘my dear admiral’ to her. Mr Weston may address his wife as ‘Anne, my dear’, but she calls him ‘Mr. Weston’. The Weston example is particularly striking as we are hearing this recently married couple talking without any witnesses and therefore without any need for formality. We never know Mr Weston’s forename – nor Mr Allen’s, Mr Palmer’s, Mr Bennet’s, Dr Grant’s, or Admiral Croft’s. Even Mrs Elton has to find a nauseating endearment – ‘Mr. E’ – rather than brandish her husband’s Christian name (
Emma
, II. xiv). Will none of Austen’s heroines use their beloved husband’s first names after marriage? Elinor Dashwood might do so when she has become Elinor Ferrars, as her husband has long been ‘Edward’ to her family. He has qualified by already being a relative by marriage. Elizabeth Bennet might be put off doing so by her husband’s cumbersome Christian name, Fitzwilliam. But surely Anne Elliot will call Captain Wentworth ‘Frederick’? At least in private? We cannot know, but nothing in the talk between married couples in the novels encourages us to think that she will.

The nature of the Musgrove marriage is revealed to us by this small touch: their use of each other’s first names. It is no sign of amorous feeling (Charles has married Mary, after all, because Anne would not have him). Rather, it dramatises the companionable disrespect of their relationship. They complain about each other, but in a fatalistic vein, and they also complain in unison, about the failure of Charles’s parents to give them more money. They cannot agree about many things, but are not afraid to disagree. They bicker, but they take their social pleasures together. Neither admirable nor wholly improper, their informality in naming each other epitomises this relationship. In Austen’s novels, as here, we should notice conventions about how people name others in order to see how they are disobeyed – or to see that different characters follow different conventions. Charlotte Heywood in
Sanditon
notes Lady Denham’s ‘oldfashioned formality’ towards her young companion, and distant relation, ‘of always calling her
Miss Clar
a
’ (Ch. 6). But clearly some conventions have a near-moral force. After Maria Bertram gets married, she is always ‘Mrs. Rushworth’ to both Fanny and the narrator. To call her anything else, even in one’s thoughts, would be to undo her marital ties. And this is just what Henry Crawford desires. Encountering her coldness, ‘he must get the better of it, and make Mrs. Rushworth Maria Bertram again in her treatment of himself’ (III. xvii).

Informality between spouses is not symmetrical. In the second chapter of
Sense and Sensibility
, John Dashwood calls his wife ‘My dear Fanny’, though she addresses him as ‘My dear Mr. Dashwood’ (I. ii). ‘Shall we walk, Augusta?’ says Mr Elton to his wife in front of the group at Box Hill. This is almost ostentatious. ‘Happy creature! He called her ”Augusta.” How delightful!’ says Harriet Smith, after first meeting the vicar’s new wife (II. xiv). Her exclamation indicates that the Eltons are behaving in an unusual, perhaps modish, manner. Mr Elton’s flourishing of ‘Augusta’ is made the more repellent by Mrs Elton’s mock-coy revelation that he wrote an acrostic on her name while courting her in Bath. Yet it is not simply ‘wrong’ to use your wife’s Christian name. Admiral Croft addresses his wife Sophia as ‘Sophy’ as he sits in his gig with her and Anne (I. x). She addresses him as ‘my dear’ and, with an anxious exclamation as he steers erratically, ‘My dear admiral, that post!’ When Admiral Croft talks to Anne he commonly quotes or cites the support of his wife, and invariably calls her ‘Sophy’. We are to notice this as a marked informality: he is the only husband in Austen’s novels to call his wife by an affectionate shortening of her Christian name. Yet this is surely at one with his breezy good-heartedness, and a sign of the couple’s closeness. His uxoriousness is such that, at one point, as he struggles to remember Louisa Musgrove’s name, he frankly wishes that all women were called Sophy.

Equally enamoured of a special name is Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
: ‘there is nobleness in the name of Edmund. It is a name of heroism and renown . . .’ (II. iv). A person’s Christian name is a kind of magic word. The heroine-centred novels of the eighteenth century invariably gave their protagonists singular names. The trend was set by Samuel Richardson with
Pamela
(1740) – a name previously to be found only in literary romance. Other heroines of successful eighteenth-century novels were called Clarissa, Evelina, Emmeline, Cecilia and Camilla.
²
Austen chooses traditional English names for her heroines, but for other female characters she chooses names that sometimes seem to announce unreliability. The range of female names in Austen’s fiction is far wider than the range of male names (twenty-six male versus fifty-five female, even though there are scarcely more named female characters than named male characters).
³
The wider lexicon allows for romantic names that bode ill: Maria, Julia, Lydia, Augusta and Selina. Marianne, a recent importation from France, should give us pause.
⁴
The Musgrove sisters, bubbly provincial aspirants to fashion, come as a named pair: Henrietta and Louisa. These are new names. The Musgroves, in their state of change, ‘perhaps of improvement’, enshrine their family ambitions in their daughters’ names. One of the running jokes in
Persuasion
is Admiral Croft’s inability to remember Louisa’s Christian name, which is really a sign of her failure of character. ‘And very nice young ladies they both are; I hardly know one from the other’ (I. x). Before he tells Anne the news of Louisa’s engagement to Captain Benwick, he says, ‘you must tell me the name of the young lady I am going to talk about’ (II. vi). A few minutes after Anne has done so, and he has confidently referred to her as ‘Louisa Musgrove’, he is saying that Captain Wentworth’s letter to his sister did not indicate ‘that he had ever thought of this Miss (what’s her name?) for himself’.

In Austen’s novels as in her family, names are often handed down to signify continuity. ‘Henry is the eldest, he was named after me,’ says Mr Woodhouse of his grandson. ‘Isabella would have him called Henry, which I thought very pretty of her’ (
Emma
, I. ix). In
Mansfield Park
, Tom Bertram, the eldest son, has been named after the
pater familias
, Sir Thomas. In
Persuasion
, Charles Musgrove’s eldest son is called Charles, while Mr Elliot carries the name Walter, which he despises (II. ix). Eldest daughters often get their mother’s names, as Cassandra Austen did: Maria Bertram and Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
; Elizabeth Elliot in
Persuasion
. Some names peculiarly meant something to Austen.
Northanger Abbey
opens with a private joke about the name Richard – ‘a very respectable man, though his name was Richard’ – that the centuries of annotation have not clarified. Perhaps there are other examples of names that had some family meaning to the Austens. It is difficult not to think that the characters in Jane Austen’s fiction who shared her author’s name – Jane Bennet and Jane Fairfax – thereby acquired a special interest for knowing readers.

As well as those married men whose forenames we never know, think of the women: Mrs Dashwood, Mrs Bennet, Mrs Allen, Mrs Norris, Mrs Grant, Mrs Dixon, Mrs Smith. The last of these is particularly significant, as she is Anne Elliot’s old and intimate friend, and the two women are usually found talking alone together. The formality perhaps tells us something of the original age gap between the friends and suggests a distance that remains. Mrs Grant’s name remains unknown because in each of several private conversations, Mary Crawford calls her ‘Mrs. Grant’ or ‘sister’, while being called ‘Mary’ – sometimes ‘dear Mary’ or ‘dearest Mary’ – in return. The women are some ten years apart in age, so Mrs Grant is a semi-maternal figure, and she is married, so Mary Crawford is speaking in a proper way. Yet the younger woman is a good deal more worldly and more penetrating than her half-sister. The asymmetry of their forms of address helps create the sense that Mrs Grant is an indulgent, fond attendant on Mary, who need not exactly requite her attentions.

Such asymmetry is often telling. The famous example is in
Emma
, where Mr Knightley uses the heroine’s forename, but she never uses his. This serves the plot: his use of Emma’s forename signifies that he is an honorary family member and a kind of father figure, and therefore out of the romantic running. It helps to sustain Emma’s own failure to think of him in romantic terms. (Mr Weston – licensed by his wife’s intimacy with Emma perhaps – also uses her forename, without any suggestion of offence.) Emma, in turn, always addresses Harriet Smith as ‘Harriet’, but Harriet, with all that proper respect that Emma so enjoys, never uses her Christian name, always addressing her as ‘Miss Woodhouse’. Emma simply assumes that Harriet’s name is hers to use. It is inconceivable that Harriet would have invited Emma to use her Christian name. Here the asymmetry enacts a power difference. It also enables Emma to avoid the damning ordinariness of Harriet’s surname. (‘Mrs. Smith, such a name!’ exclaims Sir Walter Elliot in
Persuasion
(II. v).) But how does it feel to Mr Elton, who always calls her ‘Miss Smith’? Every time he does so he thinks of the lowness of her origins. When he proposes to Emma, who tells him that he should be addressing himself to her protégée instead, his disbelief is measured by the number of times he repeats the name ‘Miss Smith!’ How could he couple himself to someone with such a name – which, as she is illegitimate, is almost certainly not the name of her unknown father.