It is possible that Jane Austen had independently hit upon two of the central tenets of the literary movement which had been initiated by the Concern and which was, by the time she arrived at Chawton, influencing some of Britain’s most popular poets, but it is more likely that, during her long sad exile in Bath, she had been reading poetry. Poetry has a particular appeal for those who are unhappy – as Jane would acknowledge when she created Captain Benwick of Persuasion. Perhaps, through William’s poetry, she had been touched by that small revolution in thinking that Dorothy had taken part in as she walked with her brother and his friend on the Quantock Hills.
Jane Austen certainly makes Mansfield Park’s heroine a wholehearted devotee of poetry. When it comes to the artistic expression of feeling, Fanny is not like Marianne with her passionate attachment to music, her enthusiasm for her sister’s drawing. The beauty of that starlit night makes her exclaim: ‘Here’s what may leave all Painting, and all Music behind, and what Poetry only can attempt to describe.’
However, though the influence of the Romantic poets may have played its part in the creation of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price is more than an embodiment of Romantic notions. When Jane Austen described herself as ‘the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress’,29 she was, no doubt, being deliberately over-modest, but she was also obliquely saying that her inspiration came from experience and observation as well as literature. The observations and life-experiences which she brought to this new novel were much wider and more complex than those which had informed her earliest work.
In particular, her experience of living as a poor relation is likely to have played its part in the creation of Fanny Price, who shares her author’s lack of autonomy. Like Jane, Fanny plays no part in the decisions which most affect her life. ‘It can make little difference to you, whether you are in one house or the other’, says the insensitive Lady Bertram when Fanny’s future is being discussed. 30 When Jane wrote that she may have been remembering her mother’s autocratic decisions, and Aunt Norris’s admonition of ‘Remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last’31 might contain a bitter memory of her own visits to the grander parts of her family.
While Sense and Sensibility is the production of a brilliant girl, Mansfield Park is the work of an experienced woman and the mature Jane was able to acknowledge that acute sensitivity need not, necessarily, launch a woman into unguarded behaviour. This is the other great difference between Fanny Price and Marianne Dashwood. Like Marianne, Fanny trusts her own feelings in the most important decisions of her life. But Fanny’s reliance on her own emotional truth does not lead to reckless self-gratification; it drives her instead into silence and concealment. Like Elinor Dashwood, Fanny is presented with a moral dilemma – should she reveal a truth and justify her own actions which are misunderstood by her family, or should she maintain an honourable silence for the sake of others?
The secret Elinor honourably conceals is Lucy Steele’s engagement to Edward Ferrars which has been revealed to her in confidence. The secret Fanny elects to keep is her knowledge of Henry Crawford’s true character, because the truth can only be told by revealing her cousin Maria’s improper behaviour during the play- acting at Mansfield.
Because of her decision to keep silent, Fanny is tormented by Crawford’s unwelcome courtship which is given the sanction of her guardians; and her resistance to him is publicly justified only by the revelation of his character when he runs off with her married cousin. It is the combination of extremely deep feeling and almost pathological restraint which makes Fanny Price’s story compelling.
Jane Austen, now safely installed at Chawton, stationary at last and able to take up her pen, set about exploring the very complex consequences of deep feeling in the world which she and Dorothy shared: a world in which silence, repression and inaction were sometimes the only honourable course of action; a world in which obligation and loyalty to her family could conflict painfully with a woman’s own idea of what was right.
It was a conflict of which she had had personal experience. When Tom Lefroy deceived her, she had submitted and done what was expected of her, what was considered ‘right’; she had done her duty to her family and controlled her feelings. Six years later, Harris Bigg Wither’s proposal presented a harder test. Here again her duty was plain: she should accept such an unexceptionable offer, provide a home for herself, her sister and her mother. At first she did her duty, but her resolution lasted for only twelve hours. Then she changed her mind and acted for herself.
When asked to sacrifice her principles for the good of her family, Jane had found the strength to make a stand. Now, on her page, Fanny Price was also opposing the wishes of her family out of principle.
‘She had been forced into prudence in her youth,’ Jane would write of her final heroine – Anne Elliot of Persuasion – ‘she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.’ In the margin of her copy of that novel, Cassandra wrote, after her sister’s death, ‘Dear dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.’ Cassandra’s endorsement of the sentiment seems to add weight to it, to highlight it as a particularly significant insight. Perhaps Cassandra recognised in it some personal meaning.
Jane Austen’s earliest writings had mocked the excesses of young women such as Dorothy Wordsworth who liked to align themselves with the wronged heroines of novels of sensibility, but her mature work would enter imaginatively into the tension which must arise for a woman of deep feeling living in the real world of early nineteenth century Britain. Jane had come to recognise that the choices forced upon women could be complicated: the world was not as simple as her youthful burlesques suggested.
Dorothy too had learned that the impetuosity which had driven her out of her uncle’s safe home to accept relative poverty with her beloved brother, the honesty which had fuelled her delightful defiance of Aunt Crackenthorpe, were not always the answers to life’s crises. Sometimes self-control and concealment were necessary.
Sarah Coleridge (a woman who might well have won Jane Austen’s admiration) had been behaving very much like the heroine of Mansfield Park. She had – out of loyalty – been concealing a secret, even though her secrecy meant that her own actions were misunderstood. And within two years of moving to Allan Bank, Dorothy at last, discovered this secret. She learned that Coleridge was a drug addict and came to fully understand the effect this had on his behaviour.
After his return from Malta, Coleridge had taken up residence with the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage, and their search for a new home had been made all the more difficult by the need to find somewhere large enough to accommodate, not only their own family, but also their friend and his two sons. For Coleridge was determined to take advantage of the unjust laws of the day which gave a father complete control over his children. He planned to leave his young daughter with her mother, but to take his two sons to live with him; and this despite the fact that he had spent so much time away from home he can have been little more than a stranger to the two boys, Hartley and Derwent.32
Dorothy seems to have felt that this was a reasonable thing to do, and she began with hopes that ‘William’s conversation and our kind offices may soothe [Coleridge], and bring on tranquillity’.33 However, once she was sharing a home with him, a thorough understanding of his illnesses, ill-temper and unreliable habits was forced upon her. ‘We have no hope of him . . . ’ she wrote in April 1810. ‘If he were not under our Roof, he would be just as much the slave of stimulants as ever; and his whole time and thoughts, are employed in deceiving himself, and seeking to deceive others.’ She complained that ‘He lies in bed, always till after 12 o’clock,’ and ‘Sometimes he does not speak a word’34. It is easy to believe that this was just the kind of behaviour his wife had been enduring for years, and her ‘ill-tempered speeches’ had not been made without provocation.
Sara Hutchinson was also hurt and disillusioned by Coleridge’s behaviour. At Allan Bank she
had been attempting to give him the support which he and his friends had believed he needed, writing to his dictation, listening to him, copying his work. But now Dorothy admitted that his love for her was no more than ‘a fanciful dream’. It seems likely that Sara had tried to break Coleridge of his opium habit for, said Dorothy, ‘when she stood in the way of other gratifications it was all over.’35 Exhausted by his demands Sara made her escape from Grasmere.
Soon after this letter was written, Coleridge quarrelled with William and left the Lake District for good36. It must have been a heavy blow. Though Dorothy had given her love unreservedly to this brilliant, damaged man within days of his arrival in her life, their friendship had proved a source of pain for both of them. Her interference in his marriage had been presumptuous, ill-judged, and, very probably, destructive; and her closer devotion to William had frequently made Coleridge feel jealous and excluded.
Yet Coleridge’s affection must have taken its toll on Dorothy just as it did on his wife and on Sara Hutchinson, for Dorothy too had done her best to support him emotionally over the years. His sense of superiority over his wife on the grounds of sex, and the impossible demands he placed on the woman whom he believed he loved, indicate the role which he might have expected his close female friend – the third member of the Concern – to perform. It seems likely that he had been an emotionally draining companion, and improbable that he had done much to encourage Dorothy’s confidence in her own talents.
After Coleridge left the Lakes Dorothy continued to worry about him, grieve over him and criticise him. They never met again, but the wounds he inflicted – wounds to which she had laid open her heart more than a decade before – would continue to smart until the oblivion of her final illness.
Just as Jane began upon those mature novels which explore the pain of deep sensibility in early nineteenth century society, Dorothy seems to have been suffering under the checks and curbs which that society imposed on unmarried women – or, as De Quincey put it ‘the decorum of her sex and age, and maidenly condition’. These checks, forced upon a woman who had, in her youth, been determined to speak every feeling, and to value only ‘an affectionate heart’ may well have caused the tension and discomfort – the ‘self-conflict’ – which he detected.
It is pointless to look for evidence – or explanation – of that inner conflict in Dorothy’s own writing. As we have seen, only the power of emotions is revealed there – rarely is the cause, or even the exact nature, of any emotion described. But a remarkable sequence of letters exchanged between William and his wife does throw some light on the landscape of Dorothy’s inner feelings as she reached the end of her thirties. There certainly was tension, because the promise of inclusion, of continuing, undiminished love, which William had made to Dorothy as he slipped the wedding ring onto her finger minutes before he gave it his bride, had proved particularly difficult – perhaps impossible – to keep.
Jonson’s poem – the one in which Dorothy and William had found solace and pain before his wedding took place – tidily separates sexual desire and tender, companionate love. But one point Jonson does not touch on is that the two are not always separable. A couple marrying, as William and Mary seem to have done, on the basis of calm affection, can continue to fall more and more deeply in love as they live together, particularly if they share a happy sex-life.
In 1803 – in the very early days of his marriage – William had, with apparent unconcern, left his wife alone to visit Scotland with Dorothy and Coleridge. But, years later – in 1810 and again in 1812 – he was forced to part from his wife for a few weeks. The letters they exchanged at those times indicate how very much this marriage had changed since the days when William left Mary behind in order to jaunt about the Highlands with his sister.
By 1810 William hated being away from Mary; it was an almost physical pain. ‘Nor will I ever,’ he promised the woman to whom he had been married eight years and who had borne him five children, ‘except from a principle of duty, part from you again, to stay any where more than one week. I cannot bear it . . . [I]t seems criminal to me in a high degree, to part from you except from a strong call of unquestionable moral obligation.’37
William was convinced that the love he and Mary now shared was rare and precious. ‘Every day every hour every moment makes me feel more deeply how blessed we are in each other,’ he wrote, indicating that he himself believed their love to have grown and matured since their marriage. ‘ . . . I am persuaded,’ he continued, ‘that a deep affection is not uncommon in married life, yet I am confident that a lively, gushing, thought-employing, spirit-stirring passion of love is very rare’.
It sounds like a wonderful marriage, and these letters call into question the rather dour picture of William Wordsworth which it is all too easy to gather from later portraits and the more didactic passages of his writing. For Mary’s part in the correspondence reveals that she was more in love with him after ten years of marriage than she had been on their wedding day. It throws a very flattering light on his character!
However, being a third party caught in the middle of a ‘thought-employing, spirit-stirring passion of love’ cannot have been pleasant. William and Mary’s letters illuminate the hidden corners of the extraordinary relationship which had developed over the years, and which had to be maintained by the three members of the Wordsworth household. Before his marriage William had been careful to assure Dorothy of his continuing love for her. But now he was involved in a burgeoning sexual love which – if it were allowed – could, by excluding her, hurt her deeply.
‘O my William!’ exclaimed Mary in delighted response to the above letter. ‘ . . . it was . . . so new a thing to see the breathing of thy inmost heart upon paper that I was quite overpowered’.38 It was the first proper love letter she had received from her husband – another indication that their courtship had been less than ardent.
It seems that most letters Mary received from William had to be shared with Dorothy, either before they were sent or after they arrived. But just now circumstances had combined to make it possible for Mary to get a letter which would not be read by her sister-in-law. Dorothy was also away from home at this time, but not with William.
So Mary was able to speak of, ‘that love which unites us & which cannot be felt but by ourselves.’ In fact, now she had the chance, Mary was quite determined to make a distinction, to let William know that this bond – marital love – had, she believed, the highest claim. In her next letter, she wrote of, ‘the blessed bond that binds husband and wife so much closer than the bond of Brotherhood – however dear & affectionate a family of Brothers [&] Sisters may love each other. – ’ 39
Her remarks form a kind of counterpoint to Dorothy’s declaration: ‘I have at all times a deep sympathy with those who know what fraternal affection is. It has been the building up of my being, the light of my path.’
In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s voice would join Dorothy’s in what might almost have been a chorus of Georgian spinsters, as she boldly stated that, in some respects, ‘the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal’.40
The cool style of Jane’s letters is far removed from that of Dorothy’s journal. It is certainly impossible to imagine her calling Edward or Henry ‘beloved’, but the passage from Mansfield Park reveals that she also had made the comparison between amore fraternal and amore conjugal, and she had considered the conflicting claims of sisters and wives not only in material, but in emotional terms.
Fraternal love could not but be important to women of the insecure, pseudo-gentry class when family circumstances manoeuvred them into celibacy. Brothers, as we have seen, had played a crucial role in the young lives of both Dorothy and Jane. Mary Wollstonecraft’s account shows how the dependency of women in Georgian times frequently threw wives and sisters into conflict. Against this background, the household at Grasmere reveals itself as an admirable, affectionate balancing of claims. Mary might, in a private letter, state her belief that the conjuga
l bond trumps the fraternal, but she does not seem to have urged her point too often, or too forcefully. She loved her sister-in-law and was considerate.
In these love letters, both William and Mary express a longing for privacy beyond what was practicable in their circumstances. William hoped to return home before Dorothy and, if other visitors did not trouble them too much – ‘I cannot say my Love with what fondness I feed on the thought of our being together without interruption day or night.’41
He also wished – since Dorothy was not with him – to have, ‘a letter for myself and of which I need only read parts to the rest of the family’. He was travelling into Wales at the time and would be in company with Mary’s sister, Sara, when such a letter reached him, but, he said, ‘I know that S[ara] will take no offense’ at hearing only part of the letter. This suggests that Dorothy would have been offended by his failing to share a letter unreservedly.42
It seems she was very touchy about such things, and here we are given an insight into her inner life which it is not possible to glimpse anywhere else. The long-married William and Mary struggled to conceal their passion from their sister, like young lovers hiding their sex-life from their parents.
Dorothy could not even be allowed to suppose that Mary would rather write to William than to her. ‘I have yet to write to Dorothy,’ Mary confessed, ‘& . . . as I can but write her a short letter; when you write to her . . . do not give her to understand that you received a longer one – this would make her uneasy.’43
Dorothy seems to have found it more painful than any of her own writing shows to share her brother with another woman. Jealousy was unacceptable: it could not be admitted to and maybe the threat of it caused her to quarrel with herself. Her self-image was one of generosity and open-heartedness; it always had been. It is easy to see why there might have been inner conflict.
Jane and Dorothy Page 34