by Paula Byrne
In Emma, Jane Austen fully explores the importance of silence, plainspeaking and non-verbal communication, offset against verbal ambiguities, equivocations, comic misunderstandings, riddles and word-games. Riddles and puns are used with great effect to exploit the comic misunderstandings between Emma and Mr Elton (his riddle on ‘woodhouse’ is blithely misinterpreted by Emma), but with the arrival of Frank Churchill we see a master game-player.
From the outset, the Knightley brothers are associated with a lack of gallantry and a love of plain-speaking, which Austen described as ‘the true English manner’, whereas Frank’s gallantry and charm are manifested by his love and mastery of word-play. He plays a flirtatious double-game with Emma and the woman he is secretly engaged to, Jane Fairfax. He makes love to Jane, but uses Emma as a blind.
In the memorable ‘Blunder’ scene Frank uses the alphabet game to communicate with Jane and to deceive Emma. He is, of course, apologizing for his blunder in divulging the gossip about Mr Perry’s carriage, which reveals to the attentive reader that he is communicating in secret with Jane. Mr Knightley, who is a close observer of people, perceives that Frank and Jane are playing a game. Emma is oblivious to the real state of play. Even worse, Frank uses the word-game to taunt Jane and please Emma, by placing the word DIXON close to Jane. The final word, which as readers we are not privy to, but which Jane Austen later revealed to her nieces and nephews, is PARDON.
Emma is also a good and clever player, more in the mould of Mary Crawford than Fanny Price. But her wit and verbal dexterity are shown to be heartless and hollow when she mocks Miss Bates on Box Hill. After all the wearying games and verbal acrobatics she has indulged in, Emma plays backgammon all evening with her father to soothe her great distress after the distressing incident, ‘giving up the sweetest hours of the twenty-four to his [her father’s] comfort’.4
Mr Knightley, the reserved and sincere Englishman, abhors subterfuge and game-playing, telling Emma at the end of the novel, ‘Mystery; Finesse – how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?’5 It’s a noble sentiment but is ironically undercut by Emma’s ‘blush of sensibility on Harriet’s account’ – for she is withholding the full truth of Harriet’s love for him. Jane Austen warns us in Emma: ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.’6 We are left wondering if Emma will ever fully disclose the truth to her future husband. The acknowledgement of the incompleteness of human disclosure strikes at the very heart of Jane Austen’s creative vision.
Jane Austen and her family loved charades, puzzles, conundrums and riddles. Her nieces and nephews left accounts of all the games they played together with their beloved aunt. There were physical games such as battledore, shuttlecock and bilbocatch (Cup and Ball) and those of skill such as spillikins (pick-up-sticks), which Austen considered ‘a very valuable part of our Household furniture’.7 She loved playing card games with children: Cribbage, Loo, Commerce, Casino, Speculation, Bragg and Nines. As we have seen, she also liked dressing-up games and private theatricals.
With no children of her own, she took her duties as aunt and godmother seriously. Austen seems to have been asked to be godmother to Anne ‘Nanny’ Littleworth’s daughter Eliza-Jane in 1789, when she was only thirteen. Anne was married to John Littleworth, who was coachman to James Austen. Jane was also witness to the marriage of John’s brother and clearly adored the extended family of the woman who had fostered the Austen children in their infancy. Later, Jane became godmother to her cousin Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth-Matilda Butler Harrison, and to her niece Louisa. After her death her gold chains were bequeathed to her godchildren. Coming from a large, loving family, she was used to having children around. Of the Austen brothers, only Henry and disabled George remained childless. James had three children, Edward eleven, Frank eleven, and Charles had eight.
Austen’s letters reveal her great love of children’s company.8 In 1805, she played shuttlecock with William Knight and reported that with practice they kept the shuttlecock in the air six times. She was good with children who were not related to her. There is a glimpse in the letters of her playing Cribbage with little Daniel Finch-Hatton, son of Lord Mansfield’s adopted daughter. Another small child, a daughter of one of her brother’s naval friends, took a fancy to her, and sat at her side while she wrote her daily letters:
She is now talking away at my side and examining the Treasures of my Writing-desk drawer; – very happy I beleive; – not at all shy of course … What is become of all the Shyness in the World? … she is a nice, natural, openhearted, affectionate girl, with all the ready civility which one sees in the best Children of the present day; – so unlike anything that I was myself at her age, that I am often all astonishment and shame.9
As a maiden aunt, she was expected to give practical help and emotional support to her female relations. Families of half-siblings and step-parents were not at all unusual with such high rates of maternal mortality. Aunts, grandmothers and sisters were depended upon to be available to motherless children. After Anna Austen’s mother died when she was a toddler, the little girl was constantly crying for ‘mama’ and was sent to Steventon to be looked after by Jane and Cassandra.
Jane knew and understood children, without being at all sentimental about them. When Elizabeth Knight died in childbed, leaving eleven grieving children behind, Jane sent for the two elder boys to stay with her at her home in Southampton. She distracted the boys with games and day trips, taking them to see a real man of war and to row on the Itchen. They played ‘spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river’.10
What made her very special was her capacity to enter into the world of children. She observed their ways and understood them. She sympathized with a niece’s acne ‘breakouts’, a nephew’s prowess in skipping (‘I hope he will continue to send me word of his improvement in the art’),11 and another’s ingenuity in pulling faces and throwing her fan in the river. She was amused at her niece Cassy’s interest in her much older cousin Anna’s romance with Benjamin Lefroy: ‘She asked a thousand questions, in her usual way – What he said to you? and what you said to him?’12
All this resonates with the knowledge of children’s behaviour she shows in Emma when the children want to be told every small detail of the Gypsies incident: ‘Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.’13
Drawing of Jane Austen’s cup and ball by Ellen Hill in her sister Constance Hill’s book Jane Austen: Her Homes and her Friends (1902)
Austen’s peripatetic life came to an end in 1809. Her wealthy brother Edward was now in possession of the ‘Great House’ at Chawton. He rented it out but arranged for his mother and sisters to take a house on his estate. It was at the junction of the two roads that went through the village, the front door opening directly on to the road, though there was a narrow enclosure to protect the house ‘from the possible shock of any runaway vehicle’.14 There were two parlours, called the dining and the drawing room, both intended originally to look out on the road. The large drawing-room window was blocked up by a bookcase when the Austen women took possession, and another was opened at the side, giving a view out on to turf and trees. The property had a reasonably sized garden with a gravel walk, long grass for mowing, an orchard, a kitchen garden and many outbuildings, which children loved to play in. The extended family, children included, often came to visit – there were enough bedrooms, albeit some of them very small. Another pleasure for the nephews and nieces was the thrill of the traffic thundering by, right outside the door: ‘Collyer’s daily coach with six horses was a sight to see! and most delightful was it to a child to have the awful stillness of night so freq
uently broken by the noise of passing carriages, which seemed sometimes, even to shake the bed.’15
The house at Chawton gave Jane Austen a secure home for the first time since her departure from Steventon eight years before. A sturdy bookcase, a green view at the side, the sound of the road to remind her of life and the city, her beloved sister at her side, room for visiting nephews and nieces. This was the stable environment that enabled her to revise Pride and Prejudice for publication, then to write Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion and the beginning of Sanditon. Chawton remained Jane Austen’s home – though one from which she frequently departed for trips to London – for eight years, until she was removed to Winchester in the last months of her life.
One of the best descriptions of Jane Austen was given by someone who knew her well in her Chawton years, Charlotte Maria Middleton. She stayed at Chawton Manor as a little girl and remembered Austen as having a ‘keen sense of humour’ that ‘oozed out very much in Mr. Bennett’s Style’: ‘She was a most kind and enjoyable person to Children but somewhat stiff and cold to strangers … my remembrance of Jane is that of her entering into all Childrens Games and liking her extremely. – We were often asked to meet her young nephews and nieces.’16
She liked children’s blunt honesty and their openness; she was amused by their malapropisms and the way they created a private language. In one letter she wrote, ‘Nunna Hat’s Love to George. – A great many People wanted to mo up in the Poach as well as me.’ George Knight was a particularly sweet toddler to whom she wrote fondly, ‘I flatter myself that itty Dordy will not forget me at least under a week. Kiss him for me.’ ‘Itty Dordy’ (Little Georgy) was how he pronounced his own name. This was the same boy who as a grown-up schoolboy came to Jane Austen to be comforted after his mother’s death, and whom she describes making and naming paper ships as his elder brother is deep in a novel, ‘twisting himself about in one of our great chairs’.17 That phrase describes so perfectly the motions of this bereaved fidgety boy and brings him alive.
To her niece Caroline she wrote: ‘Only think of your lost Dormouse being brought back to you!’ To little Cassy Esten she wrote mirror letters, ‘Ym raed Yssac, I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey.’ She encouraged their games, advised on romances and told good jokes – ‘Send my love to Cassy, – I hope she found my bed comfortable last night and has not filled it with fleas.’18
She refused to patronize children. When they became older, she wrote sensible letters that treated them as grown-ups. ‘I have always maintained the importance of Aunts,’ she wrote to her niece Fanny. To ten-year-old Caroline, she wrote, ‘Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence.’19 When Jane Austen thought she had gone too far in her criticisms of her nephews and nieces, she was quick to make amends, ‘As I wrote of my nephews with a little bitterness in my last, I think it particularly incumbent on me to do them justice now.’ As she said in another letter, ‘After having much praised or much blamed anybody, one is generally sensible of something just the reverse soon afterwards.’20
In 1983 a scrap of a letter by Jane Austen was unearthed in a library in America and published for the first time. The letter was written to her niece, Jane-Anna (known as Anna), who was very close to her aunt, having lost her own mother at the age of two. She was also struggling with being the stepsister of two younger siblings. Jane Austen tells her: ‘from the first, being born older, is a very good thing. – I wish you perseverance and success with all my heart.’21 On the reverse of the letter she writes about another child, little Charles Lefroy, ‘we thought him a very fine boy, but terribly in want of Discipline. – I hope he gets a wholesome thump, or two, whenever it is necessary.’22 The fragment is a revealing snapshot of the author and her attitude towards the younger generation. The voice is surprisingly modern and fresh, comforting one moment, teasing the other. It is not the voice of a querulous spinster, embittered by her own childlessness, which is how Jane Austen has sometimes been misrepresented.
She didn’t idealize children, and she expected good behaviour and good manners. Nor did she like being treated by her brothers as an unpaid nanny. She had great sympathy with the plight of governesses, and befriended Fanny Knight’s governess Anne Sharp. Anne was, according to Fanny, ‘good-natured’ and ‘pretty’.23 She was well educated and devoted to the Knight children, though poor health meant that she left Godmersham after only two years. Jane Austen considered her to be a close friend; she was a visitor to Chawton and they regularly corresponded. She sought Anne’s opinions of her novels: ‘Oh! I have more of such sweet flattery from Miss Sharp,’ she told Cassandra after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, which was Anne’s favourite. ‘She is an excellent kind friend.’ When Jane asked her opinion of Mansfield Park she implored her friend to be ‘perfectly honest’.24
Jane worried about her friend and cherished fantasies that one of her employers would fall in love with her: ‘I do so want him to marry her! … Oh! Sir W[illia]m – Sir Wm – how I will love you, if you will love Miss Sharp,’ she wrote in 1814.25 Her next novel, Emma, indulged that fantasy when Miss Taylor, Emma’s governess, marries widowed Mr Weston.
After Jane’s death, Cassandra sent Anne a lock of her hair and a bodkin from her sewing kit. In 2008 a presentation copy of Emma to ‘Anne Sharp’ from ‘The Author’ was discovered (it came up for auction at Bonhams). Austen was allowed only twelve presentation copies and this was the only one given to a personal friend. Anne later established a school for girls in Liverpool.26
When another governess came to take charge of the large motherless brood of Knight children, Jane showed her empathy: ‘By this time I suppose she is hard at it, governing away – poor creature! I pity her, tho’ they are my nieces.’27 Jane was often on babysitting duties herself. She took care of Charles’s two small daughters for a month. She wrote to Frank telling him that she was ‘quite sorry’ to see them go. She was pleased that time away from their doting parents had improved them: ‘Harriet in health – Cassy in manners’, and of the latter she added, ‘She will really be a very pleasing child, if they will only exert themselves a little.’28 Lack of firmness in parents was not to be admired.
Charles adored his children, and this aspect of his character is given to Captain Harville in Persuasion, who talks movingly of how it feels to leave children behind and then be reunited with them:
‘Ah!’ cried Captain Harville, in a tone of strong feeling, ‘if I could but make you comprehend what a man suffers when he takes a last look at his wife and children, and watches the boat that he has sent them off in, as long as it is in sight, and then turns away and says, “God knows whether we ever meet again!” And then, if I could convey to you the glow of his soul when he does see them again; when, coming back after a twelvemonth’s absence perhaps, and obliged to put into another port, he calculates how soon it be possible to get them there, pretending to deceive himself, and saying, “They cannot be here till such a day,” but all the while hoping for them twelve hours sooner, and seeing them arrive at last, as if Heaven had given them wings, by many hours sooner still! If I could explain to you all this, and all that a man can bear and do, and glories to do for the sake of these treasures of his existence! I speak, you know, only of such men as have hearts!’ pressing his own with emotion.29
Though in this passage Austen indulges her character’s strong paternal feeling, when it came to mothers she admired love that was rational and just rather than doting: ‘Harriot’s fondness for her [small daughter] seems just what is amiable and natural, and not foolish.’30
Jane Austen was as keen not to idealize children in her novels as she was in real life. In Sense and Sensibility she deflates one of the conventions of sensibility: the idealization of childhood innocence. She presents children as they really are, refusing to venerate them as Rousseauistic free spirits. The Steele sisters know that the way to make themselves agreeable to Lady Middleton is through courting her odious and very spoilt children. When they first arrive at Barton P
ark the Steeles come with a coachful of toys, and they indulge every whim of Anna Maria: ‘“I have a notion,” said Lucy, “you think the little Middletons rather too much indulged … I love to see children full of life and spirits; I cannot bear them if they are tame and quiet.”’ With cool irony, Elinor replies with the confession ‘that while I am at Barton Park, I never think of tame and quiet children with any abhorrence’.31
Austen was of the opinion that doting mothers could be a harmful influence. Anne Elliot in Persuasion is respected and loved by her nieces, though they clearly do not respect their own mother. Mrs Weston in Emma is described as ‘Standing in a mother’s place but without the mother’s affection to blind her’. A child can also be a plaything to a mother, as in Sense and Sensibility: ‘Mrs Parker had her child, and Mrs Jennings her carpet work.’32
Love of children is often a guide to character in the novels. Mr Knightley forgives Emma’s wrongdoing against Mr Martin when he sees her holding her baby niece in her arms: ‘though he began with grave looks and short questions, he was soon led on to talk of them all in the usual way, and to take the child out of her arms with all the unceremoniousness of perfect amity’. Mr Knightley then says, ‘If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women, and as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike.’33 By contrast, Edmund Bertram says of Mrs Norris, with lethal understatement, ‘[she] never knew how to be pleasant to children’ – a chilling indictment of her character.34