She was, over the years, less a guest at Godmersham than a relation who was sent for in time of need, helping to look after Edward’s very large family and to assist his wife, Elizabeth, when a new baby was due to arrive. Jane must have looked carefully, with a sly and intense regard, at everyday life in a great house. When she later wrote, through the thoughts of Elizabeth Bennet, that “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” it is with the full force of admiration for the power of land ownership and a wistful longing for the luxury that attends it. There is an air—coming as it does from Jane Austen, and from the morally fastidious Elizabeth Bennet—just a little vague and unspecified about that word “something,” and we have to let it fall on our ears with all its tones of stunning surprise and exuberance, and certainly a measure of confusion about what material possessions could bring.
Jane Austen’s satirical powers would have been stirred by the exuberant culture of the newly rich, and everything we know about her tells us she would not necessarily have hidden her response. Elizabeth, Edward’s wife, was not fond of her clever sister-in-law, preferring Cassandra, and she made that distinction clear, although Edward’s adopted mother, Mrs. Knight, always treated Jane with kindness and respect.
Probably Austen never got over the sense of being the poor visiting sister. Her favorite niece, Fanny, recalled many years later what Aunt Jane was like. This recollection was put down in 1869, almost fifty years after Jane Austen’s death, when Fanny was an elderly woman writing to a younger sister who would not have remembered her aunt’s visits.
Yes my love it is very true that Aunt Jane from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent, & if she had lived 50 years later she would have been in many respects more suitable to our more refined tastes. They were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level so far as refinement goes—but I think in later life their intercourse with Mrs. Knight (who was very fond of & kind to them) improved them both & Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of “common-ness” (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined, at least in intercourse with people in general.
Both the Aunts (Cassandra & Jane) were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent & the kindness of Mrs. Knight, who used often to have one or the other of the sisters staying with her, they would have been, tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society & its ways. If you hate all this I beg yr. Pardon, but I felt it at my pen’s end, & it chose to come along & speak the truth.
The letter, so cozily couched, stings the heart. It is a measure of the affection in which Jane Austen’s readers hold her, that they are almost always offended by the tone and contents of this letter. The snobbery, the casual disregard, the disloyalty of a beloved niece—all this seems intolerable, even though Jane Austen was perfectly capable of writing blunt letters herself. Perhaps Fanny in her old age had forgotten what her aunt was really like, giving way to an accretion of images that surround departed family members, especially those who have achieved a degree of recognition that surprises and shocks succeeding generations. It may be—there are signs—that Fanny was on the brink of dementia. Or perhaps—and this has to be taken into account—there is a measure of truth at the bottom of her assessment.
What exactly is refinement? And in what might Jane Austen’s presumed lack of refinement lie? Her clothes would have been simpler and fewer than those worn by her brother Edward’s family and friends: During this period wealthy women changed their dress several times a day, a habit that would have been impossible for the Austen sisters. She had country rather than town manners and valued openness over concealment and sense over sentimentality. Her familiarity with servants might have been differently gauged. Her use of language may have been sharper, more direct, lacking the extravagant locutions and fashionable references of Edward’s circle. She lived, it might almost be said, in a different England, a simpler time, before the elaborate courtesies and distinctions of the Victorian age had come to flower. She was used to dining in the midafternoon, not at the newly fashionable hour of half past six. And life at Godmersham, its abundance and wastefulness, may have stimulated in her behavior psychological defenses that were interpreted as antisocial.
Refinement is relative, of course. Jane Austen once wrote to Cassandra about some acquaintances, how “they do not know how to be particular” (her italics), meaning that some lapse of courtesy had been committed, some social roughness of manner displayed. We know she was given to careful distinctions of behavior, writing about Mrs. Armstrong, the mother of an acquaintance in Lyme Regis, who “sat darning a pr of Stockings the whole of my visit . . .” This breach of etiquette, similar perhaps to pulling out one’s knitting at a contemporary dinner party, showed a hostess’s unwillingness to devote complete attention to a guest, preferring to get on with more immediate and practical tasks.
Aunt Jane once wrote that she considered the young Fanny to be “almost another sister” and “quite after one’s own heart,” which makes the “Yes my love” letter particularly bitter. Fanny’s word “mediocre” is especially cruel, and more so because we know that Fanny appreciated her aunt’s genius. And yet, Jane Austen was eccentric to her time. Another niece, Marianne Knight, remembers how her aunt, working quietly by the fire at Godmersham, would mysteriously burst into laughter and hurry across the room to write something down, then return to her place. Unexplained laughter, erratic movement—these would have been enough in an age of highly codified behavior to raise concern about Aunt Jane’s lack of refinement.
Undoubtedly Jane Austen benefited from her visits to Kent, a place, she once wrote with sweeping exaggeration, where everyone is rich. A social window was opened to her, and it was one she could make ready use of in her writing. Nonetheless, there are those who believe that her poor-relative status and the suffering this caused her may have injured her self-regard and contributed to a gathering sense of bitterness. Without a doubt she was condescended to. The hairdresser who came to prepare the Godmersham ladies for an evening party offered the visiting Jane Austen a discount, recognizing her at once as a poor relation, someone to be pitied and accommodated. We know that during one prolonged stay at Godmersham, she expressed in the most piercing tones a longing for home, for the simplicity of Steventon (and later Chawton), with its opportunity for open conversation and simple routines, and for the dependable, satisfying companionship of her sister and mother and a few agreeable neighbors.
Probably she came to believe that the two worlds—wealthy Kent and familiar, humble Hampshire—were irreconcilable. She belonged to one and not to the other. There may well have been pain in exclusion and humiliation, but there was always the pleasure of going home, to the place where she knew she would be welcomed.
8
WE THINK OF Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen’s sunniest novel, and yet it was written during a period of unhappiness. No letters survive from the year 1797, and this is a clue, though an unreliable one. Cassandra, we know, was recovering from the death of her fiancé, and Jane from her disappointment over Tom Lefroy. The household at Steventon had shrunk. Visitors continued to arrive, but the ongoing bustle of life in the country rectory had faded. Probably there was less noise, less laughter. Theatricals in the barn were a thing of the past. The Austen parents were growing older, and finances, too, were thinner.
Yet from this difficult time sprang a fast-paced, exuberant, much loved novel with a new kind of heroine, a young woman of warmth and intelligence who, by the flex of her own mind, remakes her future and makes it spectacularly. The detachment of Jane Austen’s imaginative flight from her personal concerns is extraordinary, even given the fiction writer’s license. Pride a
nd Prejudice can be seen as a palimpsest, with Jane Austen’s real life engraved roughly, enigmatically, beneath its surface. Elizabeth Bennet, like Jane Austen, is in her early twenties and has an older sister, Jane, whom she adores. Jane and Elizabeth’s parents share a problem with the Austen parents: how to find husbands for daughters of small fortune. Elizabeth also has Jane Austen’s quickness of mind, but she is not Jane Austen. The Bennet household is more comfortable, less isolated, and employs a larger number of servants. Elizabeth’s Longbourn is not Steventon, and agriculture is not a felt presence. Mr. Bennet, unlike the Reverend George Austen, has no profession. The Bennet family members are more seriously divided in their interests and in their characters than the Austens. It is less possible to imagine them, for example, merging their energies and putting on a play for one another’s entertainment. Their conversation never achieves the Austen elegance and erudition. Their social awkwardness, partly because of Mrs. Bennet’s risible nature and Mr. Bennet’s morose obstinacy, is an exaggeration of the Austens’ unease.
Where then did Jane Austen find the material for her novel? Every writer draws on his or her own experience; where else could the surface details of a novel’s structure come from, especially a novel as assured in its texture as Pride and Prejudice? But it is not every novelist’s tactic to draw directly on personal narrative, and Jane Austen, clearly, is not a writer who touches close to the autobiographical core. There is, famously, the gift of an amber cross from her brother Charles and its fictional translation, in which it becomes the topaz cross Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is given by her brother William. But this is a mere narrative point, not a whole narrative parcel. Some readers have found a resemblance between the fictional Mr. Collins and the real Samuel Blackall, but so little is known about Mr. Blackall that the likeness remains pure conjecture. It is also suggested that the wicked, ruthless Lady Susan is drawn from stories about a wicked Lady Craven, the mother of the Austens’ neighbor Mrs. Lloyd, but if this is so, Jane Austen has taken the character of the bad mother and given her intelligence and energy.
It’s true that Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey experiences Bath society much as Jane Austen did, and almost loses her writing desk just as Jane Austen lost hers, probably during the period in which she was writing Northanger Abbey. But these explicitly matching autobiographical moments are rare.
We talk sometimes about “the world of Jane Austen,” even though there is no such nicely furnished and easily identified world. Or, rather, there is a specific culture Austen inhabited, that century-lapping time frame 1775-1817, but it is a time too variable in its components and too poised for change for us to think of a seamless and stable “world.” Much of what she puts down on the page is an England frozen in time, idealized, universalized.
Her novels are set in contemporary England, but her characters and their adventures are of the imagination—so much so that it might be thought to be a deliberate choice on her part to separate life and literature. She may, like many novelists who preceded and followed her, have been anxious to avoid injuring or embarrassing others by borrowing the material of their lives. The cruelty that colored her juvenilia had moderated, and she had become, if we can use her own word, more “particular.”
Undoubtedly, like her contemporary novelists, she also saw novel making as an excursion to an invented world, rather than a meditation on her own. She mentions real places—London, Bath, Lyme Regis—but her heroines live in fictional villages—Highbury, Langbourn, Kellynch.
With great clarity, she marks off the territory she is willing or unwilling to tackle. Whole widths of human activity are excluded. The presence of the military, so crucial to a book like Pride and Prejudice, is sketched in, but the professional activities of soldiers, the historical context, is left out. There is no mention in the novels of new discoveries in science, though we know the Austens were familiar with Edward Jenner and his work with the cowpox vaccine. She reports faithfully the rhythms and concerns of daily discourse, but never strays into those conversations to which she could not have been a direct witness. We hear women talking to men, women talking to other women and to children, but we are not admitted to those closeted conversations when only men are present. In the same way, declarations of love between men and women are abstracted, summarized and indirectly delivered. As for sexual life, it is assumed rather than alluded to.
One of the widest areas of absence is the religious life, and this has led some to think that Jane Austen herself was an unbeliever. A daughter of the manse, a person who attended church with great regularity and took part in family prayers, Austen says not a word in her novels about the consolation of spiritual life. No one prays, no one blesses. No one is caught in the midst of worship. There is no evidence that she and Cassandra, in all the hours they spent together, discussed their faith or lack of it. It is true that the novels—and her life—are crowded with clergy. There is the good Dr. Shirley in Persuasion, the ridiculous Mr. Elton in Emma, the wise and witty Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and always, of course, the presence of her own father, who unlike many lax churchmen of his day, lived among his parishioners as a Christian model. Mansfield Park examines, to some degree, the question of church ordination (at least this was Jane Austen’s intention), but nowhere in the novels do we feel a surge of communion with the divine and certainly no trace of sentimental or platitudinous sermonizing. Her letters reflect, but only indirectly, a conventional belief in an afterlife, suggesting that she was able to accept the death of family and friends with some equanimity—but these are polite letters, letters of form. She did write a few prayers, all of them beautifully but conventionally composed and meant for the family’s devotions:
Above all other blessings oh! God, for ourselves and our fellow-creatures, we implore thee to quicken our sense of thy mercy in the redemption of the world, of the value of that holy religion in which we have been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect, throw away the salvation thou hast given us, nor be Christians only in name.
That exuberant “oh!” in the first line has Jane Austen’s energy, and the reference to a “religion in which we have been brought up” hints at Jane Austen’s spiritual obligation, but the rest of the prayer might have been written by any educated person of the time.
The exclusion of the religious impulse from her work may be no more than a belief that one’s sacred life is a private matter, an attitude consistent with her times; the nineteenth-century evangelistic wave was just making itself known, and it was not a movement she felt comfortable with. Both piety and fervor would have embarrassed her, and others must have perceived this disinclination. Her cousin the Reverend Edward Cooper, who became an evangelical, wrote her cheerful and amusing letters—“He dares not write otherwise to me,” she said, and the reader can almost imagine her chin going up and her eyebrows raised.
Still, it seems curious that she, a daughter and sister of clergymen, should not have touched more closely on the force, or at least the presence, of the spiritual in everyday life. Her brother Henry, shortly after her death, described her as being “thoroughly religious and devout,” but her letters and novels present a more secular being.
Nor did she use much of the extraordinary dramatic material that was immediately available to her. Tact, and tenderness for her sister, may have kept her from creating a fiancé who dies of yellow fever shortly before his wedding. Nowhere in her novels is there a clergyman (like her father) who also keeps a school, one of whose pupils, Lord Lymington, exhibited dramatically disordered psychological symptoms. Nor is there any sideways reference to the extraordinary adventures of her cousin Eliza and Eliza’s mother, Philadelphia.
It is a cliché to think of Jane Austen’s life as being without event, since insanity, treason, illegitimacy, and elopement invaded her quiet family circle, and even, once or twice, criminal proceedings. In 1799 her aunt, Jane Leigh-Perrot, was accused of stealing a piece of lace from a Bath shop. For this presumed crime she was imprisoned for sever
al weeks and tried at Taunton assizes, where she was eventually acquitted. The case was widely reported in the press, and it is impossible that Jane Austen would not have followed the developments day by day. Mrs. Austen, in fact, offered to send her two daughters to the county jail at Ilchester to keep company with their aunt, an offer that was refused—almost certainly to the relief of the Austen sisters.
To many novelists, this episode, with its class confrontation and its soaring sense of injustice and cruelty, would have presented the basis for powerful fiction. Not a mention of it appears in Jane Austen’s fiction. Either it was unacceptable for her to drag in and further enlarge family difficulties or else she had other narratives she preferred to press forward. “She drew from nature; but whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals,” said her brother Henry in his Biographical Notice, which prefaced Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818.
Ralph Waldo Emerson remained puzzled by Jane Austen’s novels, unable to grasp their value, complaining that they were, in the end, about nothing more than the making of marriages. Her attachment to her subject matter, as book after book rolled under her pen, may puzzle contemporary readers too, though we read her presumed narrowness in the question of subject matter differently today, seeing the idea of marriage in an enlarged metaphorical sense: a homecoming, a bold glance at the wider world of connection and commitment. Emerson may have been troubled by her claim to be a witness to what he saw as a minor narrative arc, since Jane Austen herself never married and perhaps was never entirely swept up into the full sweetness of courtship. But Austen’s life and fiction rode different rails. Pride and Prejudice, that happiest of novels, erupted from a period of sadness, of personal disappointment. Elizabeth Bennet, a creation of Jane Austen’s pen, achieved what Austen must have craved in her own life, particularly at the end of the eighteenth century when personal sadness clouded her consciousness, taking from her grasp liberation, love, wealth, happiness, resolution, and—most especially—a sense of control over her own existence.
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