by John Mullan
Persuasion, I. i
So reliable are the misjudgements of casting directors as to the appropriate ages of actors chosen to perform in film and TV adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels that new conventions have been established. Even in the minds of many who have read Pride and Prejudice, an impression of the age of Mrs Bennet, say, or of Mr Collins has become settled. It would surprise many to be told that Elizabeth Bennet’s mother is probably only a little way past her fortieth birthday (her eldest daughter is twenty-one, and it is likely that she married when not much more than eighteen). The matter is significant early in the novel, when Mr Bennet makes a joke about the risk of Mr Bingley being attracted to her instead of one of her daughters (I. i). The joke would be empty if his wife were in her fifties or sixties. Instead, Mrs Bennet’s easy dismissal of his suggestion (‘I do not pretend to be any thing extraordinary now’) bespeaks her confidence that she does still possess allure. Equally, many admirers of Pride and Prejudice think of Mr Collins as middle-aged. In the 1940 Hollywood film the role was taken by British character actor Melville Cooper, then aged forty-four. The trend was set. In Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC adaptation Mr Collins was played by David Bamber, then in his mid-forties. In the 2005 film the role was taken by a slightly more youthful Tom Hollander, aged thirty-eight. Yet Mr Collins is introduced to us as a ‘tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty’ (I. xiii). Adaptors miss something by getting his age wrong. His solemnity and sententiousness are much better coming from someone so ‘young’. Middle-aged is what he would like to sound, rather than what he is.
Age naturally matters to characters in Austen’s novels because these novels are about getting married, and the age of a young woman (but perhaps also a man) will determine her (or his) marriage prospects. Age matters to the novelist because she uses it to shape the reader’s expectations. The facts that Austen gives us about her characters’ ages are like dramatic instructions. Take Sense and Sensibility. In Ang Lee’s 1995 film, Emma Thompson, then aged thirty-six, played Elinor Dashwood; Gemma Jones, then aged fifty-two, played her mother. But Elinor is nineteen. Readers have long differed over whether her composure is admirable or unsettling, but it is all the more striking given her age. Austen’s own phrasing acknowledges the prematurity of Elinor’s ‘strength of understanding, and coolness of judgement’ (I. i). These qualify her, ‘though only nineteen’, to guide her mother. Equally, Mrs Dashwood is just forty, a fact that matters a good deal in the novel’s dialogue. In the second chapter of the novel, Mr and Mrs John Dashwood discuss how much Mrs Dashwood might cost them if they settle an annuity – an annual payment for the course of her life – on her. ‘She is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty’, points out Mrs John Dashwood (I. ii).
Later, after we and the Dashwoods have first met Colonel Brandon, a ‘silent and grave’ man who is ‘the wrong side of five and thirty’, Marianne and her mother discuss Mrs Jennings’s jokes about a possible romance between him and Marianne. Mrs Dashwood, ‘who could not think a man five years younger than herself, so exceedingly ancient as he appeared to the youthful fancy of her daughter’, tries to convince her daughter that Mrs Jennings is not actually ridiculing his age (I. viii). When Marianne talks of Colonel Brandon’s ‘age and infirmity’, her mother laughs at the apparent ‘miracle’ of her own life having been ‘extended to the advanced age of forty’. We know from Mrs Dashwood at the end of Chapter iii that Marianne is ‘not seventeen’. She is youthfully absurd in her sense of the importance of age, going on to say that a twenty-seven-year-old woman could only marry a thirty-five-year-old man in order to perform ‘the offices of a nurse’, in return for financial security. Elinor, even while she disagrees with her sister, concedes that ‘Perhaps . . . thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together.’ It is an unnecessary fragment of dialogue if Austen had not wanted the reader to feel some sense of compromise at the end of the novel. We are supposed to remember this judgement when Marianne and Colonel Brandon do eventually marry, so that we know just how far Marianne has been aged, metaphorically speaking, by her errors and her sufferings.
Austen’s is an age-sensitive world, in which some people’s age sensitivity is wrong-headed. Modern readers do not have to study any social history to understand how the novels use information about characters’ ages. Any social historian, on the other hand, who tried to extract social conventions from the novels would have to be very wary. A good example is the most extraordinary reflection on the significance of a woman’s age in all of Austen’s novels, in the fourth chapter of Persuasion. We have just been told of Lady Russell’s response, eight years earlier, to the engagement of Anne Elliot to Captain Wentworth. She was dismayed to see her favourite ‘throw herself away at nineteen, involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him’ (I. iv). Anne’s age is repeated, as Lady Russell must have repeated it to herself. Not, as we might now think, because she was too young to be getting married, but because she would have been turning her back on the prospect of a finer match. Anne was ‘so young; known to so few’. That ‘so young’ is Lady Russell’s thought, and the next phrase, ‘known to so few’, clarifies her logic: ‘at nineteen’ she has every chance of attracting a grander and richer husband – a husband, if Lady Russell is to be gratified, with aristocratic pedigree. But this was not to be. Persuaded to break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth, Anne lost ‘bloom and spirits’ and no noble suitor appeared. When she was ‘about two-and-twenty’ she received a proposal from Charles Musgrove, eldest son of a local landed gentleman. Lady Russell was in favour of her accepting, and the novel’s explanation of this gives us an alarming glimpse of a young woman’s wasting assets: ‘however Lady Russell might have asked yet for something more, while Anne was nineteen, she would have rejoiced to see her at twenty-two so respectably removed from the partialities and injustice of her father’s house, and settled so permanently near herself.’ When she was nineteen, Charles Musgrove would not have been good enough; when she is twenty-two, he is entirely desirable. At twenty-two she must, according to Lady Russell’s thinking, already be prepared to compromise. Her allure is fast diminishing.
This must surely be Lady Russell’s anxious judgement rather than the author’s. Charlotte Heywood, the heroine-to-be of Sanditon, is ‘a very pleasing young woman of two and twenty’ when the novel begins (Ch. 2). There is no suggestion that she is anything other than ‘young’. Jane Bennet is twenty-two at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, and clearly still glowing. Yet there is a hint in one of Austen’s letters that nineteen is indeed thought to be the prime age for a young woman, when she characterises a Hampshire acquaintance. ‘Miss H. is an elegant, pleasing, pretty looking girl, about 19 I suppose, or 19 & ½, or 19 ¼, with flowers in her head, & Music at her fingers ends’ (Letters, 73). The joke seems to be that her appeal rather depends on her not yet being twenty. Without this sense of the brevity of a young woman’s maximum allure, there would be no point to Elizabeth Bennet’s brilliant riposte to Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s impertinent enquiry as to her age: ‘With three younger sisters grown up . . . your Ladyship can hardly expect me to own it’ (II. vi). Lady Catherine responds that, being no more than twenty, Elizabeth has no reason not to declare her age: she is still at her marketable peak.
In fact, the average age of women marrying for the first time in Jane Austen’s lifetime was probably twenty-three or twenty-four.1 We should not trust the judgement of Anne’s highly fallible adviser and surrogate mother Lady Russell. It was she who ‘persuaded’ the heroine to relinquish the man she truly loved. But we are to think that her reasoning is narrow-minded rather than merely absurd. Her concession to the match with Charles Musgrove would make no sense if it were irrational. Three years might make a big difference to a woman’s marriageability. And, indeed, twenty-two would already be older than any of Austen’s other heroines when they receive their proposals. Elinor Dashwood is nineteen at the beginn
ing of Sense and Sensibility and is engaged to Edward Ferrars nine months later. Elizabeth Bennet is twenty when Mr Darcy first proposes to her, and she accepts him after another six months have passed. When the Crawfords arrive at Mansfield, in July, Fanny Price has ‘just reached her eighteenth year’ (from later references, this evidently means that she is eighteen years old). Henry Crawford proposes to her six months later. At the end of Mansfield Park we do not know how long it is before Edmund asks her to marry him because the author has decided to ‘abstain from dates upon this occasion’ (III. xvii). We might infer a year or so, in which case Fanny would be nineteen or twenty when she is finally claimed by the man she loves. Emma Woodhouse is twenty at the beginning of Emma and is united to Mr Knightley a year later. Catherine Morland is the youngest bride of all: engaged to Henry Tilney at the age of seventeen, and married less than a year afterwards. (One of the peculiarities of these novels is that most last about a year, though not one of them mentions any heroine having a birthday.)
Age sensitivity is no mere social convention: it is built into the structure of Austen’s novels. Never more so than in Persuasion, with the early vanishing of Anne’s ‘bloom’ and Sir Walter’s certainty that she would never now be courted by any aristocratic suitor. His folly in thinking his favourite daughter Elizabeth ‘as blooming as ever’ at the age of twenty-nine is the insensitivity to age of mere vanity (I. i). Age cannot be evaded. Elizabeth’s ‘approach to the years of danger’ is both her thought and the author’s confirmation of it. The pressure is cranked up by our knowledge that Elizabeth yearns for a proposal from a suitably elevated suitor ‘within the next twelvemonth or two’. She thinks of herself in a race against time. She hates seeing that page in the Baronetage, ‘with the date of her own birth’ but without the record of a marriage. While Sir Walter believes his and his daughter’s ageing to be suspended, he is highly attentive to the ages of others. To illustrate his antipathy to the navy he tells Mr Shepherd of the Admiral whom he imagines past sixty, when he is truly only forty (I. iii). When he hears of Admiral Croft’s reputed gout, Sir Walter calls him ‘Poor old gentleman’, though he is considerably younger than Sir Walter himself (II. vi). He calls Mrs Smith ‘old and sickly’, thinking her forty – though she is in fact thirty (II. v). Even when Anne tells him her true age, he insists on describing her as ‘between thirty and forty’ – when she is but a year older than his precious, ‘handsome’ eldest daughter.
Judgements of what is inevitable at any given age are invariably ridiculous failures of imagination.
There is no dodging age, and Austen provides the facts of her characters’ ages as primary information – rather like newspapers of today, which conventionally append the age of a person to the first mention of his or her name. She was unusual in doing this. In novels of the period it is conventional to be told the age of a heroine in the opening chapters, but rare to be told the age of any other character. Austen is singular in requiring us to notice the ages of almost all her major characters. The information is interesting because of the dramatic use she makes of it. Her characters think and talk about how old people are, and her novels are comically true to the self-centredness of their different ideas of age. What is old? Emma’s protégée Harriet Smith, aged seventeen, has her own ideas about this, ideas strong enough for her almost to contradict the wisdom offered by her mentor. Harriet is appalled to hear Emma’s recommendation that Robert Martin should wait six years before he think of marrying. ‘Six years hence! dear Miss Woodhouse, he would be thirty years old!’ (I. iv). The recommendation is deceitful: Emma pretends to disinterested judgement when in fact she is trying to put Robert Martin’s marriage beyond Harriet’s hopes. Clearly thirty seems an advanced age to Harriet. She goes on, later in the same conversation, to describe the newly married Mr Weston as ‘almost an old man’, being ‘between forty and fifty’. Given Mr Weston’s sprightliness – he is always walking somewhere – Harriet’s horror at the vale of age that he is entering is comic. Yet her sense that thirty is very late to be marrying is not so foolish. Emma talks as if marriage were merely a prudential undertaking, while Harriet unguardedly speaks from deeper needs. If the choice of a sexual partner is all or nothing, why not choose when you are in your prime?
Judgements of what is inevitable at any given age are invariably ridiculous failures of imagination. ‘A woman of seven and twenty . . . can never hope to feel or inspire affection again,’ declares Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility, I. viii). Persuasion, in which the heroine who has lost her bloom is exactly this age, might be a retort. Except that age still matters. In Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Lucas is twenty-seven when she snares a husband, and her age spurs her to waste no time when he hoves into view. She becomes the only woman in all Jane Austen’s fiction to marry a man younger than herself. The novelist expects us to notice the slight difference between her age and that of her husband (of about two years). It further emphasises Charlotte’s achievement, with little money and no beauty to assist her. It is not clear that in Austen’s world it was any more unusual for a wife to be older than her husband than it might be today. In 1792 her brother James married thirty-year-old Anne Mathew, his first wife, when he was twenty-seven. Her brother Henry married his cousin Eliza in 1797 when he was twenty-six and she was ten years older than him. James Austen, whose wife Anne died in 1795, had already proposed to Eliza unsuccessfully in 1796.2 The pattern was to continue after Austen’s death. A year after his first wife, Mary, died in July 1823, her naval brother Frank married his second wife, Martha Lloyd (elder sister of his brother James’s second wife Mary). When they married, Frank was fifty-four and Martha was sixty-two or sixty-three. Jane Austen herself was almost twenty-seven when she received a proposal from twenty-one-year-old Harris Bigg-Wither in 1802, and might have received a proposal aged twenty-nine from clergyman Edward Bridges, three years younger than her, in 1805.3
The predatory protagonist of Austen’s Lady Susan (an early epistolary tale unpublished in the author’s lifetime) is said by her sister-in-law to be thirty-five but to look ten years younger (Letter 6). She is well able to ensnare the twenty-three-year-old Reginald De Courcy, and most of the other characters worry that he will indeed marry her. ‘Our difference of age must be an insuperable objection,’ he reassures his father (Letter 14). Yet the story relies on the possibility that he is wrong. Contradicting even more resoundingly Marianne’s judgements about a woman’s marriageability after her mid-twenties is the union that opens Emma. The new Mrs Weston, who first joined the Woodhouses as a young governess for the infant Emma and her sister, was with the family for sixteen years, so must be in her mid-thirties. Our realisation of this matters. We are to acknowledge the luck for Miss Taylor, apparently embarked on a lifetime as a superior servant, in finding what Mr Knightley calls ‘independence’ so late in the day. The novel opens into a discussion of this luck, with Mr Knightley telling Mr Woodhouse that his daughter ‘knows how very acceptable it must be at Miss Taylor’s time of life to be settled in a home of her own’ (I. i). ‘Miss Taylor’s time of life’ is, implicitly, not the usual one at which to be netting a husband. Later, we should be aware again of Mrs Weston’s age so that we see the suspect glitter of Frank Churchill’s gallantry when he tells Emma in their first conversation that, anticipating meeting his father’s new wife, he had ‘not expected more than a very tolerably well-looking woman of a certain age’, but had found his stepmother to be ‘a pretty young woman’ (II. v). At the age of thirty-five, the author was herself the object of a similar flourish of flattery on the part of Wyndham Knatchbull, who, at a London evening gathering, apparently called her ‘A pleasing looking young woman’ (Letters, 72). She reported the comment to Cassandra, adding ‘that must do—one cannot pretend to anything better now—thankful to have it continued a few years longer’. Coming from Knatchbull, a London merchant in his sixties, the compliment was more genuine than if it had come from a Frank Churchill, a keen-eyed young man in his early twenties.
For most of Emma, Mrs Weston is pregnant. It is not clear when exactly she tells anyone, but widespread knowledge is suggested in the course of one of Miss Bates’s effusions at the ball at the Crown Inn. ‘She was now met by Mrs. Weston.—“Very well, I thank you, ma’am. I hope you are quite well. Very happy to hear it. So afraid you might have a headach!—seeing you pass by so often, and knowing how much trouble you must have”’ (III. ii). The ‘trouble’ here seems likely to be the endurance of a first pregnancy in middle age. By now Mrs Weston is in the seventh month of pregnancy, so her condition is likely to be evident to all. We can infer the pleased surprise at her news among her friends, including Emma, and share the apprehension as the expected birth of her baby approaches. Her age gives an extra force to the manner in which the arrival of her daughter is announced. ‘Mrs. Weston’s friends were all made happy by her safety.’ ‘Safety’ would always be a consideration – two of Austen’s sisters-in-law and any number of acquaintances died in childbirth – but here it signals her friends’ worries about her having a first child so late. Mr Weston’s age is also noticed. When we are told in the novel’s first chapter that he is a ‘suitable age’ to marry Emma’s friend, it sounds much like Emma’s own judgement. Well into his forties, he is the right age to be marrying a woman who is well out of youth. When he becomes a father again, more than two decades after his first wife gave birth to Frank, we find Emma considering how his daughter will be ‘a great comfort to Mr. Weston as he grew older—and even Mr. Weston might be growing older ten years hence’ (III. xvii). As she entertains herself with the warming thought of the more sedentary Mr Weston solaced by ‘the freaks and the fancies’ of his child, we are invited to contrast the image with her relationship with her own elderly father. The gap of years here is a kind of chasm. ‘The evil of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr. Woodhouse had not married early) was much increased by his constitution and habits’ (I. i).