by John Mullan
When Jane visits Miss Bingley in London, she is made to realise that she cannot stay long ‘as Caroline and Mrs Hurst were going out’ (II. iii). The implication, unperceived by Jane, is that Caroline Bingley has pre-arranged with her sister to extract her from a tricky interview. Again, they have been talking together. When Elizabeth and her aunt, Mrs Gardiner, arrive at Pemberley to visit Georgiana Darcy, she is in the saloon, ‘sitting there with Mrs Hurst and Miss Bingley’ (III. iii). They have clearly arranged to try to fight Elizabeth off. Miss Bingley confesses the confederacy when she deplores to Mr Darcy the supposed alteration in Elizabeth’s appearance since their last meeting. ‘She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again’ (III. iii). The fact that this malign pair are always scheming together should allow us to correct what is surely a printer’s error in all the standard editions of Pride and Prejudice. In Volume III Chapter xiii, where Jane recognises how she and Bingley were kept from meeting each other while both were in London, she explains, ‘It must have been his sister’s doing’ (III. xiii). But she immediately adds, ‘They were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me.’ ‘They’ were up to something: she and Elizabeth are thinking of both sisters, who have always been scheming together, and Austen must surely have meant ‘sisters’’ (plural possessive) not ‘sister’s’ (singular possessive).
Sisterly togetherness can be deceptive. Maria and Julia Bertram seem to come as a pair, until we see that they are really rivals. They have ‘their own apartments’ at Mansfield Park (I. xvi) – all the grandeur that space can provide – and true apartness becomes natural to them. They begin in concert, alternating in their reports of Fanny’s ignorance (I. ii). They go out together as ‘belles of the neighbourhood’ (I. iv). But then come the Crawfords, and the casting of that play. The intimacy between the sisters is what allows Julia to know that she is being fobbed off with an undesirable part. When Henry Crawford asks her to play Amelia, she looks at Maria. ‘Maria’s countenance was to decide it; if she were vexed and alarmed—but Maria looked all serenity and satisfaction’ (I. xiv). Theirs is an antagonistic union: they know each other, as we say, all too well.
The sister with whom she was used to be on easy terms was now become her greatest enemy . . . With no material fault of temper, or difference of opinion, to prevent their being very good friends while their interests were the same, the sisters, under such a trial as this, had not affection or principle enough to make them merciful or just, to give them honour or compassion. (I. xvii)
These are sisters reared together as a proud pair who have long since ceased to talk to each other.
Persuasion offers us the one hint of sisterly talk that excludes the heroine but is neither conspiratorial nor rivalrous. Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove may be fairly empty-headed girls, but Anne envies them ‘that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters’ (I. v). Close in age (nineteen and twenty) and schooled together, they have an easy – we might imagine somewhat giggly – closeness. When Captain Wentworth becomes a regular visitor to the Musgrove home and the dancing begins, we glimpse the possibility of a Bertram scenario: ‘as for Henrietta and Louisa, they both seemed so entirely occupied by him, that nothing but the continued appearance of the most perfect good-will between themselves could have made it credible that they were not decided rivals’ (I. viii). But the potential rivalry evaporates exactly because of their habit of talking to each other. On the walk with Anne, Mary Musgrove, Charles Musgrove and Wentworth, they find themselves suddenly in sight of Winthrop, where Henrietta’s discarded suitor Charles Hayter lives. Mary, disliking this liaison, wants to turn back.
Henrietta, conscious and ashamed, and seeing no cousin Charles walking along any path, or leaning against any gate, was ready to do as Mary wished; but ‘No!’ said Charles Musgrove, and ‘No, no!’ cried Louisa more eagerly, and taking her sister aside, seemed to be arguing the matter warmly. (I. x)
This moment of pressing sisterly talk – of witnessed intimacy – enables Henrietta’s change of heart. We naturally assume from the exchange that Louisa knows her sister’s true feelings: Henrietta has talked to her of them before now. Her awkwardness conquered, Henrietta goes with her brother to call on the Hayters and her future is happily decided.
All Austen’s heroines have sisters. Sense and Sensibility is unique is giving us, at first, the thoughts of both of them when they talk privately together. Marianne smiles ‘within herself’ when Elinor says that Edward has a taste for drawing (I. iv). Then later in the same conversation Elinor ‘was sorry for the warmth she had been betrayed into, in speaking of him’ (I. iv). This is confidential talk indeed: the sisters discuss Elinor’s feelings for Edward, and Marianne finds out that they are not engaged. Yet despite the movement between viewpoints the conversation is unbalanced. Elinor’s measured sentences are set against Marianne’s histrionic exclamations: ‘Cold-hearted Elinor!’ It will not be long before private speech between the sisters is reported entirely from Elinor’s point of view. In a novel so concerned with secrecy, it is telling that, while Elinor and Marianne are often alone together, attempts at conversation are often stopped short. ‘“Marianne, may I ask?”—“No, Elinor,” she replied, “ask nothing; you will soon know all.”’ (II. vii). When Marianne does finally tell Elinor the truth about her relationship with Willoughby, it is an outpouring that permits no actual exchange between the two. After her recovery from her near-fatal illness, Marianne has, notoriously, learned to talk to her sister in an entirely new way. Back in Devon, the two sisters go for a walk together, Marianne ‘leaning on Elinor’s arm’ (III. x). The younger sister embarks on a flow of self-reproval couched in balanced Johnsonian sentences such as she would once have scorned.
There are, in fact, only five significant conversations between Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. In Pride and Prejudice we are given twelve private conversations between Elizabeth and Jane. Their retreat into each other’s company is a recurrent feature of the novel. Volume II Chapter xvii begins, ‘Elizabeth’s impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could no longer be overcome . . .’ (the news is Darcy’s proposal and Wickham’s perfidy). This is typical. The sisters are constantly looking for opportunities to be alone together. Jane is Elizabeth’s ‘willing listener’ (II. xvii), even if their conversations commonly stage the clash between Elizabeth’s candour (in our sense of unsentimental truth telling) and Jane’s ‘candour’ (in Austen’s sense of thinking the best of people). In their crowded house, they have to spend time finding places to talk. One of their haunts is the shrubbery, where Elizabeth tells Jane about Darcy’s supposed cruelty to Wickham in the shrubbery (I. xvii). They take their moments in what spaces they can, sometimes simply having to ‘walk out’ from the house in order to be able to communicate with each other (III. vii).
Such communication is unusual in Austen’s fiction, even where sisters like each other. In Mansfield Park Fanny Price returns to her family home in Portsmouth, to find, as well as much discord, a new ‘intimacy’ with her sister Susan (III. ix). ‘Susan was her only companion and listener’ (III. xiii). But Austen strangely muffles the relationship. Before this conversational kinship is established, we do hear Susan speak, complaining mostly about the running of the household. Once she and Fanny become companions, no word of dialogue between the sisters is given us. There is some sisterly talk similarly missing from Emma. When Emma’s sister Isabella visits Hartfield for Christmas, she speaks a good deal, but from Chapters xi to xvii she says no word of directly quoted dialogue to Emma herself. The sisters speak at opposite ends of a crowded room, or through intermediaries. Emma, we have been told, has had seven years without Isabella’s company since her sister got married. The sisters are not well matched, but the separation is also a narrative requirement: in this novel Austen needs to isolate her heroine from advice and confidences
and private conversation.
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 Clara’ (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 lit
erary 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’.