What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  ‘Oh! you would rather talk of her person than her mind, would you? Very well; I shall not attempt to deny Emma’s being pretty.’

  ‘Pretty! say beautiful rather. Can you imagine any thing nearer perfect beauty than Emma altogether—face and figure?’

  ‘I do not know what I could imagine, but I confess that I have seldom seen a face or figure more pleasing to me than her’s. But I am a partial old friend.’ (I. v)

  We may detect here something more than the language of an ‘old friend’. He is sizing up her body as well as appreciating her features. It is important, however, that Mrs Weston does not immediately detect anything in his relish of Emma’s ‘face and figure’. Such relish is allowed, even of a young woman’s figure, which means nothing less than the shape of her body as revealed and concealed by her dress. The aesthetic appreciation of a woman’s shape, or shapeliness, seems, in Sense and Sensibility, to have been shared by the author herself. Elinor Dashwood, we are told, has ‘a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure’. Her sister is ‘still handsomer’. ‘Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking’ (I. x). The use of ‘correct’ here, which is surely the author’s judgement, is strange to us, implying that there is some culturally agreed standard for body-shape, by which observers would reasonably judge actual women.

  Egged on by Mrs Weston (‘She is loveliness itself. Mr. Knightley, is not she?’) Mr Knightley actually agrees with her superlatives. ‘“I have not a fault to find with her person,” he replied. “I think her all you describe. I love to look at her.”’ These two characters could not have this conversation if either were conscious that Mr Knightley was a possible partner for Emma. He is indeed Emma’s ‘old friend’ – and we might remember this when ‘friend’ becomes the word that prods him into proposing to her some nine months later: ‘as a friend, indeed, you may command me,’ she says to him. ‘“As a friend!” repeated Mr. Knightley. “Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—Stay, yes, why should I hesitate?”’ (III. xiii)

  There is a kind of appreciative looking at a young woman – and not at her face only – that is a quite proper exercise in taste. It can be done foolishly or wrongly. We should note that Sir Walter Elliot greatly fancies himself a connoisseur of female beauty. And there is something wrong with Mr Darcy’s first expression of what he sees in Elizabeth: ‘Catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.”’ (I. iii) He is fancying himself an imperturbable judge. ‘Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing.’ Elizabeth does not please his taste, having ‘hardly a good feature in her face’, but then ‘her dark eyes’ correct his judgement. Everyone knows about the tingling dialogue between the two of them, but the complexity of feeling between them is truly expressed in a drama of looking. It is through looks that the impression of something between them has been given.

  Famously, it is really set in motion by Elizabeth’s walk across the fields, and Mr Darcy’s ‘admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion’.

  Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy’s eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange. (I. x)

  She supposes it is all about taste or distaste, as when Miss Bingley invites her to walk up and down the room with her – perhaps, Mr Darcy suggests, ‘because you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking’. Yet it is about more than taste.

  Even Mr Darcy senses that something is happening: on Elizabeth’s last day at Netherfield, he ‘would not even look at her’; when they meet in Meryton we find him ‘beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth’ (I. xv). Looks are risky. His looks escape his intentions. His looking indeed becomes so attentive that it make others observant. A great watcher of others’ looks, Charlotte Lucas (now Collins) wonders explicitly if he is in love with her friend.

  She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind. (II. ix)

  It still surprises some readers to find that looks in Austen’s novels can so openly express what we might call sexual attraction. Just such is the look that Anne gets from the unknown gentleman on the steps to the beach in Lyme: ‘he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of’ (I. xii). She has had ‘the bloom and freshness of youth restored’, ‘the animation of eye’, and she knows just how she is being looked at by this stranger in a public place. It is a look that is open enough to be seen and interpreted by Captain Wentworth too.

  It was evident that the gentleman (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.’ (I. xii)

  It is a look of admiration that Mr Elliot later admits to, though when he does so Anne remembers ‘another person’s look also’. These looks keep coming back, as when Mr Elliot enters the confectioner’s shop in Bath.

  Captain Wentworth recollected him perfectly. There was no difference between him and the man who had stood on the steps at Lyme, admiring Anne as she passed, except in the air and look and manner of the privileged relation and friend. He came in with eagerness, appeared to see and think only of her. (II. vii)

  Mr Elliot fusses away, unaware that his own role in the novel is to spark Captain Wentworth’s jealousy.

  This idea of a man appreciating a woman, expressed in the wordless encounter between Anne and Mr Elliot in Lyme, is put to unsettling use in Mansfield Park, when Edmund reports to Fanny his father’s appreciation of her looks.

  ‘Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!—and your figure—nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it—it is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle’s admiration, what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman.’

  ‘Oh! don’t talk so, don’t talk so,’ cried Fanny, distressed by more feelings than he was aware of. (II. iii)

  Edmund blunders, not knowing of Fanny’s love for him, and doubly so in talking of her being ‘worth looking at’. He alerts her both to the possibility of her being attractive, and to the fact that he does not look at her with a lover’s eyes. This perceptive yet unseeing registering of another person’s physical attractions can even distinguish a woman looking at a man, though this is much rarer. Emma is unique in allowing its heroine to appreciate the masculine ‘figure’ in a comparably candid manner, when she looks at Mr Knightley at the dance at the Crown. ‘His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body’s eyes; and, excepting her own partner, there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him’ (II. ii). It is as close as Emma can go to recognising something beyond friendship.

  In the scene where Mr Knightley and Emma finally acknowledge their true feelings for each other, looks take over. Looking in Austen is perhaps never more charged with meaning than when Mr Knightley declares himself to Emma and expects her response to what is implicitly a proposal. ‘He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her’ (III. xiii)
. It is an extraordinary grammatical usage: to ‘look the question’. As if only looking can express meaning. Something similar happens when Captain Wentworth places his letter before Anne Elliot in the room at the White Hart, and she sees and cannot misinterpret his ‘eyes of glowing entreaty’ (Persuasion, II. xi). A substitute for speech, the letter concludes with an acknowledgement that speech will hardly be necessary to communicate her response. ‘A word, a look will be enough,’ it says. Soon they meet again, in the company of others. ‘He joined them; but, as if irresolute whether to join or to pass on, said nothing, only looked. Anne could command herself enough to receive that look, and not repulsively. The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side.’ Wentworth is right. After all the elusiveness of people’s looks in Jane Austen’s fiction – after all the uncertain, anxious, puzzled, mistaken looking that has gone on – here finally, satisfyingly . . . a look is enough.

  FIVE

  Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?

  A sudden seizure of a different nature from any thing foreboded by her general state, had carried her off after a short struggle. The great Mrs. Churchill was no more.

  Emma, III. ix

  If we except the little pre-history of the Dashwood family in the first chapter of Sense and Sensibility, and the odd case of Lord Ravenshaw’s grandmother (of which more later), there are only two deaths that occur within Jane Austen’s novels, and one of these is of a character whom we never meet. The two people who die are Dr Grant in Mansfield Park and Mrs Churchill in Emma. Neither is lamented; both deaths are indeed calculated to make us consider how we might fail to grieve at others’ mortality. In the case of Mrs Churchill, the consideration is comic. She is the most powerful absentee character in all Austen’s fiction. We never see or hear her; she exerts influence over her adopted son, Frank Churchill, mostly by feigning various illnesses, but always off stage. Then suddenly she dies from an unspecified ‘seizure’, though we are told that it is something different from anything of which she has long been complaining (III. ix). Even the malade imaginaire is susceptible to the reaper. She is dead, but she is vindicated. The inhabitants of Highbury, none of whom have ever met her, respond with peculiarly disingenuous feeling: ‘Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow.’

  Dr Grant’s death in Mansfield Park is more frankly unregretted. In the rounding-up that happens in the novel’s closing phases, Dr and Mrs Grant, who first brought the amoral, chaos-causing Crawfords to Mansfield, have returned to London, where Dr Grant has found ecclesiastical advancement in Westminster. His self-satisfaction is not to last. Soon he ‘brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week’ (III. xvii). It is thoroughly poetic justice: the gastronome clergyman kills himself with gluttony at the height of his contentment. We expect deaths like this in a different kind of novel – in Fielding, say, where the irascible Captain Blifil, who has married the wealthy Squire Allworthy’s sister, also dies of ‘an apoplexy . . . just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by Mr. Allworthy’s death’.1 Dr Grant’s demise is comically smuggled in from a different, moralistic and satirical, kind of narrative. And it is not just poetic justice. His death also serves the other characters’ wishes and the author’s narrative purposes. For it means that the two half-sisters, Mrs Grant and Mary Crawford, can live together in pretty perfect harmony. The novel says nothing of any sadness or sense of loss that we might hope Mrs Grant to have felt. At the beginning of the paragraph in which Dr Grant dies, we are told that Mrs Grant has ‘a temper to love and be loved’, so we may take the omission to confirm what we surely already suspect: that she never loved her husband.

  Dr Grant was not yet fifty, but the flesh is frail. By dying he is rather surprisingly fulfilling the casual prediction made by the formerly feckless heir to the estate, Tom Bertram. When Dr Grant first arrives to take the living that was previously promised to Edmund Bertram, Tom convinces himself that the man who has purchased the position will, ‘in all probability, die very soon’ (I. iii). The prediction exhibits Tom’s callous wishful thinking: the living has been snatched from Edmund’s hands to cover his own gambling debts. Yet it is evidently a plausible guess. When Dr Grant appears ‘a hearty man of forty-five’ Tom is not to be dissuaded, and proves an accurate prognosticator. The apparently healthy prelate does indeed make way for Edmund Bertram to take up the station – and to receive the income – for which he has been groomed. Dr Grant’s demise from gorging suits everyone. The novel’s penultimate paragraph tells us that, to complete Edmund and Fanny’s happiness, ‘the acquisition of Mansfield living by the death of Dr Grant’ has occurred just at the moment when the young couple wanted a larger income and a home nearer ‘the paternal abode’ (III. xvii). His end could hardly have been better timed.

  It is telling that the two characters who die are more conveniently dead than alive. Austen wants you to notice how deaths can suit the living. Mary Crawford and Mrs Grant must both be wearing full mourning as they begin a new life together, but we take it that, even in their black clothes, they are delighted to be rid of an irksome impediment to their sisterly friendship. At the end of Emma Frank Churchill consorts with his now acknowledged fiancée, Jane Fairfax, clad in sombre mourning garb. Mrs Churchill’s death has made their marriage possible, but requires an interim. ‘There must be three months, at least, of deep mourning’ (III. xvi). Frank Churchill meets Emma again after the announcement of his engagement, smiling and laughing on this ‘most happy day’, but suited, we should realise, all in black. We are not told this, but Austen’s first readers would have ‘seen’ this garb, and registered the clash of official sorrow and private happiness. The deaths of close kin usually required a period of full (often called ‘deep’) mourning – in which clothes were predominantly black – followed by an equal period of ‘second’ or ‘slight’ mourning.2 Often the household servants would also be required to wear mourning.3 For a woman, full mourning might involve not only a black dress but also the rejection of shimmering silk for duller bombazine. ‘Short mourning for distant relations was comparable with second mourning and was expressed rather by lack of any colour than by wearing black.’4 Second mourning could involve the wearing of grey clothing. Other signs distinguished second mourning: for women, black edging on dresses or black ribbons; for men, black bands on hats and cuffs, or black buckles. Conventions were not certain, however: there are many examples from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of men and women anxiously asking each other about the regulations currently governing mourning.

  Periods of mourning were also disputable, though by the mid-nineteenth century it was de rigueur for a widow to wear full mourning for a year.5 In Fanny Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, the young heroine is disapproving of the fact that her grandmother is out of mourning only three months after the death of her husband: she has been living in France and thinks that no one in England will know how short a time she has been a widow.6 In Lady Susan, the amoral protagonist has been ‘only four months a widow’, so as she flirts and fascinates, she is presumably doing so, shockingly, in mourning garb (Letter 2). Austen’s own life was full of deaths and wearing black must have become a habit. She remarks in one letter in July 1813 that she will not need to put on mourning for the recently deceased Thomas Leigh, her mother’s cousin, as she is still wearing it for her sister-in-law Eliza, who had died just over two months earlier (Letters, 86). She can just carry on in black. The donning of mourning was a regular demand. It was not only worn for family members. In 1810, for instance, twelve weeks of national mourning was decreed to mark the death of George III’s daughter Princess Amelia.7 In June 1811 Austen described how her niece Anna and family friend Harriet Benn walked with her to Alton to buy mourning to be worn in the event of the King’s death, and that she bought a black ‘Bombasin’ for her mother (Letters, 75). The mourning clothes adopted by Austen’s
characters would have been visible in the mind’s eye of an early reader who took these habits for granted. In Persuasion, Captain Benwick is ‘in mourning’ for Fanny Harville’s loss, which means not just that he is sad, but that he is actually wearing mourning, as the Harvilles are likely to be (I. xi). Anne learns the story of their shared tragedy, but then their clothes would have made her curious. If we do not see these clothes we lose something, for Captain Benwick must have either eschewed his mourning dress while paying his attentions to Louisa Musgrove, or courted her while wearing it. Either possibility gives peculiar force to Captain Harville’s later exclamation to Anne, ‘Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon’ (II. xi). Mourning dress is, after all, donned in order to stop you escaping from the memory of the dead person.

  No one dies during the course of Persuasion, but the novel is full of the deaths that have mattered to its characters. As Linda Bree rightly says, ‘most of the characters would have been wearing black, in some form, throughout the novel’.8 The requirement to wear mourning alerts us to the possibility that people who thus advertise their loss are not always so very sad. On hearing the news of Mrs Churchill’s death in Emma, Mr Weston shakes his head solemnly while thinking – Austen cannot resist telling us – ‘that his mourning should be as handsome as possible’ (III. ix). His wife, meanwhile, sits ‘sighing and moralizing over her broad hems’. Thinking about the clothes is natural – sometimes more natural than actual mournfulness. In October 1808 Jane Austen told her sister, ‘My Mother is preparing mourning for Mrs E. K.—she has picked her old silk pelisse to peices [sic], & means to have it dyed black for a gown—a very interesting scheme’ (Letters, 57). Mrs E. K. might have been Elizabeth Knight, sister of Thomas Knight, who had adopted Edward Austen, henceforth Edward Knight, as his heir. The duties of mourning reached a long way – in Persuasion the Elliots wear black ribbons after the death of Mr Elliot’s wife, a woman they have never met – and made necessary such adaptations of clothing.