What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  Reading through Austen’s letters you might think that she cared too much about the sartorial implications of the deaths of friends and relations. When the mother of the Austens’ close friend Martha Lloyd died, her dressmaker was apparently slow to make up the mourning dress that she ordered, prompting Austen to send Martha ‘Lines supposed to have been sent to an uncivil Dress maker’.

  Miss Lloyd must expect to receive

  This license to mourn & to grieve,

  Complete, er’e the end of the week –

  It is better to write than to speak –9

  Mrs Austen even penned a facetious rhyming response from the imagined dressmaker, to divert their friend. But the business of attending to mourning dress was exactly a diversion from grief. Even when the death of Edward’s wife Elizabeth provoked Austen to shock and raw sorrow, she was soon turning to the costume implications.

  I am to be in bombazeen and crape, according to what we are told is universal here, and which agrees with Martha’s previous observation. My mourning, however, will not impoverish me, for by having my velvet pelisse fresh lined and made up, I am sure I shall have no occasion this winter for anything new of that sort. I take my cloak for the lining, and shall send yours on the chance of its doing something of the same for you, though I believe your pelisse is in better repair than mine. One Miss Baker makes my gown and the other my bonnet, which is to be silk covered with crape. (Letters, 59)

  Such detail can sound griefless to modern ears, but the peculiar requirements of mourning inevitably prompted such practical considerations.

  The adopting of mourning dress might, however, free the mourner from any obligation to grieve. When encountered at the inn in Lyme in Persuasion, Mr Elliot is in mourning, as is his manservant (I. xii). But Mr Elliot is already looking about him. There is that moment on the steps from the beach when he pauses to gaze at Anne with ‘earnest admiration’. He does not seem to be a man dwelling on memories of his recently dead wife. When Anne meets him again in Bath, she asks herself why he is paying court to her family and wonders if he has an interest in Elizabeth. But then she reflects that ‘Mr. Elliot . . . had not been a widower seven months’ (II. iv). Every time she sees ‘the crape round his hat’ she considers that he cannot be pursuing any amorous scheme so soon after the death of his wife. She should instead infer that he is behaving like someone who has indeed forgotten about his wife. He is not the only character to whom mourning is mere convention. Lady Russell, noticing Mr Elliot’s attentions to Anne, begins ‘to calculate the number of weeks which would free him from all the remaining restraints of widowhood, and leave him at liberty to exert his most open powers of pleasing’ (II. v). When Mrs Smith suggests that Mr Elliot might have an interest in her, Anne responds as if this were improper. ‘Mr. Elliot’s wife has not been dead much above half a year. He ought not to be supposed to be paying his addresses to any one’ (II. ix). Her friend has no time for this argument – ‘if these are your only objections . . . Mr. Elliot is safe’ – and is sure that he will not let his mourning impede his courtship.

  Mourning, as Austen’s novels require us to realise, is not the same as grieving.

  How long should one grieve? It is a question at the heart of Persuasion. By Captain Harville’s account, Captain Benwick is so distressed by news of Fanny Harville’s death that Captain Wentworth has to stay with him for a week (I. xii). When Anne meets him it has been just over four months since he first received the news. Yet we should know that such consuming grief is suspect when we find him, in fact, already prepared to fall in love with someone else. Anne’s judgement on him when she hears the news of his engagement to Louisa Musgrove is pragmatic and magnanimous. ‘He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody’ (II. vi). It is less than six months from his hearing the news of his fiancée’s death to his proposing to Louisa – no wonder Captain Harville feels that his sister would have slower to forget their love (II. xi). It is the subsequent discussion between him and Anne of how long grief should possess a person – of whether men or women have more ‘retentive feelings’ – that sparks Captain Wentworth’s epistolary declaration of his own undiminished passion.

  The business of dressing in mourning was so conventional that Austen could joke in her letters about those who took it to excess. Writing to Cassandra from Bath in 1799, she described bumping into a vicar from Hampshire whom they knew: ‘at the bottom of Kingsdown Hill we met a Gentleman in a Buggy, who on a minute examination turned out to be Dr Hall—& Dr Hall in such very deep mourning that either his Mother, his Wife, or himself must be dead’ (Letters, 19). Mourning, as Austen’s novels require us to realise, is not the same as grieving. Characters who know all about the conventions of mourning do not necessarily know anything about grief. In the bleakly brilliant opening of Persuasion, Sir Walter Elliot’s imperviousness to melancholy reflection is shown us. How could he so often view the page in his ‘favourite volume’, the Baronetage, which lists the deaths of both his wife and his son? Though there might be a good motive for adding the date of one’s wife’s death, Austen’s wording makes sure we know differently. She tells us how he has supplemented the bare year recorded by the book by ‘inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife’. The wording (‘most accurately’) lets us see his fussy respect for the facts of aristocratic family history. It is anything but sadness.

  In this, the most elegiac of Austen’s novels, some of the conventions for condolence are laid out in all their emptiness. The Elliots failed to send a letter of commiseration to their (literally) distant cousins the Dalrymples upon the Viscount’s death, and thereby committed a grave offence. This is despite the fact that the two families had never met. In return and revenge, the Dalrymples scorn to send condolences on the death of Lady Elliot. These minor aristocrats are caught up in a petty tit-for-tat. Meanwhile the expression of real grief is difficult to find. Anne Elliot’s sadness at the death of her mother, when she was fourteen, is left inexplicit, but it is intimated. When she is playing the piano for the unappreciative and philistine Musgroves, we hear that apart from her time with Captain Wentworth, she had not known real appreciation of her musicality ‘since the loss of her dear mother’ (I. vi). That ‘dear’ is like a flicker of her own feeling, hidden from others. The autumnal mournfulness of the book’s first part is always associated with Anne’s loss of love, but it also reaches back to this loss of her mother. The novel, following its heroine’s own habits of fortitude and avoidance, will not say much about this. Something explicit emerges belatedly, when we find that Anne’s friendship with Mrs Smith was formed many years earlier when she ‘had gone unhappy to school, grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved’ (II. v).

  The Musgroves are themselves grieving for their dead son Richard – or rather, they have just been reminded to do so again by the mention of Captain Wentworth (I. vi). Their son died two years earlier, and was ‘scarcely at all regretted’ when news of his death first arrived. This is an extraordinary sentence for a modern reader: if their son had been sent away to sea because he was ‘unmanageable’, should his parents not have felt some extra stab of guilt and regret? Returning to the only two proper letters that, under Captain Wentworth’s influence, he had bothered to write to them while at sea, Mrs Musgrove is thrown into ‘greater grief for him than she had known on first hearing of his death’. There is some sense that Austen is rigging our judgements here. When, some time later, Captain Wentworth responds to Mrs Musgrove’s expressions of grief by showing ‘the kindest consideration for all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings’, it seems that the author is also trying to show some consideration after her earlier asperity (I. viii). The consideration is passing, for soon we are hearing of ‘her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for’. The novel is satirising her for acting up to grief now, not for failing to grieve before.

  That failure would once have been more understandable because a death like
Richard Musgrove’s would not have been exceptional. Death was always possible. The question of life expectation indeed often occupies Austen’s characters. No sooner has Charlotte Lucas become engaged to Mr Collins than her mother starts thinking about her best friend’s father’s death. ‘Lady Lucas began directly to calculate with more interest than the matter had ever excited before, how many years longer Mr Bennet was likely to live’ (Pride and Prejudice, I. xxii). Such was life. In the second chapter of Sense and Sensibility, Mrs John Dashwood is happy for her husband to calculate on the ‘three thousand pounds each’ that the Dashwood girls will receive ‘on their mother’s death’. He calls this ‘a very comfortable fortune for any young woman’ (I. ii). But of course this is killing the mother off rather easily. If she lives another twenty years the girls are ‘young women’ no longer. A few sentences later, in response to her husband’s suggestion of an annuity for his stepmother, Mrs John Dashwood is observing that ‘people always live for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty’. In these examples, the prospect of death matters because of its financial consequences and it is in these terms that characters most often mention death. In the midst of proposing marriage to Elizabeth, Mr Collins cannot help referring to the fact that he is ‘to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured father (who, however, may live many years longer)’ (I. xix). His wonderful crassness should not make us forget that the Bennet family, because of the entailed estate, cannot avoid contemplating Mr Bennet’s death, and its consequences.

  Death before old age was much more common for Jane Austen than it is for us. The wives of three of her brothers died in or following childbirth. Children also died, including her own month-old niece Elizabeth, daughter of her brother Charles, in 1814. In the second half of the eighteenth century, almost a quarter of children died before the age of ten, more than half of these in the first year of their lives.10 Inevitably, mortality rates were much higher among the poor, but infant deaths were still common among the genteel classes. Mrs William Deedes, sister-in-law to the novelist’s brother Edward, had nineteen children, of whom four died in infancy. The earliest of Austen’s surviving letters, from January 1796, ends with an almost passing instance of infant mortality: ‘I am sorry for the Beaches’ loss of their little girl, especially as it is the one so much like me’ (Letters, 1). The mother concerned, Henrietta-Maria Hicks-Beach, had nine children, four of whom died in infancy.11 Perhaps the most shocking sentence that Austen ever wrote is about the death of an infant. ‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband’ (Letters, 10). It would not have been imaginable if stillbirths had not been so common.

  The deaths of children and babies feature often enough in Austen’s letters to make you suspect that she has kept them out of her fiction. There are just two examples, both external to the novels in which they feature. In Persuasion there is Sir Walter Elliot’s ‘still-born son’, ruthlessly recorded in his copy of the Baronetage, though never mentioned within the novel itself. The poignancy of this is all the more powerfully implicit, given the narrative implications. If this son had lived, Kellynch Hall would not be going the way of Mr Elliot. In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, back in Portsmouth with her family, finds herself thinking about ‘another sister, a very pretty little girl’ who was about five when she left Portsmouth and ‘who had died a few years afterwards’ (III. vii). When the news of her death had reached Mansfield, she ‘had for a short time been quite afflicted’. Susan and Betsey fight over a silver knife that the dying Mary had left to Susan, bringing her lost child to Mrs Price’s mind. ‘Poor little sweet creature! Well, she was taken away from evil to come.’ Mrs Price has learned an acceptance of mortality that elsewhere borders on Malthusian unconcern. As letters arrive telling Fanny of Tom Bertram’s dangerous illness, none of the Prices ‘could be interested in so remote an evil as illness in a family above an hundred miles off; not even Mrs. Price, beyond a brief question or two’ (III. xiii). Austen has to tell us that this indifference to deaths in other families is common enough.

  Mrs. Price did quite as much for Lady Bertram, as Lady Bertram would have done for Mrs. Price. Three or four Prices might have been swept away, any or all, except Fanny and William, and Lady Bertram would have thought little about it; or perhaps might have caught from Mrs. Norris’s lips the cant of its being a very happy thing, and a great blessing to their poor dear sister Price to have them so well provided for.

  People do die, and not just the very young. Sir Walter Elliot’s wife Elizabeth has died, as his favourite book records, some sixteen or seventeen years after marriage, probably in her late thirties. All the more contemptible, then, that, suggesting that Anne put off her appointment with Mrs Smith, he says in a kind of jest, ‘She is not so near her end, I presume, but that she may hope to see another day’ (II. v). Mrs Clay’s husband has died while she is still a ‘young woman’. In Persuasion, Fanny Harville has died in her twenties, and the novel need offer no further explanation of the fact (I. xi). In Emma, we are told that Captain Weston’s first wife dies after three years of marriage, in her mid-twenties; the event, though sad, is not treated as remarkable. Jane Fairfax’s father dies in action, and her mother follows, ‘sinking under consumption and grief soon afterwards’ (II. ii). The evidence of Austen’s letters is more informative than any mortality statistics, for it conveys just that sense of precariousness that lies behind her novels and is unknown to most modern readers. Writing to Cassandra from Bath in May 1801, Austen talks of her aunt’s cough and her mother’s cold, before suddenly recalling something graver. ‘You will be sorry to hear that Marianne Mapleton’s disorder has ended fatally; she was beleived [sic] out of danger on Sunday, but a sudden relapse carried her off the next day’ (Letters, 37). The daughter of a Bath surgeon, Miss Mapleton was twenty-one or twenty-two. If such a death was not unusual, why then should Marianne Dashwood not sicken and die? Mr Bennet’s joke about his daughter Jane’s indisposition – ‘if she should die’ – would be pointless if her death were inconceivable (I. vii). ‘People do not die of little trifling colds,’ declares Mrs Bennet, but this is cavalier.

  It is hard to know what to make of a certain casualness in Austen’s own treatment of deaths in her letters. ‘Mr Waller is dead, I see;—I cannot greive [sic] about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much’ (Letters 53). She says this to Cassandra in passing, in between a list of family engagements and news of harvesting on her brother Edward’s estate. Cassandra must have known just the reasons for the widow’s possible lack of grief, but we never will. Had Mr Waller, whom they knew in Southampton, been a wife-beater? Or just a dull dinner companion? On the death of Mrs Wyndham Knatchbull in 1807 she wrote, ‘I had no idea that anybody liked her, & therefore felt nothing for any Survivor, but I am now feeling away on her Husband’s account, and think he had better marry Miss Sharpe’ (Letters, 50). Not taking deaths very seriously was part of life. Thus the force of her comment on news of the Battle of Albuera in 1811. ‘How horrible it is to have so many people killed!—And what a blessing that one cares for none of them’ (Letters, 74). There is a grimly comic honesty in such remarks that should sensitise us to some of her characters’ casualness about the deaths of those about whom they do not care. In Mansfield Park, the Honourable John Yates complains that his theatrical pleasures were interrupted by the sudden death of Lord Ravenshaw’s grandmother (I. xiii). ‘It is impossible to help wishing, that the news could have been suppressed for just the three days we wanted.’ It ‘was suggested’ – after all, she was ‘only a grand-mother’ and did live ‘two hundred miles off’.

  Mary Crawford exhibits her deep, cold carelessness when, misjudging Fanny as ever she does, she jokes in a letter about the possibility of Tom Bertram’s death – an eventuality that would leave Edmund as the heir to the title and the estate. ‘To have such a fine young man cut off
in the flower of his days is most melancholy. Poor Sir Thomas will feel it dreadfully. I really am quite agitated on the subject. Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile, and look cunning, but upon my honour, I never bribed a physician in my life’ (III. xiv). She writes this when she believes Tom’s death likely and is acknowledging, in some sophisticated way, the benefit that might come to her from it. By a flourish of irony, she tries to recruit Fanny to her own sense of the desirability of Tom’s death. Soon she is speculating about the consequences for Edmund, who would be suddenly and desirably presented with ‘wealth and consequence’. Mary Crawford treats cynically the precariousness of life, a fact that presses on all Austen’s characters. Her first readers were aware of this precariousness in a way that we must rediscover as we read. Very few people die in her stories, but all her novels are shadowed by death.

  SIX

  Why Is It Risky to Go to the Seaside?

  ‘I have been long perfectly convinced, though perhaps I never told you so before, that the sea is very rarely of use to any body. I am sure it almost killed me once.’

  Emma, I. xii

  If bad things do happen at the seaside, one of Austen’s heroines is safe. Emma Woodhouse (unlike her father, quoted above) has never seen the sea. We find this out when she intervenes to halt a dangerous-tending disagreement between her father and her sister about the merits of sea bathing. ‘I must beg you not to talk of the sea. It makes me envious and miserable;—I who have never seen it!’ (I. xii) She is being tactful, but she is also being truthful. It is a satisfying touch, telling us something essential about Emma: all-powerful in Highbury, but incapable of reaching out beyond it; fearless in her little world, but timid about what might lie outside its closely hemmed borders. By a carefully managed irony, however, she cannot escape the seaside. She is the unknowing witness, even the abettor, of an amorous relationship that was born at the seaside. Early in the novel we hear, from Mr Woodhouse, that Frank Churchill’s much-vaunted letter to Mrs Weston congratulating her on her marriage to his father is written from Weymouth (I. ii). Much later, we hear from Miss Bates that Jane Fairfax has been in Weymouth (II. i). When Jane Fairfax arrives in Highbury and meets Emma, we are told that ‘She and Mr. Frank Churchill had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known that they were a little acquainted’ (II. ii). During his first visit to Hartfield after his arrival, Frank Churchill says that he is obliged to pay a visit to the Bates household (he pretends to have trouble remembering the name) because of his acquaintance with ‘a lady’. Mr Weston guilelessly seconds his purpose. ‘True, true, you are acquainted with Miss Fairfax; I remember you knew her at Weymouth, and a fine girl she is. Call upon her, by all means’ (II. v). His son seems to hesitate – ‘another day would do as well; but there was that degree of acquaintance at Weymouth which—’ – before his father eggs him on.