What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  And shining in her white symar,

  As through yon pale gray cloud the star

  Which now I gaze on, as on her,

  Who look’d and looks far lovelier;

  Tomorrow’s night shall be more dark;

  And I, before its rays appear

  That lifeless thing the living fear.1

  When Benwick and Anne discuss this poem, it is the latest thing. Later, Anne reflects on Benwick’s engagement to Louisa:

  She saw no reason against their being happy. Louisa had fine naval fervour to begin with, and they would soon grow more alike. He would gain cheerfulness, and she would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry. The idea of Louisa Musgrove turned into a person of literary taste, and sentimental reflection was amusing, but she had no doubt of its being so. (II. vi)

  She is entertained by the cliché that has become reality: Benwick and Louisa have ‘fallen in love over poetry’. Benwick has been reading poetry out loud at Louisa’s bedside, she his captive audience.

  Novel-readers were also novel-listeners.

  For both Austen and her characters, reading commonly means reading aloud. Benwick-like, in June 1808 Austen’s brother James read Scott’s Marmion aloud to her, their brother Edward and his wife Mary. ‘Ought I to be very much pleased with Marmion?—as yet I am not.—James reads it aloud in the Eveng’ (Letters, 53). Reading was a shared familial experience. When Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, who was staying with their brother Edward and his wife Elizabeth in Kent, she imagined the scene. ‘How do you spend your Evenings?—I guess that Eliz:th works, that you read to her, & that Edward goes to sleep’ (Letters, 14). Hearing a book was as common as silently reading it. ‘I come to you to be talked to, not to read or hear reading,’ Austen tells Martha Lloyd, her brother James’s mother-in-law. ‘I can do that at home’ (Letters, 26). Books are performed or listened to. ‘We have got the 2d vol. of Espriella’s Letters [by Robert Southey],’ Austen tells her sister, ‘& I read it aloud by candle-light’ (Letters, 56). In Sense and Sensibility Marianne finds Edward Ferrars lacking in ‘sensibility’ – the prized capacity for finer feelings – giving as evidence his poor performance in reading out loud: ‘it would have broke my heart had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility’ (I. iii). Her sister, she absurdly supposes, ‘has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him.’ Edward has been reading the poetry of William Cowper, a test of emotiveness as far as Marianne is concerned. Cowper was also a favourite of Austen, who has Fanny quote him twice with intense feeling in Mansfield Park (I. vi and III. xiv). The Austen family apparently shared Marianne’s predilection. ‘My father reads Cowper to us in the evening, to which I listen when I can’ (Letters, 14).

  As a would-be clergyman, an ability to read aloud would be expected of Edward Ferrars. (Austen’s father, Rev. George Austen, was proficient.) On Mr Collins’s first evening with the Bennets, he is naturally, as a clergyman, invited to read aloud to the family. As a vicar, Mr Elton is given the duty of reading aloud to Emma and Harriet as the former draws the latter. Another clergyman, Henry Tilney, puts his professional expertise to good (if incongruous) use by reading The Mysteries of Udolpho aloud to his sister Eleanor, before deciding that he would rather read it more rapidly to himself. ‘I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it’ (Northanger Abbey, I. xiv). Vicar-to-be Edmund Bertram earnestly discusses the importance of reading aloud with Henry Crawford.

  The subject of reading aloud was farther discussed. The two young men were the only talkers, but they, standing by the fire, talked over the too common neglect of the qualification, the total inattention to it, in the ordinary school-system for boys, the consequently natural, yet in some instances almost unnatural, degree of ignorance and uncouthness of men, of sensible and well-informed men, when suddenly called to the necessity of reading aloud, which had fallen within their notice, giving instances of blunders, and failures with their secondary causes, the want of management of the voice, of proper modulation and emphasis, of foresight and judgment, all proceeding from the first cause: want of early attention and habit; and Fanny was listening again with great entertainment. (III. iii)

  Edmund goes on to speak of this skill as if it were one of the most important qualifications of a clergyman, and regrets that ‘the art of reading’ has often been insufficiently studied by those joining this profession. Crawford, whom we presume to be untroubled by actual religious beliefs, engages earnestly in discussion of ‘the properest manner in which particular passages in the service should be delivered’. It is all to impress the listening Fanny, naturally, but the discourse could not be sustained if her admirer did not have a considered judgement of how liturgical sentences should be read out.

  Mary Crawford, we might remember, blandly tells Edmund that a vicar had best not try writing his own sermon for Sunday, but should instead read out an elegant published sermon (I. ix). Characteristically, she imagines a genteel clergyman as a polished performer of other men’s words. Her brother is the most resourceful reader of all, admired by Fanny in his performance of the very Shakespeare play that she herself has been reading to Lady Bertram: ‘She often reads to me out of those books; and she was in the middle of a very fine speech of that man’s— what’s his name, Fanny?—when we heard your footsteps’ (III. iii). Fanny has been at yet another of her duties – reading aloud – though Lady Bertram’s vagueness about text and character indicate that the book has been genteel muzak to her. Henry takes up the volume and begins to read out highlights from Henry VIII; Fanny ‘was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme’. Henry leaps from character to character and has her rapt – until ‘the book was closed, and the charm was broken’ (III. iii). Fanny may be able to resist Henry Crawford’s courtship, but his reading powers disarm her.

  However droll the image of Benwick reading himself and Louisa Musgrove into love, reading aloud is what a male lover should be able to do. When we hear that Robert Martin, in Emma, is able to do this, we know he is not the clown that Emma wants him to be. Harriet Smith recalls how he would read to her from a book on which Austen was herself schooled: ‘sometimes of an evening, before we went to cards, he would read something aloud out of the Elegant Extracts—very entertaining’ (I. iv). (The chosen anthology, edited by Vicesimus Knox, was one of those mockingly taken as standards of respectable reading in Chapter v of Northanger Abbey.) Nothing speaks more strongly of Robert Martin’s affection for Harriet than his willingness to join her in the formulaic Gothic that is her preferred reading matter. ‘I know he had read the Vicar of Wakefield. He never read the Romance of the Forest, nor the Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can’ (Emma, I. iv). Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, an eighteenth-century updating of the Book of Job that is also a brilliant parody of sentimental fiction, was just the novel to read if you did not read many novels. Anne Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey are both sensational tales, thick with mystery and coincidence. Robert Martin’s choices have the sobriety of a man trying to improve himself, which makes Emma’s unevidenced description of him to Harriet as ‘illiterate and coarse’ peculiarly unjust.

  Robert Martin reads agricultural reports to himself, but reads novels aloud to the women of his household. Fiction is something you share: ‘if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels . . .’ (Northanger Abbey I. v). This has become one of the most famous outbursts in all Austen’s fiction, apparently prompted by c
ontemporary disparagement of novels, and leading into the author’s vindication of the genre. The girls’ togetherness is not just metaphorical. They are reading passages aloud to each other. In the next chapter Isabella promises Catherine, ‘When you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together.’ This reading together was Austen’s own habit. ‘Fanny & I are to go on with Modern Europe together, but hitherto have advanced only 25 Pages’ (Letters, 89). In her letters to Cassandra, she talks of particular novels as shared experiences between the two women, probably because they had been read aloud. In 1807 she tells Cassandra how Charlotte Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote ‘makes our evening amusement, to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it’ (Letters, 49). It is being read out loud at her Southampton home. Her brother Frank’s wife ‘to whom it is new, enjoys it as one could wish’. Her brother James’s wife, however, ‘has little pleasure from that or any other book’.

  Mr Collins affects to be shocked when a book is produced to be read aloud whose cover ‘announced it to be from a circulating library’ – and therefore almost certainly a novel (Pride and Prejudice, I. xiv). He is absurd, and his behaviour perhaps evidence that the disapproval of fiction was no longer a serious matter. Fanny Price joins the circulating library in Portsmouth, and Mary Musgrove and Lady Russell, in Persuasion, visit circulating libraries. Austen herself frequented these institutions, recalling in a letter to her niece Anna that the one in Dawlish ‘was particularly pitiful & wretched 12 years ago, & not likely to have anybody’s publication’ (Letters, 104). Noting the opening of a local subscription library (possibly in Basingstoke) in 1798, Austen herself mocked those affected to disdain novels.

  I have received a very civil note from Mrs Martin requesting my name as a Subscriber to her Library which opens the 14th of January, & my name, or rather Yours is accordingly given . . . As an inducement to subscribe Mrs Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist entirely of Novels, but of every kind of Literature &c &c—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so;—but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers (Letters, 14).

  Novel-readers were also novel-listeners. Private, silent reading could accommodate a more robust choice of fiction. The great eighteenth-century novels of Fielding were deplored for their sexual amorality, and those of Sterne for being bawdy: neither was suitable for family consumption. Yet Austen’s allusions to Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy indicate her close knowledge of both.2 Her own novels were not for private consumption: they were read out loud to family and friends before they were ever published. This began with Elinor and Marianne, the early version in letters of what would become Sense and Sensibility.3 Her niece Anna recalled in later life how as a child she heard her aunt reading First Impressions (the early version of Pride and Prejudice) aloud to the family circle.4 The reading aloud continued. When Pride and Prejudice was first published, the author and her mother read out a large part of it to a neighbour, Miss Benn, who had come for dinner, without ever telling her who the author was: ‘in the evening we set fairly at it & read half the first volume to her . . . I believe it passed with her unsuspected—she was amused, poor soul! that she could not help you know, with two such people to lead the way; but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth’ (Letters, 79). Reading the book in shifts, it seems, the Austen ladies got through perhaps thirteen chapters, probably taking at least two hours to do so. Austen’s account implies considerable animation, on the part of Miss Benn as well as the readers. It is a vignette of how for Austen (as for her characters) reading could be essentially social.

  Pace Mr Darcy, books for Austen are not just the solemn matter of improvement. They are the means by which people live out their desires or their follies. Marianne Dashwood is not entirely wrong to believe that reading takes you to a person’s heart. In Mansfield Park, the first reason given for Fanny loving Edmund is that ‘he recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours’ (I. ii). Nothing, we sense, can be more intimate. In Whit Stillman’s clever 1990 film Metropolitan, loosely based on Austen’s novel, the hero wins the Austen-adoring heroine only when he himself learns to appreciate Mansfield Park. Which is as it should be.

  SIXTEEN

  Are Ill People Really to Blame for Their Illnesses?

  ‘I do not think I ever was so ill in my life as I have been all this morning: very unfit to be left alone, I am sure. Suppose I were to be seized of a sudden in some dreadful way, and not able to ring the bell!’

  Persuasion, I. v

  You might think people really were to blame for their own illnesses, if you were as easily tricked by Frank Churchill as Emma is. The day after their first meeting, Emma asks him about visiting Miss Bates’s house, where, he says, he found himself kept much longer than he had intended by ‘the talking aunt’. What about his acquaintance from Weymouth, Miss Fairfax (whose name he has not mentioned)? How was she looking?

  ‘Ill, very ill—that is, if a young lady can ever be allowed to look ill. But the expression is hardly admissible, Mrs. Weston, is it? Ladies can never look ill. And, seriously, Miss Fairfax is naturally so pale, as almost always to give the appearance of ill health.—A most deplorable want of complexion.’ (II. vi)

  He speaks as if illness were Jane Fairfax’s natural condition. Her reserve, even insipidity, he implies, makes her look unhealthy. Emma might begin ‘a warm defence of Miss Fairfax’s complexion’ but his judgement is surely half-pleasing to her. She is herself, after all, the character who claims ‘I am always well, you know’ in response to an anxious enquiry from Mrs Weston (III. xii). When Frank Churchill goes on to declare that ‘nothing could make amends for the want of the fine glow of health’, he seems to be preferring one woman rather explicitly to the other. ‘Ill’ is his word for Jane Fairfax’s very character.

  It is all a blind. He loves Jane Fairfax. So hastily and passionately has he rushed her into a secret engagement that we must also infer strong sexual attraction. That pale complexion must allure him. Yet he is clever enough to know how she appears to others and to know that Emma will be ready to believe that her rival for elegance actually looks ‘ill’ – her own robust health being, in her own mind, the sign of her superiority. In claiming that she is always well, Emma is saying something peculiar for her age. A diligent reader of Jane Austen’s letters would be hard put to find one which did not mention illnesses among family and friends. More than muslin or money, illness is her consistent concern and surpasses even the weather as a natural topic of epistolary conversation. Occasionally Austen describes her own indispositions, but mostly she reports the ailments of family members and close friends. In an age when diagnoses were unconvincing and treatments rarely productive, a slight illness might always seem like a harbinger of something worse. Take this, from a letter of June 1808: ‘There has been a cold & sore throat prevailing very much in this House lately, the Children have almost all been ill with it, & we were afraid Lizzy was going to be very ill one day; she had specks & a great deal of fever.—It went off however, & they are all pretty well now’ (Letters, 53). The relief of this is something that we can hardly feel any more. It gives us some idea of how our usually comfortable distinction between trivial and serious ailments was much less secure.

  There was good reason to worry over each new indisposition, but therefore also more to be gained from hypochondria. There are suggestions in Austen’s correspondence of reined-in exasperation at others’ supposed afflictions: a jaundiced reader might think that her mother and her brother Henry, both often ill and both notably long-lived, were possible valetudinarians. ‘Dearest Henry! What a turn he has for being ill!’ she exclaimed in a letter to her sister in 1813, as she reported yet another of his ailments (Letters, 96). In November 1815 she wrote from London to Cassandra describing Henry’s slow recovery from another bout of illness, ‘but still they will not let him be well’ (Letters, 128). She seems divided between exasperatio
n (‘He is so well, that I cannot think why he is not perfectly well’) and concern (‘The fever is not yet quite removed’). Occasionally she lets loose about some notable hypochondriac, as in a letter of September 1813, where she describes Edward Bridges’ wife as ‘a poor Honey—the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well—& who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else’ (Letters, 90). For the most part, however, Austen fusses over symptoms without mockery. ‘Henry is not quite well.—His stomach is rather deranged. You must keep him in Rhubarb & give him plenty of Port & Water’ (Letters, 88). Sometimes it seems that Mr Woodhouse’s pseudo-medical twitterings were all too easy for her to generate.

  A cold or an attack of bile might be nothing – or it might be something. It is a shock for the modern reader when he or she begins to realise from the dates of letters that Austen’s comments on her own health, as inconsequential as the bulletins that she has been issuing on friends and family for twenty years, tell us of the onset of a fatal illness. The shock is the greater as most of her reports talk of her improving health. ‘We are all in good health & I have certainly gained strength through the Winter & am not far from being well; & I think I understand my own case now so much better than I did, as to be able by care to keep off any serious return of illness’ (Letters, 149). Less than six months later she was dead.

  Illness shapes the plots of several of her novels. Illness takes Catherine Morland to Bath, whence Mr Allen has been sent for his gout. Mrs Allen is naturally delighted. ‘A neighbour of ours, Dr. Skinner, was here for his health last winter, and came away quite stout’ (I. viii). ‘That circumstance must give great encouragement,’ replies Mr Tilney, with his special brand of unnoticed irony. It is usefully unclear what the reader is to think of going to Bath for your health. Mrs Allen is foolish, but her husband is not. That exemplary couple Admiral and Mrs Croft also come to Bath to minister to illness. According to Mary Musgrove, the Crofts are in the town because ‘they think the admiral gouty’ (Persuasion, II. vi). The report comes originally from Charles Musgrove, so might be thought to be reliable. Yet there is always the suspicion that the therapeutic powers of the Bath waters are illusory. The waters are, after all, sampled by Mr Woodhouse and recommended by Mrs Elton. Jane Austen’s brother Edward was one of those who came to Bath for his ill health, drinking the waters and bathing and attaching himself to a Bath physician, Dr Fellowes (Letters, 20 & 22). The novelist knew well the fashionable valetudinarian culture of Bath, though we do not know how absurd she found it . . .