Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Marianne allows Willoughby to cut off a lock of her hair, as a love token (or perhaps a trophy); Elinor assumes – mistakenly – that the hair set in a ring which Edward wears is her own. She is ‘conscious’, Jane explains, that it ‘must have been procured by some theft or contrivance unknown to herself’. Elinor is ‘not in a humour […] to regard it as an affront’, but let’s just pause a minute – she thinks he’s stolen her hair. How? Does she imagine he’s pulled hairs out of her hairbrush? Bribed her maid, or a hairdresser? Crept into her room at Norland while she was sleeping, even, with a pair of scissors?u

  Edward seems to have a thing about scissors, remember. Towards the end of the novel, when he’s come to Barton Cottage to explain that his engagement with Lucy Steele is at an end, he finds breaking the news awkward, stressful. He walks across the sitting room to the window ‘apparently from not knowing what to do’ and helps himself to ‘a pair of scissors that lay there’. While he explains that Lucy is now married to his brother Robert, he is ‘spoiling both them [the scissors] and their sheath by cutting the latter to pieces’.

  It’s no wonder that Emma Thompson felt the need to alter this scene in her screenplay for the 1997 film of Sense and Sensibility, and have her Edward fiddle with the china ornaments on the mantelpiece instead. Just imagine the fun Sigmund Freud would have had. The Latin for sheath is ‘vagina’, as Jane, with her smattering of Latin, may very plausibly have known. The word was already in use as a medical term during her lifetime.

  The sheath, then, is Lucy, or, strictly speaking, Lucy’s private parts. The scissors are – what, a penis? Robert’s? Edward’s? Or something else, even. Jane seldom uses symbolism, but this looks like symbolism, and symbolism of a deeply disturbing, unhealthy, sexually violent kind. Perhaps we don’t need to look any further for the reason why Edward was educated privately with a tutor, away from his younger siblings.

  ‘Men were deceivers ever’, as the song in Much Ado About Nothing has it. Willoughby and Edward are deceivers, capable of lying to mothers, lovers, sisters. All the way through the novel, a careful reader can see that Jane suggests reserving judgement about people. Someone may seem or appear a certain way; what they really are is harder to ascertain. Almost every page reveals sentences which, on a second reading, hesitate, equivocate.

  Take Edward; ‘he appeared to be amiable’, ‘he gave every indication of an open and affectionate heart’ (my emphasis). Even Elinor is forced to speak of his virtues in lengthy sentences, complexly structured: ‘Of his sense and his goodness […] no one can, I think, be in doubt, who has seen him often enough to engage him in unreserved conversation. The excellence of his understanding and his principles can be concealed only by that shyness which too often keeps him silent.’ It’s no accident, I think, that these sentences contain words like ‘doubt’ and ‘concealed’. Over the course of Sense and Sensibility, readers learn enough about Edward to doubt his sense, and perhaps his goodness too; we realise that it’s more than just ‘shyness’ concealing his ‘understanding and principles’.

  Jane reminds us, through the medium of Elinor, how easy it is to misjudge people:

  ‘I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes,’ said Elinor, ‘in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.’

  Elinor would do well to heed her own words; so would we. There are far more secrets in Sense and Sensibility than in any of Jane’s other novels. There are also confessions, and the person who receives nearly all of them is Elinor. The contortions Jane has to go through in order to make this happen suggest that it’s important, perhaps because we’re meant to be holding this pronouncement of hers in mind. What people ‘say of themselves’ shouldn’t be used as a guide ‘without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge’.

  Of the four confessions Elinor receives, the first – Lucy’s – is obviously intended to be suspect. Lucy has heard that the man who is engaged to her looks like he’s courting another woman. She’s warning Elinor off. When Willoughby rushes to Marianne’s sick-bed, and spends what must be some considerable time haranguing Elinor, he claims that he means ‘to open my whole heart’ to her. Edward’s heart, we’re told, is ‘open to Elinor’, eventually; ‘all its weaknesses, all its errors confessed’. But each speech needs to be sifted for self-justifications and inconsistencies. None should be taken at face value.

  And this surely also holds true for the other confession Elinor is forced to listen to; Colonel Brandon’s story of his past, of his connection with his cousin, and with his ward, Eliza Williams.

  Jane puts three male romantic interests into the novel. Given that two of them spend large portions of time lying, and conceal dark secrets in their romantic and sexual pasts, we’re well within our rights to ask a few hard questions about Colonel Brandon. ‘No one can be deceived in him!’ cries Mrs Dashwood. Well, she’s been deceived in Edward and Willoughby too, so let’s not give what she says too much weight.

  What do other people say about Brandon? He’s first mentioned as a ‘particular friend’ of Sir John Middleton, and as ‘neither very young nor very gay’. Sir John drops ‘hints of past injuries and disappointments’. Mrs Jennings declares, with complete confidence, that he has fathered a bastard child – ‘Miss Williams […] is a relation of the Colonel’s, my dear; a very near relation […] she is his natural daughter’. She’s equally sure that he is in love with first Marianne, and then Elinor. She informs Elinor, and through her us, that Brandon’s estate is worth in the region of ‘two thousand a year’ and that though ‘his brother left everything sadly involved’, the Colonel ‘must have cleared the estate by this time’. Willoughby jokes about disliking him and asserts, at the same time, that he believes ‘his character to be in other respects irreproachable’. Both Willoughby and Marianne claim that Brandon tells dull stories about the ‘East Indies’. Marianne thinks him, in addition, an ‘old bachelor’, ‘old enough to be my father’.

  From this mishmash of fact and opinion, we can glean the information that Colonel Brandon isn’t particularly young – 35 when we first encounter him – that he is a younger son, that he has substantial assets which have required some careful handling, that he has been in the East Indies – and that there is some mystery in his background connected with his young ward.

  Marianne, in this early part of the novel, thinks that the age difference between them makes any suggestion of romantic interest absurd. An age difference between husband and wife of around five years was most common in this period and the average gap between Jane’s heroes and heroines is a little larger; closer to six or seven years.5v Colonel Brandon is eighteen years older than Marianne. Unusually for her, Marianne isn’t exaggerating when she says that Brandon’s old enough to be her father; he is.

  The age difference wouldn’t have been as troubling for Jane’s first readers as it is for us, however. What they were much more likely to be troubled by, is the Colonel’s connection with India.

  Exactly how long Colonel Brandon has spent in India is unclear, a detail I’ll return to in a moment. But he has been there, serving either in the British army or possibly in a private regiment controlled by the British East India Company. The company was one of several European organisations which had started trading with India around 1600. By the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to wars, proxy wars, ethically dubious taxation schemes and worse, it was a dominant force in the sub-continent.

  The East India Company essentially gained Britain a vast imperial holding on the cheap. But public opinion was hostile. British men who returned home, having gained fortunes in India, were referred to, scornfully, as ‘nabobs’, a corruption of the Urdu nawab. The Company’s rule was seen as corrupt and corrupti
ng, even criminal.

  In a 1772 play by Samuel Foote, called The Nabob, the title character Sir Matthew Mite is presented in a wholly negative light. He’s accused of ‘scattering the spoils of ruined provinces’, of being someone ‘who owes his rise to the ruins of thousands’. His possessions are ‘plunder’, ‘treacherously gained’. At one point in the play, the East India Company’s modus operandi is described:

  Why, here are a body of merchants that beg to be admitted as friends, and take possession of a small spot in a country, and carry on a beneficial commerce with the inoffensive and innocent people, to which they kindly give their consent […] Upon which […] we cunningly encroach, and fortify by little and by little, till at length, we growing too strong for the natives, we turn them out of their lands, and take possession of their money and jewels.

  And, alongside accusations of war crimes and general corruption, this was almost exactly what Warren Hastings, old boy of Westminster School and Governor General of India, was charged with in 1787 – that he had stolen the treasury belonging to the women of the royal family of Oudh. The prosecution was, really, less about Hastings and his actions and more about the government of India. It was driven by a man called Edmund Burke, a famous orator and politician, and occasional idealist. We’ll talk more about him, and his most famous piece of writing, in the next chapter.

  The trial of Warren Hastings took place in the House of Commons, with prominent politicians acting for the prosecution and defence. There was, for a time, enormous popular interest. The interest faded, however. The trial dragged on until 1795, when, in the changed political climate of war with France, Hastings was acquitted on all charges. But the damage was done, both to him and to the reputation of the British in India.

  Jane does seem to have been intrigued by India. In a youthful attempt at a novel, called Catherine, or the Bower, she sends the heroine’s friend, Miss Wynne, to Bengal. A second Wynne sister is sent to Scotland and we’re told the heroine corresponds with both; we would almost certainly have seen letters sent from India if Jane had continued, perhaps even scenes set there. In Mansfield Park, one of the heroine’s many younger brothers is employed on an ‘Indiaman’, that is, one of the East India Company’s trading ships. The fascination is natural. Jane’s aunt Philadelphia Austen had sailed to India, to a marriage which had probably been arranged for her before she left. Jane’s cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza was born there. As I mentioned, Eliza’s godfather was Warren Hastings. There were long-standing rumours, possibly true ones, that he was also her biological father.

  But whatever Jane’s family connections and family loyalties might have been, she can hardly have avoided knowing that, for the majority of her readers, a reference to India would have been a black mark, a reminder of corruption, of avarice. Brandon is tainted by association. She could easily have avoided it, either by not mentioning where Brandon had been, or by substituting the ‘East Indies’ with somewhere like Canada. She doesn’t.

  In fact, if we look at Colonel Brandon’s tragic history, as narrated by himself, he can’t have been in India for all that long. The history consists of the following: Colonel Brandon had a cousin, named Eliza. An orphan, she was brought up in his family ‘from her earliest infancy’. He and Eliza were very close in age (‘Our ages were nearly the same’), they were ‘playfellows and friends’ from their ‘earliest years’. As they grew, friendship deepened to love. They planned to elope together ‘to Scotland’, where it was and still is possible to marry without parental consent from the age of sixteen; the plan was discovered, they were separated, and Eliza was coerced into marrying Colonel Brandon’s older brother instead.

  Here, again, we can see primogeniture at work, can see too the damage it does to natural loyalties, honourable impulses. Eliza is an heiress (‘her fortune was a large one’). That Colonel Brandon’s father, as her uncle and guardian, should act to stop the planned elopement is entirely proper; without the proper paperwork her fortune would immediately pass out of her hands. An uncle’s instinct, a guardian’s duty, should be to protect, not to exploit. But by then marrying her off to his older son without drawing up a marriage settlement, he transfers her fortune to his own family; by compelling Eliza to marry ‘against her inclination’, he has, arguably, committed a crime under the law against ‘stealing an heiress’. It was all done for money; for money and the good of the eldest Brandon son. The family estate is ‘much encumbered’, which is, as the Colonel remarks, ‘all that can be said for the conduct of one, who was at once her uncle and guardian’. The action is legally questionable, and morally, wholly reprehensible.

  The marriage, as might be expected, doesn’t prosper. Eliza is ‘lost’ to Colonel Brandon – married – ‘at seventeen’. That point seems fixed. But inconsistencies start to emerge elsewhere in the Colonel’s narrative. It is ‘about two years’ after Eliza married that he hears of ‘her divorce’. Divorce was not, at the time, a quick affair; each required its own bill in parliament. Add to this the fact that the Colonel is with his regiment in India, and that the news had to travel there from England, a journey which, even with favourable weather, was likely to take four months or more, and it begins to look as if the marriage got into serious difficulties very early on. The Colonel tells Elinor that it was ‘nearly three years after this unhappy period before I returned to England’. Is that three years since the divorce, or since he heard of the divorce, or since Eliza married? It isn’t entirely clear.

  Eliza has, to all intents and purposes, vanished. The Colonel tries to find her, but cannot trace her ‘beyond her first seducer’. The tiny divorce alimony she was awarded has been signed over to someone else. The Colonel does find her, however, ‘at last, and after I had been six months in England’. He finds her in a ‘spunging house’ – a private debtors’ prison – dying of tuberculosis. With her is ‘her only child’, also called Eliza, ‘a little girl, the offspring of her first guilty connection, who was then about three years old’. Born after the divorce, or before? Again, we can’t be certain. What Colonel Brandon intends, by mentioning all these dates, is surely to indicate that the child isn’t his. He’s been six months finding them. Add in the time for the voyage and the three years, however imprecise the starting date, that he’s been in India, and it becomes impossible. Nevertheless, the Colonel explains that he took charge of her. He sends her to school, and later, once his brother has died and he’s inherited the family estate, he puts her ‘under the care of a very respectable woman, residing in Dorsetshire’. He’s even had her to stay with him. On a visit to Bath, she is unfortunate enough to meet Willoughby, and to be seduced by him. She vanishes, and has a daughter outside marriage. Like mother, like daughter.

  Throughout this version of events, the Colonel’s behaviour is impeccable – he falls in love; he removes himself from the scene to try to promote the happiness of Eliza once she’s married; tries to find her when he returns; he attends her deathbed; he cares for her child, and for her child’s child. He even fights a duel with Willoughby. It’s the generosity of deathless love.

  Or is it?

  Setting aside the insistent egoism apparent in the Colonel’s story (just look at all the ‘I’s and ‘my’s in it), it never seems to enter his head that perhaps he ought to be saving up as much money as he can to give to his ward – to replace, in some measure, the fortune which was effectively stolen from her mother and used to prop up the estate. John Dashwood is appalled to find that the Colonel hasn’t sold the right to serve as priest in his local parish (‘for the next presentation to a living of that value […] he might have got I dare say—fourteen hundred pounds’). That’s fourteen hundred pounds which could have gone a little way towards righting the financial wrongs that the Brandon family have committed, and doesn’t.

  Then there’s the small problem of the dates not quite adding up. Colonel Brandon mentions that ‘three years ago’, his ward ‘had just reached her fourteenth year’. By this he seems to mean that she had just turn
ed fourteen. Elsewhere he mentions the mother’s death, which took place when the child was three, as a ‘subject […] untouched for fourteen years’. He is 35 when we first meet him, and turns 36 towards the end of the main action of the novel. His age is mentioned no fewer than eight times. Jane really didn’t want us to miss it. Did she want us to be able to perform a fairly simple piece of arithmetic?

  Colonel Brandon must have been eighteen when the younger Eliza was born, or at the outside, nineteen. Add in the nine months during which her mother was pregnant with her, and all at once we’re presented with a question – just when was she conceived? If it was really eighteen months or two years after the Colonel left for India, how young was he precisely when he was planning to elope to Scotland – fifteen? In spite of his careful, coded protestations – in spite of the fact that he describes events to Elinor in such a way as to allow her to conclude that he spent five years in India and so could not possibly be considered as a candidate – it seems that Colonel Brandon is very much in the frame as a potential father to the younger Eliza. In fact he never explicitly denies the relationship. He says that the child is ‘the offspring’ of his cousin’s ‘first guilty connection’. He says that: ‘I called her a distant relation; but I am well aware that I have in general been suspected of a much nearer connection with her.’