Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  o Perhaps emboldened by the fact that Lord Fitzwilliam appeared completely unaware or unconcerned that she’d made use of his name, Jane borrowed more from him – Lord Fitzwilliam lived at the vast Yorkshire mansion called Wentworth Woodhouse.

  p For an explanation of how the system of employing clergymen worked, see Chapters 5 and 6.

  q We ought, I think, to read a touch of malice into Mr Bennet’s behaviour over Bingley. As soon as Mrs Bennet realises that the visit has been paid, she invites Bingley for dinner so that he can meet her daughters. He has to turn the invitation down in order to go to London. When the day of the Meryton assembly comes round, does Mr Bennet accompany his wife and daughters, so that he can introduce them, naturally and easily? No, he stays at home, in his study, reading. Luckily, Bingley seeks an introduction to Jane.

  r These examples are from Fanny Burney’s Camilla.

  s Darcy’s refusal to interact with his perceived social inferiors leads to some strangulated, triangulated conversations, as when Mrs Bennet, taking offence at a comment which Darcy addresses in front of her, but to Miss Bingley, is forced to refer to him as ‘that gentleman’. Her apparent rudeness at the end of the novel, when she speaks to Darcy only in the shortest of sentences, is in fact an attempt at socially correct behaviour under circumstances which Darcy has made extremely problematic.

  t Burney’s novel Evelina features the following conversation in praise of the eponymous heroine: ‘“By Jove,” cried the man, “she is the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life!” Lord Orville, as he well might, laughed; but answered, “Yes, a pretty modest-looking girl.” “O my Lord!” cried the madman, “she is an angel!”’

  u The often-quoted comment about Emma Woodhouse (‘a heroine whom no one but myself will like’) is unsubstantiated family tradition, while we can’t be entirely sure which heroine Jane is referring to as ‘almost too good for me’ in a letter which seems to belong to 1817. Probably it’s Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, but we can’t say for certain.

  v Mitford was writing to a man called Sir William Elford, who had been a friend of Pitt and had also served as a lieutenant-colonel of militia. This letter, dated 20th December 1814, is the only one to survive from a longer correspondence. It’s interesting that Mitford seems to anticipate that Elford will agree with her negative judgement of Elizabeth.

  w The only really convincing exception is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and even then the heroine’s social status remains problematic to the end of the novel and most of the way through a very lengthy sequel. The unequal marriage was mocked viciously by other writers.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘The Chain and the Cross’

  Mansfield Park

  London, 1813.a

  The little girls, who had hoped for an evening at one of the theatres, are indulging in a fit of the sulks. It is only the mildest of fits, however. Jane has been determinedly ignoring them this past half hour, and is encouraging her eldest niece Fanny to ignore them likewise. Fanny is not always wise where her sisters are concerned. And after all, Jane is sure she would be rather sulky herself, if she had been compelled to subject her teeth, as they had earlier in the day, to the tender mercies of Mr Spence – filing and extractions and gold stops and the dear knows what else besides. And those frowns, those gusty sighs, might well be a sign, not that the girls feel themselves hardly-used, but that their letters to their brothers and sisters, at home in Kent, are proving difficult to write. No one knows better than she does that words do not always flow easily.

  Jane loves a play well enough, but what with the shopping, and the wearing hour they spent at the dentist, she is glad of a quiet evening with only their own company. Her eyes are troubling her again. A trip to town often takes her this way. It is the late nights, and the smoky lamps, and the dust in the streets forever agitated by carriages and crossing-sweepers. It is pleasanter to sit round the circular table in this snug inner room in Henry’s house, even if the girls are being a trifle tiresome. It is pleasant to be wearing her new cap and to know that her hair is dressed more or less according to the fashion.

  The arrival of the tea things seems a good moment to put an end to her letter. The girls evidently think so, too; they laughingly drag Fanny from the table, complaining that they’re fainting from hunger, and that some of those little cakes will be just the thing—

  Fanny, struggling to maintain her seniority, begins to read them a lecture on all the trash and sweet things they eat and to threaten them with a return visit to the dentist. Perhaps Marianne will have to have all her teeth taken out!—

  Marianne turns white. The drops of laudanum which she took with her wine and water have not made her forget her ordeal at the hands of Mr Spence, poor child.

  Fanny, says Jane, folding her letter, this is hardly helpful—

  —And, replies Fanny, as if she has not heard her aunt, as if producing a winning card, sugar is made by slaves and so it is the most immoral, unchristian thing for her sisters to eat as much of it as they do.

  Is that true? the little girls ask. And, is that true, Aunt Jane – I thought we didn’t have slaves any more in England?

  We don’t, says Fanny. You must know that sugar comes from the Sugar Islands, from Jamaica, and Antigua, and places such as those. And it is a shocking thing to eat it in such quantities – practically heathenish. Mr Plumptre says that sugar might as well be soaked in blood—

  —Oho! crows Lizzy, in delight. Mr Plumptre!

  Jane frowns her down, but not before a tide of colour has begun to mount in Fanny’s cheeks.

  Marianne, putting her hot little face close to Jane’s ear, proffers the whispered information that Mr Plumptre is Fanny’s particular friend.

  Edward appears in the doorway, his looks severe, Henry trailing behind, embarrassed. The little girls fall silent. Fanny too. Her father does not altogether approve of Mr John Plumptre.

  The younger girls dismissed to bed, Fanny and Edward nibbling on cake, avoiding one another’s eyes, Jane asks Henry in an undertone whether he is unwell.

  Henry, grimacing all the while, at last confesses to a disordered stomach. He will be much the better for some tea, with sugar, if Jane would be so kind.

  Jane stares down at the delicate cup and saucer, the spoon poised, the sugar powdered into dust.

  Her other hand strays to the topaz cross which her brother Charles bought her, oh, years since, and which is still her very prettiest ornament. She put it on when she was dressing for dinner, in compliment to the cap and the hair.

  How many souls, she wonders, suffered to make this spoonful of sugar?

  Mansfield Park was published in May 1814, to almost total silence. There were no reviews at all in the literary magazines – Mansfield Park is the only one of Jane’s novels which wasn’t reviewed when it came out. Both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had won praise in the press. The Critical Review said that Sense and Sensibility ‘reflects honour on the writer’. The British Critic picked out a few ‘trifling defects’ but pronounced it a ‘very pleasing and entertaining narrative’ and lamented that there wasn’t room to discuss it more prominently. In 1813, it judged Pride and Prejudice ‘very far superior to almost all the publications of the kind’. The Critical Review, too, thought the novel ‘very agreeable’. These responses indicate how carelessly literary critics tended to read the work of lady novelists, quite as carelessly as Crosby had. They indicate, too, that a lot of the force of these novels was lost by publishing them when memories of the texts and events which had helped to inspire them were beginning to grow vague.

  Both these journals were conservative, allied to traditional, establishment views. The British Critic had actually been set up as an Anglican journal and was part-owned by clergymen and part by the Rivingtons, a printing firm which had specialised in religious publications for decades. The reviewers for both magazines enjoyed Jane’s characters and her writing, but they were interested – openly so – in lessons, and in what
they call ‘sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life’. That they didn’t find lessons or ‘salutary maxims’ in Mansfield Park, or at least any they wanted to promote, gives us the first hint that, in this novel, Jane had gone further than was, perhaps, altogether wise.

  In the autumn of 1815 Jane left Egerton, the firm which had seen three of her novels into print, and moved to John Murray. Murray – who also published Lord Byron’s poetry – was a highly professional publisher, bred to the trade. Jane describes him to Cassandra as ‘a rogue, of course, but a civil one’.1 As had become usual, Henry Austen began the negotiations – perhaps as early as the end of 1814 – but he fell ill and Jane took over the business herself.b It was the first time she had dealt with a publisher directly since her disastrous attempt to manipulate Crosby in 1809. More cautious, and more considered, her correspondence with Murray displays none of the word tricks or empty threats that she had employed with Crosby. But she did, as part of the agreement for Emma, insist that Murray produce a second edition of Mansfield Park. Her insistence was, as it turned out, ill-judged; the second edition made a heavy loss, eating up most of the profits from Emma.c

  But the fact that she insisted at all suggests that she thought Mansfield Park hadn’t reached the audience it deserved.

  Murray did his duty by Emma, which was reviewed in no fewer than five journals, including Murray’s own ‘house journal’ the Quarterly Review, edited by his friend and close collaborator William Gifford. The reviewer selected was Walter Scott, the author of Waverley and Ivanhoe, who was at this point still known chiefly for his poetry. The review is a serious one – thoughtful, attentive. It takes the form of a twenty-page essay which begins by discussing the emergence of a new kind of novel, dealing not with long-lost heirs and brigands and adventures but with ‘such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation of most folks’. As far as this newer type of novel is concerned, Jane is, for Scott, in a class of her own. A writer himself, he appreciates not only the end product (‘sketches of such spirit and originality’) but the work which has gone into producing it; the ‘neatness’ and ‘precision’, and the ‘peculiar tact’ with which she reveals character through ‘quiet yet comic dialogue’.

  At one point in the essay, Scott explains that he’s including ‘a short notice of the author’s former works’ as a way of illustrating the kind of novels she writes. The plots of both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are duly summarised. Mansfield Park isn’t even mentioned.

  Jane questioned this when she wrote to Murray, returning the copy of the magazine he’d sent to her: ‘I return you the Quarterly Reveiw [sic] with many Thanks’, she writes. ‘The Authoress of Emma has no reason I think to complain of her treatment in it — except in the total omission of Mansfield Park. — I cannot but be sorry that so clever a Man as the Reveiwer of Emma, should consider it as unworthy of being noticed.’

  What does this indicate? That Jane wanted to know what a ‘clever man’ (‘a reading man’, to quote Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth) thought of her third, difficult, disappointing novel? Did she consider the omission deliberate? I think so – she sees it as a cause for complaint. She was ‘sorry’; was she surprised?

  What was it that made the literary reviewers shy away from Mansfield Park?

  So far as we know it was the first novel Jane had started – and finished – in years, perhaps nearly a decade or even longer. We can’t be sure how much she reworked Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but there are enough indications remaining in the texts to suggest that the family tradition that they were originally written in the 1790s isn’t entirely wide of the mark. Redrafting and revising are – as every writer knows – different, very different, to writing something from scratch.

  And Mansfield Park is very different from the novels which were begun when Jane was young, even if the first page seems like a sort of sequel to Pride and Prejudice, picking up where that novel ended, with three sisters marrying into different social classes, the second oldest making a brilliant match while the youngest elopes and lands in comparative poverty. If Pride and Prejudice is, as Jane joked, ‘too light and bright and sparkling’, then Mansfield Park is its dark and sombre reflection.

  It is a sober novel, even more so than Sense and Sensibility. There are few moments of comedy to vary the tone. The two weddings at the end of Mansfield Park are neatly cancelled out by a divorce (extraordinarily rare at the time) and a death, two marriages finished, dissolved. The book is filled with infidelities, with not-so-genteel poverty, with bullying and threats of violence. The heroine, Fanny Price, is sent away from her birth family as a child of ten. Her much-loved brother William, little older, joins the Royal Navy and is sent to sea, in wartime. Another of the Price children enters the service of the East India Company, sailing half-way round the world with cargoes worth a king’s ransom, exposed to the dangers not only of the sea, and of piracy, but of the Indian climate and diseases – malaria, dengue fever – to which European settlers had absolutely no natural resistance. Another of Fanny’s siblings dies as a child. Fanny’s uncle, the Reverend Mr Norris, dies at the beginning of Chapter 3. The gluttonous clergyman, Dr Grant, ‘brings on apoplexy and death’ a few pages before the end of the novel. Even Fanny’s favourite horse, the ‘old grey poney’, dies.

  Then there are the parents. In all the novels except for this one either the hero or heroine has lost at least one parent. This is true in Northanger Abbey, in Sense and Sensibility, in Pride and Prejudice, in Emma, and in Persuasion. In Mansfield Park, by contrast, the heroine has almost too many parents, and all of them are terrible. Perfection, for Jane, belongs only to the dead, and the living parents she writes are, without exception, flawed human beings – just as her heroes and heroines are. But though the parents in Jane’s other novels may be tyrannical, like General Tilney, dangerously inept, like Mrs Dashwood, or a social embarrassment, like Mrs Bennet, they are motivated by what they believe is best for their children. Not so for Fanny Price. There are her own father and mother – the one a drinker, ‘dirty and gross’, the other ‘a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern’. Then there are her foster parents, her uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. Lady Bertram is ‘indolent’, ‘dozing’ her life away on the ‘sopha’. Sir Thomas Bertram is ‘cold’ and ‘injudicious’, anxious about the implications of allowing Fanny to enter his household (‘he thought of his own four children, of his two sons, of cousins in love, etc.’). Fanny’s other aunt, Mrs Norris, a deeply unpleasant individual whose mind is a mystery even to her creator (‘perhaps she might so little know herself’), only ever notices Fanny to scold her.

  Both of the heroine’s ‘fathers’ behave in ways which are, on the kindest interpretation, ill-judged.

  Meeting his eldest daughter for the first time in years, Mr Price gives her a ‘hug’, the only one in all of Jane’s novels. A ‘hug’, for Jane, meant something slightly different than it does nowadays. It was more than an embrace, it was close, rough, forcible. It’s a pressing together of bodies. Implicit in it is threat, and physicality – even sexual intimacy. And there’s more. When Mr Price reads in his newspaper that Fanny’s cousin Maria has left her husband for another man, he announces that, if he were Maria’s father, he would whip her for it: ‘I don’t know what Sir Thomas may think of such matters; he may be too much of the courtier and fine gentleman to like his daughter the less. But, by G—! if she belonged to me, I’d give her the rope’s end as long as I could stand over her.’

  It has, we gather, been a while since Mr Price was in gainful employment, but when he did work it was as an officer of marines – the soldiers who served as part of the Royal Navy. He will have seen men flogged until their backs were nothing more than a mass of soft bloody flesh. The word ‘sadist’ hadn’t been coined when Jane was writing, but that’s undoubtedly what Mr Price is.

  What should we make of the fact that Fanny’s two sisters fight over possession of a silver knife, and
that one of Fanny’s first actions after arriving back in Portsmouth is to make sure they each have one? Does she suspect – does she know – that they might need to protect themselves?

  Fanny’s other father, her uncle, admires her ‘person’, her ‘complexion’ and ‘figure’ – that is, her body, lightly covered by the flimsy dresses which were in fashion in the early years of the nineteenth century. He watches closely, almost vicariously, as Henry Crawford courts Fanny. He discusses her looks with his son, Fanny’s first cousin – the man Fanny loves and eventually marries. The idea of a man of 50 noticing his wife’s niece in this way, a girl brought up in his house, should, I think, make us feel uncomfortable. It makes Fanny feel uncomfortable.

  It’s worth noting that she’s the only one of Jane’s heroines who, it seems, has short hair – ‘a queer fashion’, her brother William remarks, and one which he ‘could not believe’ when he ‘first heard of such things being done in England’.d Short hair was quite modish for a time, but it was daring – an odd choice of hairstyle for the painfully shy Fanny to adopt, unless one views it as an attempt to avoid male attention, to evade ‘being worth looking at’.

  Fanny Price’s family is not like the other ones Jane creates. We’ll see another possibly ill-advised, quasi-incestuous relationship between the hero and heroine of Emma, but we come closer to incest in Mansfield Park – threatened and real. Marriage between first cousins was legal in England and in fact remains so. Indeed, Jane’s brother Henry married their first cousin Eliza. True, Henrietta Musgrove marries her cousin Charles Hayter in Persuasion, but it’s something Jane otherwise goes out of her way to avoid in her writing. Mr Darcy doesn’t marry his cousin Anne de Bourgh. Even with more distant cousins – William and Anne Elliot, Mr Collins and the Bennet girls – Jane prevents any marriage from getting near to happening.