There were no cheerful visits from Henry and Eliza. In March 1799 Henry had been sent to Ireland with his regiment, required to guard the coast against the French and keep down the continuing disaffection among the Irish. He remained there for seven months, mostly in Dublin, and made himself agreeable to the Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, officially Governor-General of India, but sent by the government to Ireland to crush the rebellion. Such rich and powerful figures appealed to Henry, and he was quick to think of how they might be useful to him after he left the army. With his experience as Paymaster, he began to think of becoming a banker and to discuss it with friends in the regiment.
Meanwhile Eliza retreated to what she called her “hermitage” near Dorking, in Surrey. She said she preferred her piano, harp and books to any other company; in confirmation, a printed volume of “Feuilles de Terpsichore,” pieces to be sung at the harp, and another of hand-copied songs by Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mozart, bear her name, “Mrs. Henry Austen” and “Eliza Austen, 19 August 1799.”7 Her gaiety was in eclipse. She told Phila, who wrote soliciting help for her brother from Warren Hastings, that she had “the most insuperable aversion to asking favours.” Her health was poor, and her son’s worse: he suffered from frequent and violent epileptic fits. “Their effects on his mental powers, if his life should not be destroyed by them, must be of the most melancholy nature, and are a constant source of grief to me.” She went on sadly, “mental & bodily sufferings are ever closely connected.”8
15
Three Books
When Jane Austen wrote the first draft of Pride and Prejudice, she was twenty, the same age as Elizabeth Bennet. By the time it was published in 1813 she was thirty-seven: almost old enough to be Elizabeth’s mother. Seventeen years must be one of the longest delays ever between composition and publication. Sense and Sensibility went through the same long, drawn-out process, with a sixteen-year gap between first draft and publication. Northanger Abbey took twenty years to find a publisher, and did not appear in print until its author was dead. It is sobering to think how easily any of them might have been lost.
She made some copies; but neither the copies nor any of her good care help us to know how the earlier versions differed from the later. There are no manuscripts of either drafts or final versions of any of the published novels.1 It makes talking about her revisions almost entirely guesswork. You can have fun speculating whether she was nineteen, or twenty-one, or thirty-five when she wrote a particular passage, but proving anything is like trying to carve a solid shape out of jelly. We know that Pride and Prejudice was originally longer than the final version, because she says she “lop’t and crop’t” it, and we can suppose that the dialogue was more finely characterized with each revision; there must also be some lost passages we should dearly like to see. A puzzling thread from an early version that hangs into the final one is that Jane Bennet is a horsewoman, while Elizabeth only walks, which seems contrary to their characters. How this came about is anyone’s guess; something lop’t that should not have been. There are some small late insertions such as references to Scott’s poetry and Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda, which cannot have been in the early drafts; beyond this, no certainties.2 My own assumption is that the central characters and plot structures were in place by 1800, when she had three completed novels, one of them already thought good enough for publication by her father, and that although she did more work on them, they were substantially the books we know. And although the titles of two of them changed before they were published, I shall call them by their final names.
The first striking thing about these three early novels is that each approaches its subject in a radically different way. Sense and Sensibility is—roughly speaking—a debate, Pride and Prejudice a romance, and Northanger Abbey a satire, a novel about novels and novel reading. You might expect a young writer to keep working within the same formula several times, learning as she goes. Not so with Jane Austen. She was too inventive and too interested in the techniques of fiction to settle in any one mode, and she tackled the problems of three such diverse forms with astonishing skill.
In Sense and Sensibility Elinor and Marianne act out a debate about behaviour in which Austen compares the discretion, polite lies and carefully preserved privacy of one sister with the transparency, truth-telling and freely expressed emotion of the other. Austen is considering how far society can tolerate openness, and what its effect on the individual may be. The question was keenly debated in the 1790s as part of a wider political discussion, with radical writers like William Godwin and Robert Bage favouring the complete openness practised by Marianne, conservatives insisting that the preservation of the social fabric requires an element of secrecy and hypocrisy. These were serious questions, and one of the things that gives the book its intense interest is that Austen starts as though she is favouring one set of answers, and grows less certain as the book progresses. For me, this ambivalence makes Sense and Sensibility one of her two most deeply absorbing books—the other being Mansfield Park, which has a similar wobble in its approach. Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot.
Early in the story Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are both engaged in love affairs with slippery young men. Austen sets out to present Elinor as the model of good behaviour, and to back her insistence on the social necessity of discretion and even lying. She speaks of the duty of “telling lies when politeness required it,” and refuses to confide her own difficulties and sorrows even to her much loved sister. Marianne, who will not—cannot—lie, is at first set up as merely silly and self-indulgent, dramatizing her emotions, making things more difficult for others whether she is grieving for her dead father or letting everyone see how much she is in love with her new friend, Willoughby; and she follows the dictates and desires of her heart into unconventional and even risky behaviour, justifying it with the words “we always know when we are acting wrong.” Like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, she follows an inner voice that tells her what is right and what is wrong.
Marianne’s honestly expressed feelings are not all silly. This is how she reproaches her neighbour, the bluff forty-year-old Sir John Middleton, for talking about girls “setting their cap” at men: “That is an expression, Sir John . . . which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common-place phrase by which wit is intended; and ‘setting one’s cap at a man,’ or ‘making a conquest,’ are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity.” This fierce, and fiercely intelligent, Marianne is surely giving Jane Austen’s opinion here, even if Austen herself never spoke such words aloud to the Hampshire squires. Marianne’s ability to talk well, her refusal to tell lies, and the fact that she is not afraid to express her views and feelings are shown as attractive. Austen did not break accepted codes of behaviour as she makes Marianne do, by corresponding privately with a man to whom she was not engaged, although she did let everyone see her attraction to Tom Lefroy. As narrator, she makes her disapproval of Marianne’s imprudences plain; but as the story proceeds, she shows increasing sympathy for her. Marianne’s exaggerated responses may be absurd, and her wild behaviour with Willoughby dangerous to her reputation and peace of mind, but once she is in London her key characteristics become her openness and vulnerability.
Elinor knows, just as her rival, the cunning Lucy Steele, knows, that concealment, disguise, pretended indifference, are almost indispensable props on the social stage. One theme of the book is that survival in society means you cannot afford to live with Marianne’s openness, at least not if you are an unprotected woman. Marianne’s behaviour is wrong in the light of this social fact; Jane Austen learnt it quickly enough herself. Whether it is absolutely wrong is another question. Marianne goes through the fire of betrayal and humiliation by the man she loves and trusts, and expresses remorse for “a series of imprudence towards myself”; but the reader is likely to feel that she has acted innocently and purely, and with
a consistency that justifies what she has done. The justification is endorsed by Willoughby’s continued love for her after he has jilted her and made his prudent, mercenary marriage; and by Elinor’s acknowledgement to herself that he would have been the right husband for her sister, in spite of his misdemeanours. Marianne’s morality, unfortunate as its effects are on her own life, is not so bad after all, and Austen’s answer to the questions posed at the beginning becomes uncertain.
It may be that Austen started with a simple opposition between the sister who follows the correct path—polite lies, suppression of feeling—and the one who rejects it; and that it was in reworking her story that Marianne drew ever more of her sympathy. Rather as Tolstoy created Anna Karenina to show the evils of adultery, and then found himself bewitched by his creation, Austen, beginning with a sometimes crude portrait of a self-indulgent sixteen-year-old, found her appreciation of her character growing as she developed the portrait and traced out her history.
The ball at which Marianne is humiliated is one of her great set-pieces. That it is played out entirely as tragedy, and not as a merely embarrassing social occasion, makes it a unique moment in the novels, and is another sign that Austen credits Marianne with being more than a foolish girl, and allows her depth of character and feeling. And although Austen shifts the story back into the comic mode, the tragic shadow remains over Marianne. Other potential tragedies occur to the reader: that she might have suffered the same fate as Colonel Brandon’s niece Eliza Williams, seduced by Willoughby and left pregnant. Or that she might die of her illness, which she herself describes as brought on by a suicidal impulse: “Had I died,—it would have been self-destruction,” she tells Elinor. Again, it is possible to speculate that an early version of the book might have allowed Marianne to die.
Even as the final version stands, she is punished, and the punishment is never lifted, since she is not allowed to marry Willoughby, whom she loves and who loves her. None of Austen’s words about her learning to love Colonel Brandon cut much ice with the reader, and Austen does not risk a single exchange of dialogue between them; always a sign of her lack of commitment to a plot point.
What she does give us is the amazing moment when Elinor finds herself wishing that Willoughby’s wife would die: she “for a moment wished Willoughby a widower.” For Elinor to harbour murderous desires is so surprising that most readers fail to notice that Austen gave them to her. The scene in which Willoughby and Elinor talk, he already married, Marianne lying ill near by, has the surprisingness of art that has lifted entirely away from pattern and precept into truthfulness to human nature. 3
Sense and Sensibility lies between tragedy and comedy. The tidying up of the love affairs at the end hardly changes that, and the prevailing tone of the book is sombre. Mrs. Jennings is a blessed creature, as we learn to appreciate, but a trio of black-heartedly villainous women dominates much of the action. Mrs. Ferrars, rich, stupid and cruel, bullies her sons and becomes a dupe herself. Lucy Steele gets her claws into one victim and hangs on, lying and cheating, until she achieves the position in society she has set herself to win; and Fanny Dashwood, all avarice and envy, steals her sister-in-laws’ inheritances.
Just as the question of truth versus social lies is of the 1790s, so does Marianne’s self-destructive impulse fit the ethos of that decade. The linking of love with suicide became an important theme in literature from the publication of Goethe’s hugely influential Sorrows of Young Werther; it appeared in English in 1779 and produced a crop of imitations. One who was influenced by it was Mary Wollstonecraft. Her story was much in the air in the late 1790s, and the Austens had a particular reason for hearing about her, because the father of one of their ex-pupils was a benefactor of hers. Sir William East not only sent his son Gilbert to school with them, he was also a neighbour and friend of the Leigh-Perrots. Sir William showed particular kindness to Mary Wollstonecraft in the spring of 1796, as she recovered from a suicide attempt, brought about by the ill treatment she had received from an unreliable lover into whose power she had put herself by her rash behaviour. Wollstonecraft died in September the following year, two months before Austen started revising her first draft of Sense and Sensibility, and her friendship with Sir William was mentioned in the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft that appeared the following year; or rather it was mentioned in the first edition, and cut out of the second. I am not suggesting that Austen modelled Marianne on her, only that the theme of sensibility, outspokenness, refusal to conform to social rules and attempted self-destruction when love fails are paralleled in the two cases.4
Marianne is made to recover from her self-induced illness in a thoroughly chastened state, blaming herself for her death wish. She promises, “I shall now live solely for my family . . . and if I do mix in other society it will be only to shew that my spirit is humbled, my heart amended, and that I can practise the civilities, the lesser duties of life, with gentleness, and forbearance.” When she goes on to say that the memory of her lover “shall be regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment,” she sounds almost as though she is speaking from a manual of advice warning young ladies to avoid passion in any form.5 And when she sinks into marriage with Colonel Brandon, one in which the reader knows there will be no passion for her, we feel she deserves better; as does Elinor. For Elinor has changed too; rewarded for her prudence, self-effacement and stoicism by the marriage she hoped for, she has also had her views enlarged.
Sense and Sensibility is a book that moves to tears; and this in spite of the schematic plot and reliance on standard subplots to move things forward: seduced and abandoned girls, a tyrannical guardian and a wicked mother with her hand on the purse strings; an unsuitable engagement to a scheming minx; a miraculous reversal of the minx’s plan; and so on. Yet it repeatedly bursts into brilliance. Chapter 2 alone stands as a masterpiece of dramatic writing, as Austen makes Fanny Dashwood, in thirteen speeches, turn her husband through 180 degrees without his once being aware of what is happening; a perfectly engineered piece of manipulation, and a tour de force of dialogue. When Mary Lascelles wrote that “it was never to count for as much, to the author or her family, as the later novels,” you wonder whether it was simply too strong for the Austens in its portrayal of an openly passionate heroine.6
Pride and Prejudice has always been the most popular of Jane Austen’s books, inside her family and out. It is the simplest to enjoy, with its good-humoured comedy, its sunny heroine, its dream denouement. Yet it had its origins in a bleak time for the Austen sisters: 1797 was the year of Tom Fowle’s death and also when Jane was putting up her defences against what she had felt for Tom Lefroy; a year from which no letters at all survive. The book’s detachment from her personal circumstances is notable; never do we feel more strongly that she was “engrossed in making an artifact which pleased her,” and creating a world altogether unlike the one in which she was living.7 Its setting is a country town, and although there is a farm in the background, and some shooting takes place, you cannot imagine Mr. Bennet worrying about the price of pigs or a ploughing competition; his family, with its cook, housekeeper, butler, footman, coachman and maids, is much more comfortably established than the Austens could ever have hoped to be. Mr. Bennet has never had to follow a profession, and Mrs. Bennet prides herself on her daughters being without domestic responsibilities. Occasional themes and touches tie it to her real world— notably the Brighton camps of the mid-1790s and the militia officers—but essentially she is inventing, absorbed by the form and possibilities of the novel. Elizabeth Bennet is a superb creature, and we may think Jane Austen another; but Elizabeth is not a version of herself, as she would be in the work of a romantic novelist.
The plot moves at a cracking pace, bringing four new young men into the Bennet girls’ circle in a few chapters, each of them a potential husband; and the pace is kept up with a series of crises and confrontations. It is a warm story, and a lot of the warmth comes from its steady movement towards consummate
d love. Elizabeth and Jane Bennet— and Lydia too—are all as intent on this as is their mother on their behalf. The physical attractiveness, beauty and energy of the young women is made much of, in Lydia’s case the bounciness of a healthy animal, in Lizzy’s given extra edge by her intelligence. In fact intelligence and beauty are almost the same thing in her; Darcy notices how her face is “rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.”
Austen endowed her heroine with four admirable qualities, energy, wit, self-confidence and the ability to think for herself, and out of these qualities spring the most dramatic and characteristic moments of the book, when Lizzy is shown in action, running, laughing, teasing, arguing, contradicting and refusing to comply with orders. She resembles Marianne Dashwood in her energy and wit, but unlike Marianne she is tough and knows how to protect herself. She uses humour as both defence and attack, but she does not overstep the rules of society. She is the clear moral centre of the book, and her judgements of character are good in almost every case; this makes her two failures of judgement—about Darcy and about Wickham—surprising enough to provide the pivot on which the plot can turn.
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