The men, like the girls, are physical beings, strong, young and good-looking, Bingley with his easy nature and pleasant expression, Darcy tall and strikingly handsome, Wickham a charmer in his irresistible uniform. Even Colonel Fitzwilliam is possessed of a sexual charge; although he is “not handsome” he is very good company, and his exchanges with Lizzy are characterized by their “spirit and flow.” This line-up of desirable men helps to make Mr. Collins seem worse than merely ridiculous. He is disgustingly repellent. He inspires laughter in Mr. Bennet, but in Lizzy an almost panicky physical revulsion. She knows enough about sex to find the thought of her friend Charlotte’s subjection to his embraces as loathsome as she would in her place, and so incredulous is she that Charlotte can be prepared to endure them that the thought sets up a barrier of confidence between them. (Austen’s joke about Mrs. Hall losing her baby because she happened to catch sight of her husband, a clergyman of the same age as Mr. Collins, seems to relate to a similar physical revulsion in real life.) But Austen allows that Charlotte, ten years older than Lizzy, is making what is for her a reasonable decision in buying herself a social position as a married woman, escaping the humiliations of a dependent daughter at home in exchange for sexual and domestic services. The notion of marriage as a form of prostitution, spelt out by Mary Wollstonecraft and dwelt on by Austen when writing about her Aunt Phila, is surely present again in Lizzy’s mind here.
Austen is careful to balance her revulsion with a very fair account of Charlotte Collins’s management of her situation as a married woman. She takes pleasure in being in charge of her own small domain—drawing room, cow, poultry, a few servants—and being able to receive her guests; and she is shown developing strategies for minimizing her husband’s awfulness. While she blushes for some of his remarks, she tries not to hear others; she encourages him to separate activities such as gardening, and carefully chooses to sit in a back room while he works in his study at the front, to reduce the chances of his interrupting her. Perhaps the delicate implication is that she attempts a similar distancing method upstairs. It would require great firmness to maintain separate bedrooms; the only one of the married Austen brothers whose sleeping arrangements we know anything about would not have considered such a plan. When Edward was away from Godmersham, his wife took his daughter Fanny to sleep with her, and she records in her diary how, at the age of twelve, she was pulled out from beside her mother in the night when her father arrived home unexpectedly, so that he could take his rightful place in the matrimonial bed. Elizabeth Austen was, as we know, almost permanently pregnant.8 On the other hand, James Austen’s strong-minded second wife managed to confine their family to two children, with a seven-year gap between them; Jane believed she dominated him, and perhaps she did, not least in order to preserve herself. James is also, incidentally, the closest to Mr. Collins in his social situation, summoned regularly to dine at The Vyne by the Chutes after taking the Sunday service.
Social awkwardness, one of Austen’s great themes, supplies a good deal of the comedy in Pride and Prejudice, and is so fundamental to the plot that it must have been an important element from the first. The central embarrassment for Lizzy is that her mother is every bit as vulgar, stupid and regrettable as Mr. Darcy thinks she is, and acts as an appalling obstacle to any hopes she can have of getting on with an intelligent man under the prevailing social constraints. How much better things are when they meet in Kent and Derbyshire; at home, Lizzy, Jane and their father can only cringe away from Mrs. Bennet’s excesses. And although Lizzy loves her father, she sees that the infatuation of his youth is squarely responsible for landing them all in this painful situation; she is his favourite, and the “least dear” of her mother’s children. Yet Lizzy’s vitality—and Lydia’s too—comes from their mother, who is not, as she is often represented, a frumpish elderly woman but one in her forties who would like to be taken to Brighton to enjoy herself; when Lydia imagines herself there, “tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once,” we are told that only her mother would understand the fantasy, because “she might have felt nearly the same.”
Austen had read scenes in Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Cecilia in which vulgar older women say things that make their heroines wince; but they are not mothers. Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison does bring on a mother whose behaviour causes her daughter distress, but she is made to reform and becomes presentable. Both writers see the drama of such situations, but neither has anything like Austen’s bite. Mrs. Bennet is the first modern mother. Lizzy is too polite to formulate, even in the privacy of her own mind, the wish that her mother would drop dead, but she undoubtedly feels something like it.
And Mrs. Bennet dominates the book from its opening sentence. We read it as a piece of resounding irony—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—whereas in fact it is something like a choral statement of the view she shares with every mother in the neighbourhood. As the book proceeds, we see Mrs. Bennet proved right more than once. The single men do line up, wanting wives. Her silly predictions about Bingley marrying one of her daughters are justified. Her maddening manoeuvres to leave Jane alone with her admirer are indeed necessary to bring him to the point. Her restored faith that Lydia and Wickham will turn out very well is wonderfully brought to pass. Indeed, her belief that it is better to have ten thousand a year than five, better five thousand than one, and better something than nothing, is also well founded; it was after all a tenet shared by the Austens. Money was important if a married woman was not to be ground down by comfortless child-bearing and drudgery. No question of that for Mrs. Darcy, of course; impossible to imagine Darcy inflicting a yearly baby on Lizzy as Edward Austen did on his Elizabeth. The good landlord and master, the kind and imaginative brother, the discerning reader and collector of books, concerned for his sister’s cultural development, aware of the civilizing effect of women on society, is surely not going to abdicate his responsibility for his wife’s physical well-being and turn her into a “poor animal” once they are married at the end of the book. Outside its pages, Jane Austen credited him with a mixture of “Love, Pride & Delicacy” in his attitude towards his wife.9 No doubt his fine, up-to-date library contained novels. Fiction itself— despised by Mr. Collins, for whom it is also the case that one woman is virtually indistinguishable from another when it comes to choosing a wife—is one of the higher pleasures that brings a better appreciation of women’s contribution to civilization.
A puzzling weakness of the book is the way in which Darcy, a fastidious and educated man, accepts the many crude conversational manoeuvres of Bingley’s sisters, intending to flatter him and put down the Bennets. He even hopes to marry his sister to Bingley, although these tough, shallow young women, their malice polished by “one of the first private seminaries in town,” are surely no models for Georgiana Darcy. It is hard to believe he finds their behaviour or their talk acceptable, let alone companionable; their terrible manners seem to have strayed in from the Austen juvenilia. My guess is that they were retained from the earliest draft into the final version for structural reasons, because they provide a series of opportunities for comic dialogue that allows Austen to dramatize Darcy’s developing feelings about Lizzy, obviously neater than describing it. The reason is sound, but it makes an awkwardness in the credibility of the plot.
As to Wickham and his fellow officers, they are the one feature of the book that ties it into Austen’s known experience. The attractions of officers quartered in Canterbury to Mrs. Lefroy’s daughter and her friend are touched on sardonically in one of her letters shortly before she started writing. 10 There were militia officers in Basingstoke (Eliza Chute gave dinners for them, and mentioned the “fracas” they made in the summer of 1794); Tom Chute was in a militia regiment, and Henry doubtless had stories to tell of his fellow officers in the Oxford militia. All this must have contributed to Wickham, Colonel Forster, Denny, Pratt and Chamberlayne, who was dressed up in
women’s clothes by Lydia, Kitty and Mrs. Forster. And Wickham carries a faint suggestion of Henry Austen, as he hesitates between possible brides and possible careers, and shows himself to be more agreeable than reliable. If Henry was not a villain, it is also true that the story of Wickham’s wickedness seems artificial and grafted on, strayed in from a different sort of novel altogether; because as we see him in action he seems frivolous rather than evil, casting about to see what prizes he can win for himself in a competitive society, rather than steeped in cold-hearted villainy.
Wickham’s prize is a particularly interesting one. Lydia, presented as a bad girl, and spoilt by her mother, who sees her as a surrogate self, is selfish and stupid; but her outrageous energies propel her into getting what Elizabeth also wanted—i.e., Wickham—and Austen shows that Lizzy cannot quite forgive Lydia’s success. It is not only her superior morality at work, you feel, but a touch of envy that makes her so prim and bad-tempered with Lydia, whose careless vivacity and amorality have allowed her to bag the desirable Wickham. Lydia is the id to Lizzy’s ego. What’s more, she is to be allowed to enjoy him. This is one of the great touches of the book; Austen is too honest to pretend that stories like Lydia’s must end as the gloating neighbours predict, with every erring girl either reduced to prostitution—“on the town”—or banished to lonely penitence and poverty. When she came to write Mansfield Park she felt obliged to condemn Maria Rushworth to precisely that formal banishment, insisted on by her father; but not here. Lydia remains pleased with herself and her situation, at ease with her charming if forcibly married husband, with enough money and rich brothers-in-law prepared to pay to ensure her continuing comfort in life. It is even possible to feel a sneaking sympathy for that shameless ability to enjoy herself.
The finest stroke of invention in the whole book is the way in which Austen arranges for Lizzy to accept Darcy. Since Lizzy’s best scenes are her refusals—first of Collins, then of Darcy—it is pure genius to allow her another refusal, this time made to Lady Catherine, as the means of signifying her willingness to marry Darcy at last. Not only is the scene intensely dramatic in itself, as every adapter for stage and film knows; it also serves to keep the flag of excitement flying right to the end.
Northanger Abbey was also started in the aftermath of a family tragedy, this time the death of their 27-year-old cousin Jane Williams in August 1798. Again, there is very little trace of personal allusion in the book, although it is written more in the style of a family entertainment than any of the others, with its detailed picture of Bath, familiar to most of the Austens, and its references to novels read and doubtless discussed at Steventon. One of the jokes is that the heroine is not a heroine by any of the usual rules of fiction, neither clever nor beautiful, and without accomplishments or admirers—an ordinary girl, one of ten children of a plain country clergyman. When she is taken to Bath by dull, kindly friends, she falls in love with the first young man who dances with her, and although he likes her for her simplicity and straightforwardness, he does not think of her as a possible wife until he realizes she is in love with him, and notices that she listens with sparkling eyes to everything he says: “in finding him irresistible, becoming so herself.” Later we learn that “a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.”
The narrator’s stance is that of a cheerful elder sister who from time to time disrupts the story by commenting on it, very much in the manner of Fielding in Tom Jones: “And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion; to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night’s rest in the course of the next three months.” Fielding-like, she offers maxims: “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.” And, most famously, on the status of the novel: “ ‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ ” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame . . . in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” 11
The second source of humour is at the expense of the fashion for Gothic fiction: mysterious old buildings, secret hiding places, lights suddenly extinguished, night terrors, indecipherable messages, rumours of suspicious deaths, powerful and menacing men. The genre has lasted long enough for modern readers to pick up the joke without having read Mrs. Radcliffe or her imitators, and is so precisely and delicately handled that it is as funny today as it was when it was written. Jane Austen was using Mrs. Radcliffe as Stella Gibbons used Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence, finding their weakest points and through them undermining the whole basis of their work. It is an unfair and a deeply enjoyable exercise.
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Twenty-five
Anyone arriving at their twenty-fifth birthday with three outstanding novels to their name looks well embarked on the road to success; fame, riches, happiness all within easy reach, you would think. This was exactly Jane Austen’s situation: she had three substantial and original books completed, owing nothing to anyone but their very bright, energetic and inventive author. There had been a set-back with Cadell, but she was sure of her father’s support; and she could joke about her manuscripts, accusing Martha Lloyd of planning to memorize First Impressions and publish it from memory as her own work, teasing Cassandra for not rereading it often enough. This is the laughter of a confident person. Everything was set for her to put in a little more work perhaps on the three manuscripts—revising is easier than the first draft—find a publisher who understood his trade, and start on a new novel.
This did not happen. Instead, she fell silent. For ten years she produced almost nothing, and not until she was nearly thirty-five, in the summer of 1809, did she return to the working pattern of her early twenties. On the face of it there was no reason why she should not have gone on writing steadily through the first decade of the nineteenth century. Her family offered no explanation. Her biographer nephew remarked only that “it might rather have been expected that fresh scenes and new acquaintance would have called forth her powers,” but that they failed to do so; and he shrugs her silence off.
The truth is that Austen depended very little on fresh scenes and new acquaintance; her work was done in her head, when she began to see the possibility of a certain situation and set of characters, and her books are never transcripts of what she saw going on around her. She used the odd particular point and incident—the amber crosses Charles gave to her and Cass become a topaz one given by Midshipman William Price to his sister in Mansfield Park; the Cobb at Lyme Regis suggests a dramatic scene; Henry’s experiences in the militia may have set her mind working on Wickham and his fellow officers— but she did not draw from life, or write down the stories of her friends and family. A series of thrilling novels could have been based on the adventures of her Aunt Philadelphia and her Cousin Eliza; they seem to cry out for fiction. Or she could have put the oddities and crimes of half a dozen neighbouring Hampshire families into novels; but, as we have seen, Hampshire is missing from the novels, and none of the Austens’ neighbours, exotic, wicked or merely amusing, makes a recognizable appearance. The world of her imagination was separate and distinct from the world she inhabited.
What she did depend on was particular working conditions which allowed her to abstract herself from the daily life going on around her; and these she lost just after her twenty-fifth birthday. What made her fall silent was another huge event in her “life of no event”: another exile.
The decision by Mr. and Mrs. Austen to leave their home of over thirt
y years, taking their daughters with them, came as a complete surprise to her; in effect, a twenty-fifth birthday surprise, in December 1800. Not a word had been said to anyone in advance of the decision. Charles had been at home on leave in November—he and Jane went to a ball together at Lord Portsmouth’s—and when he received the news early in the new year it came as a shock to him too. After his visit both daughters were away, Jane at Ibthorpe staying with Martha, Cassandra at Godmersham, where the arrival of a sixth baby made her presence desirable. This had left the Austen parents on their own; and, like a pair of enthusiastic children left to their own devices, they egged one another on with the possibilities and pleasures of a new life, and agreed to cast off the habits and responsibilities of four decades. So they hatched their plan to leave Steventon, without reference to anyone else, and decided to move to Bath.
No one can blame them for wanting some relief from their long years of labour. And although they might have proceeded a little more tactfully than they did, tact would not have altered the essential point. According to several accounts, Jane was told, immediately and baldly, that the move was settled as she walked into the house on her return from Ibthorpe: “Well, girls, it is all settled, we have decided to leave Steventon in such a week and go to Bath” is the family version of Mrs. Austen’s announcement. Jane was greatly distressed. This is Mary Austen’s account, who was there; and although she misremembered the presence of Cassandra, there is no reason to doubt the truth of it. She had a reason to stress the bright side rather than insist on Jane’s unhappiness, since she was to benefit from the change.1 James and Mary were to move into Steventon rectory and take over the parish. James’s daughter Anna was told her Aunt Jane fainted. Whether she did or not, it can hardly be doubted that the whole thing was a shock, and a painful one.
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