by Jane Austen
At the very least, Austen and her family must have had concerns over the tumultuous historical events that unsettled the British nation during their lifetime. She was born in 1775, the year that marked the beginning of the American Revolution. Several decades later, she would read newspaper accounts of another British conflict with the new American nation in the War of 1812, which began as she finished revising Pride and Prejudice. What must have played significantly in Austen’s imagination, as in the mind of every Briton, was the ongoing war with Napoleon’s forces, which marked the culmination of a century of conflicts between Britain and France, and which ended, with the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, six months before her fortieth birthday. The British fear of invasion by Napoleon, which endured until 1805, caused concern even in the towns and villages that seemed safest. Austen would have been aware of the billeting of British militia troops in the English countryside, and she certainly followed the career of her brother Henry, who had joined the Oxford militia in 1793, when Britain’s latest war with France erupted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. She must also have taken a personal interest in the campaigns of the British navy, which counted her brothers Francis and Charles among its officers. To what extent she cared about daily political events is difficult to discern, for her letters are marked by characteristic irony. Of a newspaper report of an 1811 battle of the Peninsular War, when Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal in an effort to close ports to British commerce, Austen declared, “How horrible it is to have so many people killed!—And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!” (Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 191; see “For Further Reading”).
If history and politics in general, and the war with France in particular, seem far removed from the affairs of Austen’s novels, it is worth remembering that the militia and army provide romantic distraction in the form of dashing young officers for the two youngest Bennet sisters, Kitty and Lydia, in Pride and Prejudice, while her final novel, Persuasion, centers on the romantic interests of British naval officers. A feature of Austen’s comic mode is that the events that produce the greatest instability within the British nation are tamed into the material of harmless social disarray that furthers the romantic plot. We find the same process at work in other of her novels. Several scholars have noted that the Bertram family estate of Mansfield Park must be supported by the West Indian slave economy and that Sir Thomas Bertram’s absence from his home in England in order to protect his interests in Antigua provides the occasion for the Bertram children and their friends to engage in the mildly improper behavior that promotes comic disorder. We are also reminded of local instability when Harriet Smith, of Emma, is accosted by a band of gypsies and must be rescued by Frank Churchill; the incident plays on commonly held fears of the vagrants and highway-men who traveled the roads of England.
Austen’s firsthand experiences of the world and its momentous events seem limited if we consider her life in terms of the travels that might have spurred her writer’s imagination. Unlike many of her contemporaries whose literary work was enriched by journeys to Scotland, Ireland, and the European continent, Austen spent most of her relatively short life—she died in 1817 at age forty-one, possibly of Addison’s disease or of a form of lymphoma—in the small villages and towns and countryside of the county of Hampshire, in the south of England. Despite several visits to London, vacation tours throughout southern England, and several years’ residence in the spa city of Bath and in the port town of Southampton, Austen can hardly be called cosmopolitan, and, in any case, she would have preferred to think of herself as provincial, a description that better suits her sense of her subject matter as a writer. In a letter to her niece Anna Austen, an aspiring novelist, she dispensed the now famous advice that “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on” (Letters, p. 275).
Austen’s life appears to have been relatively untroubled, although there must have been painful episodes. The daughter of a respectable Anglican clergyman, she was the seventh of eight children in what appears to have been a happy, stable family. There were, however, financial troubles, and the Reverend George Austen was obliged to add to his income by establishing a boarding school for boys in the Austen home and by borrowing money from his sister and her husband. Further, as Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin points out, even though the family was close, several of the children spent a considerable amount of time living away from home, which, though not unusual for the gentry and professional classes at this time, was probably disorienting for Austen and her siblings. One of her six brothers, George, was disabled—possibly a deaf-mute—and was sent from home for most of his long life. Jane, too, was sent from home, first to a village nurse and later to two boarding schools that, if they resembled the typical girls’ schools of that era, were characterized by bad food, dull teachers, and an atmosphere ripe for one epidemic or another. Along with her older sister, Cassandra, the seven-year-old Jane spent only two seasons at the first institution, where she nearly died from a contagious fever that spread through the school. At age nine, she was sent to a second school, which, if not damaging, was not beneficial either. Although her parents chose to terminate her formal education when she was ten, her father gave her access to his library of some five hundred volumes, and he encouraged his daughter’s literary interests. It was he, in fact, who first tried, unsuccessfully, in 1797, to have an early version of Pride and Prejudice published.
Austen’s immediate family was solidly professional, unlike that of her heroine Elizabeth Bennet, whose father is a member of the gentry, which is to say that his wealth is inherited and tied to land ownership, rather than earned through work or commerce. Austen’s eldest brother, James, followed his father into the ministry, while Henry, the brother who served for several years in the militia, turned next to banking, and then, when his bank failed, followed his father and elder brother into the ministry. The two naval officers, Francis and Charles, both rose to the rank of admiral. Austen’s father and brothers were hardworking, responsible, family-oriented men, so it makes sense that in Pride and Prejudice Austen satirizes snobbish and frivolous members of those classes above hers, the gentry and the aristocracy, who would have looked down upon her own immediate family, just as she paints an unsympathetic portrait of the haughty social climber Caroline Bingley, who fancies herself a member of the gentry, even though her family’s wealth was made “in trade,” or through commerce. Nor, if we consider Austen’s own unaffected outlook, is it surprising that the most sensible characters in the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, not only make their money in trade but are apparently not embarrassed to live near their warehouse. Elizabeth Bennet herself descends from lower gentry, on her father’s side, while her maternal grandfather was an attorney.
Despite her allegiance to professionals and businessmen, Austen clearly had respect for what she would have regarded as the nobler values of the landed gentry and aristocracy, particularly the sense of social responsibility and decorum that are implicitly endorsed by the narrator and main characters of the novel. Although these values are fostered through the preservation of a strict social hierarchy, they do not happen to thwart the aspirations of the fictional Elizabeth Bennet, and thus modern readers need never confront the injustices of an English society that remained wary of the new democratic values espoused in America and France and among English radicals. Moreover, even if Austen’s own immediate family fell socially and economically a degree below that of her central fictional characters, her family connections made the upper orders not wholly unknown to her. Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, was descended from a distinguished family and was related to the duke of Chandos. Austen’s first cousin, Eliza Hancock, was goddaughter to Warren Hastings, the eminent statesman and governor of British India, and wife to a member of the French nobility, Count Jean François Capot de Feuillide, who was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. Austen’s brother Edward was literally adopted into the British gentry when Thomas and Catherine Knight, seco
nd cousins of the Austens, took an interest in him, obtained permission to raise him, and, finding themselves childless, ultimately made him heir to their splendid estate of Godmersham Park in Kent.
Austen’s own situation in a family of well-connected professionals was somewhat precarious, for she remained unmarried in an age when women depended largely on male relatives for support. Her father and brothers, however, with their strong sense of family responsibility, must have made her feel more secure than the typical “spinster” would have felt. She and her sister Cassandra, who also remained unmarried and was Jane’s closest friend and confidante, were initially dependent on their father, and then, after his death in 1805, on a small annuity and on the generosity of their brothers. Jane Austen had always lived in her father’s house; upon his death, she, her sister, and their mother took up lodgings and visited extensively with relatives and friends for three years. The women eventually settled in the Hampshire village of Chawton, in a house made available to them by Edward. Austen spent the final eight years of her life at Chawton, and it was from this house that she published her novels.
Given how centered her novels are on the marriage plot and how family-oriented her immediate society was, it is worth commenting on Austen’s choice to remain single. In 1802, she received and accepted a proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, a pleasant young man, Oxford educated and heir to the impressive Manydown estate in Hampshire, close to Austen’s family home at Steventon. She quickly changed her mind, however, and rejected the proposal the day after having accepted it. It seems that while Jane liked Harris, she was not in love with him, and this was enough to give her pause. Her decision was remarkable, for even though romantic love had increasingly become an acceptable incentive for marriage, Austen was a dutiful daughter who lived in an age when friendship, economic motive, family ties, and religious duty were at least as compelling as personal choice. In declining Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal, Austen made a choice not nearly so dramatic in its disregard for economic considerations as that of her fictional heroine Elizabeth Bennet in declining Mr. Darcy, but one that was similarly impractical. It is hard to say whether Austen simply flew in the face of convention and unwisely put her economic future at risk, or whether she knew that with so many successful and dutiful brothers someone would maintain her somehow.
Claire Tomalin suggests that Austen compared Harris Bigg-Wither unfavorably to Tom Lefroy, to whom she had had a romantic attachment several years earlier, one severed by his relatives, who were concerned about the imprudence of such a match—Austen was, after all, no heiress. Now that she was heading into her late twenties and had grown accustomed to life as a spinster aunt, it is also possible that Austen took a long, hard look at motherhood and decided that its joys were not worth the grief. Throughout the eighteenth century and long afterward, the mortality rates for newborns and women during childbirth was high. The trend in British society to encourage frequent and numerous pregnancies put women at even greater risk. In 1808 Austen’s brother Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, died giving birth to her eleventh child. Her brother Charles’s wife, Fanny, died during childbirth in 1814, at age twenty-four, with her fourth child, who also died several weeks later. In 1823, a few years after Austen’s own death, her brother Francis’s wife, Mary, died giving birth to her eleventh child. Understandably, Austen’s letters demonstrate a mixed attitude toward marriage and motherhood. To her niece Fanny Knight, Austen wrote shortly before her own death that “Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony.” On the other hand, she continued with sage advice, “Do not be in a hurry; depend upon it, the right Man will come at last. . . . And then, by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure & countenance.” Earlier she had cautioned Fanny against entering into a marriage of convenience by remarking, “When I consider . . . how capable you are . . . of being really in love . . . I cannot wish you to be fettered” (Letters, pp. 332, 286).
While it was not unheard of for a woman to have both a family and a writing career in the eighteenth century, it was undoubtedly the case that Austen’s marital status made her writing life much easier. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that she deliberately chose to forsake marriage in order to write books about it. In fact, the extent to which Austen actually saw herself as a writer, as someone whose identity was shaped through her writing and who might have been interested in earning money or fame by doing so, is a matter of debate. She may have described herself, with alternating irony and seriousness, as someone who took up the pen in her idle hours, the way one might take up fancy needlework or china painting. Yet she clearly had a lifelong passion for writing—she authored an impressive collection of juvenilia as well as mature novels—and it seems difficult to believe that she regarded her art as a mere hobby, even if she did not flaunt her gifts publicly. If she did not claim the kind of psychological and material entitlement, the room of one’s own that in the early twentieth century Virginia Woolf would identify as essential for women writers, she did come to depend on the money her novels earned. She became, whether she wished it or not, a professional writer in an age when the market in novels by women and for women was already well established. Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously, as were the works of many women writers to whom publicity seemed indelicate, and while Austen did not court fame, she nevertheless created a stir with her first publication, Sense and Sensibility (1811).
Austen’s second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, appeared at the beginning of 1813, after having been revised the previous year. A first version of the novel, the manuscript of which is now lost, had been written many years earlier, between October 1796 and August 1797. Austen called that early version “First Impressions,” a suggestive title that draws upon stock associations with conduct books to point a moral lesson: One’s first impressions of character should be mistrusted or at least managed with caution; opinion and judgment must be formed through careful reflection and consultation. Although rooted in a didactic message about first impressions, Austen’s exploration of the subsequent themes of pride and prejudice is far more textured than any superficial association with conduct manuals would suggest. The phrase “pride and prejudice” held currency in eighteenth-century literature, but, as the editor R. W. Chapman has shown, Austen appears to have borrowed it most immediately from the closing pages of Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia. (In addition to reading the Bible and Shakespeare, Austen inherited a formidable tradition of eighteenth-century works, and the novels of Burney and Samuel Richardson appear to have influenced her considerably; she also turned to popular didactic tales and moral essays for her subject matter and was especially fond of the writings of Dr. Johnson.)
With good reason, scholars have typically viewed pride and prejudice in Austen’s novel as distinctly unfavorable qualities, for when the narrator and principal characters evoke “pride” and “prejudice,” the terms have primarily unfavorable connotations, as they do in the world at large. To be sure, Austen assails family pride and social prejudice through the merciless portraits of self-centered individuals. By exposing Mrs. Bennet’s tribalism and Lady Catherine’s snobbery, she offers an amusing indictment of polite society. It should give us pause, however, that Elizabeth Bennet’s overly bookish sister, Mary, pontificates against pride by imitating the trite morality of conduct manuals. (What a shame that Mr. Collins hadn’t thought to marry her.) That is, if Austen calls undue pride and prejudice into question, she also regards shallow pieties about those qualities with irony.
Moreover, for an author whose comic closure depends upon an affirmation of the values of the gentry and aristocracy, pride is not simply arrogance. Rather, it marks a legitimate sense that one’s exalted position in society makes one accountable to uphold those values and to behave in a manner worthy of one’s rank. Under a gentleman’s code of honor, the vestiges of which still existed in Austen’s day, pride is cl
osely affiliated with valor and strength of character. Prejudice, too, does not always signify a tendency to make careless, hasty, or harmful judgments. Writing in 1790 on the revolution in France he so deplored, Edmund Burke regarded prejudice as a protection of time-honored custom and the consensus of generations of wise and noble minds, while the revolutionary individual’s so-called reason, by contrast, is prone to error and narrow self-interest. “Prejudice,” Burke wrote, “renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 76). Burke’s appeal to virtue, duty, and tradition would have resonated with Austen’s society in the early nineteenth century, when the revolutionary language of Britain’s radical thinkers of the previous generation, considered seditious in the 1790s, was still regarded with suspicion. The notion of affirming pride and prejudice, even in moderation, may be difficult for today’s readers to accept, but Austen did not live in a democratic society, where pride and prejudice surely thrive but where they are not usually regarded as necessary components of political and social organization. In Austen’s world, these qualities of discrimination helped to preserve the correct social alliances and were integral to the stability of the order of things, even when exhilarating—or menacing—new possibilities for social mobility began to impinge upon the consciousness and writings of English provincials such as Austen.
The exploration of pride and prejudice through Austen’s principal characters, Elizabeth and Darcy, is instructional but also multifaceted. The heroine’s early prejudices against Darcy and in favor of Wickham—an inappropriate set of judgments formed by Elizabeth’s having put too much weight on first impressions and circumstantial evidence—are made possible by an excess of pride in her own ability to read character. Darcy’s pride of place, his disdain for social inferiors who lack a proper sense of their own provincialism, leads to a blanket prejudice against nearly every local at the assembly room ball. And yet there is something defensible in these weaknesses: Elizabeth proves herself a thoughtful judge of character in most instances, while Darcy is not entirely amiss in his estimation of a party of lower gentry who are eager to ape the manners of the great but who lack the true social refinement that he himself possesses. In this novel of emotional growth, pride and prejudice are not flaws for Elizabeth and Darcy to overcome but character traits that require minor adjustments before the couple can recognize each other’s merits and live happily together.