by Fay Weldon
I wonder if you are a politicized young woman? I wonder if you notice that your examinations become more and more difficult to pass as there are fewer and fewer places available in our universities? Or, if you know, perhaps you do not care? You are, I suspect, too privileged, too bright, too pretty, too secure in your opinions to care much what goes on in your society. And, above all, too unread, too little practised in empathy.
Jane Austen wrote her first version of Pride and Prejudice (then called First Impressions) in 1796. It was a year of famine and shortages. The price of wheat was rocketing. There was large-scale rural unemployment — most workers on the land were temporary employees, and in hard times were left without work. Nearly everyone worked at harvest time — almost nobody at Christmas. If there was no work there were no wages, and if there were no wages there was no food. More children died, inside or outside the womb. The villagers still doffed their caps to the gentry, and especially to the vicar who, leaving his relationship to God out of it, was usually the magistrate, and had almost total power in the community; to sentence for offences, to grant relief, to evict, and so forth. No doubt the vicar’s children were well and truly doffed to. What should they notice? They took soup to the poor, and did not wonder at the causes of their poverty. They took comfort, if they did, in the existence of the Speenhamland system — which came into being in the mid-1770s, and which subsidized low wages out of the local rates in cases where the labourer’s family income fell below the subsistence level, either because the price of bread was too high or because he had too many children. It was never law, but it was certainly common, and it never worked. The distinction between worker and pauper vanished. Farmers continued to pay below-subsistence rates. The subsistence level itself was whittled away. In 1795 a three-and-a-half gallon loaf did for an adult male, a one-and-a-half for every other member of his family: twenty years later a one gallon loaf per adult male was considered appropriate. That’s the way it goes.
The rural population saw its common land vanishing as farmers and landowners claimed it for their own, and enclosed it with hedges, and was powerless to prevent it, and grew hungrier and hungrier.
And Mr Bingley rode by the Bennets’ window on his way to Netherfield Park, and Elizabeth was slighted by Darcy, and sister Jane was slighted by Mr Bingley, and then Darcy fell in love with Elizabeth, who rejected his offer of marriage, and Lydia ran off and lived in sin for at least a week with Mr Wickham, and Elizabeth fell in love with Darcy, and Bingley was reunited with Jane, and everyone lived happily ever after, even Mrs Bennet, the only one with the slightest notion of the sheer desperation of the world, whom everyone laughed at throughout.
Nonsense, isn’t it!
Millions starving, then and now, I hear you protesting. And Jane Austen! What are you going on about? All I can answer is, plaintively, man, and especially woman, does not live by bread alone: he has to have books.
Not that Pride and Prejudice would have cheered the lives of the rural poor, for so few of them could read. The Rev. Austen was busy teaching the sons of the gentry Latin; not the sons of the poor to read and write. That way revolution lay — or at any rate uncomfortable demands for higher wages.
Emma Woodhouse befriended Harriet in Emma and Harriet was born in rather sorry circumstances and Emma tried to teach her, but I’m afraid in eighteenth-century terms breeding will out — Harriet was a disappointment to Emma. Mr Knightley knew it would be so. The argument then was all from nature, not nurture. In the genes v. environment debate, genes won hands down, even in Jane Austen. Harriet found her natural level with honest Robert Martin, tenant farmer. The gentry, if misbegotten, went down a fairly sharpish peg or so.
So what are you going on about? I hear you repeat. Why this reverence for Jane Austen, who was blind (in our terms) to so much? I will tell you. The gentry, then as now, has to read in order to comprehend both the wretchedness and ire of the multitude. It is not only ignorance in the illiterate we need to combat, it is insensitivity in the well-to-do. Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can. Well, you will know this for yourself. A play on television makes ten times the impact as a documentary on the same subject. (I am talking about plays — not series episodes. The play is the controlled fantasy of a single person, and the technology follows where he or she — usually he — leads. The series episode is the product of group thinking, and will hold the mind of the viewer but not his or her — usually her — imagination.)
If society is to advance then those that hath must empathize with those that hath not. I am not offering quite so severe a doctrine as Auden’s — ‘we must love one another or die’ — rather that we must learn to stand in other people’s shoes and look out at the world with their eyes, or die. (It is at least a little more attainable to most people, love being in such scarce supply and depending — or so they say — on love of self, which is scarcely within our control.) If the Minister of Education and the Prime Minister read more novels, your exams would not be so difficult to pass, university places having been cut. They would know what it felt like to be an unsuccessful student, and they would have mercy.
You can practise the art of empathy very well in Pride and Prejudice, and in all the novels of Jane Austen, and it is this daily practice that we all need, or we will never be good at living, as without practice we will never be good at playing the piano.
The writer, oddly enough, holding master classes in empathy, is excused from his or her obligation to observe the distress of society, to record the wider sweeps of social change. More than enough to observe and pass on the minutiae of the dealings between one human being and another: it is up to others to extrapolate from the small to the great, from the microcosm to the greater world. I have heard it offered as a reason (or excuse, I suppose) for the fact that a whole band of writers appears to espouse fascist causes, is because — dealing so intently with the fictional world, needing all their energy for the building of their splendid houses in the City of Invention — they like to be able to relax in the real world, and leave its conduct to the strong and powerful; those who cannot, in fact, be argued with. Discuss, on one side of the paper only.
I have had my Sunset Daiquiri brought to me by Room Service, and also a club sandwich filled with curry. Thus East and West must meet. Room Service — as often happens when ladies of a certain age travel alone — also offered more intimate services, which I refused. Your mother would be proud of me — your father merely conclude that women who travel alone deserve whatever they get. I know a young woman who travelled the world fomenting revolution and when she got home to her parents’ house in leafy Muswell Hill complained tearfully of having been raped by five policemen on the Afghanistan border, and was met by ‘well, what do you expect?’ She took great exception to this, but I think I am on her parents’ side. Nothing is for nothing. The world is very real, and not made up of an insubstantial web of rights and wrongs, and ins and outs, as we like to think in our leafy, decent suburbs, and it is no use being astonished — as journalists often are — if you join a war and are shot by real and not theoretical bullets, often by your own side. Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good. It is a hard lesson, lately learned.
I have put the chain on my door and re-read your letter. You complain about Emma. You say you have read the first third. I will admit there is a middle section of Emma which drags, rather.
Let me give you a quick run-down of the plot — the peg upon which Jane Austen hangs her novels. Plots, I assure you, are nothing but pegs. They stand in a row in the writer’s mind. You can use one or another for your purposes, it makes some difference, but not much, which one it is. The plot of Emma is not quite so flimsy as that of Pride and Prejudice: it can support altogether more character, and more observation, and more meaning: and more boredom on the part of the grudging and hasty reader — in whose ranks I still include you.
If you want real enthusiasm, read Ronald Blythe’s introduction to
the novels in the Penguin series. ‘Emma is the climax of Jane Austen’s genius and the Parthenon of fiction’, it begins. They won’t allow you to be so dramatic and positive in your essays on the book: they will feel you are throwing words around like weapons, to parry attack: but that is because they, like me, are suspicious of your youth, and how easily ignorance and enthusiasm blend, like eggs into choux pastry, making the whole, when baked, rise and puff and grow light: empty, mere shells, requiring to be filled.
Emma opens with a paragraph which sends shivers of pleasure down my spine: it glitters with sheer competence: with the animation of the writer who has discovered power: who is at ease in the pathways of the City of Invention. Here is Emma, exciting envy in the heart of the reader and also, one suspects, the writer — and now, she declares, Emma will be undone; and I, the writer, and you, the reader, will share in this experience:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence: and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her…
It’s the word ‘seemed’, fourteen in, which sets the whole book up. It will take four hundred pages to resolve. You have five variations there — handsome, clever, rich, comfortable home, happy disposition — five to the power of five, which you can relate in various combinations of the ‘blessings of existence’.
It is so simple, you see, and so wonderfully full of promise, which bypasses the conscious mind of the reader, gets us instantly into the City of Invention, and off we go.
I frequently find myself saying to unpublished and resentful writers who do not understand the reason for their rejection, ‘but you must think of your readers’, and they think I am telling them to write for a market, but I am not. I am trying to explain that writing must be in some way a shared experience between reader and writer: the House of Imagination built with doors for guests to enter in, and pegs for their coats, and windows for them to look out of: it is no use being a recluse. You will die of hypothermia and malnutrition if you live alone in your house, however beautifully constructed it is. It must be a welcoming place, or exciting, if dangerous, or educative, if unpleasant, or intensely pleasurable.
Emma lives with her (to me, but not Emma) irritating, difficult, hypochondriacal father, Mr Woodhouse, in the village of Hartfield. Her mother died in her infancy: she has a married sister, Isabella. She has £30,000 of her own. She was brought up by a governess, who presently marries, thanks to Emma’s matchmaking, and leaves Emma lonely. She is conceited. There is a fairly obvious suitor in the village, a Mr Knightley; but Emma sees him in the role of friend, not lover. (Lover in the old sense of suitor, Alice. Fornication was simply not in the minds of decent and self-controlled people, for reasons I have already gone into.) Another possible lover is approaching over the horizon — a Frank Churchill — brought up, like her own brother, Edward, in rather grander circumstances than the ones into which he was born. Emma has befriended Harriet Smith; Harriet Smith is a beautiful but misbegotten girl. ‘The misfortune of your birth ought to make you particularly careful of your associates,’ Emma warns her. Illegitimate! Harriet is on the verge of marrying Robert Martin, farmer, but Emma, believing Harriet could do better in the marriage stakes, turns the foolish girl against poor Mr Martin. Mr Knightley reproaches her for this. Emma means Harriet to marry Mr Elton, the handsome curate, and mistakes his courtesy to Harriet for passion. Mr Knightley reproaches her. Jane Fairfax appears as a foil to Emma — more talented, more clever, and more serious than her, and doomed to be misunderstood, and ever so slightly disliked. (I wonder sometimes if Jane Fairfax is not more of a self-portrait of Jane Austen than Elizabeth Bennet — the bright, lovable, wayward heroine of Pride and Prejudice, as is so often supposed.) Emma is unkind to Miss Bates. Mr Knightley reproaches her. Mr Elton takes a detestable wife. In and out the relationships intertwine.
Ronald Blythe, in his loyalty, describes the ins and outs as a ‘detective story’, and you would do better to believe him than me if you want to pass your exams. But it was written in 1814—15. I believe that Jane Austen, from the internal evidence of Emma, was at that time driven to distraction by her mother and Cassandra, and to boredom by the manner of her life, and not quite having the courage to go to the kind of parties where Madame de Staël would appear, and developing a fatal illness, and humiliated by living in a corner house in the village by courtesy of her brother, who lived up in the big house, when the Prince Regent had a set of her books in each of his houses. I think she wrote on, gritting her teeth, wrapping her misery into herself, taking refuge in the world of invention, instead of going there with a clear mind and heart, travelling freely in and out, unable quite to get the coat properly off the peg. She kept tugging and it wouldn’t come; and that is why you have no trouble with the first third of the book and then stopped reading. She was having trouble too.
She did get it off the hook. Harriet develops aspirations to Mr Knightley which shocks Emma into realizing her own love for him. Harriet’s origins are discovered to be even lower than at first thought, so she can be safely married to Robert Martin. The odious Mr Woodhouse is talked into liking the idea of Mr Knightley and Emma marrying. The intimacy between Emma and Harriet changes into a calmer sort of goodwill. Well, it would have to, wouldn’t it, if Emma is going to be Mrs Knightley. Some have doubted that the marriage of Emma to Mr Knightley is indeed a happy ending, but I am content to let Jane Austen know her own characters best.
We return, very much, in all this, to the ‘breeding must out’ preoccupation of the times. Emma befriends Harriet, who was born in such sorry circumstances, and tries to teach and improve her, whilst taking pleasure in her simple gaiety (even then, it seems, the gentry looked a little askance at their own refinement, envying the common herd their general energy and lack of inhibition — as our modern-day cultural spokesman will love to go to football matches, and middle-class young ape the language of the streets, and music critics attempt to take the Beatles seriously, and in general invent art forms which require an untutored imagination rather than a dangerously desiccated expertise) — but Harriet was in the end a disappointment to Emma. Mr Knightley, who knew everything, knew it would be so.
Harriet may have been well born (there were funds for her education, so presumably at least one of her parents had money) but she was not virtuously born; she had better make do with a yeoman farmer for a husband. Seven out of ten for genes, take away three for unfortunate beginnings, add one for a good sound education, another two for prettiness and charm, and take away two for a general lack of soundness and you end up with five out of ten — the same marks as Robert Martin, yeoman farmer, began and ended with; it was therefore a good match. The delight of Emma — which I trust by now you have taken up again — is in the violent seesawing of marks out of ten, especially in Harriet’s case, which the author awards. Emma herself hovers between seven and eight, losing marks for folly and wilfulness, gaining them for being good to her dreadful father, Mr Woodhouse, losing them (and quite right too) for being so obnoxious to Miss Bates, gaining them again for putting up with grief without making a fuss (unlike Harriet) — and finally making it through to nine out of ten, and thus being allowed to marry Mr Knightley — a steady nine out of ten throughout. And he would have had a ten out of ten, like Mr Darcy, had he been nobly born and about to be a Marquis any minute.
(It is observable in Jane Austen’s novels that it is the women who have moral struggles, rather than the men. This may, of course, be a reflection of life. It is because I make this sort of remark that your father will not have me in the house — that and the matter of the bread rolls, of course.)
Jane Austen likes to see the division between nobility and gentry broken down — or perhaps she merely wishes to ennoble the rather dreadful habit the nobility had, of using the gentry as their breeding ground — choosing suitable mothers for their children as they chose mates for their farm animals �
�� liking to ‘breed out’ in order to achieve healthy stock. They weren’t daft. Later, the English nobility were to use the nouveau riche American girls for similar purpose — and they, of course, often brought money with them. Elizabeth Bennet brought neither land nor money to Darcy — but she brought intelligence, vigour and honesty. Her vulgar mother, her dreadful sister Lydia, just had, in the end, to be put up with.
(Or, as Winston Churchill would say — himself the son of a love-and-money match between an English Lord and an American heiress — ‘up with which in the end everyone would have to put’. It is a truism — at least to my generation — that Churchill sent back for re-writing memoranda containing sentences which ended with prepositions. Even with Hitler battering at the gates, it seemed important. Civilization v. barbarity.)
In general, in the novels of the times, if working girls — governesses, dairy maids and so forth — won the love of gentlemen, some switching at birth is bound to have occurred. Until very recently, the switching of babies, the sending away of rightful heirs and so forth, has been the stock-in-trade of fiction — and not only an attractive idea in the personal sense — which of us, when young, did not stare at our parents and think ‘surely, surely this can’t be them!’ — but in the political sense, as a phenomenon, both echoing and leading the groping forward of society, through the fog of custom and prejudice, through to the light at the end of the tunnel, when all men could be reckoned to be born equal. It is out of fashion, now that we are all (more or less) socially mobile.