Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  According to the authors of the Life, Jane Austen had already been deep in her revision of Pride and Prejudice in April 1811, when Sense and Sensibility was in the printer’s hands. No doubt by now she was well established in her Chawton habit of working in the family living-room, writing, according to a niece, on small scraps of paper that could be pushed quickly under the blotter when a handily creaking door announced the threat of a visitor. If original composition in such circumstances seems an achievement, a close revision like that of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice seems almost incredible. You cannot push a whole novel under the blotter, particularly if you have it dismembered on the table. I think this story, like the other charming one of her sitting quietly for a while at her work, then bursting into laughter and hurrying across the room to make a note, must be the happy later embroidery of her nieces.

  She probably did write her books in the family sitting-room, for the bedroom she shared with Cassandra was tiny, and there were coal and candles to be considered, but I imagine that she wrote at the quiet time of the day when she could count on being undisturbed. Life, in those days, was lived to a rigid pattern, and callers would only arrive at the proper time. I suspect that Jane Austen planned her day’s work, peacefully, at the piano before breakfast, while her hands found their way round the familiar notes, and that there was then some quiet bit of the day, later, when she could safely spread out Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice and lop and crop away to her heart’s content. Granted her good manners and her intense feeling about privacy, the pieces of paper she pushed out of sight when guests called could just as well have been letters to Cassandra.

  These letters take up again, on a cheerful note, in January 1813. For once, Cassandra was at Steventon rather than Godmersham, and Martha, who had been at the deathbed of an old friend in December, was there too. “Tell her that I hunt away the rogues every night from under her bed, they feel the difference of her being gone.” The rogues in question were probably the dogs they kept at Chawton. One of the more absurd criticisms levelled at Jane Austen is that there are no animals in her books. In fact, dogs are used significantly, if without any great affection. Henry Tilney had “a large Newfoundland puppy and two or three terriers” at Woodston, which settled the question of where he really lived, while Charles Musgrove and Captain Wentworth had their sport spoiled by a young dog and therefore came home in time to join the walk to Winthrop. It does sound as if Jane Austen felt that dogs, like children, should not be spoiled. It is difficult not to agree with her.

  The Austen ladies seem to have been active in establishing some kind of informal book club at Chawton, and Jane was enjoying the results. She had been reading Captain Pasley’s Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire. “I am as much in love with the author as ever I was with Clarkson[12] or Buchanan,[13] or even the two Mr. Smiths of the city — the first soldier I ever sighed for — but he does write with extraordinary force and spirit.” These references are a useful reminder that Jane Austen was not only a novel-reader. As for “the two Mr. Smiths of the city”, Jane had tried to discuss their Rejected Addresses with Mrs. Digweed at a party. “Her answer was ‘Oh dear yes, very much, very droll indeed — the opening of the house, and the striking up of the fiddles!’ What she meant poor woman, who shall say?” Like Lady Saye and Sele before her, Mrs. Digweed had been worth a silent laugh to her courteous interlocutor.

  The Rejected Addresses were probably worth more than a silent laugh to Jane Austen. Some of the Smith Brothers’ parodies of contemporary poetry are brilliantly comic, and it is pleasant to think of Jane reading aloud their parody of Scott:

  Survey the shield, all bossy bright —

  These cuisses twain behold!

  Look on my form in armour dight

  Of steel inlaid with gold.

  My knees are stiff in iron buckles,

  Stiff spikes of steel protect my knuckles …

  Or of Byron:

  Sated with home, of wife, of children tired,

  The restless soul is driven abroad to roam;

  Sated abroad, all seen, yet nought admired,

  The restless soul is driven to ramble home ...

  Or of her favourite, Crabbe:

  ‘Tis sweet to view, from half-past five to six,

  Our long wax candles with short cotton wicks,

  Touched by the lamp lighter’s Promethean art,

  Start into light, and make the lighter start.

  The next letter is jubilant: “I have got my own darling child from London.” Pride and Prejudice came out that January. “The advertisement is in our paper today for the first time 18s. He shall ask £1.1 for my two next and £1.8 for my stupidest of all.” There is always that note of confidence when Jane Austen speaks of Pride and Prejudice, and how right she was. She never got £1.8 for her “stupidest of all”, but Emma would sell at £1.4. Like Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice received two good reviews, one in the British Critic for February 1813, and the other in the Critical Review for March, and, also like Sense and Sensibility, it received acclaim in society. Annabella Milbanke, who was later, disastrously, to become Lady Byron, called it “the fashionable novel”, and “a very superior work ... It is not a crying book, but the interest is very strong, especially for Mr. Darcy.” Did he remind her of Lord Byron?

  Meanwhile, at Chawton, they were reading it aloud to an old protégée of theirs, Miss Benn. Of course they did not tell her who the author was, but, “She was amused, poor soul! — She really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess,” went on the happy author, “that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know.” There were not to be many such. When Jane next wrote she had received a letter full of praise from Cassandra, which was lucky as the second evening of reading aloud to Miss Benn had not gone so well, partly because old Mrs. Austen read too fast and could not make the characters “speak as they ought”. They were in the second half of the first volume and one can imagine the author’s silent anguish as she listened to her mother mangling the immortal Mr. Collins.

  Did she know he was immortal? I suspect so. She has a comment of her own that suggests it:

  Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Bonaparte, or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.

  Most of this is Austen-nonsense, of course, and very significant at that. Jane Austen was laughing for pure pleasure. “I doubt your quite agreeing with me here,” she goes on. “I know your starched notions.”

  In fact, she was artist and critic enough to recognise Pride and Prejudice as a masterpiece of its kind, and this is her polite way of saying so. It would be a brave critic who disagreed with her, though some have. Like Sense and Sensibility, and, as Macaulay would say, like Shakespeare’s plays, Pride and Prejudice can be read at many levels. It is the most light-hearted and the most comic of Jane Austen’s books, and yet it is, for many people, the most romantically interesting. It may not be a “crying book”, but, as Jane Austen herself suggested, it would be a hardened character indeed who could resist being concerned with the fortunes of the entrancing Elizabeth Bennet. In her, the young Jane Austen had given full play to all the qualities she herself, in her double life, had learned to hide. Elizabeth Bennet is the suffragette, the women’s liberation woman of her day. Like Emma Watson, she does not talk, she acts. She will not sit back and be quizzed by the men, but gives as good as she gets. Most women (and some men) love her for it. Elizabeth, said the anonymous reviewer in the Critical Review, “is i
n fact the Beatrice of the tale”, and the parallel is as sound as it is complimentary. Jane Austen may have written a more interesting book than Pride and Prejudice, but she never wrote a more satisfactory one.

  12

  The double life went on thrivingly. By the time that Pride and Prejudice was at the printer’s, Jane Austen was hard at work on Mansfield Park, her first complete new book for more than ten years. The originals of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice dated back into the late 1790s, while even Susan, still languishing with Crosby, had been finished and sold to him by 1803. The Watsons had been left unfinished, but at last, in 1813, Jane Austen could write, “Now I will try to write of something else, and it shall be a complete change of subject — ordination.” In fact, she must already have been well started on Mansfield Park, for in a previous letter to Cassandra she had told her, “As soon as a whist party was formed, and a round table threatened, I made my mother an excuse and came away, leaving just as many for their round table as there were at Mrs. Grant’s.” The reference is to the scene in Mansfield Park where the diminished Bertram family dine with the Grants at the vicarage and Henry Crawford sits between Fanny and Lady Bertram at the round table and teaches them both speculation. As this episode is almost exactly half way through the second of Mansfield Park’s three volumes it is clear that Jane Austen’s remark about ordination was by way of an afterthought; she was already well advanced in the book that was to bear unmistakable traces of the psychological crisis of the silent years.

  She had worked herself back into the writing mood by revising her early books. Now, she was breaking new ground. But it was not new to her. Mansfield Park had been long in the incubation. Letters from her summer visit to Godmersham in 1808 had shown germinal ideas for the book. Perhaps she had, in fact, been planning it, based on the luxurious great house life at Godmersham, that last happy summer of Elizabeth Austen’s life, and had put it by for a while after her death. Certainly, as opposed to Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions, which seem to have been written fairly quickly and then polished and repolished, Mansfield Park must have gone through a prolonged period of gestation in its author’s mind. The result is a book of great beauty and complexity, the final refutation of that extraordinary Depreciation of H. W. Garrod’s. “A drab scenery the worse for use, a thin plot unfashionably cut, and by turning, re-lining and trimming made to do duty for five or six novels; a dozen or so stock characters — these are Miss Austen’s materials.” Of course, he meant to provoke, as, one must hope, he did in his objection to the phrase “great woman”. He can hardly have been serious in suggesting that Jane Austen used the same plot for all her novels, unless he meant that the stories all end in a marriage or marriages, presumably intended to be happy. If this is what he meant, it is true of practically all the novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with such obvious exceptions as Tristram Shandy and Clarissa Harlowe to prove the rule.

  Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were basically a young girl’s brilliant experiments, and, as one might expect, in them the romantic theme is predominant, and the heroine the heart of the matter. Mansfield Park is the deliberate work of a mature artist. The first thing one notices is that the heroine has been moved away from the centre of the book, which is occupied instead by the moral issue with which Jane Austen was always, at one level, concerned. She had said she was writing about ordination, but as so often she did herself less than justice. The question of Edmund’s ordination, like that of Fanny’s determined adherence to her principles, first about the play and then about Henry Crawford’s proposal, are both merely facets of the basic problem with which Jane Austen was concerned in this, her most serious book. It is, quite simply, the problem of good and evil. Mansfield Park is her Pilgrim’s Progress, with Edmund and Fanny, the Christian hero and heroine, fighting their way through temptation towards a not very clearly defined goal. There is no Celestial City for them, just a happy marriage and the right work to do. The very fact that Jane Austen never talks in terms of easy answers and eternal salvation makes the moral struggles of her characters infinitely more interesting.

  In defiance of the clues provided by the Crawfords’ early behaviour, many critics have insisted that they are the true hero and heroine of Mansfield Park. This is proof, if any were needed, of the subtlety of Jane Austen’s treatment. In fact, the Crawfords are the most dangerous characters in the book, because they are intelligent and yet corrupt. And, as always, Jane Austen is at pains to explain this. They have been badly brought up in the house of a vicious uncle. The ordered, stupid, selfish pattern of life at Mansfield Park is almost totally vulnerable to them. But not quite. Quiet, neglected, ailing, sometimes irritating, Fanny Price will not be beguiled by their charms; though, realist as always, Jane Austen points out that this is because she has her love for Edmund as talisman to support her in her decision of principle. Otherwise, although Henry Crawford would not have succeeded in seducing her, he would probably, Jane Austen suggests, have managed to marry her.

  Fanny, timid, feeble, so unlike Jane Austen herself; is the touchstone of the book. She alone sees keenly and if we are to read the book as Jane Austen meant us to, we must accept her vision as true. In the vital, symbolic scene where they all go to Sotherton and the Bertrams and Crawfords lose themselves in a dangerous garden of delights, only Fanny sees things for what they are, and is aware of moral danger. After this, we should be prepared to accept her judgment about the play, which has caused so much critical anguish. Jane Austen loved plays: they had acted them when they were young at Steventon: she was bitterly disappointed when she missed seeing Mrs. Siddons in London. It is this play, in these circumstances, that Fanny recognises as morally dangerous, and we are supposed to feel that she is right.

  But here, and with the question of Edmund’s ordination, which comes to the fore at about the same time, lies the central weakness, in my view, of the book. Mrs. Inchbald’s Lover’s Vows was a rather vulgar, popular play, and perhaps it was not quite the thing to put it on when the head of the Bertram family was in danger at sea. Similarly, Edmund Bertram was a perfectly well brought up young man who intended going into the Church because there was a family living waiting for him. For some reason, Jane Austen loads these two strands of the book with more moral overtones than they can bear. It is at this point that the casual reader, looking round for relief, may well light on the Crawfords and think them ill-used. And because Jane Austen, according to the anonymous lady quoted in M. A. Austen-Leigh’s Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, believed that “example and not ‘direct preaching’ was all that a novelist could afford to exhibit”, she never quite succeeded in making her point.

  Or was it because, in a sufficiently depressing world, she failed to convince herself on the moral issue? Mansfield Park is certainly her most serious attempt to come to grips with it, but it cannot be called an entire success. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” she says at the end, with an almost perceptible shudder, and turns to one of her brisk, common-sense conclusions. She has been down into the depths, and has emerged intact, and with that double, ironic vision of hers sharpened in intensity, but it is a curious, disconcerting thought that of all the brilliantly drawn characters of Mansfield Park, it is Mrs. Norris, almost wholly bad, who first comes to mind. Was this, perhaps, catharsis on a personal level? Did Mrs. Norris represent everything that Jane Austen had found intolerable in James’s Mary, and Aunt Jane Leigh Perrot, and all the host of other bustling, unintelligent women to whom she was exposed throughout her life?

  If so, Mrs. Norris’s creation probably made it easier for her author to bear with them, and Jane no doubt behaved perfectly during that unlucky second reading of Pride and Prejudice, when, one suspects, poor Miss Benn began to wriggle in her chair, or play with the contents of her reticule. And, for Miss Jane Austen, the author, there was real comfort coming, in the form of letters of high praise for Pride and Prejudice from Cassandra and Fanny. The latter, characteristic
ally, had been a little more cautious to Cassandra than to Jane herself. Jane, the realist, saw it all. “To me it is of course all praise,” she wrote Cassandra, “but the more exact truth she sends you is good enough.”

  A letter of February 1813 to Martha Lloyd, gives one of Jane Austen’s comparatively rare comments on public events. The Prince Regent and his wife, the deplorable Princess Caroline of Brunswick, had been angrily separated for years, and in January 1813 the Princess had written to her husband protesting against her treatment, particularly with regard to their daughter, the next heir to the throne, Princess Charlotte. On receiving no reply to her letter, Princess Caroline gave it to the press, and Jane Austen comments, “I suppose all the world is sitting in judgment upon the Princess of Wales’s letter. Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a woman, and because I hate her husband ... I do not know what to do about it; but if I must give up the princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first.” Jane Austen clearly knew the whole disastrous history of that marriage, from the moment when the Prince of Wales appointed his mistress as his new wife’s lady-in-waiting; and had made up her mind about it. She was always one to go back to first causes.

  Another letter to Martha, printed as an addendum by Chapman, and dated September 1814, must, I think, be two letters accidentally run together. The date and opening clearly belong to 1814, but the second half of the letter belongs just as obviously to 1812. Jane Austen is reporting Henry’s fears about war with America, which he and his friends think “certain, and as what is to ruin us”. Jane herself is more hopeful. “If we are to be ruined, it cannot be helped — but I place my hope of better things on a claim to the protection of Heaven, as a religious nation, a nation in spite of much evil improving in religion, which I cannot believe the Americans to possess.” This war broke out in 1812, and Henry and his friends proved right in their conjecture that the Americans could not be conquered, “We shall only be teaching them the skill in war which they may now want.” “Mr. Madison’s war” dragged to a close in 1814, although, due to the slowness of trans-Atlantic communication its last battle, a bloody one, was actually fought at New Orleans in January 1815.