Even before readers had arrived at chapter one, though, Emma’s distinction from the earlier novels was apparent from its new publisher – the fashionable firm of John Murray – and from the surprising dedication to ‘His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent’. Emma was clearly receiving the best treatment because, like the heroine, it could not put up with any other. Despite the confidence exuded by her new novel, and despite the example set by Murray’s most famous author, Lord Byron, Jane Austen did little to exploit her own chance to become a literary celebrity. Emma was dedicated to the Prince Regent not because Jane Austen wanted to flatter the future king, but because he had declared himself an admirer. All her novels had been published anonymously, but, by the time Mansfield Park appeared, her authorship was widely known. Henry, especially, found it difficult to keep quiet when he heard his sister’s books being discussed, as Jane reported to Frank: ‘Henry heard P.&P. warmly praised in Scotland, by Lady Robt. Kerr & another Lady; – & what does he do in the warmth of Brotherly vanity & Love, but immediately tell them who wrote it!’52 She was clearly torn between dismay that the great secret, once out, would never be contained again, and delight in Henry’s obvious pride in her success: ‘A Thing once set going in that way – one knows how it spreads! – and he, dear Creature, has set it going so much more than once. I know it is all done from affection & partiality.’ Since Henry had lost Eliza to cancer only a few months before, Jane was prepared to forgive him anything, but she was more grateful to Frank for his respect for her wishes. Public recognition was not an unmixed blessing, as she discovered when summoned to Carlton House by the Prince Regent’s librarian. She could hardly refuse to dedicate her novel to the future king once he had decided to bestow royal patronage, but those closest to her smiled at the sight of the grand flourish, remembering her earlier, decidedly parodic dedications. No doubt the authoress enjoyed the irony of attracting royal patronage for a novel set more firmly than any of her others in a quiet corner of the kingdom.
Emma is a novel of rural retirement, in which London, Bath and Richmond are mentioned only as the distant destinations of characters disappearing from centre stage. Unlike the peripatetic heroines of her previous books, Emma remains at home and travels only a few miles in the entire course of the narrative. Of all Jane Austen’s protagonists, however, Emma Woodhouse is the least retiring. Mansfield Park began by emphasising the range of characters contributing to the narrative, but Emma concentrates from the first on its heroine. Although she is a younger sister like Elizabeth Bennet or Marianne Dashwood, Emma dominates her novel in an entirely new way, with much of the narrative conveyed through her confident, if often mistaken, perception of those around her. The novel is again concerned with relative fortunes, examining the issue of female dependency through the portrayals of Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax, Mrs Weston and Miss Bates. Its imaginative focus, however, remains firmly fixed on Emma Woodhouse, whose personal wealth means that she is free of the economic obligation to marry that influenced so many of Jane Austen’s earlier characters. ‘I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry,’ she tells Harriet: ‘Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want; I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house, as I am of Hartfield.’ Emma’s eloquence on the subject is as startling to readers of Jane Austen’s earlier novels as it is to Harriet Smith. She is an entirely new kind of heroine and has unsettled readers ever since her first appearance in December 1815.
Despite Emma’s sense of her own independence, she is nevertheless as preoccupied with the question of marriage as any of her predecessors. It is just that she does not restrict the matter to her own future. The novel opens on the evening of her governess’s wedding, which Emma takes personal pride in having brought about (‘I made the match, you know’). Within a couple of chapters, she has begun directing her matchmaking skills at Harriet Smith, whose sequence of infatuations and disappointments provides one of the main strands of the narrative. Emma’s determined search for prospective husbands for Harriet and simultaneous denial of her own attraction to men shows Jane Austen’s acute insight into the psychology of displaced desire. Much of the comedy and ultimate satisfaction of the novel arises from Emma’s apparently endless misunderstanding, and eventual recognition, of her true feelings. The combination of the heroine’s abundant self-confidence and unerring capacity to misread situations provides a new kind of comedy in which the witty woman can also be the butt of many jokes.
Jane Austen had already made much of the comic potential of the matchmaker in Pride and Prejudice, but Mrs Bennet’s energy is contained within set dialogues and situations, her thoughts visible only from her speeches. Emma, however, has both the freedom to create her own romances and the will to extend her managerial powers into the lives of all those around her. At times, she is almost like a novelist within her own novel, as she conjures up suitors for Harriet and ignores the reality of her friend’s situation, attractions or feelings. She is proud of being an ‘imaginist’, ever ready to be ‘on fire with speculation and foresight’, and so the slightest information rapidly assumes dramatic significance in her eager mind. Minor incidents are magnified and preserved in Emma’s imagination, and her desire to turn life into fiction is abundantly apparent in her constant recital of ‘the story of Harriet and the gipsies’.
If Northanger Abbey had considered the relationship between reading fiction and interpreting immediate experience, Emma extended the field to explore the very nature of imaginative creation. Jane Austen’s perennial enjoyment of playing with literary convention was emerging in far more subtle ways, with the elaborate Gothic parody of the past condensed into passing jokes about Emma’s fear of Miss Bates ‘haunting the Abbey’. Her interest was now focused not so much on how to write successful fiction (a problem she had already solved), but on the very sources and processes of creative thought. By developing a narrative technique that allowed readers to share the heroine’s perspective on a scene, even without the help of dialogue, Jane Austen was able to represent the workings of Emma’s mind with far greater complexity than she had previously afforded her characters. At times, she offers Emma’s thoughts as direct internal speech: ‘“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,” said she afterwards to herself.’ At other moments, she develops the brilliant free indirect style that allows the omniscient narrator to recede and Emma’s thoughts to take over, almost imperceptibly: ‘Emma, beginning hastily and with an arch look, but soon stopping – it was better, however, to know the worst at once – . . .’
The novel’s focus on the heroine also allows for detailed development of the growth of consciousness, so readers are able to trace the progress of, for instance, the ‘ingenious and animating suspicion’ that enters Emma’s brain after an offhand remark by Miss Bates about her niece’s friendship with the Dixons. As the idea is nourished by Jane Fairfax’s subsequent reticence and Frank Churchill’s interest, the imagined tendresse becomes more real to Emma than much of what is actually going on before her eyes. Jane Austen’s attention to the stories that take hold of Emma’s mind in this way affords remarkable insight into the imaginative process. Emma does not read the world through library books like Catherine Morland, but her imaginative response is just as powerful, and often just as misleading. Since Emma’s sources lie not in the Gothic novels of the past, but in her immediate circle, she is a character to whom everyone can still relate, and whose mistakes are inevitably shared. For, while many readers see through her confusions over Mr Dixon at once, few can avoid responding with some impatience to Miss Bates’s long speeches, and, as a consequence, are almost as thrown by discovering the limitations of their own judgement as Emma is after the visit to Box Hill.
If Emma’s imagination leads to mistakes, however, it is also what makes her such a life-affirming character. Her father’s habit of offering only very small portions of the plainest food to his guests is countered by Emma’s generous spirit and her ‘pleasure in sendi
ng them away happy’. Her sense of independence and her imaginative freedom enable her to make gifts and generate happiness, even if her attempts are not always sufficiently attentive to alternative views. Emma’s relish for life means that she possesses a rare capacity for contentment. The little scene in Highbury in which she waits for Harriet to choose her muslin demonstrates that the benefits of Emma’s imagination far outweigh any of its drawbacks:
[W]hen her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough.
In a situation that might have nothing to interest the Bertrams or the Crawfords, Emma is perfectly happy. Anything can provide the materials for a new story, as long as the onlooker has a mind to create.
In Emma, Jane Austen was celebrating the power of the human imagination and demonstrating the riches of a rural environment. If her earlier novels had made jokes at the expense of Lady Susan or Caroline Bingley, with their prejudices against country towns and villages, Emma defended provincial life by revealing its untold imaginative wealth. Gilbert White, whose bestselling Natural History of Selborne, published in 1789, had already shown the world that his tiny Hampshire village, only four miles from Chawton, was a place of unique importance. Jane Austen similarly presented Highbury as the hub of the world, but her most remarkable achievement lay in creating a fictional place that was every bit as complete and convincing as her neighbour’s factual record of his parish. Frank Churchill may joke about becoming a ‘true citizen of Highbury’ by buying gloves at Ford’s, but his gently patronising tone is roundly answered by Mr Knightley’s contempt for a man who would travel all the way to London for a haircut. Mr Knightley’s relief at riding home after staying on in London, ‘vigorously, day after day’, is a telling inversion of the kinds of metropolitan prejudice encountered by Jane Austen on her visits to Henry in Chelsea. It may take time to understand the true value of Highbury, but many readers have discovered over the years that the world of Emma lives on in their minds with far greater vitality than many of the real places they have known.
Emma was not, after all, an inappropriate gift for the Prince Regent. Its patriotism is apparent in Emma’s paean of praise to Donwell Abbey and Abbey-Mill Farm: ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.’ What need was there to travel abroad with such delights to be found on one’s doorstep? The hidden heart of England was open to anyone who took the time to stop and look. Emma’s celebratory tone undoubtedly owes something to the national sense of relief at Napoleon’s defeat and the banishment of long-standing fears about a French invasion, but the novel also reflects Jane Austen’s deep gratitude for the quiet countryside that had proven so congenial to her creative spirit. In a letter offering advice to James Austen’s daughter Anna, who was writing a novel of her own in 1814, Aunt Jane congratulated the young woman on setting the scene in ‘such a spot as is the delight of my life; – 3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’.53 It was the very kind of spot in which Austen was now happiest because it worked so well – and therefore she could too. In Mansfield Park, she had examined the idea of a true home, but in Emma she knew that she had found one, and her happiness fills the novel.
Emma may be a flawed heroine, and, at times, her ‘solitary grandeur’ makes her seem melancholy despite all the blessings of her existence, but the novel is infused with a deep satisfaction. It is Jane Austen’s most complicated creation, with a huge cast of brilliantly realised characters and a host of minor figures whose presence contributes to the overall sense of completion. The varied comedy of misunderstanding and game-playing, eccentricity and prejudice, snobbery and hypochondria, misplaced affection and rejected addresses is woven into a fine structure that is at once extraordinarily intricate and strong. Everything is so perfectly placed that it seems to follow as naturally and inevitably as the seasons, despite the complexity of the plot. Emma’s vital freedom is possible because her world is so carefully grounded. Jane Austen was demonstrating the importance of attending to the tiniest parts, as well as their essential and cumulative contribution to the larger entity. As a healthy example for the future King of England, Emma could hardly have been better.
PERSUASION
1816
In Emma, Jane Austen resolved so many of the problems she had set for herself that she inadvertently created a new one: what could she write next? Such a virtuoso performance was not easy to follow, even for a writer whose voice had now achieved its perfect pitch. Once her authorship became known, she began to receive ideas from admirers such as James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, who wrote on 16 November 1815 to suggest that she might turn her talents to delineating ‘the Habits of Life and Character and enthusiasm of a Clergyman – who should pass his time between the metropolis & the Country – who should be something like Beatties Minstrel’. Although she politely demurred, claiming that she might be equal to the ‘comic part of the Character . . . but not the Good, the Enthusiastic, the Literary’,54 Mr Clarke continued to send suggestions. By December, he was even imagining the clergyman being sent to sea ‘as the Friend of some distinguished Naval Character about a Court’.55 When he wrote again in March, urging her to compose a ‘Historical Romance illustrative of the august House of Cobourg’, it was time to make herself plain: ‘I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life,’ she replied, ‘& if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.’56 She did not send Mr Clarke the hilarious ‘Plan of a Novel’, which his well-meaning but ill-judged ideas had provoked.57
Although Jane Austen modestly stressed her literary limitations and incurably comic inclinations, the correspondence with the Prince Regent’s household displays the same underlying confidence that shines from every line of Emma. ‘No – I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way,’ she wrote to Clarke – and, even though the letter is dated 1 April 1816, she clearly meant what she said. For that very day she also wrote to John Murray, thanking him for sending her a copy of the Quarterly Review that carried a long critical discussion of her work by no less a master than Walter Scott.
An author who was receiving serious public praise in one of the most influential literary journals had no need of advice on the subject of her next book, however well intended. She had spent long enough doubting the success of her work and had lost out on the copyright of Pride and Prejudice as a result. With the publication of Emma, she had found a new publisher and better terms, so she was not going to resume any deferential attitude. Indeed, in the early months of 1816, she had the satisfaction of recovering the old manuscript of ‘Susan’ from Crosby, revealing the identity of the work’s anonymous author just as the Quarterly put its seal on her fame. By this point, however, Jane Austen was not prepared to publish work unless it met the exceptionally high standard she had achieved in Emma, and so, although she went back to ‘Susan’, renaming her novel ‘Catherine’ and making various related alterations, she was no longer satisfied with her earlier work. In March 1817, she wrote to her niece Fanny admitting that ‘Miss Catherine is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out’.58 The same letter nevertheless reveals in confidence that Austen had, after all, been working with much greater success on another project: ‘I have a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear in about a twelvemonth hence.’ That ‘something’ was Persuasion.
Although Jane Austen had made a start on the new novel soon after completing Emma in March 1815, she had largely managed to keep her work quiet. It had been a year of upheavals, with Napoleon’s final attempt
to regain power and his defeat at Waterloo providing the remarkable international prelude to Henry’s near-fatal illness in the autumn and the subsequent collapse of his bank. Henry’s bankruptcy had a great impact on the entire family, not only in their natural sympathy for his distresses, but also because Frank was a partner in the bank too, and so the financial repercussions for everyone were considerable. Charles was still far away in the eastern Mediterranean, but he seemed to take his share of the family’s misfortunes when his ship was wrecked in a storm in the Aegean. Though exonerated from all blame, Charles came home depressed and poor, taking years to recover professionally from the disgrace of losing a ship. Worst of all, though not recognised as such at the time, Jane’s health was beginning to decline. She began suffering from a bad back and deep fatigue during the summer of 1816 and, despite cheerful references to her recovery in letters that winter, she was evidently aware that something was not right.
The national rejoicing that accompanied the end of the war was evident in the buoyant mood of Emma, but by 1816 it seemed to be giving way to an all-engulfing depression. Nevertheless, in between attending to Henry in his London sickbed, supporting her mother through the family trials, and entertaining the extended family during their numerous visits to Chawton, Jane Austen succeeded in writing a novel every bit as innovative as Emma. Although she had told Mr Clarke that she must keep to her own style, this did not merely mean repeating her earlier successes. In Persuasion, she reconsidered many aspects of her previous novels, but the result was something quite unlike any of them.
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