A Little History of Literature (16 page)

CHAPTER
16

The Sharpest Mind

J
ANE
A
USTEN

It has taken a long time for us to realise that Jane Austen (1775–1817) is one of the great English-language novelists. One of the reasons we can overlook her is that the world of her fiction is (there is no other word) small. And, to the superficial eye, the big question posed in each of her six novels – ‘Who will the heroine marry?’ – looks, if not similarly small, something less than earth-shatteringly important. We are not, it is clear, in the same league as Tolstoy's
War and Peace
(even though virtually all of Austen's fiction was actually written in wartime – the longest war that modern Britain had ever fought).

In a letter written in 1816, Austen likened her novels, with her characteristic irony, to miniature paintings: ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush’. Charlotte Brontë took up the same image, but much more critically:

Hard words, but it's a common criticism. Austen, implies the author of
Jane Eyre
(who wrote her fiction from behind a male pseudonym), is not a writer who can hold her own in the man's world. And she is too tame – ‘un-stormy’ is Brontë's term – even for the more demanding woman reader.

Can literary greatness find room for itself on those two inches of Austen ivory, restricting itself, as her novels do, to such a limited range of largely female, exclusively middle-class experience? The answer, modern readers would reply, is ‘Yes indeed’. Explaining why is trickier. But a firm yes is the right place to start from.

Jane Austen was born the daughter of a country parson, moderately prosperous and wholly respectable. She was brought up in a happy family environment with brothers and a sister, Cassandra, to whom she was particularly close – so close that for many years they shared a bed. After her sadly early death, it is from her favourite brother Henry's fond recollection of her, and the surviving letters to Cassandra (most of which were deliberately destroyed), that we know what little we do know of Jane Austen's life. What one can safely suppose is that there was little high drama in it.

Austen's novels were written in the first instance for her own amusement. There is a pleasant recollection of her hiding her work-in-progress under the blotter of her
escritoire
when the creaking door warned that someone was coming into the room. She insisted the door mustn't be mended. They might not peep, but they could listen when she was ready, as her stories were tried out first on her family. They it was who heard their clever young Jane read ‘First Impressions’, the early version of the novel published years later, in 1813, as
Pride and Prejudice
. (The action is set fifteen years before its publication date.) One would give a lot to know what the Revd George Austen and Mrs Austen made of Mr and Mrs Bennet – characters depicted in a not entirely sympathetic light in their daughter's narrative. Probably they chuckled, if a little nervously.

Austen travelled very little in her life. Nor do her heroines travel much. The family spent some time in Bath, the Regency spa-town and marriage market, a place Austen seems to have disliked. She visited London but never lived there, and it figures little in her writing; usually, as in
Sense and Sensibility
, as a place it's good to get away from. The ‘home counties’ – principally Hampshire – were her home ground. It's quaint to be told that she had a strong loyalty to the local cricket team, the ‘Gentlemen of Hampshire’.

An attractive woman, one gathers (no reliable portrait of her survives), she is known to have had an offer of marriage. She accepted, but then withdrew her consent the next morning. She never did marry, although all her novels are centrally concerned with her heroines' courtship problems. Austen's motives for remaining single can only be guessed at. Whatever those motives might have been, lovers of her work may be grateful that she changed her mind on that fateful night in 1802. A wife and mother would have had less time to produce the six novels on which her reputation rests. She died that most pitied object in her fiction: an old maid.

Old, though, is the wrong word. Austen was only forty-one at the time of her death. As with so much in her life, we don't know what disease killed her. But it was not sudden, and her last novels were composed in growing physical weakness through her final illness. An understandable darkness tinges her last complete work,
Persuasion
. In the ending to that novel, one can almost feel the pen drooping with exhaustion on the paper. She did not live to revise it to her satisfaction.

The Austen heroine invariably has both a suitable and an unsuitable suitor. Will Emma Woodhouse marry Frank Churchill or consent to become the wife of the older, duller Mr Knightley? Will Elizabeth Bennet mend her family's fortunes by accepting the offer of the Revd Mr Collins, or stick to her guns and (after some heavy counter-fire from Lady Catherine de Bourgh) become Mrs Darcy? Will Marianne succumb to the Byronic Willoughby or discover the attractions of the dull, but worthy, Colonel Brandon with his flannel waistcoat (he is middle-aged and feels the cold)? All the
novels end with a peal of church bells, the right choice having been made.

Famously Jane Austen never goes beyond what a ‘lady’ would decently know. (‘By a Lady’ is the description under the title of her anonymously published first novel,
Sense and Sensibility
.) There are many men in her novels but she never depicts males in conversation together without a lady present and listening. There are few truly grand aristocrats – exceptions are Sir Thomas Bertram in
Mansfield Park
and Sir Walter Elliot in
Persuasion
, but neither of them stands high in the register of peers of the realm. Equally, there are no working-class characters in the foreground of her novels. Shabby-genteel is as far down the social scale as we go in Jane Austen's world. There are, of course, servants everywhere. Some of their names (James the coachman in
Emma
, for example) we know. But life below stairs is another, unvisited world in Austen's fiction.

Occasionally we get glimpses of a harder world than the novels choose to dwell on. In
Emma
Jane Fairfax finds herself in a cruel dilemma. Penniless, but talented, she must make her own way in the world. Marriage would be a solution but the man she loves (and who may have taken cruel advantage of her) seems more interested in rich Emma Woodhouse. The only means by which Jane can support herself is by becoming a governess – earning barely enough to live on and enduring the humiliating household status of ‘upper servant’. She describes applying for such positions as being like a slave on the auction block. Charlotte Brontë would make a novel,
Jane Eyre
, out of this scenario. For Jane Austen it is a sideline to the main plot, which she chooses not to go too far into, other than to draw the reader's attention to Jane's plight.

One can rack up any number of things that Jane Austen's novels don't do. She lived and wrote through some of the greatest historical upheavals the world had known – the American and French revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. Sailors (she had brothers in the Navy) and military men (Colonel Brandon in
Sense and Sensibility
, for example, and the naval hero Frederick Wentworth in
Persuasion
) make an appearance in her narratives, but only as eligible or ineligible suitors for the heroines. If Horatio Nelson
himself appeared in an Austen novel one suspects the novel's only interest in him would be whether he was ‘Mr Right’ for the heroine.

A grand estate such as Mansfield Park supports itself, financially, by its sugar plantations in the West Indies, worked by slaves. The fact is alluded to – but not examined or dwelled on. Nor, perish the thought, is the reader given a glimpse of what is going on in those West Indian plantations. Austen's political and religious views are those of her class, although in her later novels they seem to have hardened somewhat. She was a devout Anglican, and clergymen figure prominently in her fiction. But not once do her novels take us inside a church, or venture into theological matters. That was reserved for Sundays, not fiction.

The feminist movement that took off in the 1960s has stoutly championed Austen's fiction. Her own view on these latter-day champions might have been doubtful. Her novels never question the status of men as the superior sex. We don't know whether she resented the fact that her publishing contracts had to be negotiated by her father or brother – women having no property rights, even in the fruits of their own brains. The richest of her heroines is Emma, possessed, when she reaches twenty-one, of some £30,000 (a vastly huger amount in modern value). When she marries Mr Knightley, it will become his. The novel accepts that, serenely.

Austen's views on literature were as conservative as her social beliefs. Although she coincided, historically, with the Romantic movement – and is often classified as a Romantic – she belonged to an earlier, more stable age, whose values her novels collectively endorse. Much contemporary fiction – particularly the ‘tale of terror’ – offended her sense of literary propriety.
Northanger Abbey
has a heroine, Catherine Morland, who is morally poisoned by her addiction to modern novels – temporarily, thank heavens.

All the above would seem to make the point that Jane Austen was a writer of very limited range. Insignificant, even. What then do the novels do that makes them so supremely good? Two things. The first is Austen's technical mastery of her novel's form, particularly in her use of irony. The second is her moral seriousness – her ability to articulate, in all its complications, how one should
live one's life. We could also cite her wit, her tolerant observation of human foibles, and her sympathy.

There are few more artful plot-wrights than Austen. It is hard for her fans to remember their first readings of the novels, because they know them so well. ‘Janeites’, as her devout followers are called, take it on themselves to re-read the six novels every year like holy writ. But for first-time readers especially, her novels are page-turners, masterly in their winding up of suspense. Will Emma (or Elizabeth, or Catherine, or Elinor) do the right thing? The reader is on tenterhooks until almost the last chapter.

No writer uses her prose instrument more skilfully than Austen. Moreover she has the knack of making us, her readers, use our own skill-set to the limits of our ability, and beyond what we normally trouble to do. Take, as an example, the opening of
Emma
:

Two words grate interestingly in this sentence. ‘Handsome’: is that not a word more applicable to a man? Would not ‘pretty’, or ‘beautiful’ be more appropriate? ‘Emma Woodhouse’ (no ‘Miss’, you note) may, we suspect, be her own woman, and not necessarily conformist. The other reverberating word in the sentence is ‘seemed’. That confidence about ‘the best blessings of existence’ will, we are warned, be tested: as indeed it is, almost to destruction, in the pages that follow. And the word ‘vex’ (not ‘upset’): it suggests a haughtiness, a pride waiting for its fall. This one sentence bristles with irony and suggestion.

Austen's command of prose style and narrative technique is combined with a high moral seriousness. Her novels are much more than a maiden's fraught progress to the marriage altar after a few mistakes en route. Her heroines invariably start life as good young women determined to do the right thing. Inexperience and innocence – sometimes exacerbated by thoughtlessness or
obstinacy – lead them into life's difficulties and dangers. Put another way, they make mistakes which they pay for. Out of the resulting stress and suffering they emerge as ‘adult’, morally mature. What Austen's novels tell us is that in order to live properly, you have first to have lived. Life is an education for life. Here again (as with the skills mentioned above) Austen has been seen as the pioneer in what is called the ‘Great Tradition’ of English fiction – a line that runs through George Eliot, the Brontës (despite Charlotte's moans), Dickens, Henry James and D.H. Lawrence. All take their starting point from the modest lady writing in a rectory in Hampshire who understood the world more than the world gave her credit for.

Austen's fiction demonstrates, supremely well, that a literary work need not be large to be great. And what can two inches of ivory contain? Everything worth writing about, if the brush and the surface are in the hands of a genius.