Authors: Elizabeth Jenkins
"straight" comedy, though their foundation is of the most brilliant and subtle excellence. Mr. Bennet is one of the most remarkable figures in the whole range of English comedy. Dean Swift is one of the few English masters of irony; it is not perhaps too much to say that Mr. Bennet is another. Of every other one of Jane
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Austen's male characters we may say that they are men as they
appear to women; and that they are so is no reflection upon her powers. Man's aspect as he appears to women is after all as
important, neither more nor less, as his aspect as he appears to men.
But Mr. Bennet is the unique exception; he might have been drawn by a man, except that it is difficult to think of a man who could have drawn him so well. It is relatively easy to be witty at somebody else's expense; but to create the character of a genuinely witty man is, one would say, for a woman, next door to impossible. Male characters of unconscious humor, women, with their capacity for acute
observation, achieve very well. George Eliot was highly successful in this genre, so was Fanny Burney; even Emily Brontë relaxed her sternness over the delineation of old Joseph; Jane Austen herself is of course inimitable; but Mr. Bennet was something extraordinary even for her. To detach his remarks from their context is to deprive them of half their subtlety and force: as, for instance, his reply to the endless maunderings of Mrs. Bennet on the subject of the entail in Mr. Collins' favor. "'How anyone could have the conscience to entail away an estate from one's own daughters, I cannot understand, and all for the sake of Mr. Collins, too! Why should he have it more than anybody else?'
"'I leave it to yourself to determine,' said Mr. Bennet."
One can appreciate the full aroma of that only after having read the twenty-three chapters that precede it.
Of Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins, those two creations of unconscious humor, the only method of doing justice to them would be to repeat every word uttered by either; but it is one of the remarkable aspects of Jane Austen's comedy that though such characters are brilliantly funny, one can at the same time see them in relation to every aspect of
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ordinary life. We not only see Mr. Collins in the ballroom,
"awkward and solemn, apologizing instead of attending," making such an exhibition of himself to Mr. Darcy as caused that gentleman to eye him "with unrestrained wonder," and making his celebrated proposal to Elizabeth; we see him also at Hunsford, being borne with by his wife. "Poor Charlotte! It was melancholy to leave her to such society; but she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though
evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion. Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms."
The distinguishing of novelists as "subjective" and "objective" is essentially misleading, since a purely objective presentation of a character is, to a human being, an impossibility; but the degree to which novelists appear to be either is sometimes very marked. In the last four of Jane Austen's works we are insensibly drawn in to believing that her rendering of the characters of Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Norris and Miss Bates and Mary Musgrave gives us the actual scientific truth about those characters. It is impossible, almost, to have any other opinion of them than that held by Jane Austen
herself. She makes none of those violent assaults upon our prejudice and our imagination which the writer makes who is eminently
subjective; she seems to leave us quite free to form our own
judgment on the most mature of her masterpieces, but really the guiding is there, only it is so firm and skillful that we have not the opportunity to perceive it, excepting just now and again. Pride and Prejudice perhaps affords an example in Lydia Bennet. Lydia is very interesting because she shows that the type of girl known as
"modern" is perhaps one of the best and earliest known to society; bouncing, rowdy, indiscreet, with no attraction but
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"youth and a tolerable person," a success with the majority of young men by reason of health and noise, full of enthusiasm for her own concerns and pleasures, and not so much inattentive to advice and entreaty from anybody else, as actually deaf to it. Jane Austen disliked her very much; so do we when we read of her in relation to Jane and Elizabeth, and Mrs. Gardiner, and even poor silly Mrs.
Bennet, when the latter said: "O my dear Lydia, when shall we meet again?" and Lydia replied: "O Lord! I don't know. Not these two or three years, perhaps." But though we do not question the truth of the portrayal, there are moments, when we have closed the book, when we wonder if we dislike her quite so much, after all. She interrupted Mr. Collins when he was reading aloud one of Fordyce's Sermons; she bought a bonnet, and when her sisters said it was very ugly, she said that there had been several in the shop much uglier, and had thought she might as well buy it as not; and she ran away at sixteen with Mr. Wickham without actually supposing she would be married to him, though at the same time she thought it would be very good fun if she were. She seems at times a sympathetic character; but then one remembers her overbearing wildness, her selfishness, how when she was invited to Brighton and the miserable Kitty was not, "wholly inattentive to her sister's feelings, Lydia flew about the house in restless ecstasy, calling for everyone's congratulations and laughing and talking with more violence than ever"; and one feels that Jane Austen was right after all; she does indeed dislike Lydia Bennet, but there is nothing warped or desiccated in the portrayal of this robust, noisy, natural creature; as much sap went to her composition as to the divine reality of her elder sisters.
The dialogue of Jane Austen's men and women is so strikingly in character, what they say is at once so expressive
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of themselves and so material in forwarding the action, that although her stories are built on a structure which, solid as it is, contains very little incident, the idea of the theatre naturally rises in the mind when one is considering some of it.
A dramatization of
Pride and Prejudice
compiled by Miss Helen Jerome has had a very successful run in London, and it is an
interesting comment on the age that a work which purported to bring Jane Austen's novel on the English stage should have been tolerated in the language of Miss Jerome. Had Jane Austen been able to attend one of the performances herself and to hear some of the remarks put into the mouth of her Elizabeth, she would have echoed the words of Mr. Woodhouse: "I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear."
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IN THE AUTUMN of 1812 Edward Austen brought his family to
stay at the Great House opposite Chawton Cottage. The visit was mutually delightful; Cassandra and Jane always enjoyed the Great House's being occupied, whether by the owners or Frank and Mary with their Mary Jane, Frank and Cassy, or Charles and Frances with their Cassy, Harriet and little Frances; but the visit of Edward's family meant that Jane had the favorite Godmersham children, and the especially favorite Fanny.
Fanny was by now taken into confidence over the writing; some of it was read aloud to her in manuscript. Her younger sister Marianne, aged eleven at the time of this visit to Chawton Great House,
remembered when she was grown up that her Aunt Jane when in the library at Godmersham. would sometimes burst out laughing, jump up and go over to a desk, at which she wrote something down, and then return to the company as if nothing had happened. Marianne remembered also of this Chawton visit, that she often stood outside a closed door, curious and disappointed, behind which her older sister and her aunts were uttering peals of laughter. The room in Chawton House where Jane usually sat with the children is one over the porch, lined with paneling and known as the Oak Room.
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This occasion, during which
Pride and Prejudice
was being worked upon, was the last time of the Godmersham Austens appearing under that name; towards the close of 1812 old Mrs. Knight died, and upon her death Edward adopted the name of Knight, and Jane had to grow accustomed to addressing letters to Miss Knight at Godmersham
Park.
In November 1812 Jane Austen submitted the manuscript of
Pride
and Prejudice
to Mr. Egerton, and on this occasion there was no suggestion of the author's meeting the expenses of the printer.
Egerton paid her £110, and the novel was to appear in January, in three volumes, at eighteen shillings the set. The title announced that it was by the author of
Sense and Sensibility
.
Jane was not so much elated by the prospect of this second
publication that she could think of nothing but that; she had begun the first story of an entirely new nature that she had attempted since the sketch of
Lady Susan
in 1805.
Mansfield Park
was already forming in her mind, and she was careful that no slightest inaccuracy of detail should mar the reality of the whole. Very early in January Cassandra was staying at Steventon, and Jane wrote to her: "I learn .
. . that there is no Government House at Gibraltar. I must alter it to the Commissioner's." She was referring to William Price's remark that when the ladies of the Commissioner's House at Gibraltar came out in the new style of hair-dressing, he had thought it outlandish, but when he saw it on his sister's head, he was reconciled to it. But her preoccupation with her own work did not make her any the less interested in the works of other people. The general interest in novels and literary work of all kinds is shown, not only by the flourishing of the circulating libraries, but by the establishment of Book Societies in various districts.
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Chawton possessed one, and now Jane heard that the Miss Sibleys wanted to begin one like it on their side of the county. She was delighted. What could be a stronger proof, she asked, of how much better theirs was than that at Manydown or Steventon? "No emulation of the kind was ever inspired by
their
proceedings."
On January 29th, however, nothing could be thought of but
Pride
and Prejudice
. Jane had received a set from Mr. Egerton, and wrote to Cassandra: "I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London." Henry had been entrusted to dispatch the others, and wrote to say he had given one to Charles and sent another by coach to Godmersham. "Just the two sets which I was least eager for the disposal of," she exclaimed. She wrote to beg Henry to send her the remaining two so that she could dispatch them to James and Mary, and to Frank at Portsmouth; but Henry had left town for a day or two, so delay was unavoidable; but Jane consoled herself by saying to Cassandra: "For
your
sake I am as well pleased that it should be so, as it might be unpleasant to you to be in the
neighborhood in the first burst of the business." On the day of the volumes' arrival Miss Benn dined at the cottage, and Mrs. Austen, Martha and Jane told her they had got a new novel from town, of which they had heard before its publication, and had asked Henry to send them as soon as it came out. They suggested reading it aloud after dinner, and Miss Benn was all acquiescence. Mrs. Austen did the reading, and Jane thought Miss Benn was genuinely amused;
"she really does seem to admire Elizabeth." Jane added with complete candor: "I must confess 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."
She said: "The second volume is shorter than I could
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wish, but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of narrative in that part." She then made a casual mention of something that showed what consummate care had gone to the achieving of that compact and buoyant masterpiece. "I have lop't and crop't so successfully, however, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S. and S. altogether."
The next morning Miss Benn came again to hear the reading, but this time Jane was not so much pleased as she had been before. She
thought that perhaps the work did not make its proper impression owing to Mrs. Austen's reading too rapidly and without giving the conversations their proper emphasis. "Though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought."
"Upon the whole, however," Jane said, "I am quite vain enough and well satisfied enough." In the fullness of her glee, she added: "[It] 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."
But in spite of the exquisite delight of seeing
Pride and Prejudice
in its published form--far keener than that attending the appearance of
Sense and Sensibility
, for it contained the dearest of her inspirations,
"as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print"--she did not forget the new creation. She said to Cassandra, thinking James might have more knowledge on this subject than Chawton could afford: "If you could discover whether Northamptonshire is a country of hedgerows, I should be glad." What episode in
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Mansfield Park
she had seen in a hedgerow, we can only imagine, since one must conclude that Cassandra's inquiries did not produce anything satisfactory; but the idea stayed in her mind, and three years later, Wiltshire having been, perhaps, discovered to be a county of hedgerows of the high and hollow kind, she placed in such a one the conversation Anne Elliot overheard between Louisa
Musgrove and Captain Wentworth.
In April something happened that brought back to Jane many