What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (14 page)

‘The young people were all wild to see Lyme’ (I. xi). ‘Wild’ is a word for the Musgrove girls: earlier in the novel they are ‘wild for dancing’ (I. vi). It is the sea that draws them, for the place is off the beaten track and largely (in November) shut up. Once they have arrived and booked in at their hotel, ‘the next thing to be done was unquestionably to walk directly down to the sea’. It is likely that Austen herself had taken a November holiday in Lyme in 1803, in her late twenties, and would have had memories of the place out of season.
¹⁰
She visited again the next summer, when she danced in the assembly rooms and bathed in the sea (
Letters
, 39). She walked for an hour on the Cobb with Miss Armstrong, a family friend. Her experiences might be behind Mary Musgrove’s enjoyment of her stay in Lyme, supposedly justified by Louisa’s injury. Pretending to remain in the town to help look after her sister-in-law, Mary ‘had found more to enjoy than to suffer’ (II. ii). She breathlessly tells Anne and Lady Russell that, ‘She had been taken to Charmouth too, and she had bathed, and gone to church, and there were a great many more people to look at in the church at Lyme than at Uppercross.’ Church attendance is made a seaside recreation. Bathing – it is November – might well mean in Lyme’s indoor baths (Jefford’s), built in 1804.

For Anne, the sea exerts a kind of spell. On their morning in Lyme, she and Henrietta Musgrove walk down to the sands before breakfast ‘to watch the flowing of the tide’ (I. xii). ‘They praised the morning; gloried in the sea; sympathized in the delight of the fresh-feeling breeze—and were silent.’ By the sea Anne comes back to life, ‘the bloom and freshness of youth restored’. She comes back to what we might call sexual life. No wonder that Mr Elliot can ingratiate himself by talking to her of Lyme and agreeing in her ‘lively’ wish to visit it again (II. iv). With great meaning, Anne later tells Captain Wentworth, ‘I should very much like to see Lyme again . . . So much novelty and beauty!’ (II. viii). It is what happened to her there that draws Anne back to the place in her mind and conversation. Bad things happen at the seaside because it is a place of licence. In Austen’s first four novels, it is distant from the main events and beyond the knowledge of the heroine. We have to imagine what goes on there. In
Persuasion
, we finally travel to the sea and find that licence can also be a kind of liberation.

SEVEN

Why Is the Weather Important?

‘. . . though you will never own being affected by weather, I think every body feels a north-east wind.’

Emma
, III. xiv

There is weather in English fiction before Austen, but she is the first novelist to mark the small changes in the weather that anyone might notice on any ordinary day. Partly this is circumstantial precision: the weather has to be minutely observed because each Austen novel follows a tightly defined chronology. As we pass in
Emma
from Christmas to midsummer, as
Persuasion
takes us from autumn in Somerset to winter in Bath, the patterns of the weather change too. Meteorology clues us in to the passing of the year. But it is more than this. Austen likes to make her plots turn on the weather. Having arranged her characters and defined their situations, having planned her love stories and hatched the misunderstandings that might impede them, she lets the weather shape events. It is her way of admitting chance into her narratives.

Look at any single episode in which the weather shapes some important encounter and you might hardly notice the role that Austen gives it. But note the pattern of other such weather-produced accidents, and you can see a design. Take the moment in
Persuasion
where Anne Elliot meets Captain Wentworth in Bath. She has just found out about Louisa Musgrove’s engagement to Captain Benwick; Captain Wentworth, she realises, is ‘unshackled and free’ (II. vi). There is hope. It starts raining and she takes shelter in a shop with her companions, her sister Elizabeth, Mrs Clay and Mr Elliot. Through the shop window she suddenly sees Captain Wentworth in the street (II. vii). In a state of confusion she finds herself moving towards the door ‘to see if it rained’ – as if the weather was really what was on her mind. Then Captain Wentworth himself enters the shop. ‘He was more obviously struck and confused by the sight of her, than she had ever observed before; he looked quite red.’ They converse falteringly, while the rain creates a fuss and a bustle in which Lady Dalrymple’s carriage is made available to Elizabeth and Mrs Clay, and Mr Elliot goes back and forth making arrangements. Suddenly brought together, Captain Wentworth and Anne hardly notice all the business – until Mr Elliot returns to whisk her off. Captain Wentworth has just been showing her his new umbrella, but is denied the chance to put it to gallant use. A little West Country rain creates the drama of the episode, in which Captain Wentworth has to take second place to Mr Elliot. Nothing like the weather to bring matters to a crisis.

Sense and Sensibility
is kicked into life by a misjudgement about the weather: Marianne goes walking on the Devon hills with her younger sister Margaret, convincing herself that ‘the partial sunshine of a showery sky’ bodes well’ (I. ix). ‘Marianne’s declaration that the day would be lastingly fair’ is, of course, folly, revealed when ‘a driving rain set full in their face’. Fleeing for home, Marianne trips and is rescued by the handsome Willoughby. It might seem a fortunate accident, the beginning of a romance, but at the root of this episode is Marianne’s determination to delude herself about the weather. The plot of
Pride and Prejudice
is also made early to depend on the weather. When Jane is invited to visit Netherfield, Mrs Bennet famously requires that the horses that would pull the Bennet coach be unavailable. They must be being used on the farm. So Jane must travel on horseback ‘because it seems likely to rain’ (I. vii). Some amateur forecasting settles Jane’s fate: she will have to stay the night, giving her all the more chance to win Mr Bingley’s heart. And Mrs Bennet is not wrong; it does indeed rain hard. She duly takes the ‘credit’ for the climatic conditions, although the consequences are rather beyond her control: Jane catches ‘a violent cold’ and is confined to her bed.

Emma
is probably the most weather-dependent of all Austen’s novels. So often mentioned and so frequent an influence is weather in
Emma
that earth scientist Euan Nisbet was moved to make a meteorological analysis of its patterns in
Nature
magazine. ‘
Emma
is weather. Meteorology shapes the novel’.
¹
In the very first chapter, Emma recalls for Mr Knightley’s benefit how the match between the Westons was first suggested to her when she and Miss Taylor were caught in a light ‘mizzle’ on a walk through Highbury and Mr Weston had ‘darted away with so much gallantry, and borrowed two umbrellas for us from Farmer Mitchell’s’. This was Mr Weston’s first sign of romantic inclination, according to Emma. And the evidence is that Emma, who spends the novel being so wrong about so much, was right about this. Would-be lovers love to make the weather their collaborator. Emma finds this to her cost when a slight snowfall flusters the guests into a hurried departure from the Westons’ dinner party, and she finds herself entrapped in a carriage with a suddenly, drunkenly amorous Mr Elton. Later, in another encounter forced by the weather, heavy rain makes Harriet take shelter in Ford’s shop, and thus occasions her awkward, emotional meeting with Robert Martin and his sister (II. iii). Harriet’s feelings for Robert Martin are clearly reawakened.

Exposure to the weather was a basic fact of the author’s life. ‘Our Pond is brimful & our roads are dirty & our walls are damp, & we sit wishing every bad day may be the last’, Austen wrote from Chawton in March 1816 (
Letters
, 137). Those who walk, particularly women, are always wondering about the weather. Miss Bates clucks about the possibility of rain on behalf of her weather-susceptible niece. ‘Jane, you had better go home directly—I would not have you out in a shower!’ (II. iii). Always walking, pale and strained, Jane Fairfax’s vulnerability to the weather is no mere neurosis. She is truly exposed to the elements. But when it comes to letter collection, she is dauntless. Mr John Knightley, who has been out with his two boys, hopes that she was not caught out in the rain and she pretends not: ‘it did not absolutely rain when I set out’ (II. xvi). He teases her, having seen her setting out just as the rain was beginning, and assures her that when she is older she will never think a letter ‘worth going through the rain for’. His teasing produces the nearest to a
cri de coeur
that we ever hear from Jane Fairfax, as she says that he has ‘every body dearest’ to him ‘always at hand’, while she ‘probably, never shall again’. The post office, where letters wait for collection, ‘must always have the power to draw me out, in worse weather than today’. Utterly constrained by her circumstances, the weather is one constraint she will not obey. But the tense expressiveness of this exchange is soon overtaken by much less significant weather-talk, as her walk in the rain becomes the topic first for Mr Woodhouse (‘Young ladies should take care of themselves’) and then Mrs Elton (‘You sad girl, how could you do such a thing?’).

The point of the exchange is that Jane Fairfax is indeed vulnerable, so the first-time reader should infer that she has some strong reason for persisting in her walking. We might think Mr Woodhouse rather readily frightened by the Surrey climate, but Austen makes a point of having Mrs Weston give advice, ‘kindly and persuasively’: ‘The spring I always think requires more than common care.’ Equally susceptible to the weather, and liable to be exposed to it, is Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
. On a broiling July day she is twice sent by Mrs Norris on errands to her house in the village and is thoroughly ‘knocked up’ as a result (I. iii). Her vulnerability to the weather is a symptom of her greater defencelessness: she must follow her aunt’s uncharitable orders. A volume later she has again been sent out on an errand by her aunt Norris when she is spotted from the parsonage, sheltering from the rain under a tree. Dr Grant appears with an umbrella and she finds that she must enter the house, to the relief of Miss Crawford ‘who had just been contemplating the dismal rain in a very desponding state of mind’ (II. iv). Fanny soon wishes to leave, so she and Mary Crawford engage in a debate about the state of the weather. Fanny says that the weather is now fair, but Miss Crawford demurs. ‘I know a black cloud when I see it; and you must not set forward while it is so threatening.’ It is the beginning of Miss Crawford’s attempts to win Fanny round, to seduce her. She requires the weather to support her case, and throws in the offer of some harp music if she will stay.

Jane Austen’s own letters to her sister invariably include accounts of what the weather has been like where she is, in Hampshire or Kent or London. It seems that such reports are expected, perhaps that it would be peculiar not to include some mention of recent weather. We should realise how determining the weather can be. ‘How lucky we were in our weather yesterday!—This wet morning makes one more sensible of it,’ wrote Austen in May 1813 (
Letters
, 84). She was lucky on this particular day because she had been on an outing to the Hog’s Back in Surrey, travelling in a curricle – an open carriage – but the sense of having a life shaped by the weather is common and constant in her letters. Most often it is the sense of being hampered by the weather, as in a letter to her nephew Edward in July 1816 where she complains of unseasonal days of rain that have kept her indoors. ‘It is really too bad, & has been too bad for a long time, much worse than anybody
can
bear, & I begin to think it will never be fine again’ (
Letters
, 142). She adds a joke about her subjection to the climate. ‘This is a finesse of mine, for I have often observed that if one writes about the Weather, it is generally completely changed before the Letter is read.’

Like the author, Elizabeth Bennet is attentive to the weather, for she is liberated by being out of doors. She visits her sick sister by walking across the fields in what the Bingley sisters call ‘dirty weather’, though this is a telling inaccuracy on the part of two cosseted ladies (I. vii). On Elizabeth’s visit to the Collins marital home in the early spring, the weather is ‘so fine for the time of year’ that she has the ‘great enjoyment’ of frequent walks (II. vii). She loves to walk, while her sisters need to walk in order to get to the local town. To the Bennet girls the weather matters very much. In the period before the Netherfield ball, they spend four or five days imprisoned in their house because ‘there was such a succession of rain as prevented their walking to Meryton once. No aunt, no officers, no news could be sought after’ (I. xvii). Such is rural life, without the use of a coach at least. In
Persuasion
Mary Musgrove is bitter about the imprisoning effect of winter weather in Somerset. As she writes in a letter to Anne, ‘What dreadful weather we have had! It may not be felt in Bath, with your nice pavements; but in the country it is of some consequence. I have not had a creature call on me since the second week in January’ (II. vi). Even in Bath, where Mary thinks the weather makes no difference, a woman cannot go out on her own if it is raining much. When Anne is looking forward to meeting the Musgrove party, and especially Captain Wentworth, at the White Hart, the weather heightens her anxiety by preventing her for some time from attempting the walk (II. xi). In
Emma
, in contrast, the heroine is delighted to be trapped by the weather in the wake of the Mr Elton debacle. Immobilised for ‘many days’ by snow and rain, she can communicate with Harriet only ‘by note’ (I. xvi). Only men can scorn the weather, in special circumstances, like Mr Knightley riding back from London ‘through the rain’ to see Emma and declare himself (III. xiii). But men can be confined too, like Tom Bertram, trying to explain away the theatricals to his father in
Mansfield Park
: ‘We have had such incessant rains almost since October began, that we have been nearly confined to the house for days together’ (II. i). In
Sense and Sensibility
, the grumpy Mr Palmer finds the restrictive influence of bad weather a reason for his own grumpiness. ‘Such weather makes every thing and every body disgusting. Dullness is as much produced within doors as without, by rain. It makes one detest all one’s acquaintance. What the devil does Sir John mean by not having a billiard room in his house? How few people know what comfort is! Sir John is as stupid as the weather’ (I. xx).