What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (39 page)

So in
Northanger Abbey
, ‘the reader’ is present too, addressed three times directly (but not in any other of Austen’s completed novels). ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday have now passed in review before the reader; the events of each day, its hopes and fears, mortifications and pleasures, have been separately stated, and the pangs of Sunday only now remain to be described, and close the week’ (I. xiii). In this novel as never again, the author is joined with the reader in an amused monitoring of her ingenuous heroine. The author’s presence is needed because Catherine is so unworldly, and it assures us that she will not really come to harm. She must even be protected from her own self-condemnation. Listening to the Tilneys’ educated talk of the picturesque on a walk above Bath, Catherine is ‘heartily ashamed’ of her ignorance of what makes for a good view (I. xiv). ‘A misplaced shame,’ the author immediately tells us. ‘Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant . . . A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.’ This ends in a jaundiced worldliness that any biographer would imagine speaks from the author’s own experience. Austen’s reflections on her unworldly heroine give a singular tone to the narratorial irony of
Northanger Abbey
. When Catherine is first hooked by Isabella Thorpe, she forgets her interest in Henry Tilney in the excitement of her new ‘amity’, and the narrator comments: ‘Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love’ (I. iv). This judgement comes from outside the narrative and can easily be thought of as the wry voice of the author. Catherine has not yet discovered what anyone could properly call ‘love’, and the ‘friendship’ of Isabella is entirely a cloak for self-interest, so this slice of sententiousness is the author’s
faux
wisdom. Similarly, when she comments on her heroine’s interest in clothes – ‘She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all time a frivolous distinction’ (I. x) – it is with the confidence that her reader will hear the author’s scorn for such moralism.

Sometimes Jane Austen cannot resist . . .

Austen could not always remain aloof from her creations. She knew very well the impulse to make a mocking comment on people’s behaviour, and gave this impulse to her most fallible heroine, Emma Woodhouse. Thus the line preceding Emma’s worst act, the mortification of Miss Bates at Box Hill: ‘Emma could not resist’ (III. vii). Sometimes Jane Austen cannot resist either. Take the introduction in
Emma
of Frank Churchill’s plans to arrange a ball in Highbury.

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;—but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. (II. xi)

This is larded with irony, but parades itself as commentary from personal experience. Even in later novels, she sometimes cannot resist, usually when awakening the reader to the difference between fact and wishfulness. In
Mansfield Park
, when the Bertrams and the Crawfords go riding in the hot weather, ‘there were shady lanes wherever they wanted to go’. There is not a pause before Austen adds, ‘A young party is always provided with a shady lane’ (I. vii). She could not resist the remark. All that supposed shade was the excuse for the young people to do what they wanted to do anyway. When Austen describes Miss Goddard’s school in
Emma
, she really cannot resist having a stab at modern girls’ schools ‘which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity’ (I. iii). Where does this come from? We are being told of something that does not occur to any of the characters in the novel. Is it sharp social commentary, or a bee in the authorial bonnet?

In her last completed novel, the devil in Austen produces comments that have taken readers aback down the years. As Captain Wentworth sits on the sofa with Mrs Musgrove in order kindly to condole with her over the death of her scapegrace son, Austen fails to imitate his ‘self-command’. She cannot resist reflecting on how ridiculous a fat person’s grief can seem.

Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain—which taste cannot tolerate—which ridicule will seize. (I. viii)

Ridicule, in the person of the author herself, has certainly seized this opportunity in a manner that many have often found ‘not fair’. The author who occasionally intervenes in
Persuasion
cannot help laughing at what we might think sad. She steps aside from the drama on the Cobb just after Louisa Musgrove’s fall to comment on the growing crowd collected ‘to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies, for it proved twice as fine as the first report’ (I. xii). What the characters think of as tragedy is suddenly, from the author’s perspective, a comedy. In this melancholy novel, a satirical author sometimes cannot stop herself from intervening. When Lady Russell calls at Uppercross at Christmas, the house is full of loud, cheerful children and she is relieved when she departs for Bath. But the author must tell us that Lady Russell’s ears are not always so sensitive. ‘Every body has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity’ (II. ii). She cannot abide the infant tumult at the Musgroves’, but her spirits rise at the din of Bath when she enters the town in her carriage.

The literary admirer of Jane Austen does not want to know her views from her novels, for they are most apparent when her interpolated comments seem unsettlingly unironical. When, in
Mansfield Park
, Henry Crawford is not punished by the world as harshly as the former Mrs Rushworth, Austen explicitly acknowledges and regrets this inequality. ‘That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure attend
his
share of the offence is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue. In this world the penalty is less equal than could be wished’ (III. xvii). That ‘we’ is both the author and the reader, recognising together that a woman is for ever tainted by such an ‘offence’, while a man may go on in the world. It is in
Sense and Sensibility
, however, that we find a vein of authorial opinion that is diluted out of her subsequent novels. Take our introduction to the Steele sisters, who win over Lady Middleton by their rapturous attentions to her children. ‘Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow anything’ (I. xxi). This is amusing enough, but it is the dry observation of an author. The balanced and paradoxical form of her sentences in this novel seem to entice her to sententiousness.Take this, on Mrs John Dashwood’s having Elinor and Marianne as companions in some of her London social forays:

Mrs. John Dashwood was obliged to submit not only to the exceedingly great inconvenience of sending her carriage for the Miss Dashwoods, but, what was still worse, must be subject to all the unpleasantness of appearing to treat them with attention: and who could tell that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough; for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of any thing better from them. (II. xiv)

That last sentence is just what we might expect from a well-meaning novelist of the period. Here is Maria Edgeworth in
Patronage
, published just three years after
Sense and Sensibility
, explaining why Caroline Percy’s suitor Mr Barclay has not made more of an effort to persuade her to listen to his declarations of affection for her.

Love . . . let poets and lovers say what they will to the contrary, can no more subsist without hope than flame can exist without fuel. In all the cases cited to prove the contrary, we suspect that there has been some inaccuracy in the experiment, and that by mistake, a little, a very little hope has been admitted.
⁴

The obligation of a serious author is to offer us insights into the paradoxes of human behaviour. Here is Mary Brunton in her novel
Self-Control
, published a year before
Sense and Sensibility
, telling us that the rakish Colonel Hargrave is likely to fall short of even the very modest reformation (no more seducing servant girls) he plans in order to win pious Laura Montreville.

It might be supposed, that when the scale of duty which we trace is low, we should be more likely to reach the little eminence at which we aspire; but experience shews us, that they who poorly circumscribe the Christian race, stop as much short of their humble design, as does he of nobler purpose, whose glorious goal is perfection.
⁵

In
Sense and Sensibility
, Austen still has some of this wisdom-giving manner of her contemporaries, but she has another reason for authorial intervention that is unique to this novel: Marianne Dashwood. Austen finds the character so provoking that she sometimes cannot resist diagnosis and judgement. This is particularly clear in the wake of Willoughby’s sudden departure, when Marianne retreats into an agonised display of wounded sensibility. ‘She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself’ (I. xv). The analysis is not in Elinor’s thoughts; it is the author passing judgement on Marianne’s display of distress. This is Austen informing us of what we might not otherwise correctly perceive. The impression is confirmed by the next chapter, which begins with a description of Marianne’s incessant weeping and her refusal to sleep or eat or even speak. She gives her mother and sisters pain, but will not be consoled by them. The author is pushed to an exclamation. ‘Her sensibility was potent enough!’ (I. xvi) We can hear all the author’s scorn for the display of ‘sensibility’ in the sarcasm with which this demands to be read.

The exclamation mark indicates that the author, exasperated or disbelieving, has just had to speak. At the end of the opening chapter of
Mansfield Park
, Mrs Price, a little mystified at the Bertrams’ decision to adopt one of her girls rather than one of her boys, has written to excuse Fanny’s delicacy with the hope that she might be better for a ‘change of air’. Austen is stopped by the truth behind the platitude. ‘Poor woman! she probably thought change of air might agree with many of her children’ (I. i). It is an odd device, by which the author has a good guess at the thoughts of a character she has herself invented. It is used with delicious sarcasm in
Persuasion
when Sir Walter Elliot fishes for compliments from Elizabeth and Mrs Clay by saying that women look at him and Colonel Wallis in the street in Bath because Colonel Wallis is ‘a fine military figure’ (II. iii). ‘Modest Sir Walter!’ exclaims someone who can only be the author. The opposite is surely true: Sir Walter is fully expecting to be told that his looks, not his companion’s, are the cause of fluttering female attention. The character’s vanity is so overwhelming that it has provoked even the author to derision. Similarly when Lady Russell, a ‘good woman’ who often excites ridicule from her creator, decides that Sir Walter’s move to Bath is an excellent thing, Austen is nettled into an outburst. ‘How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!’ (I. ii). So they do. Yet the general aphorism has a special dramatic force. The author is driven to speak by the self-serving reasoning of her own character. She is struck by Lady Russell’s behaviour, as if she were observing her rather than creating her. The author speaks for the best reason that an author can have: to credit her character with a life all of her own.

TWENTY

How Experimental a Novelist Is Jane Austen?