Jane Austen Study Guide

© 2019 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.
 Table of Contents
Biography.............................................................................................................................................................1

Critical Essays.....................................................................................................................................................9

Analysis............................................................................................................................................................188

i
Biography
Biography
Article abstract: Austen’s realistic rendering of dialogue and her satirical accuracy make her novels a
matchless re-creation of upper-class English society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her
novels owe their lasting popularity, however, to Austen’s understanding of human nature as it operates in
everyday life.

Early Life

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England, the seventh child and second
daughter of George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. Her father was the reactor of Steventon and nearby
Deane. A member of an old but poor family, he had been reared by a wealthy uncle, who educated him at St.
John’s College, Oxford, where he was later a fellow. Austen’s mother was the daughter of a clergyman of
noble ancestry, also an Oxford graduate and also a former fellow.

Although Jane and her older sister, Cassandra Austen, spent several years in schools in Southampton and
Reading, their real education took place at home. The Austens loved words and books. The children could
roam at will through George Austen’s impressive library. As they grew older, they staged amateur theatricals.
The environment stimulated their curiosity, whether they were observing their mother’s experiments in
farming or hearing their aristocratic French cousin talk about life in prerevolutionary France. With an
ever-increasing family and a wide circle of friends, the Austen children had ample opportunity to analyze
human motivations and relationships; it is not surprising that two of Jane’s brothers and her sister Cassandra
all did some writing at one time or another.

The Austens also shared in remarkable good looks; Jane and Cassandra were sometimes called the
best-looking girls in England. However flattering such comments may have been, it is true that Jane was a tall,
slender brunette with brown, curly hair, hazel eyes, a good complexion, and a sweet voice. Although neither
Jane nor Cassandra was ever married, it was not for lack of prospects. Indeed, both were engaged, Cassandra
for some time, to a young clergyman who died in the West Indies, and Jane only overnight, to a family friend
whom she rejected in the morning. There was evidently at least one other serious relationship for Jane, a
holiday romance which was not pursued and which terminated when that young man, too, died.

Because Jane never left the family circle, her life has often been called uneventful. In fact, it was so busy that
Jane had to snatch time to write. In addition to the normal social activities of her class, there were frequent
visits to and from the brothers and their families, including lengthy stays by their children, several of whom
were very close to their Aunt Jane. There were births, deaths, marriages, and remarriages; there was anxiety
about Jane’s cousin, whose husband was executed in the French Revolution, and about two brothers, who
were British naval officers. Thus, Jane was immersed in life, grieving and rejoicing with family members and
friends, mothering nieces and nephews, worrying about the effect of her unstable times on those she loved. As
one may note from her letters, she was also a perceptive observer of human behavior, unimpressed by
pomposity, unfooled by pretense, and always alert to the comic dimension of human relationships.

It was this comic sense which first led Austen to writing. Her three notebooks collect jokes, skits, and
rudimentary character sketches dating from the time she was eleven or twelve, along with a later comic
history of England and a brief, unfinished novel named “Catherine.” By 1795, when she was twenty, Austen
had produced “Elinor and Marianne” (which was later revised and published in 1811 as Sense and
Sensibility). By 1797, she had completed “First Impressions,” which the publisher Cadell refused even to read

1
but which, revised, became her most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813). Although none of her novels
was to be published until 1811 (six years before her death, when Sense and Sensibility made its public
appearance), Austen was thus involved in her mature work before her twenty-first birthday. No longer a
superficially amusing girl, she had become a serious woman of letters.

Life’s Work

Austen’s literary reputation rests on six novels, four of which were published during the last years of her life
and two posthumously. Because she revised and retitled her early works before she was able to find a
publisher for them, it is difficult to trace her development. Evidently, after a work was rejected, she would put
it aside, begin another work, and then later revise the earlier one. Her most famous work, Pride and Prejudice,
for example, was the product of twelve or fourteen years; Sense and Sensibility took at least sixteen years and
two revisions between conception and publication.

Austen’s creative maturity can be divided into two major periods. During the first, she wrote three novels and
vainly attempted to get them published. During the second, she revised, completed, and published two of her
early novels and wrote three more, two of which were published before her death. It was only during the last
half dozen years of her life, then, that she received the recognition which her genius merited.

During her years at Steventon, Austen wrote the first version of what was to be her first published work.
“Elinor and Marianne” was the story of two sisters whose lives were governed by two different principles. In
every crisis, one tried to be sensible, while the other gave way to uncontrolled emotion. The theme was
reflected in Austen’s revision a year or two later, when she changed the title to Sense and Sensibility. It was
under the second title that the novel, again revised, was finally published in 1811.

During 1797, Austen completed “First Impressions,” which pointed out how foolish rash assessments of other
people may be. Like Sense and Sensibility, this work told the love stories of two sisters; in this case, however,
the prejudiced sister, with all of her faults, captures the reader, who can hardly wait for her to capture the
proud nobleman. Tentatively, Austen’s father offered the manuscript to a publisher, but the publisher refused
even to read it. Austen put it away. In 1809, she revised it, and in 1813, it was published as Pride and
Prejudice, which is still one of England’s best-known and best-loved novels.

The third novel of the Steventon period, Northanger Abbey (1818; originally titled “Susan”), began as a satire
of the gothic and sentimental novels which were so popular in the late eighteenth century. Like a gothic
heroine, the central character is determined to find a murderer in the country house which she visits; her
curiosity is interpreted as bad manners, however, and she very nearly loses the eligible man who had invited
her. Yet Austen’s genius could not be confined in a mere literary satire, and like her other works, Northanger
Abbey is a full-fledged commentary on morals and manners.

Northanger Abbey is also interesting because it was the first novel actually sold for publication. The publisher
who bought it in 1803, however, evidently changed his plans, and six years later Austen paid him for its
return. It was published the year after her death.

In 1801, George Austen suddenly decided to retire and to move his household to Bath, where he and his
family lived until his death in 1805. Despite her reluctance to leave Steventon, Austen was fascinated with the
famous watering place, which was the setting both for Northanger Abbey and for Persuasion (1818). Whether
her inability to publish discouraged her or she continued to work on her earlier manuscripts is a matter of
conjecture; at any rate, The Watsons, begun in 1804, was never completed (although its fragment was
published in 1871 in J. E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen). In 1809, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother
moved back to Hampshire, to a house in the village of Chawton, which had been made available to them by
Jane’s brother Edward Knight. There Jane spent the remaining years of her life, years which at last brought

2
her success. In 1809, Jane revised Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Probably with the
encouragement and help of her brother Henry Austen, who lived in London, in 1811 she found a publisher for
Sense and Sensibility. Like all of her novels printed during her lifetime, it was anonymous. It was also highly
successful. In 1813, it was followed by Pride and Prejudice.

Henry was too proud of his sister to keep her secret any longer, and in 1813 Jane had to acknowledge that she
was known to be the author. By this point in time she had written another novel, Mansfield Park (1814), a
serious work which deals with religious and ethical issues, particularly as they relate to clerical life. After its
publication, she wrote Emma (1815), thought by many to be her best novel, even though Jane worried that her
readers might dislike the spoiled, snobbish heroine. Drawing from the world of her naval officer brothers,
Jane then wrote her final completed novel, Persuasion, whose noble but misled heroine had once rejected her
true love, a navy captain. Tragicomic in tone, Persuasion has often been considered to be Austen’s most
moving book.

Happy in her Chawton home, surrounded by family and friends, admired by public and critics alike, and
inspired with her ideas for another novel, at the end of 1816 Austen seemed destined for years of happiness.
She was struck down, however, with a debilitating and crippling illness. By March, 1817, she put aside her
novel; by May, she had moved to nearby Winchester, where her physician lived; on July 18, she died. She was
buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Summary

Jane Austen has often been praised because of what she did not do: She did not write about characters or
scenes with which she was unfamiliar; she did not attempt a scope which might have been above her powers;
she did not indulge in self-conscious digressions, as did Henry Fielding and his imitator William Makepeace
Thackeray, which displayed the author and delayed the novel; and she did not permit herself errors in plotting.

The genius of this restraint has become even more fully appreciated with time. A child of the neoclassical
period, she was determined to point out the virtues of moderation in a period which was increasingly
infatuated with excess, the need for reason at a time when emotion was increasingly enthroned. She had
observed life; she had found that only the classical standards, combined with Christian virtues, could direct
one toward happiness. She also had observed that the real dramas of life were played out in the everyday
world of ordinary people. People were annihilated as hopelessly at Bath as in battle; families were destroyed
as suddenly by foolish marriages as by the guillotine. Therefore, her themes were as profound as human life
itself.

That restraint which Austen counseled was exemplified in her work. Every character she introduced was
essential to her plot and theme. Every scene and every authorial comment were so carefully pruned that no
word could be omitted. Thus, perhaps more than any previous novelist, she understood the artistic heights to
which the novel could rise, and while in theme she reflected the age of Samuel Johnson, in technique she
anticipated the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family
Record. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1913. 2d ed. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965. This work by
family members has been considerably augmented as later materials have become available. The seminal
work of Austen biography, it includes a useful appendix with textual comments and a detailed genealogical
chart.

3
Cecil, David. A Portrait of Jane Austen. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. One of the most readable
introductions to Jane Austen’s life and work. Cecil integrates biographical data, Austen’s own letters, and
historical details in an attempt to place the writer within the society about which she is writing. Contains
numerous color illustrations, including watercolors by Jane’s sister Cassandra.

Galperin, William H. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. This study
provides a fresh explication of Austen’s work. Galperin examines how Austen used her fiction to serve as a
“social and political” tool.

Gill, Richard. Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Although specifically a study of the English country house in early
twentieth century fiction, Gill’s book includes an appendix on earlier literature which deals extensively with
the works of Austen, particularly Mansfield Park. An essential work for anyone who wishes to understand the
viewpoint of Austen and later English writers of her class.

Menon, Patricia. Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and the Mentor- lover. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003. An examination of how Austen, Eliot, and Brontë handled matters of gender, sexuality, family,
behavior, and freedom in their work.

Pinion, F. B. A Jane Austen Companion: Critical Survey and Reference Book. London: Macmillan, 1973.
Useful brief biography and separate analyses of the six completed novels, along with a commentary on
Sanditon. Contains also an alphabetical listing of characters and places in the novels, a glossary of unusual
words, appendixes, maps, and a number of black-and-white illustrations. A thorough, careful book.

Sherry, Norman. Jane Austen. New York: Arno Press, 1969. A brief, simple study for the nonacademic
reader, Sherry’s book includes a short biography and critical generalizations on Austen’s work as a whole and
specifically on each of the six completed novels. While the comments on her work are fairly standard, Sherry
provides helpful illustrations drawn from the novels to support his points. Convenient for a beginning student
of the novel form.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Cavalcade of the English Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1943. A
widely available survey which has useful chapters on the predecessors of the novel and brief but sound
discussions of major writers. Reflects earlier attitudes toward Austen as a writer who was above all a lady and
whose limitations should be stressed. Comments interestingly on her grotesque characters.

Wilks, Brian. Jane Austen. London: Hamlyn, 1978. A large, lavishly illustrated volume which depends
heavily on quotations from the Austen letters for a rather rambling, episodic account of the writer’s life.
Although, as the index indicates, Wilks’s work incorporates all of the major biographical details, his
digressions are confusing for a reader who is looking for a clear chronology.

Biography
Jane Austen, a nineteenth-century English novelist, is considered one of Britain's most important writers. Her
talent has been compared to that of Shakespeare, and her work remains an integral and important part of what
is commonly accepted as the canon of classic English literature.

Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh child and second daughter of Rev.
George Austen and his wife Cassandra. As a clergyman's daughter, Austen was a member of the professional
class. As she lived her entire life in the country, she wrote about her society and her surroundings, and she
would become famous for her insightful portrayals of upper-class English country life.

4
The Austens, though plagued by debt, were a learned family of book lovers. Her mother wrote light poetry,
and her brothers, in early adulthood, aspired to literary endeavors while they were at college. Their delight in
language, puns, and witticisms is evident in Austen's works.

Except for brief stints at boarding schools, Austen was schooled largely at home, benefitting from her father's
extensive library. She and her sister Cassandra, who remained her closest friend throughout her life, were
given a proper girls' education in that they learned to play the piano and draw, but unlike their brothers, who
attended Oxford, they were not afforded a formal, extended education.

Austen's novels often focus on the necessity of women of her society to marry for security. Although Austen
did have several suitors throughout her early adulthood, she never did marry, either because of a lack of
money on both sides or because of a lack of compatibility.

As a teenager, Jane wrote plays and stories, mostly satires and parodies of contemporary work, for the
amusement of her family. She began the manuscripts for her serious novels in her early twenties, but she was
hard-pressed to find publishers for any of them. Sixteen years after first beginning Sense and Sensibility as
"Elinor and Marianne," a publisher finally agreed to take the manuscript—but the printing was done at the
expense of Austen's brother. To avoid developing a scandalous reputation, for it was still frowned upon for
women to indulge in literary endeavors, Austen published her first book anonymously. Sense and Sensibility
proved to be successful: Austen netted 140 pounds. Encouraged, she went on to publish three more novels:
Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). However, even after her work gained
in popularity and demand, her brother Henry did not reveal his sister's identity until after her death.

Austen died in Winchester on July 18, 1817, after a gradual illness. Henry went on to publish Austen's final
novels in 1818. They were Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Biography
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in England, to George and Cassandra (Leigh) Austen. Her
father was a clergyman in Steventon, a small town in Hampshire County. Her mother, whose ancestors were
titled, was born into a higher social class. She and her husband settled into a comfortable but modest life,
associating with the local gentry and raising eight children. Jane's close relationship with her siblings and her
family's relationship with the local gentry would provide her with material for her plots and influence her
creation of the settings and characterizations in her novels.

Austen received only five years of formal schooling; however, she continued her education at home. When
she was in her teens, she wrote plays, verses, short novels, and other prose works, which were primarily
parodies of sentimental fiction. Soon she began writing Elinor and Marianne, an early version of Sense and
Sensibility, and after that, First Impressions, which later became Pride and Prejudice. Even though a London
publishing house rejected the draft of the latter work after her father had submitted it, the novel was heartily
enjoyed by her family and a wide circle of acquaintances.

Scholars divide Austen's literary career into an early and a late period separated by a writing hiatus of eight
years. The first includes her early writings, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice (both published in
1811), and Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 but published posthumously in 1818). Her late period includes
Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (published posthumously along with Northanger
Abbey in 1818. During the eight-year hiatus, Austen moved frequently with her family, staying in Bath,
London, Clifton, Warwickshire, and Southampton, where they moved after her father died in 1805.

5
Austen started writing her last novel, which the family would later title Sandition, in 1817. She had not
completed the novel when she died, most likely of Addison's disease, on July 18, 1817, in Winchester,
England.

During her lifetime, Austen's works were well-received, especially Sense and Sensibility and Pride and
Prejudice, yet since all her works were published anonymously, she was not well-known by the public. After
her death, when her brother revealed her authorship, scholars began critiquing her work. By the end of the
nineteenth century, she came to be regarded as one of the most important English novelists, a position she
retains today.

Biography
Jane Austen, the daughter of an English clergyman, was born in 1775 at her father’s Hampshire Vicarage in
South Central England. Austen had six brothers and one sister. Austen and her sister, Cassandra, were
inseparable. After several attempts to find an appropriate boarding school, they were schooled at home. Their
father taught his own children and several who boarded with the family. This education was by extensive
reading of the classics. Both sisters were pretty and popular, and they enjoyed most of the social amenities
portrayed in Austen’s novels.

By the time she was in her mid-twenties, Jane’s brothers, two of whom later became admirals, had careers and
families of their own. After the father’s death in 1805, the family lived temporarily in Southhampton before
finally settling in Chawton.

A lively and affectionate family circle and a network of friends provided a stimulated context for her writing.
It was the world of landed gentry and the country clergy that she used in her novels.

In the six novels published between 1811 and 1817, Austen revealed the possibilities of domestic literature.
Her concentration on personality and character and the tensions between her heroines and their society make
her works more closely related to the modern world than to the traditions of the eighteenth century. This
modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, helps to explain her continuing
appeal to twentieth century readers.

Northanger Abbey, a satire on the romances, was sold for ten pounds in 1803, but as it was not published, was
bought back by members of the family. It did not appear in print until after Austen’s death.

Although her friends knew of her authorship, she received little recognition in her lifetime. She was quite
aware of her special excellences and limitations, and often compared her style to that of a miniaturist painter.
She ridiculed the silly, the affected, and the stupid, ranging in her satire from early, light portraiture to later,
more scornful exposures.

Austen published several minor works and five major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and
Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and posthumously, a collection of Persuasion and
Northanger Abbey (1818). Other minor works included Juenilia, the novel, Lady Susan, and the fragments:
The Watsons and Sandition. Her name never appeared on her title pages, therefore, she received little
recognition until after her death in 1817.

Her comedies of manners depict the self-contained world of provincial ladies and gentlemen, and most of her
works revolved around the delicate business of providing proper husbands and wives for marriageable
offspring of the middle class. She is best remembered for her lively interplays of character, her meticulous
care to style and plot, a sense of comic irony, and her moral firmness. The overall substance of this novel

6
concerns a small section of society locked into a timeless present in which little will change. The people
involved are fixed, and the routines and social rituals are predetermined. Money is a problem when it is short.
Successful courtships lead to satisfactory marriages. For the first two volumes of the book, Mr. Darcy and
Elizabeth Bennet are pre-judging and re-judging. It is a drama of insight that acts by revision and sees things
as they really are and not what was presumed.

There is a whole vocabulary connected with the processes of decision, conviction, and opinion. People’s
varied and unstable judgments are exposed and analyzed. Opinions are constantly changing as characters’
behaviors appear in a different light. The need to be aware of the difference between appearance and reality is
made clear throughout the novel.

Austen writes about what she knows. Therefore, great areas of human experience are never mentioned. The
male characters are not finely drawn. In contrast, the female characters are strong and stand out as intelligent
and complex individuals. Extreme passions are avoided. This is demonstrated when Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s
second proposal. She says, “My sentiments have undergone such a material change as to make me receive
with gratitude and pleasure your present assurances.” There seem to be many important topics which Austen
avoided.

Her greatest talents were her subtle insight into character and her precise dialogue. Each character’s speech is
appropriate. Collins is pompous, Mr. Bennet is cynical and sarcastic, Elizabeth is forthright and honest, Lydia
is frothy and giddy, and Darcy is sensitive and sure of himself.

Although Romanticism was at its peak during Austen’s life, she rejected this movement. She adhered more
closely to the neo-classic style, and to its discipline, devoid of passion. Her style emphasizes plots that turn
like gears on the intricacies of character interaction. Her work is often satiric but underlined with moral
purport. She seemed to observe human conduct with an amused and good-humored consciousness.

She once compared her writing style to that of a painter whose subjects are miniatures. This is particularly
true of her immaculate attention to detail. She was a perfectionist, and re-wrote most of her novels at least
twice.

Jane Austen died at the height of her creative potential at the age of 42. Researchers have suggested the cause
to be either Addison’s disease or tuberculosis. She spent the last weeks of her life in Winchester, Hampshire
in South England and is buried in the cathedral there.

She gradually developed a following in England in the late 1800s, but became even more popular in America.
Today, she is regarded as one of the great masters of the English novel.

Biography
Jane Austen, one of England's most cherished and frequently read novelists, was born into the landed gentry
in the town of Steventon on December 16, 1775. She was the sixth of seven children raised by strong parents:
Cassandra, the daughter of an Oxford University scholar, and George, an Oxford- educated country
clergyman. Never married, Austen lived comfortably with her family in Steventon until 1800, and thereafter
in Bath, Southampton, and Chawton.

Many of her biographers have written that Austen's life lacked dramatic or noteworthy incidents. She and her
older sister Cassandra were educated primarily at home by their father. As a youth she read literature avidly,
wrote fragments of novels and histories, and took part in standard social activities such as formal dances and
visiting. In adulthood her daily life included assisting her parents at home and looking after her many nieces

7
and nephews. Two adult experiences do stand out: in 1801 a mysterious romantic interest of hers died, and in
1802 she accepted and then declined an offer of marriage from a man she did not love. Otherwise Austen
seems to have lived happily and uneventfully. During her mature years, when she was an author of solid
repute, she remained at home, preferring rural domesticity to the London literary scene. She died in
Winchester of Addison's disease on July 18, 1817.

In her early twenties, Austen wrote in earnest, completing Lady Susan, Elinor and Marianne, and First
Impressions, and drafting other works. Her father sent the novels to a publisher, but all were rejected, as was
Susan in 1803. In 1804 she began The Watsons but abandoned it after her father's death. Perhaps because of
these disappointments, Austen's interest in writing waned until 1809-1811, when she revised Elinor and
Marianne and won it an anonymous printing as Sense and Sensibility. In 1812 she greatly revised First
Impressions and saw it published, also Working intensely in a busy parlor in her Chawton home from 1813 to
1816, she composed Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion and revised Susan into Northanger Abbey, a
spoof of the popular romance and horror novels of the era. At the time of her death she was working on a
manuscript entitled Sanditon

All of these works deal with the lives of young, marriageable men and women in England's nineteenth-century
rural landowning and aristocratic classes. Young readers have long admired Austen's endearing, if imperfect
heroes and heroines, whose struggles to find the right partner are complex, moving, and often humorous.
Austen's work is also known for its finely crafted plots, masterful language, and subtle irony, and for its vivid
and sometimes satirical presentation of the only society in which Jane Austen lived.

8
Critical Essays
Critical Essays: Jane Austen Short Fiction Analysis
With unsurpassed charm and subtlety, Jane Austen’s novels of country life present and appraise the manners,
morals, and relationships of Regency England’s prosperous middle class. In choosing to depict what she
called her “bits of ivory,” the segment of the world she knew best, Jane Austen steered the course of the
English novel away from the melodramatic implausibilities that dominated popular fiction at the turn of the
nineteenth century. Sir Walter Scott, who recognized the importance of Austen’s choice, also praised her for
the literary finesse that made such a choice workable, “the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things
and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment.”

Although the subject of Jane Austen’s novels was contemporary life, it was contemporary literature with its
various excesses and deficiencies which inspired her earliest attempts at fiction. In the short pieces collected
as her juvenilia—tales, miniature novels, and epistolary narratives—Austen applies the conventions of
sentimental fiction, which she and her family read avidly but critically, with rigorous consistency and pushes
them to their logical extremes to demonstrate that such standards produce slipshod literature and convey a
false view of the world.

Austen’s juvenile fiction differs from the novels in its audience as well as in its subject matter. The young
author wrote these short pieces for the private amusement of her family, and as an experienced novelist never
contemplated revising and publishing them. Consequently the reader familiar with the decorous elegance of
the public prose sees a new side of Jane Austen in the short fiction which, like her letters, voices a tough
candor and a blunt humor that the novels mute: Remarks such as “Damme Elfrida you may be married but I
wont” seldom make their way from the nursery of Austen’s short fiction to the drawing rooms of her adult
novels.

Many of the apprentice pieces are literary parodies and burlesques poking fun at the distinctive features of the
novel of sensibility: the high-flown language, incredible coincidences, instant friendships, immoderate loves,
unaccountable lapses of memory, and sudden recognitions. For example, “Evelyn” amusingly points out the
dangers of the cult of sensibility’s much-vaunted “sympathetic imagination” unallied with judgment by
portraying a village full of utterly and undiscriminatingly benevolent people. “The Beautifull Cassandra”
achieves its comic effect by yoking two shortcomings of the popular novel: absurd, unmotivated action
included to engage readers and trivial details supplied to convince them. A typical effusion from “Frederic
and Elfrida” demonstrates the emptiness of the sentimental novel’s stock praises and the egocentricity of its
refined protagonists:Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy
tresses & your swelling Back, which are more frightfull than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot
refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the
Horror, with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor. Your sentiments so nobly
expressed on the different excellencies of Indian & English Muslins, & the judicious preference you give the
former, have excited in me an admiration of which I alone can give an adequate idea, by assuring you it is
nearly equal to what I feel for myself.

Love and Freindship

Perhaps the most wide-ranging and successful of the literary burlesques is Love and Freindship (1922), in
which Laura, a paragon of sensibility, relates her adventures through a series of letters. Here, Jane Austen
lampoons most of the conventions of the sentimental novel and its popular successor, the gothic romance: the
convoluted plots, star-crossed loves, cruel families, and in particular the transports of emotion that, in the

9
world of sensibility, are the index of personal excellence. At the climax of this story containing enough
harrowing incident for a triple-decker novel, Laura and her bosom friend Sophia discover “two Gentlemen
most elegantly attired but weltering in their blood” who turn out to be their husbands. The heroines react in
the prescribed manner:Sophia shreiked & fainted on the Ground—I screamed and instantly ran mad—. We
remained thus mutually deprived of our Senses some minutes, & on regaining them were deprived of them
again—. For an Hour & a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation—Sophia fainting every
moment & I running Mad as often. At length a Groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share
of Life) restored us to ourselves—. Had we before imagined that either of them lived, we should have been
more sparing of our Grief—.

Sophia, in fact, literally dies of the sensibility that has engendered her “shreiks and faints,” though not before
warning Laura of the medical risks that she now, too late, knows attend on swoons: “Run mad as often as you
chuse,” Sophia concludes, “but do not faint.” These last words undercut many a sentimental deathbed.

In Love and Freindship, Jane Austen’s satire points out the weaknesses of the literary fashion of sensibility
but extends its criticism to include the code of behavior as well. Sensibility as embodied by Laura and Sophia,
who meddle, lie, and even steal with perfect complacency, is ethically bankrupt as well as absurdly
unrealistic. In several of the juvenile pieces, among them The Three Sisters (1933), Lesley Castle (1922), and
Catherine (1818), literary parody gives way to concern with the social and moral themes that pervade the
mature novels; but the most sophisticated example of Austen’s “serious” short fiction is Lady Susan (1871,
1925), an epistolary narrative written after the juvenilia but before the versions we now possess of the six
novels.

Lady Susan

Lady Susan is unique among Jane Austen’s works for several reasons. Lady Susan Vernon, the beautiful and
brilliant main character, is Austen’s only aristocratic protagonist, and her only femme fatale. Unlike the
heroines of the novels, whose characters are being formed by experience and who will place themselves in
society by the ultimate act of self-definition, marriage, Lady Susan possesses a character matured, even
hardened, by years of social skirmishing in the Great World. Furthermore, as a titled widow she already has
an established place in society, a most respectable public position she has every intention of retaining without
sacrificing her private taste for amorous adventures. Whereas the heroines of the novels gradually learn what
they need to know, Lady Susan knows from the start of the story exactly what she wants: “Those women are
inexcusable,” she observes, “who forget what is due to themselves and to the opinion of the World.”

The substance of Lady Susan is social and romantic intrigue. Lady Susan balances the attentions of her kindly
brother-in-law, her married lover, the rich and well-born fool she has marked out for her insignificant
daughter, and the self-assured young man of fashion whose heart she wins for amusement and thinks of
retaining as an investment, while two virtuous but worldly women, the brother-in-law’s wife, Mrs. Vernon,
and her mother, Lady De Courcy, do their best to frustrate her efforts. Although Lady Susan’s action, deftly
manipulated by the protagonist until luck finally thwarts her, is interesting as pure narrative, its chief
fascination is psychological revelation. Lady Susan is as honest with herself as she is false to others; and the
epistolary format, often a clumsy way of presenting a story, is ideally suited to pointing up this contrast
between her social roles and her true character. The letters Lady Susan’s dupes and foes exchange with one
another and with her show how easily she can identify and play on the follies of “virtuous” people; Lady
Susan’s candid letters to her confidante Mrs. Johnson let us see how far the scheming adventuress surpasses
the other characters in the quality that is the first step to true virtue: self-knowledge.

Thus, this important piece of short fiction is more than a chronological transition from Jane Austen’s juvenilia
to her novels; it is a moral bridge as well. In Lady Susan, Austen moves from the realm of literary burlesque
into sustained, serious treatment of moral problems, but the conclusion she leaves us to draw is more

10
completely ironic and hence more “literary” than any found in the later works. Never again in Jane Austen is
vice so attractive and successful and virtue so unappealing.

Critical Essays: Jane Austen Long Fiction Analysis

Jane Austen’s novels—her “bits of ivory,” as she modestly and perhaps half-playfully termed them—are
unrivaled for their success in combining two sorts of excellence that all too seldom coexist. Meticulously
conscious of her artistry (as, for example, is Henry James), Austen is also unremittingly attentive to the
realities of ordinary human existence (as is, among others, Anthony Trollope). From the first, her works unite
subtlety and common sense, good humor and acute moral judgment, charm and conciseness, deftly marshaled
incident and carefully rounded character.

Austen’s detractors have spoken of her as a “limited” novelist, one who, writing in an age of great men and
important events, portrays small towns and petty concerns, who knows (or reveals) nothing of masculine
occupations and ideas, and who reduces the range of feminine thought and deed to matrimonial scheming and
social pleasantry. Though one merit of the first-rate novelist is the way his or her talent transmutes all it
touches and thereby creates a distinctive and consistent world, it is true that the settings, characters, events,
and ideas of Austen’s novels are more than usually homogeneous. Her tales, like her own life, are set in
country villages and at rural seats from which the denizens venture forth to watering places or to London.
True, her characters tend to be members of her own order, that prosperous and courteous segment of the
middle class called the gentry. Unlike her novel-writing peers, Austen introduces few aristocrats into the
pages of her novels, and the lower ranks, though glimpsed from time to time, are never brought forward. The
happenings of her novels would not have been newsworthy in her day. She depicts society at leisure rather
than on the march, and in portraying pleasures her literary preference is modest: Architectural improvement
involves the remodeling of a parsonage rather than the construction of Carlton House Terrace and Regent’s
Park; a ball is a gathering of country neighbors dancing to a harpsichord, not a crush at Almack’s or the
duchess of Richmond’s glittering fete on the eve of Waterloo.

These limitations are the self-drawn boundaries of a strong mind rather than the innate restrictions of a weak
or parochial one. Austen was in a position to know a broad band of social classes, from the local lord of the
manor to the retired laborer subsisting on the charity of the parish. Some aspects of life that she did not herself
experience she could learn about firsthand without leaving the family circle. Her brothers could tell her of the
university, the navy in the age of Horatio Nelson, or the world of finance and fashion in Regency London. Her
cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza, who had lost her first husband, the comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine,
could tell her of Paris during the last days of the Old Regime.

In focusing on the manners and morals of rural middle-class English life, particularly on the ordering dance of
matrimony that gives shape to society and situation to young ladies, Austen emphasizes rather than evades
reality. The microcosm she depicts is convincing because she understands, though seldom explicitly assesses,
its connections to the larger order. Her characters have clear social positions but are not just social types; the
genius of such comic creations as Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, and Miss Bates is that each is a sparkling
refinement on a quality or set of qualities existing at all times and on all levels. A proof of Austen’s power (no
one questions her polish) is that she succeeds in making whole communities live in the reader’s imagination
with little recourse to the stock device of the mere novelist of manners: descriptive detail. If a sparely drawn
likeness is to convince, every line must count. The artist must understand what is omitted as well as what is
supplied.

The six novels that constitute the Austencanon did not evolve in a straightforward way. Austen was, memoirs
relate, as mistrustful of her judgment as she was rapid in her composition. In the case of Pride and Prejudice,
for example, readers can be grateful that when the Reverend George Austen’s letter offering the book’s first

11
incarnation, titled “First Impressions” (1797), to a publisher met with a negative reply, she was content to put
the book aside for more than a decade. Sense and Sensibility was likewise a revision of a much earlier work. If
Austen was notably nonchalant about the process of getting her literary progeny into print, one publisher with
whom she had dealings was yet more dilatory. In 1803, Austen had completed Northanger Abbey (then titled
“Susan”) and, through her brother Henry’s agency, had sold it to Crosby and Sons for ten pounds. Having
acquired the manuscript, the publisher did not think fit to make use of it, and in December, 1816, Henry
Austen repurchased the novel. He made known the author’s identity, so family tradition has it, only after
closing the deal. For these various reasons, the chronology of Austen’s novels can be set in different ways;
here they are discussed in order of their dates of publication.

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first published novel, evolved from “Elinor and Marianne,” an epistolary work
completed between 1795 and 1797. The novel is generally considered her weakest, largely because, as Walton
Litz convincingly argues, it strives but fails to resolve “that struggle between inherited form and fresh
experience which so often marks the transitional works of a great artist.” The “inherited form” of which Litz
speaks is the eighteenth century antithetical pattern suggested in the novel’s title. According to this formula,
opposing qualities of temperament or mind are presented in characters (generally female, often sisters) who,
despite their great differences, are sincerely attached to one another.

In Sense and Sensibility, the antithetical characters are Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, the respective
embodiments of cool, collected sense and prodigal, exquisite sensibility. In the company of their mother and
younger sister, these lovely young ladies have, on the death of their father and the succession to his estate of
their half brother, retired in very modest circumstances to a small house in Devonshire. There the imprudent
Marianne meets and melts for Willoughby, a fashionable gentleman as charming as he is unscrupulous.
Having engaged the rash girl’s affections, Willoughby proceeds to trifle with them by bolting for London.
When chance once again brings the Dashwood sisters into Willoughby’s circle, his manner toward Marianne
is greatly altered. On hearing of his engagement to an heiress, the representative of sensibility swoons, weeps,
and exhibits her grief to the utmost.

Meanwhile, the reasonable Elinor has been equally unlucky in love, though she bears her disappointment
quite differently. Before the family’s move to Devonshire, Elinor had met and come to cherish fond feelings
for her sister-in-law’s brother, Edward Ferrars, a rather tame fellow (at least in comparison with Willoughby)
who returns her regard—but with a measure of unease. It soon becomes known that Ferrars’s reluctance to
press his suit with Elinor stems from an early and injudicious secret engagement he had contracted with
shrewd, base Lucy Steele. Elinor high-mindedly conceals her knowledge of the engagement and her feelings
on the matter. Mrs. Ferrars, however, is a lady of less impressive self-control; she furiously disinherits her
elder son in favor of his younger brother, whom Lucy then proceeds to ensnare. Thus Edward, free and
provided with a small church living that will suffice to support a sensible sort of wife, can marry Elinor.
Marianne—perhaps because she has finally exhausted her fancies and discovered her latent reason, perhaps
because her creator is determined to punish the sensibility that throughout the novel has been so much more
attractive than Elinor’s prudence—is also provided with a husband: the rich Colonel Brandon, who has long
loved her but whom, on account of his flannel waistcoats and his advanced age of five-and-thirty, she has
heretofore reckoned beyond the pale.

The great flaw of Sense and Sensibility is that the polarities presented in the persons of Elinor and Marianne
are too genuinely antithetical to be plausible or dynamic portraits of human beings. Elinor has strong feelings,
securely managed though they may be, and Marianne has some rational powers to supplement her overactive
imagination and emotions, but the young ladies do not often show themselves to be more than mere
embodiments of sense and sensibility. In her second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, Austen makes
defter use of two sisters whose values are the same but whose minds and hearts function differently. This

12
book, a complete revision of “First Impressions,” the youthful effort that had, in 1797, been offered to and
summarily rejected by the publisher Cadell, is, as numerous critics have observed, a paragon of “classic”
literature in which the conventions and traditions of the eighteenth century novel come to full flowering yet
are freshened and transformed by Austen’s distinctive genius.

Pride and Prejudice

The title Pride and Prejudice, with its balanced alliterative abstractions, might suggest a second experiment in
schematic psychology, and indeed the book does show some resemblances to Sense and Sensibility. Here
again the reader encounters a pair of sisters, the elder (Jane Bennet) serene, the younger (Elizabeth) volatile.
Unlike the Dashwoods, however, these ladies both demonstrate deep feelings and perceptive minds. The
qualities alluded to in the title refer not to a contrast between sisters but to double defects shared by Elizabeth
and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy and well-born young man she meets when his easygoing friend Charles
Bingley leases Netherfield, the estate next to the Bennets’ Longbourn. If so rich and vital a comic masterpiece
could be reduced to a formula, it might be appropriate to say that the main thread of Pride and Prejudice
involves the twin correction of these faults. As Darcy learns to moderate his tradition-based view of society
and to recognize individual excellence (such as Elizabeth’s, Jane’s, and their Aunt and Uncle Gardiner’s) in
ranks below his own, Elizabeth becomes less dogmatic in her judgments and, in particular, more aware of the
real merits of Darcy, whom she initially dismisses as a haughty, unfeeling aristocrat.

The growing accord of Elizabeth and Darcy is one of the most perfectly satisfying courtships in English
literature. Their persons, minds, tastes, and even phrases convince the reader that they are two people truly
made for each other; their union confers fitness on the world around them. Lionel Trilling has observed that,
because of this principal match, Pride and Prejudice “permits us to conceive of morality as style.” Elizabeth
and Darcy’s slow-growing love may be Pride and Prejudice’s ideal alliance, but it is far from being the only
one, and a host of finely drawn characters surround the heroine and hero. In Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley,
whose early mutual attraction is temporarily suspended by Darcy and the Bingley sisters (who deplore, not
without some cause, the vulgarity of the amiable Jane’s family), Austen presents a less sparkling but
eminently pleasing and well-matched pair.

William Collins, the half-pompous, half-obsequious, totally asinine cousin who, because of an entail, will
inherit Longbourn and displace the Bennet females after Mr. Bennet’s demise, aspires to marry Elizabeth but,
when rejected, instead gains the hand of her plain and practical friend Charlotte Lucas. Aware of her suitor’s
absurdities, Charlotte is nevertheless alive to the advantages of the situation he can offer. Her calculated
decision to marry gives a graver ring to the irony of the novel’s famous opening sentence: “It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

The last of the matches made in Pride and Prejudice is yet more precariously based. A lively, charming, and
amoral young officer, George Wickham, son of the former steward of Pemberley, Darcy’s estate, and source
of many of Elizabeth’s prejudices against that scrupulous gentleman, first fascinates Elizabeth and then elopes
with her youngest sister, the mindless, frivolous Lydia. Only through Darcy’s personal and financial
intervention is Wickham persuaded to marry the ill-bred girl, who never properly understands her disgrace—a
folly she shares with her mother. Mrs. Bennet, a woman deficient in good humor and good sense, is—along
with her cynical, capricious husband, the ponderous Collins, and the tyrannical Lady Catherine De
Bourgh—one of the great comic creations of literature. Most of these characters could have seemed odious if
sketched by another pen, but so brilliant is the sunny intelligence playing over the world of Pride and
Prejudice that even fools are golden.

Mansfield Park

13
Mansfield Park, begun in 1811 and finished in 1813, is the first of Austen’s novels to be a complete product
of her maturity. The longest, most didactic, and least ironic of her books, it is the one critics generally have
the most trouble reconciling with their prevailing ideas of the author. Although Mansfield Park was composed
more or less at one stretch, its conception coincided with the final revisions of Pride and Prejudice. Indeed,
the critics who offer the most satisfying studies of Mansfield Park tend to see it not as a piece of authorial bad
faith or self-suppression, a temporary anomaly, but as what Walton Litz calls a “counter-truth” to its
immediate predecessor.

Pleased with and proud of Pride and Prejudice, Austen nevertheless recorded her impression of its being
“rather too light, and bright, and sparkling”—in need of shade. That darkness she found wanting is supplied in
Mansfield Park, which offers, as Trilling observes in his well-known essay on the novel, the antithesis to
Pride and Prejudice’s generous, humorous, spirited social vision. Mansfield Park, Trilling argues, condemns
rather than forgives: “Its praise is not for social freedom but for social stasis. It takes full notice of
spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and
happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life.”

Most of the action of Mansfield Park is set within the little world comprising the estate of that name, a
country place resembling in large measure Godmersham, Edward Austen Knight’s estate in Kent; but for her
heroine and some interludes in which she figures, Austen dips into a milieu she has not previously frequented
in her novels—the socially and financially precarious lower fringe of the middle class. Fanny Price, a frail,
serious, modest girl, is one of nine children belonging to and inadequately supported by a feckless officer of
marines and his lazy, self-centered wife. Mrs. Price’s meddling sister, the widowed Mrs. Norris, arranges for
Fanny to be reared in “poor relation” status at Mansfield Park, the seat of kindly but crusty Sir Thomas
Bertram and his languid lady, the third of the sisters. At first awed by the splendor of her surroundings, the
gruffness of the baronet, and the elegance, vigor, and high spirits of the young Bertrams—Tom, Edmund,
Maria, and Julia—Fanny eventually wins a valued place in the household.

During Sir Thomas’s absence to visit his property in Antigua, evidence of Fanny’s moral fineness, and the
various degrees in which her cousins fall short of her excellence, is presented through a device that proves to
be one of Austen’s most brilliant triumphs of plotting. Visiting the rectory at Mansfield are the younger
brother and sister of the rector’s wife, Henry and Mary Crawford, witty, worldly, and wealthy. At Mary’s
proposal, amateur theatricals are introduced to Mansfield Park, and in the process of this diversion the moral
pollution of London’s Great World begins to corrupt the bracing country air.

Just how the staging of a play—even though it be Lovers’ Vows, a sloppy piece of romantic bathos, adultery
rendered sympathetic—can be morally reprehensible is a bit unclear for most modern-day readers, especially
those who realize that the Austens themselves reveled in theatricals at home. The problem as Austen presents
it lies in the possible consequences of role-playing: coming to feel the emotions and attitudes one presents on
the stage or, worse yet, expressing rather than suppressing genuine but socially unacceptable feelings in the
guise of mere acting. In the course of the theatricals, where Fanny, who will not act, is relegated to the role of
spectator and moral chorus, Maria Bertram, engaged to a bovine local heir, vies with her sister in striving to
fascinate Henry Crawford, who in turn is all too ready to charm them. Mary Crawford, though it is “her way”
to find eldest sons most agreeable, has the good taste to be attracted to Edmund, the second son, who plans to
enter the clergy. Mary’s vivacity, as evidenced by the theatricals, easily wins his heart.

Time passes and poor Fanny, who since childhood has adored her cousin Edmund, unintentionally interests
Henry Crawford. Determined to gain the affections of this rare young woman who is indifferent to his charms,
Crawford ends by succumbing to hers. He proposes. Fanny’s unworldly refusal provokes the anger of her
uncle. Then, while Fanny, still in disgrace with the baronet, is away from Mansfield Park and visiting her
family at Portsmouth, the debacle of which Lovers’ Vows was a harbinger comes about. The homme fatal
Henry, at a loss for a woman to make love to, trains his charms on his old flirt Maria, now Mrs. Rushworth.

14
She runs away with him; her sister, not to be outdone in bad behavior, elopes with an unsatisfactory suitor.
Mary Crawford’s moral coarseness becomes evident in her casual dismissal of these catastrophes. Edmund,
now a clergyman, finds solace, then love, with the cousin whose sterling character shines brightly for him now
that Mary’s glitter has tarnished. Fanny gains all she could hope for in at last attaining the heart and hand of
her clerical kinsman.

Emma

Austen’s next novel, Emma, might be thought of as harmonizing the two voices heard in Pride and Prejudice
and Mansfield Park. For this book, Austen claimed to be creating “a heroine whom no one but myself will
much like,” an “imaginist” whose circumstances and qualities of mind make her the self-crowned queen of
her country neighborhood. Austen was not entirely serious or accurate: Emma certainly has her partisans.
Even those readers who do not like her tend to find her fascinating, for she is a spirited, imaginative, healthy
young woman who, like Mary Crawford, has potential to do considerable harm to the fabric of society but on
whom, like Elizabeth Bennet, her creator generously bestows life’s greatest blessing: union with a man whose
virtues, talents, and assets are the best complement for her own.

Emma’s eventual marriage to Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey is the ultimate expression of one of Austen’s
key assumptions, that marriage is a young woman’s supreme act of self-definition. Unlike any other Austen
heroine, Emma has no pressing need to marry. As the opening sentence of the book implies, Emma’s situation
makes her acceptance or rejection of a suitor an act of unencumbered will: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome,
clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings
of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

Free though circumstance allows her to be, Emma has not been encouraged by her lot in life to acquire the
discipline and self-knowledge that, augmenting her innate intelligence and taste, would help her to choose
wisely. Brought up by a doting valetudinarian of a father and a perceptive but permissive governess, Emma
has been encouraged to think too highly of herself. Far from vain about her beauty, Emma has—as Mr.
Knightley, the only person who ventures to criticize her, observes—complete yet unfounded faith in her
ability to judge people’s characters and arrange their lives. The course of Emma is Miss Woodhouse’s
education in judgment, a process achieved through repeated mistakes and humiliations.

As the novel opens, the young mistress of Hartfield is at loose ends. Her beloved governess has just married
Mr. Weston, of the neighboring property, Randalls. To fill the newly made gap in her life, Emma takes notice
of Harriet Smith, a pretty, dim “natural daughter of somebody,” and a parlor-boarder at the local school.
Determined to settle her protégé into the sort of life she deems suitable, Emma detaches Harriet from Robert
Martin, a young farmer who has proposed to her, and embarks on a campaign to conquer for Harriet the heart
of Mr. Elton, Highbury’s unmarried clergyman. Elton’s attentiveness and excessive flattery convince Emma
of her plan’s success but at the same time show the reader what Emma is aghast to learn at the end of book 1:
that Elton scorns the nobody and has designs on the heiress herself.

With the arrival of three new personages in Highbury, book 2 widens Emma’s opportunities for
misconception. The first newcomer is Jane Fairfax, an elegant and accomplished connection of the Bates
family and a girl whose prospective fate, the “governess trade,” shows how unreliable the situations of
well-bred young ladies without fortunes or husbands tend to be. Next to arrive is the suave Mr. Frank
Churchill, Mr. Weston’s grown son, who has been adopted by wealthy relations of his mother and who has
been long remiss in paying a visit to Highbury. Finally, Mr. Elton brings home a bride, the former Augusta
Hawkins of Bristol, a pretentious and impertinent creature possessed of an independent fortune, a
well-married sister, and a boundless fund of self-congratulation. Emma mistakenly flatters herself that the
dashing Frank Churchill is in love with her and then settles on him as a husband for Harriet; she suspects the
reserved Miss Fairfax, whose cultivation she rightly perceives as a reproach to her own untrained talents, of a

15
clandestine relationship with a married man. She despises Mrs. Elton, as would any person of sense, but fails
to see that the vulgar woman’s offensiveness is an exaggerated version of her own officiousness and
snobbery.

Thus the potential consequences of Emma’s misplaced faith in her judgment intensify, and the evidence of her
fallibility mounts. Thoroughly embarrassed to learn that Frank Churchill, with whom she has shared all her
hypotheses regarding Jane Fairfax, has long been secretly engaged to that woman, Emma suffers the
deathblow to her smug self-esteem when Harriet announces that the gentleman whose feelings she hopes to
have aroused is not, as Emma supposes, Churchill but the squire of Donwell. Emma’s moment of truth is
devastating and complete, its importance marked by one of Jane Austen’s rare uses of figurative language: “It
darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” Perhaps
the greatest evidence of Emma’s being a favorite of fortune is that Mr. Knightley feels the same as she does
on this matter. Chastened by her series of bad judgments, paired with a gentleman who for years has loved
and respected her enough to correct her and whom she can love and respect in return, Emma participates in
the minuet of marriage with which Austen concludes the book, the other couples so united being Miss Fairfax
and Mr. Churchill and Harriet Smith (ductile enough to form four attachments in a year) and Robert Martin
(stalwart enough to persist in his original feeling).

Emma Woodhouse’s gradual education, which parallels the reader’s growing awareness of what a menace to
the social order her circumstances, abilities, and weaknesses combine to make her, is one of Austen’s finest
pieces of plotting. The depiction of character is likewise superb. Among a gallery of memorable and
distinctive characters are Mr. Woodhouse; Miss Bates, the stream-of-consciousness talker who inadvertently
provokes Emma’s famous rudeness on Box Hill; and the wonderfully detestable Mrs. Elton, with her
self-contradictions and her fractured Italian, her endless allusions to Selina, Mr. Suckling, Maple Grove, and
the barouche landau. Life at Hartfield, Donwell, and Highbury is portrayed with complexity and economy.
Every word, expression, opinion, and activity—whether sketching a portrait, selecting a dancing partner, or
planning a strawberry-picking party—becomes a gesture of self-revelation. Emma demonstrates how, in
Austen’s hands, the novel of manners can become a statement of moral philosophy.

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey was published in a four-volume unit with Persuasion in 1818, after Austen’s death, but the
manuscript had been completed much earlier, in 1803. Austen wrote a preface for Northanger Abbey but did
not do the sort of revising that had transformed “Elinor and Marianne” and “First Impressions” into Sense and
Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. The published form of Northanger Abbey can therefore be seen as the
earliest of the six novels. It is also, with the possible exception of Sense and Sensibility, the most “literary.”
Northanger Abbey, like some of Austen’s juvenile burlesques, confronts the conventions of thegothic novel or
tale of terror. The incidents of her novel have been shown to parallel, with ironic difference, the principal lines
of gothic romance, particularly as practiced by Ann Radcliffe, whose most famous works, The Romance of the
Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), had appeared several years before Austen began work on
her burlesque.

Like Emma, Northanger Abbey is centrally concerned with tracing the growth of a young woman’s mind and
the cultivation of her judgment. In this less sophisticated work, however, the author accomplishes her goal
through a rather schematic contrast. As an enthusiastic reader of tales of terror, Catherine Morland has gothic
expectations of life despite a background most unsuitable for a heroine. Like the gothic heroines she admires,
Catherine commences adventuring early in the novel. She is not, however, shipped to Venice or Dalmatia;
rather, she is taken to Bath for a six-week stay. Her hosts are serenely amiable English folk, her pastimes the
ordinary round of spa pleasures; the young man whose acquaintance she makes, Henry Tilney, is a witty
clergyman rather than a misanthropic monk or dissolute rake. Toward this delightful, if far from gothic, young
man, Catherine’s feelings are early inclined. In turn, he, his sister, and even his father, the haughty, imperious

16
General Tilney, are favorably disposed toward her. With the highest expectations, Catherine sets out to
accompany them to their seat, the Abbey of the novel’s title (which, like that of Persuasion, was selected not
by the author but by Henry Austen, who handled the posthumous publication).

At Northanger, Catherine’s education in the difference between literature and life continues. Despite its
monastic origins, the Abbey proves a comfortable and well-maintained dwelling. When Catherine, like one of
Radcliffe’sprotagonists, finds a mysterious document in a chest and spends a restless night wondering what
lurid tale it might chronicle, she is again disappointed: “If the evidence of her sight might be trusted she held a
washing-bill in her hand.” Although Catherine’s experience does not confirm the truth of Radcliffe’s
sensational horrors, it does not prove the world a straightforward, safe, cozy place. Catherine has already seen
something of falseness and selfish vulgarity in the persons of Isabella Thorpe and her brother John,
acquaintances formed at Bath. At Northanger, she learns that, though the general may not be the wife
murderer she has fancied him, he is quite as cruel as she could imagine. On learning that Catherine is not the
great heiress he has mistakenly supposed her to be, the furious general packs her off in disgrace and
discomfort in a public coach.

With this proof that the world of fact can be as treacherous as that of fiction, Catherine returns, sadder and
wiser, to the bosom of her family. She has not long to droop, however, for Henry Tilney, on hearing of his
father’s bad behavior, hurries after her and makes Catherine the proposal that he has long felt inclined to offer
and that his father has until recently promoted. The approval of Catherine’s parents is immediate, and the
general is not overlong in coming to countenance the match. “To begin perfect happiness at the respective
ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well,” observes the facetious narrator, striking a literary pose
even in the novel’s last sentence, “andI leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the
tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.”

Persuasion

Persuasion, many readers believe, signals Austen’s literary move out of the eighteenth century and into the
nineteenth. This novel, quite different from those that preceded it, draws not on the tradition of the novelists
of the 1790’s but on that of the lionized poets of the new century’s second decade, Sir Walter Scott and Lord
Byron. For the first time, Austen clearly seems the child of her time, susceptible to the charms of natural
rather than improved landscapes, fields, and sea cliffs rather than gardens and shrubberies. The wistful,
melancholy beauty of autumn that pervades the book is likewise romantic. The gaiety, vitality, and sparkling
wit of Pride and Prejudice and Emma are muted. The stable social order represented by the great estate in
Mansfield Park has become fluid in Persuasion: Here the principal country house, Kellynch Hall, must be let
because the indigenous family cannot afford to inhabit it.

Most important, Persuasion’s heroine is unique in Jane Austen’s gallery. Anne Elliott, uprooted from her
ancestral home, spiritually isolated from her selfish and small-minded father and sisters, separated from the
man she loves by a long-standing estrangement, is every bit as “alienated” as such later nineteenth century
heroines as Esther Summerson, Jane Eyre, and Becky Sharp. Anne’s story is very much the product of
Austen’s middle age. At twenty-seven, Anne is the only Austen heroine to be past her first youth.
Furthermore, she is in no need of education. Her one great mistake—overriding the impulse of her heart and
yielding to the persuasion of her friend Lady Russell in rejecting the proposal of Frederick Wentworth, a
sanguine young naval officer with his fortune still to make and his character to prove—is some eight years in
the past, and she clearly recognizes it for the error it was.

Persuasion is the story of how Anne and Frederick (now the eminent Captain) Wentworth rekindle the embers
of their love. Chance throws them together when the vain, foolish Sir Walter Elliott, obliged to economize or
rent his estate, resolves to move his household to Bath, where he can cut a fine figure at less cost, and leases
Kellynch to Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who turn out to be the brother-in-law and sister of Captain Wentworth.

17
Initially cool to his former love—or, rather, able to see the diminution of her beauty because he is unable to
forgive her rejection—the captain flirts with the Musgrove girls; they are sisters to the husband of Anne’s
younger sister Mary and blooming belles with the youth and vigor Anne lacks. The captain’s old appreciation
of Anne’s merits—her clear insight, kindness, high-mindedness, and modesty—soon reasserts itself, but not
before fate and the captain’s impetuosity have all but forced another engagement on him. Being “jumped
down” from the Cobb at Lyme Regis, Louisa Musgrove misses his arms and falls unconscious on the
pavement. Obliged by honor to declare himself hers if she should wish it, Wentworth is finally spared this
self-sacrifice when the susceptible young lady and the sensitive Captain Benwick fall in love. Having
discovered the intensity of his devotion to Anne by being on the point of having to abjure it, Wentworth
hurries to Bath, there to declare his attachment in what is surely the most powerful engagement scene in the
Austen canon.

Though the story of Persuasion belongs to Anne Elliott and Frederick Wentworth, Austen’s skill at evoking
characters is everywhere noticeable. As Elizabeth Jenkins observes, all of the supporting characters present
different facets of the love theme. The heartless marital calculations of Mr. Elliott, Elizabeth Elliott, and Mrs.
Clay, the domestic comforts of the senior Musgroves and the Crofts, and the half-fractious, half-amiable
ménage of Charles and Mary Musgrove all permit the reader to discern more clearly how rare and true is the
love Anne Elliott and her captain have come so close to losing. The mature, deeply grateful commitment they
are able to make to each other is, if not the most charming, surely the most profound in the Austen world.

Critical Essays: Jane Austen World Literature Analysis

In a letter written to her nephew several months before her death, Austen referred to her writing as “the little
bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush,” a description of her work that conveys
its essence with remarkable precision. Austen is not a writer whose books are characterized by sweeping
dramatic action unfolding against a vivid historical backdrop; nor are her novels treatises on social ills or
controversial contemporary issues. Austen wrote instead about the world she knew—a world of country
villages, of polite middle-class society, of family life, of love and courtship—and her books offer a portrait of
life as it was lived by a small segment of English society at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries.

Yet so great is her talent and her insight into the complexities of human nature that the seeming simplicity of
her books belies the universality of their perceptions. In turning her writer’s gaze on the world around her,
Austen reveals deeper truths that apply to the world at large. Her portraits of social interaction, while specific
to a particular and very carefully delineated place and time, are nevertheless the result of timeless human
characteristics. If one looks beneath the details of social manners and mores that abound in Austen’s novels,
what emerges is their author’s clear-eyed grasp of the intricacies of human behavior.

What is also readily apparent is that human behavior was a source of great amusement to Austen. Her novels
are gentle satires, written with delicate irony and incisive wit. The famous opening lines of Pride and
Prejudice capture her style at its best: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Courtship and marriage are the subject of all six of Austen’s
completed novels, and she treats the topic with a skillful balance of humor and seriousness. The elaborate
social ritual of courtship and the amount of time and energy expended on it by the parties involved provide
Austen with an ideal target for her satirical portraits. Dances, carriage rides, and country walks are the settings
for the romances that unfold in her books, and the individual’s infinite capacity for misconceptions and
self-delusions provide the books’ dramatic structure. Her heroes and heroines misjudge each other,
misunderstand each other, and mistake charm for substance and reserve for lack of feeling with a
determination that seems likely to undermine their chances for happiness—until at last they find their way
through the emotional mazes they have built for themselves and emerge with the proper mate.

18
Yet while Austen is happy to amuse her readers with her characters’ foibles and missteps, she brings an
underlying empathy to her creations as well. Her heroines are never figures of fun—that role is left to the
stories’ supporting characters—but are instead intelligent, sensitive, amiable young women who are eminently
likable despite the flaws they may exhibit. It is human nature in all its complexity that fascinates Austen, and
she is capable of providing her novels with interesting, well-developed central characters who are believable
precisely because they are flawed. Her amusement is not scorn but rather a tolerant awareness of the qualities,
both good and bad, that constitute the human character. It is this awareness that lends Austen’s work its
relevance and contributes to her stature in the hierarchy of English literature.

Also central to the high critical regard in which she is held is Austen’s extraordinarily eloquent and graceful
literary style. Austen’s use of language is as sure and as precise as her character development; indeed, the two
are inseparable. Whether she is depicting the selfish, greedy Mrs. John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility,
who says of a proposed yearly allowance for her widowed mother-in-law, “people always live forever when
there is any annuity to be paid them,” or characterizing Edmund Bertram’s pursuit of Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park with the observation, “She was of course only too good for him; but as nobody minds having
what is too good for them, he was very steadily earnest in the pursuit of the blessing,” Austen sketches her
characters and relates their stories with the elegance and wit that are the unmistakable hallmarks of her style.

Austen’s work offers ample proof that, in the hands of a gifted writer, stories of ordinary lives filled with
everyday events can transcend their outward simplicity and capture the intricacies of human nature. Austen’s
ironic portraits of the world she knew are both a revealing look at her own time and a perceptive examination
of the workings of the human heart and mind.

Sense and Sensibility

First published: 1811

Type of work: Novel

Two sisters, very different in nature, face obstacles as they find love.

Sense and Sensibility is a novel that is best understood within the context of the era in which it was written.
Austen lived in that period of English history when eighteenth century rationalism was giving way to the
increasing popularity of nineteenth century romanticism, as typified by William Wordsworth and the
Romantic poets. The open embrace and deliberate cultivation of sensibility—deep feelings and passionate
emotions—were perhaps a natural reaction to the admiration of reserve and practicality that had typified the
preceding decades.

Austen’s novel, her first published work, offers a portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who
embody the two qualities set forth in the title. Elinor, the elder of the two, is intelligent, loving, and wise
enough to see the potential folly in failing to temper emotion with good sense. Marianne, although sharing
many of these qualities, lacks her sister’s wisdom; she is, as Austen describes her, “everything but prudent.”

Marianne’s insistence on giving her emotions free rein leads her into an unhappy romance with the
fortune-hunting Willoughby when she mistakes his false expressions of sentiment for love. Although
Marianne’s own excessive displays of emotion spring from genuine feeling, they blind her to the realization
that less fervently expressed emotions may also be heartfelt and true. Waiting patiently throughout the book is
the quiet, steadfast Colonel Brandon, a man of deep but reserved feelings who loves Marianne and whose true
worth she comes to recognize only after she is forced by her failed romance with Willoughby to reassess her
views.

19
Elinor remains her sister’s mainstay throughout her unhappy first love, assisting her toward maturity with
patience and tenderness. She, too, is ín love, with her selfish sister-in-law’s brother, Edward Ferrars. Both are
restrained in their expressions of their feelings, Elinor out of modesty and a sense of propriety and Edward
because he is secretly and unhappily engaged to another woman favored by his snobbish mother. Yet
adherence to principles of rational thought and good sense does not prevent Elinor from suffering greatly
when she believes that her hopes of marrying Edward are impossible. Their eventual union is as happy and
full of emotion as that of any two people in love.

Although her own sympathies are perhaps most closely aligned with those of Elinor, Austen writes with
affection for both sisters and her message is one of compromise. She is careful to show that a balance of both
heart and intellect is necessary for a full life—a blending of sense and sensibility that both Elinor and
Marianne possess by the novel’s close.

Pride and Prejudice

First published: 1813

Type of work: Novel

A man and woman must reassess their first impressions of each other before they are able to find love.

Pride and Prejudice is the best known of Austen’s six novels and ranks among her finest work. As in Sense
and Sensibility, its story centers on two sisters, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet. Jane falls in love early in the book
with the amiable, wealthy Charles Bingley. Bingley returns her sentiments but is temporarily persuaded to
abandon the romance at the urging of his friend, Mr. Darcy, who does not detect love in Jane’s discreet
manner.

The book’s true center, however, is the complex relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy. Both are
intelligent and forthright, but their initial impressions blind them to the qualities in each other that will
eventually form the basis for their love. Darcy is indeed proud and feels himself above the less refined country
families in whose company he finds himself during his visit to Bingley. Elizabeth’s mother, a vain, silly
woman who is often a source of embarrassment to her daughter, is also an object of Darcy’s scorn. When she
overhears Darcy’s assessment of her and her family, Elizabeth’s own pride is wounded; she dismisses him as
a proud, disagreeable man and is more than willing to believe the lies she is told about him by the charming,
deceitful Wickham. For his part, Darcy’s pride in his position and his family cause him at first to resist his
attraction to Elizabeth and later to propose to her in a manner that she finds even more offensive than his
initial hauteur.

Yet as time passes and their interest in each other continues, both Elizabeth and Darcy begin to see beyond
their original judgments of the other’s personality and character. Both possess a measure of pride and
prejudice that must be overcome before they will fully understand one another, and Elizabeth’s younger sister,
Lydia, is unintentionally a catalyst for the change. Foolish and headstrong, Lydia runs away with Wickham,
and it is only through Darcy’s intervention that the two are married and the Bennet family is saved from
disgrace. Elizabeth has already learned the truth behind Wickham’s slander toward Darcy, and Darcy’s
willingness to help her family despite her own stinging refusal of his proposal offers her a glimpse of the true
nature of his character. Darcy, too, has changed, losing some of the stiffness and pride that accompanied his
wealth and social standing.

The substantial emotional shift experienced by Darcy and Elizabeth is indicated by Mr. Bennet’s reaction to
the news of Darcy’s second proposal: “’Lizzy,’ said he, ’what are you doing? Are you out of your senses, to
be accepting this man? Have you not always hated him?’” Mr. Bennet’s reaction is understandable, given the

20
disdain with which Elizabeth had expressed her initial reaction to Darcy. What her father has not been witness
to—and the reader has—is Austen’s gradual revelation of the qualities that Darcy and Elizabeth share and the
manner in which each has come to appreciate these qualities in the other.

That theirs is a meeting of the mind and heart is clear, and those qualities that at last draw them to each other
and impel them to overcome their early misunderstandings will form the basis for a strong and happy
marriage.

Mansfield Park

First published: 1814

Type of work: Novel

A timid young girl living with wealthy relations falls in love with her cousin.

There are several points that set Mansfield Park apart from the rest of Austen’s work. Chief among them is
Austen’s depiction of her heroine, Fanny Price, a frail, quiet young woman who has none of the high spirits or
wit of Elizabeth Bennet or Marianne Dashwood. Reared from the age of ten among wealthy relatives, Fanny
is an unobtrusive presence in the household at Mansfield Park, useful and agreeable to everyone and steadfast
in her secret affection for her cousin, Edmund Bertram.

Fanny’s manner contrasts sharply with the livelier, sometimes careless behavior of her cousins and their
friends. Only Edmund spends time with the gentle Fanny, although his own affections have been captivated
by the sophisticated Mary Crawford. With Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, away on an extended stay in
the West Indies, the cousins and their friends decide to put on an amateur theatrical production of a
scandalous French play. Only Fanny refuses to participate, out of natural modesty and a certainty that her
absent uncle would not approve. Sir Thomas returns unexpectedly and does not approve, much to his
children’s chagrin, but Fanny quickly falls from his favor when she refuses the proposal of Mary Crawford’s
brother, Henry, who had begun an unwelcome flirtation with her after Fanny’s cousin Maria married another
man.

Distressed by her uncle’s disapproval, Fanny visits her parents and her eight brothers and sisters, only to
discover that her years at Mansfield Park have left her unable to fit easily into her noisy, often vulgar family.
She is summoned back by Sir Thomas when Maria leaves her husband for Henry Crawford and Maria’s sister,
Julia, elopes. Now fully appreciated by her uncle, Fanny comes into her own, winning the love of Edmund
Bertram.

Because Austen’s novels often adopt the tone of their heroines, Mansfield Park is a more somber, less satirical
book than Pride and Prejudice. Fanny is a young woman who has been shaped by both her separation from
her family and her awkward position as a poor relation in a wealthy household. Yet, it is her alienation from
her cousins that has perhaps saved her from taking on their faults. They have been spoiled while she has been
grateful; she has grown in sensitivity and moral strength while they have been indulged. In Austen’s world,
true worth is always recognized in the end, and Fanny’s resistance to the more worldly pursuits of her cousins
and their friends wins for her the love of her adored Edmund.

Fanny is also alone among Austen’s heroines in her uncertainty as to her position in society. Catherine
Moreland of Northanger Abbey may visit wealthy friends, but she enjoys a secure place in her own family, as
do the Dashwood and Bennet sisters and Emma Woodhouse of Emma. Only Anne Elliot of Persuasion,
unappreciated by her self-centered father and sister, somewhat approximates Fanny’s experience. It is a
situation that lends great poignancy to Fanny’s experiences and one which Austen conveys with great feeling

21
and perception.

Mansfield Park is perhaps the most controversial of Austen’s novels. While some critics fault its author for
abandoning the irony and elegant wit that characterize most of her work, others praise her for her willingness
to undertake a variation on her usual themes. In Fanny Price, Austen has created a heroine who must engage
the reader through her gentleness rather than her spirit, and Fanny does that with admirable success.

Emma

First published: 1815 (dated 1816; book came out in December, 1815)

Type of work: Novel

A good-hearted but indulged young heiress misguidedly plays matchmaker for her friends.

The forces that shape the dramatic action in Emma are described by Austen in the book’s opening paragraphs;
they are the qualities possessed by Emma Woodhouse herself. In this novel, Austen turns her satiric talents to
a portrait of a wealthy young woman with “a disposition to think a little too well of herself,” who has yet to
acquire the sensitivity to realize that the emotional lives of her companions are not toys for her own
amusement.

With an adoring, widowed father and an indulgent companion, Emma has reached early adulthood secure in
the belief that she knows what is best for those around her. When her companion marries, Emma replaces her
with Harriet Smith, an impressionable young girl from a local school, and quickly decides that the girl’s
fiancé, a farmer, is beneath her. Persuading Harriet to break off the engagement, despite the misgivings of
Emma’s admiring friend, Mr. Knightley, Emma sets in motion a chain of romantic misunderstandings that
will come close to ruining Harriet’s chances for happiness. After playing with the romantic futures of several
of her acquaintances, Emma at last recognizes the dangers of her interference and realizes that her own chance
for happiness has existed within her grasp for some time in the person of Mr. Knightley.

Emma is one of Austen’s best novels, with some critics holding it in higher regard than Pride and Prejudice.
In Emma Woodhouse, Austen has created one of her most memorable heroines, a willful, headstrong, yet
fundamentally well-intentioned young woman whose intelligence and energy need the tempering of
experience before she can be judged truly mature. She gains this experience through her relationship with
Harriet when her manipulations backfire and she finds that Harriet believes herself to be in love with Mr.
Knightley. With the force of a revelation, the truth of what she has done comes to Emma, along with the
realization that she loves Knightley herself. As Austen writes, “Her own conduct, as well as her own heart,
was before her in the same few minutes.” Seeing herself and her actions clearly for the first time, Emma is
forced into difficult but necessary self-doubt and self-examination, a new but ultimately valuable experience
for a young woman who has never before had cause to doubt her own judgment.

That Emma will learn from her mistakes is clear, and her happiness with Knightley, who has known and
admired her since childhood, seems assured. Emma is Austen’s commentary on how little anyone knows
about the workings of another’s heart and affections, and her heroine’s painful lesson is evidence of her
creator’s wisdom.

Critical Essays: Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIV, February 15, 1988, p. 966.

22
Kirkus Reviews. LVI, January 1, 1988, p. 39.

Library Journal. CXIII, March 1, 1988, p. 67.

London Review of Books. X, January 21, 1988, p. 18.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 21, 1988, p. 5.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, February 28, 1988, p. 15.

Newsweek. CXI, March 14, 1988, p. 58B.

The Observer. November 22, 1987, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXII, January 8, 1988, p. 67.

The Sunday Times. January 17, 1988, p. G13.

The Times Literary Supplement. November 6, 1987, p. 1216.

Austen, Jane: Introduction

Austen is best known as a consummate novelist of manners. The author of six novels, Austen depicted a small
slice of English life during the Regency period, a time marked by the Napoleonic Wars, the early growth of
the English Empire, and an economic and industrial revolution that was countered by a cultural emphasis on
all things proper, elegant, genteel, and truly "English." Austen captured this moment in great detail, focusing
narrowly on the lives of the landed gentry in rural England and—more particularly—the little triumphs and
defeats faced by the young women attempting to secure their future survival through respectable marriage. In
such works as Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), and Mansfield Park (1814), Austen employed wit,
irony, and shrewd observation to advance the literary status of the women's novel and to address the social
and political concerns of nineteenth-century men and women.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

The daughter of the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen, Jane Austen was born December
16, 1775. She was the seventh of eight children and the youngest of two daughters in the middle-class family,
then living at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, England. As the parson's daughter, Austen mixed frequently
and easily with the landed gentry of rural England. Among the Austens's neighbors was Madam Lefroy, wife
to a parson and sister to an aristocratic squire fond of books. Lefroy, who wrote and published poetry, took a
special interest in Austen's education, and encouraged her intellectual development. At home, Reverend
Austen entertained the family by reading literature aloud and guided Austen in choosing books from his large
library and local circulating libraries, while James Austen, Austen's eldest brother, directed the family in
amateur theatricals. Between 1783 and 1786, Austen received formal schooling, first at a boarding school at
Oxford, then at the Abbey School in Reading. Around the age of twelve, Austen began writing children's
stories. She stayed at Steventon until 1801, reading, writing, and participating in the Hampshire social rounds
of balls, visits, and trips to Bath. Austen never married, but in 1795 fell in love with Thomas Langlois Lefroy,
the nephew of her mentor Madam Lefroy. Madam Lefroy, however, disapproved of the match, thinking
Thomas would lose his inheritance if he married the penniless daughter of a clergyman, and sent her nephew
away. During these last years at Steventon, Austen began several early drafts of her mature works. She wrote
her first novel in 1796 and 1797; "First Impressions" was sufficiently polished that her father attempted to

23
publish it, but it was turned down. She would eventually revise it as Pride and Prejudice. Her next attempt
was a novel she titled "Susan," and though she was able to sell it to a publisher in 1803, it was never published
in its initial form. She eventually revised it further, and the book was published posthumously as Northanger
Abbey (1818). Austen's authorial efforts were interrupted by a series of tragedies: in 1804 Madam Lefroy,
who had remained her close friend, died in a riding accident, and in 1805 her father died, leaving Austen, her
sister, and her mother with no means of support. They became dependent on her brothers, who jointly
maintained the women in Bath until 1806, when Frank, a naval officer, invited them to live at his home in
Southampton. In 1809, they moved to Chawton Cottage, on her brother Edward's estate in Kent. There,
Austen worked on Sense and Sensibility, finally succeeding in getting her first novel published in 1811. As
with all her works, Sense and Sensibility was published anonymously, "By a Lady." That year, she also
worked on the final version of Pride and Prejudice and began Mansfield Park. She was unusually secretive
about her writing for some time, even insisting that the door to the chamber she used for writing not be
repaired, so that the squeak of the hinges would alert her to intruders. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and
Prejudice both sold out their first printings and went into second editions and Mansfield Park sold out its first
printing as well. Now a literary success, Austen began work on Emma in 1814. The Prince Regent (later
George IV) invited Austen to meet with him in November 1815, expressing his admiration for her work and
asking her to dedicate her next novel to him. She reluctantly agreed, and Emma was released with a dedication
to the prince just over a month later. During that year, Austen also began work on Persuasion (1818), the last
novel she would complete. She began the novel Sanditon in 1817 but was forced to leave it unfinished due to
illness. In May of that year, she moved with her sister Cassandra to Winchester to obtain medical care but
died on July 18. The obituary in the Hampshire newspaper contained one of the first public
acknowledgements of her authorship.

MAJOR WORKS

Austen's novels are peopled with characters drawn from her sphere of life: ladies and gentlemen of the landed
gentry. The plots of her novels revolve around the intricacies of courtship and marriage between members of
the upper class. Austen's novels consider a narrow scope, using wit and irony to develop and further her plots.
In many of her novels, women suffer, at least temporarily, for the joint distinctions of sex and class. Jane and
Elizabeth Bennett, in Pride and Prejudice, are nearly prevented from marrying their wealthy suitors because
of social codes forbidding it. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, in Sense and Sensibility, similarly find
themselves prohibited from marrying men for lack of adequate resources and social standing to make the
connections respectable. As Austen's heroines painfully recognize, being female puts them in a precarious
position: the Bennett family's estate will pass into the possession of a male cousin, and the Dashwood sisters
and their mother are at the mercy of a half-brother's beneficence after the death of Mr. Dashwood. Mansfield
Park and Persuasion are more complex works and have been considered less accessible to readers. The
satirical aspect of Mansfield Park is less clear than in other novels; in particular, critics have found the heroine
Fanny difficult to sympathize with, and it is not clear if her unusually moralistic thought and behavior is
meant as a model to be emulated or one to be avoided. The heroine of Persuasion, Anne Elliot, has been
characterized as a departure from Austen's usual characters. Persuasion's tone is more subdued and poetic
than Austen's earlier work, possibly a reflection of the author's increasing interest in Romanticism and an
indication of her greater attention to the pain inflicted by the social mores she examined in her earlier works.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

During the first several decades after Austen published her novels, her work received little commentary. After
the 1870 publication of her nephew's Memoir of Jane Austen, however, interest in her works increased. James
Austen-Leigh's Memoir inaugurated a worshipful, nostalgic brand of Austen criticism. Adoring critics praised
Austen's characteristic authorial traits, especially the elegance of her prose, but offered no thorough critical
analysis of her works. Subsequent studies of Austen therefore reacted strongly to counter this tendency,
emphasizing the technical flaws in the novels and dismissing what scholars considered the narrow, trivial

24
world about which she wrote. A pronounced move toward a more balanced, objective mode of criticism came
in 1939 with Mary Lascelles's focused attention on the technical and thematic aspects of Austen's work. With
the advent of feminist criticism, critics again reexamined Austen's novels. Margaret Kirkham portrays Austen
as a proto-feminist who purposefully argued in her novels against the social, political, and economic
limitations placed on women by patriarchal English society. Susan Fraiman differs in her assessment of
Austen's treatment of women's issues. She notes that although Austen's heroines are often witty and
independent, offering an observer's perspective on women's inferior position in society, by the end of the
works the heroines are reincorporated back into patriarchal society, no longer free agents and independent
thinkers but wives subsumed by their husbands' households. Political and feminist scholarship on Austen's
novels was further invigorated by the rise of postcolonial criticism. Moira Ferguson contends that Austen's
novels offer a reformist critique of imperialism and finds a close link between the reformist impulse and
women's status in English society.

Austen, Jane: Principal Works

Sense and Sensibility (novel) 1811

Pride and Prejudice (novel) 1813

Mansfield Park (novel) 1814

Emma (novel) 1816

Northanger Abbey: And Persuasion (novels) 1818

Lady Susan (novel) 1871

The Watsons (unfinished novel) 1871

Love & Freindship, and Other Early Works (juvenilia) 1922

The Novels of Jane Austen. 5 vols. (novels) 1923; republished with revisions to notes and appendices, 1965-66

[Sanditon] Fragments of a Novel (unfinished novel) 1925

Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others (letters) 1932

Volume the First (juvenilia) 1933

Volume the Third (juvenilia) 1951

Volume the Second (juvenilia) 1963

Primary Sources: Jane Austen (Letter Date 18 November

1814)
SOURCE: Austen, Jane. "Letter to Fanny Knight, November 18, 1814." In Jane Austen's
Letters, 2nd ed., edited by R. W. Chapman, pp. 407-12. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1952.

25
 In the following excerpt from a letter to her niece dated November 18, 1814, Austen expresses
in detail her opinions on love and marriage.

I feel quite as doubtful as you could be my dearest Fanny as to when my Letter may be finished, for I can
command very little quiet time at present, but yet I must begin, for I know you will be glad to hear as soon as
possible, & I really am impatient myself to be writing something on so very interesting a subject, though I
have no hope of writing anything to the purpose. I shall do very little more I dare say than say over again,
what you have said before.—I was certainly a good deal surprised at first—as I had no suspicion of any
change in your feelings, and I have no scruple in saying that you cannot be in Love. My dear Fanny, I am
ready to laugh at the idea—and yet it is no laughing matter to have had you so mistaken as to your own
feelings—And with all my heart I wish I had cautioned you on that point when first you spoke to me;—but
tho' I did not think you then so much in love as you thought yourself, I did consider you as being attached in a
degree—quite sufficiently for happiness, as I had no doubt it would increase with opportunity.—And from the
time of our being in London together, I thought you really very much in love—But you certainly are not at
all—there is no concealing it.—What strange creatures we are!—It seems as if your being secure of him (as
you say yourself) had made you Indifferent.—There was a little disgust I suspect, at the Races—& I do not
wonder at it. His expressions there would not do for one who had rather more Acuteness, Penetration & Taste,
than Love, which was your case. And yet, after all, I am surprised that the change in your feelings should be
so great.—He is, just what he ever was, only more evidently & uniformly devoted to you. This is all the
difference.—How shall we account for it?—My dearest Fanny, I am writing what will not be of the smallest
use to you. I am feeling differently every moment, & shall not be able to suggest a single thing that can assist
your Mind.—I could lament in one sentence & laugh in the next, but as to Opinion or Counsel I am sure none
will ‹be› extracted worth having from this Letter.—I read yours through the very eveng I received it—getting
away by myself—I could not bear to leave off, when I had once begun.—I was full of curiosity & concern.
Luckily your Aunt C. dined at the other house, therefore I had not to manœuvre away from her;—& as to
anybody else, I do not care.—Poor dear Mr. J. P.!—Oh! dear Fanny, your mistake has been one that thousands
of women fall into. He was the first young Man who attached himself to you. That was the charm, & most
powerful it is.—Among the multitudes however that make the same mistake with yourself, there can be few
indeed who have so little reason to regret it;—his Character and his attachment leave you nothing to be
ashamed of.—Upon the whole, what is to be done? You certainly have encouraged him to such a point as to
make him feel almost secure of you—you have no inclination for any other person—His situation in life,
family, friends, & above all his character—his uncommonly amiable mind, strict principles, just notions, good
habits—all that you know so well how to value, All that really is of the first importance—everything of this
nature pleads his cause most strongly.—You have no doubt of his having superior Abilities—he has proved it
at the University—he is I dare say such a scholar as your agreable, idle Brothers would ill bear a comparison
with.—Oh! my dear Fanny, the more I write about him, the warmer my feelings become, the more strongly I
feel the sterling worth of such a young Man & the desirableness of your growing in love with him again. I
recommend this most thoroughly.—There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the
Creature You and I should think perfection, Where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are
equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or if he does, he may not
be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the Brother of your particular friend, & belonging to your own
County.—Think of all this Fanny. Mr. J. P.—has advantages which do not often meet in one person. His only
fault indeed seems Modesty. If he were less modest. he would be more agreable, speak louder & look
Impudenter;—and is not it a fine Character of which Modesty is the only defect?—I have no doubt that he
will get more lively & more like yourselves as he is more with you;—he will catch your ways if he belongs to
you. And as to there being any objection from his Goodness, from the danger of his becoming even
Evangelical, I cannot admit that. I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am
at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason and Feeling, must be happiest & safest.—Do not be
frightened from the connection by your Brothers having most wit. Wisdom is better than Wit, & in the long
run will certainly have the laugh on her side; & don't be frightened by the idea of his acting more strictly up to
the precepts of the New Testament than others.—And now, my dear Fanny, having written so much on one

26
side of the question, I shall turn round & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of
accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying
without Affection; and if his deficiencies of Manner&c&c strike you more than all his good qualities, if you
continue to think strongly of them, give him up at once.—Things are now in such a state, that you must
resolve upon one or the other, either to allow him to go on as he has done, or whenever you are together
behave with a coldness which may convince him that he has been deceiving himself.—I have no doubt of his
suffering a good deal for a time, a great deal, when he feels that he must give you up;—but it is no creed of
mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of Disappointments kill anybody.—Your sending the Music
was an admirable Device, it made everything easy, & I do not know how I could have accounted for the parcel
otherwise; for tho' your dear Papa most conscientiously hunted about till he found me alone in the
Ding-parlour, your Aunt C. had seen that he had a parcel to deliver.—As it was however, I do not think
anything was suspected.—We have heard nothing fresh from Anna. I trust she is very comfortable in her new
home. Her Letters have been very sensible & satisfactory, with no parade of happiness, which I liked them
the better for.—I have often known young married Women write in a way I did not like, in that respect.

You will be glad to hear that the first Edit: of M. P. [Mansfield Park] is all sold.—Your Uncle Henry is rather
wanting me to come to Town, to settle about a 2d Edit:—but as I could not very conveniently leave home
now, I have written him my Will and pleasure, & unless he still urges it, shall not go.—I am very greedy &
want to make the most of it;—but as you are much above caring about money, I shall not plague you with any
particulars.—The pleasures of Vanity are more within your comprehension, & you will enter into mine, at
receiving the praise which every now & then comes to me, through some channel or other.

FROM THE AUTHOR

AUSTEN'S IRONIC RESPONSE TO WRITING ADVICE FROM JAMES STANIER CLARKE,

LIBRARIAN TO THE PRINCE REGENT, REGARDING THE LIMITATIONS OF HER
EXPERIENCE AS A WOMAN

I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in
your note of Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not
the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and
philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a
woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read very little in that, would be totally
without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English
literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to
your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and
uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

Austen, Jane. Letter to James Stanier Clarke of December 11, 1815. In Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister
Cassandra and Others, 2nd ed. Edited by R. W. Chapman, pp. 442-43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932.

Primary Sources: Jane Austen (Novel Date 1817)

SOURCE: Austen, Jane. "Chapter 8." In Fragment of a Novel, pp. 102-112. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1925.

In the following excerpt from her unfinished novel Sanditon, written in 1817, Austen directs
her satire towards the type of novel popularized by Samuel Richardson—who was nonetheless
among her stylistic influences.

27
The two Ladies continued walking together till rejoined by the others, who as they issued from the Library
were followed by a young Whitby running off with 5 vols. under his arm to Sir Edward's Gig—and Sir Edw:
approaching Charlotte, said "You may perceive what has been our Occupation. My Sister wanted my Counsel
in the selection of some books.—We have many leisure hours, & read a great deal.—I am no indiscriminate
Novel-Reader. The mere Trash of the common Circulating Library, I hold in the highest contempt. You will
never hear me advocating those puerile Emanations which detail nothing but discordant Principles incapable
of Amalgamation, or those vapid tissues of ordinary Occurrences from which no useful Deductions can be
drawn.—In vain may we put them into a literary Alembic;—we distil nothing which can add to
Science.—You understand me I am sure?" "I am not quite certain that I do.—But if you will describe the sort
of Novels which you do approve, I dare say it will give me a clearer idea." "Most willingly, Fair
Questioner.—The Novels which I approve are such as display Human Nature with Grandeur—such as shew
her in the Sublimities of intense Feeling—such as exhibit the progress of strong Passion from the first Germ
of incipient Susceptibility to the utmost Energies of Reason half-dethroned,—where we see the strong spark
of Woman's Captivations elicit such Fire in the Soul of Man as leads him—(though at the risk of some
Aberration from the strict line of Primitive Obligations)—to hazard all, dare all, achieve all, to obtain
her.—Such are the Works which I peruse with delight, & I hope I may say, with amelioration. They hold forth
the most splendid Portraitures of high Conceptions, Unbounded Views, illimitable Ardour, indomptible
Decision—and even when the Event is mainly anti-prosperous to the high-toned Machinations of the prime
Character, the potent, pervading Hero of the Story, it leaves us full of Generous Emotions for him;—our
Hearts are paralized—. T'were Pseudo-Philosophy to assert that we do not feel more enwraped by the
brilliancy of his Career, than by the tranquil & morbid Virtues of any opposing Character. Our approbation of
the Latter is but Eleemosynary.—These are the Novels which enlarge the primitive Capabilities of the Heart,
& which it cannot impugn the Sense or be any Dereliction of the character, of the most anti-puerile Man, to be
conversant with."—"If I understand you aright—said Charlotte—our taste in Novels is not at all the same."
And here they were obliged to part—Miss D. being too much tired of them all, to stay any longer.—The truth
was that Sir Edw: whom circumstances had confined very much to one spot had read more sentimental Novels
than agreed with him. His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned, & most exceptionable parts of
Richardsons; & such Authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson's steps, so far as Man's
determined pursuit of Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling & convenience is concerned, had
since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, & formed his Character.—With a perversity of
Judgement, which must be attributed to his not having by Nature a very strong head, the Graces, the Spirit, the
Sagacity, & the Perseverance, of the Villain of the Story outweighed all his absurdities & all his Atrocities
with Sir Edward. With him, such Conduct was Genius, Fire & Feeling.—It interested & inflamed him; & he
was always more anxious for its Success & mourned over its Discomfitures with more Tenderness than cd
ever have been contemplated by the Authors.—Though he owed many of his ideas to this sort of reading, it
were unjust to say that he read nothing else, or that his Language were not formed on a more general
Knowledge of modern Literature.—He read all the Essays, Letters, Tours & Criticisms of the day—& with
the same ill-luck which made him derive only false Principles from Lessons of Morality, & incentives to Vice
from the History of it's Overthrow, he gathered only hard words & involved sentences from the style of our
most approved Writers.

General Commentary: Mary Lascelles (Essay Date 1939)

SOURCE: Lascelles, Mary. "Style." In Jane Austen and Her Art, pp. 87-116. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1939.

In the following excerpt, Lascelles discusses the origins and development of Austen's style.

[Austen] did not look to the novelists for direction as to style; and this was well, for the great novels of the
mid-eighteenth century had too strong individuality, and their successor, the novel of sentiment, did not know

28
its own business. It wanted, not merely a grand style for its more ambitious passages, but also an unaffected,
level style for plain relation of fact and circumstance. This is Fanny Burney's notion of a matter-of-fact
introductory statement:

'In the bosom of her respectable family resided Camilla. Nature, with a bounty the most
profuse, had been lavish to her of attractions; Fortune, with a moderation yet kinder, had
placed her between luxury and indigence. Her abode was the parsonage-house of
Etherington.…The living, though not considerable, enabled its incumbent to attain every
rational object of his modest and circumscribed wishes; to bestow upon a deserving wife
whatever her own forbearance declined not; and to educate a lovely race of one son and three
daughters, with that liberal propriety, which unites improvement for the future with present
enjoyment.'1

Fanny Burney takes pains to be ridiculous. Her followers are often merely slovenly. Jane Austen neither
strains after grandiloquence2 nor slips into slovenliness. She practises but one grammatical irregularity which
is uncomfortable to the ear now—what may be called the dislocated clause.3 Of this I have found instances in
the prose of every one of those writers who seem likely to have influenced her—as a slip; it is occasional, and
usually to be found in casual writing—in Goldsmith's task-work, in Gibbon's letters. Jane Austen, however,
uses it as freely as though she had never heard it condemned; and Beckford parodies it savagely as an habitual
fault of style in women's novels.4 Was it a licence which had been tacitly permitted to them? Did James and
Henry Austen regard it as a fault which they would not have allowed to stand had they noticed it in their own
writings, but which might be passed over in their sister's with the apology that Fielding had offered for faults
of style in David Simple?—'… some small Errors, which Want of Habit in Writing chiefly occasioned, and
which no Man of Learning would think worth his Censure in a Romance; nor any gentleman, in the writings
of a young Woman'.5 At all events, it may fairly be said that Jane Austen's sentences are rarely if ever
ambiguous; a pronoun may sometimes go astray, but the drift of the paragraph always makes the writer's
intention clear. Beckford's general satire of the novelists' style does not in fact apply to her.

To the essayists and historians, on the other hand (to adopt Henry Austen's division), his sister seems to have
apprenticed herself, even in childhood. Already in Love and Freindship echoes of Goldsmith's voice are
heard—echoes, at least, of some of those tones of his voice that belong to his task-work for booksellers. This
summary account of Edward IV—'His best qualities were courage and beauty; his bad, a combination of all
the vices'6—might equally well come from his History of England or from the pert little burlesque version of
it in Love and Freindship, in which I seem to hear a tinkling echo of this very phrase: 'This Monarch [Edward
IV] was famous only for his Beauty and his Courage, of which the Picture we have here given of him,7 and his
undaunted Behaviour in marrying one Woman while he was engaged to another, are sufficient proofs.'8

This tone of sly simplicity is not, however, audible to me in Jane Austen's later writing. The simplicity of her
novels, with that other quality, slyness or shrewdness, which gives this simplicity its value, seems to belong to
another tradition and, even so, to belong with a difference. The essayists of the eighteenth century had been
kindly masters to the young Jane Austen; the turn of wit, the phrasing, of their lighter moods had come easily
to her—and this may perhaps account for that precocious assurance in style which has half hidden her later
development. Even in her childish burlesque pieces every sentence is almost as deliberately and neatly turned
(on its small scale) as are those of her masters. From the lightest piece of nonsense—'Our neighbourhood was
small, for it consisted only of your Mother'9—to the sharpest prick of satire—'I expect nothing more in my
wife than my wife will find in me—Perfection'10—each stands firmly, its weight exactly poised. Here already
is the sharp definition of Lady Susan, and here the promise which Pride and Prejudice was to fulfil. 'Next to
being married,' Mr. Bennet says to Elizabeth, when he hears of Jane's cross fortunes, 'a girl likes to be crossed
in love a little now and then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her
companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to be long outdone by Jane. Now is your time.
Here are officers enough at Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham be your

29
man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.'

'Thank you, Sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me. We must not all expect Jane's good fortune.'11
This, like many other passages in Jane Austen's novels, tingles with a rhythm which stage comedy12 could
never quite forget, though it might sound but faintly for a generation at a time—rhythm which is justified (as
prose rhythm needs to be) by excitement. Instant perception of the absurd charges word and phrase with all
the forces which in ordinary talk are dissipated, giving an impression of speed and simplicity not alien from
the temper of verse. Such an impression must be elusive; no reader can vouch for more than his own
experience. To me this rhythm seems audible in every one of Jane Austen's novels—even where I should least
expect it, where no pulse of bodily well-being keeps time with it, in Sanditon. For it is appropriated by no one
kind of comic dialogue. It tingles in the wit of Mr. Bennet—'Wickham's a fool, if he takes her with a farthing
less than ten thousand pounds. I should be sorry to think so ill of him, in the very beginning of our
relationship.'13 It is perceptible in the shrewd or droll saying that may be occasionally allowed to 'plain
matter-of-fact people, who seldom aim at wit of any kind'—'And very nice young ladies they both are; I
hardly know one from the other.'14 And yet it is not out of place in the merely absurd talk of fools. 'We ', Mr.
Parker assures his wife, when she envies their more sheltered neighbours, 'have all the Grandeur of the Storm,
with less real danger, because the Wind meeting with nothing to oppose or confine it around our House,
simply rages & passes on.'15 For it is their creator's delight in absurdity that vibrates in their talk. But if Jane
Austen learnt from the dramatists the turn of phrase proper to comedy she learnt also, in writing Pride and
Prejudice, how to differentiate her dialogue from that sort she would associate with the stage; how to make it
more reflective on the one hand, more inconsequent on the other, according to the bent of the speaker. And
what she learnt from the essayists she likewise transmuted to her own use; that, indeed, is the way in which
they were good masters, and she an apt pupil—they taught her to make something of her own. Lady
Middleton and Mrs. Dashwood 'sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanour, and a
general want of understanding'.16 That might come from one of the early periodical essays. It has the
formality, the preponderance of general and abstract terms, which seems to have repelled Mrs.
Meynell17—but which we are less likely to take amiss. To us Jane Austen appears like one who inherits a
prosperous and well-ordered estate—the heritage of a prose style in which neither generalization nor
abstraction need signify vagueness, because there was close enough agreement as to the scope and
significance of such terms.18 Character and motive, for example, might be presented in them—a practice best
illustrated, and very likely familiar to Jane Austen herself, in the Lives of the Poets. 'His mind was not very
comprehensive, nor his curiosity active; he had no value for those parts of knowledge which he had not
himself cultivated.'19 This, surely, and countless passages like it, represent the school in which she trained
herself. Lady Russell forms and expresses her judgement on Mr. Elliot in these terms: 'Every thing united in
him; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, and a warm heart … He was steady,
observant, moderate, candid'; he possessed 'sensibility', and 'a value for all the felicities of domestic
life'20—and so on. Here, of course, the ear catches an inflexion of irony in the use of such exact and emphatic
terms for a misapprehension; but that implies no dissatisfaction with the terms themselves. They are used to
express the opinions on their fellow characters of all the reflective heroines (Catherine being a child, and
Emma, as she calls herself, an 'imaginist'): for Elizabeth Bennet's criticism of her father's 'ill-judged …
direction of talents … which rightly used, might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters,
even if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife';21 for the shrewd observations of Elinor Dashwood and
Charlotte Heywood; even for Anne Elliot's gentler judgements. But, more and more freely, they are combined
with other kinds of expression in that interplay of formal and colloquial, abstract and concrete, general and
particular, to whose interaction are due the firmness and suppleness of the style in which the great prose
writers of the eighteenth century could address the Common Reader. Fanny Price, eager to find in her own
shortcomings the reason for her mother's early neglect of her, supposed that 'she had probably alienated Love
by the helplessness and fretfulness of a fearful temper, or been unreasonable in wanting a larger share than
any one among so many could deserve'.22 Sometimes there is a humorous purpose in the juxtaposition: 'They
had a very fine day for Box Hill; and all the other outward circumstances of arrangement, accommodation,
and punctuality, were in favour of a pleasant party.…Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got

30
there.'23 Sometimes it marks the centre of a comic episode—as in Sir Thomas's attempt to give 'Mr.
Rushworth's opinion in better words than he could find himself'—and his author's comment: 'Mr. Rushworth
hardly knew what to do with so much meaning.'24 That commonplace turn of expression—the neutral verb
mobilized by the preposition—goes with the grain of the language, would not be out of place in dialogue, yet
is wholly in keeping with the narrative passage to which it belongs. Scott, the only one of Jane Austen's
contemporaries who has a lively appreciation of the prose tradition they inherited, is at a drawback here: the
language of his narrative passages must always remain distinct from the dialogue of his Scots-speaking
characters, and from the Ossianic drone by which he distinguishes his Gaelic speakers.

If Jane Austen trained herself in Johnson's school, that was not, I think, the limit of her debt to him; something
more personal remains—some tones of his voice seem to be echoed in her style. An echo is too elusive to be
certainly identified; but conjecture may be worth offering. I think I see in her familiarity with, and love of, his
work the explanation of her aptitude for coining pregnant abstractions—such phrases as Miss Bates's
desultory good-will, of which the sounds pursued her visitors as they mounted her stairs;25 Mrs. Elton's
apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and basket;26 and Sir Walter's advance towards his grand cousins
'with all the eagerness compatible with anxious elegance';27 these, surely, may be called Johnsonian phrases
and may fairly remind us of such passages in The Rambler as the description of the leisurely travellers who
'missed … the Pleasure of alarming Villages with the Tumult of our Passage, and of disguising our
Insignificancy by the Dignity of Hurry'.28 From Johnson she may have learnt also a liking for antithetic
phrasing, coming to perceive his antitheses closing on his subject as large hands may close on a creature
which must be held before it can be set free; coming to distinguish this formality as one congenial to English
idiom. Anne Elliot, advising Captain Benwick, 'ventured to hope that he did not always read only poetry; and
to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it
completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which
ought to taste it but sparingly'.29 I will suggest another small accomplishment which Jane Austen may
possibly owe to 'her dear Dr. Johnson': while he has been criticized for making all the fictitious
correspondents in his periodical essays address him in his own stately language, his lively mimicry of idiom
in oblique oration has passed unnoticed. Thus Anthea, who thought nothing so elegant as a display of
timidity, 'saw some Sheep, and heard the Weather clink his Bell, which she was certain was not hung upon
him for nothing, and therefore no Assurances nor Intreaties should prevail upon her to go a Step farther; she
was sorry to disappoint the Company, but her Life was dearer to her than Ceremony'.30 Now Jane Austen has
an aptitude, not very common among the earlier novelists, for these satirically reported conversations: Mrs.
Elton on strawberries, and Lady Bertram on the ball, are probably the best-remembered; but these merely
confirm impressions already made; her slighter essays in this kind are quite as shrewd, and, within small
compass, create the impression in our minds of the talk of some minor character who would otherwise be
silent—of Mrs. Philips with her promise of 'a little bit of hot supper',31 or Mr. Shepherd, with his account of
his chosen tenant—'quite the gentleman'.32

Among these elusive echoes of the tones of voice of her favourites I seem to detect one that may be worth a
moment's notice. The train of possibilities begins with Richardson's realization that a parenthetical phrase,
most often built upon a present participle, if introduced abruptly into the midst of a speech—that is, not
qualifying the introductory 'he said' or its equivalent, but indicating change of tone or gesture as a
stage-direction might do—gives the air of eyewitness to any one who reports the speech; and since, in his
novels, the narrator is always, for the moment, autobiographer, that reporter is always supposed to be an
eyewitness, and therefore needs this illusion. (Thus, conversations reported by Miss Harriet Byron are not
seldom interrupted by the parenthesis 'Snatching my hand'.) Fanny Burney appears to perceive this advantage
and follow Richardson, so long as she also lets one of the characters tell the story—that is, in Evelina's letters.
(Need it be said that here, too, 'Snatching my hand' is a not infrequent parenthesis?) But it seems to be
Boswell who, in his own double character of author and eyewitness reporting an affair, introduces this device
into direct narration, in his Tour to the Hebrides and, still oftener, in his Life of Johnson. Thus, in Johnson's
speeches occur such parenthetical phrases as: '(looking to his Lordship with an arch smile)'. Whether or no

31
Jane Austen's ear really caught from one of these three among her favourite authors the impression of
immediacy which this device is able to lend to dialogue, her frequent and apt use of it is worth remarking.
Nancy Steele's tale of her sister is brought within earshot by such parentheses as '(Laughing affectedly)' and
'(giggling as she spoke)',33 and poor Miss Bates's of her niece by '(twinkling away a tear or two)';34 while we
seem indeed to see Captain Harville's attention divided between Anne and Captain Wentworth: 'There is no
hurry on my side', he tells Wentworth. '"I am only ready whenever you are.—I am in very good anchorage
here," (smiling at Anne) "well supplied, and want for nothing.—No hurry for a signal at all.—Well, Miss
Elliot," (lowering his voice) "as I was saying, we shall never agree I suppose upon this point."'35

Evidence as to Jane Austen's dislikes in word or phrase is less elusive, for it consists not only in her avoidance
of such habits of expression but also in her ridicule of them in her burlesque writings, and in her warnings to
Anna against them. Any close observer of her ways must have noticed that she is, so to speak, shy of
figurative language, using it as little as possible, and least of all in her gravest passages. I do not think it
extravagant to find some suggestion of the amusement and discomfort which idle use of figurative expressions
caused her in this small quip to Cassandra: 'He … poor man! is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear
a cannon, were it fired close to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted,
and talked to him a little with my fingers.…'36 For this use of stale, unmeaning figures of speech is a common
mark of insincerity in her disagreeable people—in Mrs. Elton, with her borrowed plume of poetic image, her
chatter of 'Hymen's saffron robe';37 in General Tilney, whose imagery belongs to the conventions of a
heartless gallantry: '"I have many pamphlets to finish," said he to Catherine, "before I can close my eyes; and
perhaps may be poring over the affairs of the nation for hours after you are asleep. Can either of us be more
meetly employed? My eyes will be blinding for the good of others; and yours preparing by rest for future
mischief"'38—a manner of speech that almost seems to excuse Catherine's suspicions; above all, in Mrs.
Norris: 'Is not she a sister's child?' she asks, rhetorically, of Fanny Price; 'and could I bear to see her want,
while I had a bit of bread to give her?'39 And one sees a grotesque vision of those two—the child and the
woman—confronting one another across the shining expanse of the parsonage dining-table, with a 'bit of
bread' between them. But Mrs. Norris did not see that vision; she saw nothing—metaphor was to her a screen
for the meaninglessness of her generous words.

I suspect that it was Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as
any other of her habits of expression, repelled Charlotte Brontë, and has alienated other readers, conscious of
a dissatisfaction with her style that they have not cared to analyse. What prompted her to such a denial? Did
she distrust all figurative language because she was sharply aware of the aptitude of the most languid
figurative expressions for persisting as a mere habit of speech, after they have lost even the feeble life they
had for the imagination?—a not unreasonable distrust, so large is the element of figurative idiom in our
tongue. And was she further aware that, since such language commonly carries in the first using some
emotional suggestion, it cannot fossilize without turning into a lie? Even if this should seem a rashly
conjectural explanation of her apparent distrust of all figures of speech, her evident dislike of all that are ready
made, it is certainly worth while to notice her quick ear for all those ready-made phrases, whether figurative
or no, which creep so insidiously into our habitual speech. She had always held aloof from slang:40 'Miss
Fletcher and I were very thick', she writes to Cassandra in Steventon days, 'but I am the thinnest of the two.'41
She makes fossil phrases the staple of Lady Bertram's accustomed style of letter-writing—'a very creditable,
commonplace, amplifying style':42 'We shall greatly miss Edmund in our small circle', she writes to Fanny
when he has gone to fetch his sick brother; 'but I trust and hope he will find the poor invalid in a less alarming
state than might be apprehended …'43—a style that breaks up and dissolves under the influence of real feeling:
'He is just come, my dear Fanny, and is taken up stairs; and I am so shocked to see him, that I do not know
what to do.'44 They are a mark also of the talk of Mr. Parker—who was not 'a man of strong understanding':45
'Here were we, pent down in this little contracted Nook, without Air or View, only one mile and 3 qrs from the
noblest expanse of Ocean between the South foreland & the Land's end, & without the smallest advantage
from it. You will not think I have made a bad exchange, when we reach Trafalgar House—which by the bye, I
almost wish I had not named Trafalgar—for Waterloo is more the thing now.'46 And she is at pains to

32
emphasize this habit: 'The Growth of my Plantations is a general astonishment'47—that was substituted in
revision for 'My Plantations astonish everybody by their Growth'.

What it is that disgusts in Mrs. Elton's speech is not so obvious. It is not merely the idle figurative
expressions—the recluse torn reluctant from her instrument and crayons, and the rest, though they are many;
nor the slang, with its uneasy pretensions, nor the wilful use of concrete and particular expressions where
there is no occasion for them: 'A most pitiful business!—Selina would stare when she heard of it.'48 It is rather
a general and insidious misuse of language in the interests of an ugly smartness, which produces much the
same sort of unpleasant sensation as seeing a tool misused.

Jane Austen's sharpest critical satire is aimed, however, at the contemporary novelists' peculiar
phraseology—commonly a rank weed in the aftermath of a great age of fiction. Miss Clavering, who was to
have collaborated with her friend Miss Ferrier, noticed it. 'I don't like those high life conversations', she says
shrewdly; 'they are a sort of thing by consent handed down from generation to generation in novels, but have
little or no groundwork in truth … [they] could at best amuse by putting one in mind of other novels not by
recalling to anybody what they ever saw or heard in real life.…'And she is pretty severe on her friend's more
ambitious writing in this kind, 'which is the style of conversation of duchesses only in novels'.49 A
conversational style handed down from one generation of novelists to another—that is a pitfall, as Jane
Austen gently reminds Anna: 'I do not like a Lover's speaking in the 3d person;—it is too much like the formal
part of Lord Orville, & I think is not natural.'50 She had made fun of fossilized phraseology in her earliest
pieces, sometimes tilting a fragment of it gently to let the light fall on it: 'his Mother had been many years no
more'.51 Even more unobtrusively it makes its way into her early novels: 'the lenient hand of time did much
for [Catherine] by insensible gradations in the course of another day.'52 Beckford had parodied these stock
phrases; but his hand had been heavy: '… the finer feelings of the celestial Arabella suffered a new and more
terrible shock, which the lenient hand of time could alone hope to mollify. The original breaking of his collar
bone, by the fall from his famous hunter, which had once so cruelly alarmed the ladies in the park, was no
longer an object of material magnitude, but … the innumerable difficulties he might labour under, was indeed
a stroke which required the utmost fortitude, and every religious consideration to combat and sustain.'53
Where he makes nonsense, Jane Austen with a lighter touch makes something that is almost sense. She sees
where exaggeration is not needed, where demure imitation will serve. She allows Henry Tilney to hit off the
style of Mrs. Radcliffe's descriptive passages in his mock forecast of Catherine's arrival at the Abbey,54 and of
the novel of sentiment in his pretended investigation of Catherine's feelings upon the arrival of Isabel-la's
letter.55 She never lost her taste for mimicry, but her later novels gave her less scope for it. Her consciousness
of this particular pitfall is most forcibly expressed in her watchful avoidance of it, most pointedly in that
stricture on Anna's novel in which she comes nearest to severity: 'Devereux Forester's being ruined by his
Vanity is extremely good; but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of Dissipation". I do not
object to the Thing, but I cannot bear the expression;—it is such thorough novel slang—and so old, that I dare
say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.'56

Behind this explicit expression of aversion we can perceive her steady rejection of 'novel slang', and behind
this consistent practice her sensitiveness to the entity of the word. Her corrections show her mind moving
among words, arranging and rearranging them, until she gets them phrased to her liking; and so every one of
them remains exquisitely whole, like a falling drop of water, and no two or three are allowed to run together
and settle into stagnant pools.

Delicate precision, resulting from control of the tools chosen—one could almost be content to claim no more
than this for Jane Austen's style, surmising that she would hardly claim as much. She might have been willing
to accept Richardson's compliment to Lady Bradshaigh: 'The pen is almost as pretty an implement in a
woman's fingers as a needle.'57 She would probably have been puzzled by John Bailey's tribute: 'She wrote …
well, because she could write well and liked it, and all the better because she did not know how well she
wrote.'58 For I think that she would have been satisfied to transfer to her style her playful boast of her own

33
manual dexterity: 'An artist cannot do anything slovenly.'59

Notes

1. Camilla, ch. i.
2. Her rare inversions sound to me Johnsonian; that is, an unconscious reflection of her reading.
3. e.g. Lady Catherine, speaking of her daughter and Darcy, says: 'While in their cradles, we planned the
union' (Pride and Prejudice, p. 355, ch. lvi).
4. Modern Novel Writing (under the pseudonym of Lady Harriet Marlow), 1796.
5. Sarah Fielding, David Simple, 1744 (2nd edit.)—with a preface by Henry Fielding, in which he
mentions his correction of these errors. (They are seldom worse than colloquialisms or
awkwardnesses.)
6. Goldsmith, History of England (1771), ii. 250.
7. i.e. one of Cassandra's medallions, made, perhaps, in playful imitation of those in the 1771 History.
8. Love and Freindship, p. 86; Minor Works, pp. 140, 141.
9. Ibid., p. 7; Minor Works, p. 78.
10. Volume the First, p. 46; Minor Works, p. 26.
11. Pride and Prejudice, pp. 137, 138, ch. xxiv.
12. J. A. was probably an habitual reader of plays.
13. Pride and Prejudice, p. 304, ch. xlix.
14. Persuasion, p. 92, ch. x.
15. Sanditon, p. 48; Minor Works, p. 381.
16. Sense and Sensibility, p. 229, ch. xxxiv.
17. Alice Meynell, 'The Classic Novelist' in The Second Person Singular (1921).
18. It is, I believe, want of realization of this element in Jane Austen's style that has made critics such as
Mr. Forster find a reflection of her point of view in the thoughts of all her heroines; see Abinger
Harvest (1936), p. 149.
19. Life of Shenstone.
20. Persuasion, pp. 146, 147, ch. xvi.
21. Pride and Prejudice, p. 237, ch. xlii.
22. Mansfield Park, p. 371, ch. xxxvii.
23. Emma, p. 367, ch. xliii.
24. Mansfield Park, p. 186, ch. xix.
25. Emma, p. 239, ch. xxvii. I think this is not a very common idiom in women's writings, though Mrs.
Thrale learnt it from the same master.
26. Ibid., p. 358, ch. xlii.
27. Persuasion, p. 184, ch. xx.
28. The Rambler, number 142.
29. Persuasion, pp. 100, 101, ch. xi.
30. The Rambler, number 34.
31. Pride and Prejudice, p. 74, ch. xv.
32. Persuasion, p. 22, ch. iii.
33. Sense and Sensibility, pp. 274, 275, ch. xxxviii.
34. Emma, p. 378, ch. xliv.
35. Persuasion, p. 234, ch. xxiii.
36. Letters, p. 242.
37. Emma, p. 308, ch. xxxvi.
38. Northanger Abbey, p. 187, ch. xxiii.
39. Mansfield Park, p. 7, ch. i.
40. It is Mary Crawford's slang that persuades me she was never meant to be very agreeable.
41. Letters, p. 14.

34
 42. Mansfield Park, p. 425, ch. xliv.
43. Ibid., p. 426, ch. xliv.
44. Ibid., p. 427, ch. xliv.
45. Sanditon, p. 23; Minor Works, p. 372.
46. Ibid., p. 44; Minor Works, p. 380.
47. Ibid., p. 46; Minor Works, p. 381.
48. Emma, p. 484, ch. lv. I think that Jane Austen positively disliked this idiosyncrasy—of which she
gives variants to Sir Edward Denham and John Thorpe.
49. Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier, ed. J. A. Doyle, pp. 114-118 (letter of 10 May 1813).
50. Letters, pp. 387, 388. Charlotte Brontë slipped back into this awkward practice.
51. Love and Freindship, p. 10; Minor Works, p. 80.
52. Northanger Abbey, p. 201, ch. xxv.
53. Modern Novel Writing, ch. i.
54. Northanger Abbey, ch. xx.
55. Ibid., p. 207, ch. xxv.
56. Letters, p. 404.
57. Correspondence, ed. Barbauld (1804), vi. 120 (no date).
58. Introductions to Jane Austen, 1931, p. 25.
59. Letters, p. 30.

References

In referring to Jane Austen's six novels, I give the number of the page as it appears in Dr. Chapman's edition,
followed by the number of the chapter as it would appear in any other modern edition. For her letters and
other unpublished writings, I refer likewise to his editions. References to the letters are simple; those to the
other writings require a little explanation. When I completed my book, Dr. Chapman had already edited (in
separate volumes) practically all of Jane Austen's unpublished work other than those three note-books of
juvenilia entitled Volume the First, Second, and Third; but of these we had only the First from his hand.
Volume the Second had appeared (with a preface by G. K. Chesterton) under the title of its principal content,
Love and Freindship, and it was by this name, therefore, that I referred to it, and to all that it contained.
Volume the Third had not been printed, nor was it accessible to me in manuscript; it had therefore to be left
out of my account. This latter note-book had since been edited by Dr. Chapman, who has moreover now
gathered all these and some smaller pieces into a single volume of Minor Works. Thus, for Jane Austen's tales,
fragments, and drafts, except the contents of Volume the Second, we have two earlier editions from his hand;
differing in that the earlier records the traces of revision discernible in her manuscripts. Mindful of the diverse
needs of readers possessing these different editions, I have retained my original page-reference for every
passage quoted, but added another, to the Minor Works—except where the subject under discussion was Jane
Austen's practice in revision.

For her brother's Biographical Notice and her nephew's Memoir also I refer to Dr. Chapman's editions, except
in those instances where it was necessary to use the first edition of the Memoir, or a passage from that part of
the second which his edition does not reproduce.

For other books I have, of course, referred to the first editions, except where an authoritative collected edition
of the author's works seemed preferable. In references to novels, mindful of the difficulty of getting access to
a first edition of many of those I cited, I have given the number not of the page but of the chapter.

In my necessarily brief account of Jane Austen's life (intended only as a foundation to the critical part of this
book) I have, I hope methodically, preferred the earliest source of information, except where a later source of
equal authority gave fuller detail—for example, where the Life was fuller that the Memoir.

35
Full Titles of References

H. Austen, A Biographical Notice of the Author prefixed to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 1818
(reprinted with slight alteration in Bentley's collected edition of J. A.'s novels; the version of 1818 reprinted in
R. W. C.'s edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion).

J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870 (reprinted with parts of J. A.'s unfinished works, 1871; the
second edition, with some of the additions, reprinted, R. W. C., 1926).

M. A. Austen-Leigh, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, 1920.

R. A. Austen-Leigh and W. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, 1913.

A. C. Bradley, 'Jane Austen,' in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 1911.

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 1927.

H. W. Garrod. 'Jane Austen: A Depreciation,' in Essays by Divers Hands (Transactions of the Royal Society
for Literature), 1928.

C. Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Friends, 1902.

P. Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, 1921.

W. Scott, review of Emma in the Quarterly Review, vol. xiv (for 1815; appeared 1816).

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925.

General Commentary: Margaret Kirkham (Essay Date 1983)

SOURCE: Kirkham, Margaret. “Allusion, Irony and Feminism in the Austen Novel.” In Jane
Austen, Feminism, and Fiction, pp. 81-98. Brighton, England: Harvester Press Limited, 1983.

In the following essay, Kirkham asserts that Austen’s novels are both comic and feminist.

Comedy and the Austen Heroines: The Early Novels

F. R. Leavis placed Jane Austen as the inaugurator of the ‘great tradition’ of English nineteenth-century
fiction. But she is unlike the later novelists of this tradition in that she writes comedies, that is, her novels
preserve, and call attention to, certain formal features proper to comedy in its theatrical sense, and this is used
to distance what is represented from life itself, even though character and events are made, for the most part,
to look natural and probable. In George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the distinction between
comedy and tragedy is no longer of importance, for their form of realism attempts to embrace the whole of life
under a single vision. Auerbach speaks of the comédie larmoyante and Sturm und Drang as opening the way
to the realism of Balzac and the naturalism of Zola, in which ‘random individuals from daily life in their
dependence upon historical circumstances’ are made the subject of ‘serious, problematic and even tragic
representation’.1 But the Austen heroine is not realistic in quite this way, for what is ‘serious, problematic and
dependent upon historical circumstances’ about her is subsumed under the formal, comic role which she is
required to play. In the Austen novels the narrator, at crucial moments, when everything has been made to
look natural and probable, draws the reader’s attention to the way in which character and action also fulfil the

36
formal requirements of comedy and, in this way, directs us not to mistake what is represented for a
straightforward imitation of life itself. Sometimes the conventions adhered to are mocked and this, as Lloyd
W. Brown has shown, is especially true of the ‘happy endings’.2

Some critics with a social conscience, including feminist ones, have found the Austen novels complacent in
their optimism, but Jane Austen’s vision does not seem complacent or superficial if we take the formal comic
features of her novels seriously, as part of their total meaning. The comic vision is partial, but it need not be
untruthful provided it is not mistaken for more than it is. Jane Austen puts pressure on the limits of comedy,
but she does not seek to break down the distinction between tragedy and comedy, only to enlarge the scope of
comedy in prose fiction, by making it capable of embodying a serious criticism of contemporary manners and
morals and of contemporary literature. As a feminist moralist, Jane Austen criticises sexist pride and
prejudice as embedded in the laws and customs of her age, but she was also a critic of the same faults in
literature itself. Her interest in the conventions of art is not a means of escaping from her central moral
interest, but a way of showing, through drawing attention to them, that they must be questioned critically if
true understanding is to be achieved. As her work developed she became more, not less, aware of literary form
as in need of the conscious critical attention of the discerning reader. In her later novels she relies upon a
greater awareness of contemporary conventions and their accustomed meanings than the modern reader
always possesses, and this has led to the belief that she became more conservative in her outlook, whereas she
became more radical and more subtle, demanding more in the way of intelligent, critical co-operation in the
reader.

The full strength of Austen’s feminist criticism of life and literature, and the consistency with which she went
on developing new ways of making it, does not appear unless one takes account of literary and theatrical irony
as controlling the total meaning of the major late novels, Mansfield Park and Emma, as well as of the earlier
ones. Part Three of this study is mainly about allusion, irony and feminism in these two novels but, before
discussing that, a little more needs to be said about the character of the Austen comedy, and the way in which
it accommodates both an ideal vision—the idyllic element which Lionel Trilling3 saw in it—together with
forceful and sometimes subversive (to use D. W. Harding’s4 word) criticism of life and letters as they actually
were.

FROM THE AUTHOR

AUSTEN GIVES THE OUTLINE FOR A NOVEL PARODYING THE UNREALISTIC CONVENTIONS
OF THE POPULAR ROMANCES OF THE TIME

Early in her career, in the progress of her first removal, heroine must meet with the hero—all perfection, of
course, and only prevented from paying his addresses to her by some excess of refinement. Wherever she goes
somebody falls in love with her, and she receives repeated offers of marriage, which she always refers wholly
to her father, exceedingly angry that he should not be first applied to. Often carried away by the anti-hero, but
rescued either by her father or the hero. Often reduced to support herself and her father by her talents, and
work for her bread; continually cheated and defrauded of her hire; worn down to a skeleton, and now and then
starved to death. At last, hunted out of civilized society, denied the poor shelter of the humblest cottage, they
are compelled to retreat into Kamschatka, where the poor father, quite worn down, finding his end
approaching, throws himself on the ground, and, after four or five hours of tender advice and parental
admonition to his miserable child, expires in a fine burst of literary enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives
against holders of tithes. Heroine inconsolable for some time, but afterwards crawls back towards her former
country, having at least twenty narrow escapes of falling into the hands of anti-hero; and at last, in the very
nick of time, turning a corner to avoid him, runs into the arms of the hero himself, who, having just shaken off
the scruples which fettered him before, was at the very moment setting off in pursuit of her. The tenderest and
completest éclaircissement takes place, and they are happily united.

37
Austen, Jane. Excerpt from Plan of a Novel. In Sandition, The Watsons, Lady Susan, and Other Miscellanea,
p. 5. London: Dent, 1934, 1979.

Jane Austen is the major comic artist in English of the age we call ‘Romantic’, her scepticism about
Romanticism being largely a product of her feminism, but, in her confidence that the comic vision remained
capable of bringing enlightenment, and of reaching towards the ideal, she is the representative of that true
comic spirit which the Romantics admired in Shakespeare, and which Shelley thought lost in a corrupt age,
like that in which he and Jane Austen lived. Where ‘the calculating principle’ predominates, he tells us, in A
Defence of Poetry,

Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency
and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm and contempt succeed to sympathetic
merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile.

There is, in the Austen comedy, a great deal of wit, some sarcasm and a trace of malignity here and there (for
example, in the portrayal of Aunt Norris and Sir Walter Elliot) but there is more sympathetic merriment than
sarcasm, and the wit is tempered by humour. Jane Austen’s comic vision includes a glimpse of something
ideal and universal, together with a sharp, ironic awareness of how far short we mostly are of it, especially
when ‘dressed in a little brief authority’. The feminism is in the laughter, sometimes rather harsh laughter, but
it is also in the visionary ideal, for Austen manages to create a few brief oases where men and women
experience equal relationships with one another, and where it would appear that the idea of their being
otherwise, at least for those of such superior mind as her heroes and heroines, has never been heard of.

This is not to say that the Austen heroines lead extraordinary lives, or are endowed with extraordinary genius.
The difficulties they experience are not, in many instances, the same as those experienced by men, but the
way they learn to solve them is what matters. Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing that ‘for man and woman . . . truth
must be the same’, says:

Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the
principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.5

That is the central moral principle developed in the Austen novels and, though it goes against Rousseau and
Richardson, it does not go against the author’s Butlerian, secularised Christianity. Gilbert Ryle, observing that
Jane Austen’s

heroines face their moral difficulties and solve their moral problems without recourse to
religious faith or theological doctrines. Nor does it ever occur to them to seek the counsels of
a clergyman,

suggests that Austen ‘draws a curtain between her Sunday thoughts, whatever they were, and her creative
imagination’.6 Perhaps she did think more about revealed religion on Sundays than other days, but even so
there would have been no reason for her Sunday thoughts to come into conflict with her weekday ones. The
Austen heroines act as independent moral agents because that is the way in which the Creator intended those
with powers of reason to act. Since the novelist wishes to show us heroines capable of learning morals
through experience and the exercise of their own judgement, she does not send them off to get the advice of
the few rational clergymen available in her fiction, for to do so would prevent her showing that, while the
Church of England ordains such moral teachers as Mr Collins, Mr Elton and Dr Grant, the natural moral order
of things allows Miss Bennet, Miss Wood-house and Miss Price (under Providence) to do very well without
them, having within themselves, as Miss Price puts it, ‘a better guide . . . than any other person can be’
(Mansfield Park, p. 412).

38
Jane Austen’s heroines are not self-conscious feminists, yet they are all exemplary of the first claim of
Enlightenment feminism: that women share the same moral nature as men, ought to share the same moral
status, and exercise the same responsibility for their own conduct. As Austen’s understanding of the problem
of presenting heroines fit to take the place of central moral intelligence in her novels increased, so did their
moral stature. It is all done, apparently without effort, as though it were perfectly natural for young women to
think, to learn through what passes under their own observation, and to draw conclusions the author thinks
valid from it. It looks natural, but it is done by playing with the mirror of art and producing an illusion. The
illusion is both visionary and salutary, for it suggests how we might live, and criticises the way we actually
live, in a world where women, however marked their abilities, are not thought of (except by a few, mostly
heroes) as equals and ‘partners in life’.

E. H. Gombrich, in his study of Art and Illusion, takes John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, painted in 1816, as
an illuminating example of how what appears an unpremeditated representation of natural landscape is the
outcome of lengthy testing of the painter’s fresh vision against models of landscape painting in his immediate
tradition. Gombrich speaks of Rousseau’s assertion that Emile must copy nature and never other men’s work
as ‘one of those programmes charged with explosive ignorance’, since a greater appearance of fidelity to
Nature is achieved through adaptation and adjustment of earlier models or, as he summarises it, through
‘schema and correction’. Wivenhoe Park

looks so effortless and natural that we accept it as an unquestioning and unproblematic

response to the beauty of the English countryside. But, for the historian there is an added
attraction to this painting, he knows that this freshness of vision was won in a hard struggle.7

These remarks are apposite to Jane Austen as well as to Constable, for her fresh vision of how things might be
in a more natural social order was arrived at in a comparable way, and her art is no more an ‘unquestioning
and unproblematic response’ to English society than Constable’s was to the English landscape. There is,
however, an important difference between the painter and the novelist: Constable wished it to be thought that
he drew directly from Nature and played down his debt to Cozens.8 Austen, being less disturbed than
Constable by awareness of how ‘the tradition’ of any art impinges upon ‘the individual talent’, and sometimes
has to be consciously resisted, draws attention to the models or schemas employed in the formation of her
distinctive, feminist vision, expecting the reader better than a ‘dull elf’ to see their point.

In her earlier work, Jane Austen came up against a major difficulty: the literary models which she needed to
use could not, even when adjusted and corrected, be easily freed of anti-feminist bias. It came naturally to her,
as her earliest writings show, to write burlesque, and two of her early novels—Northanger Abbey and Pride
and Prejudice —develop out of well established burlesque plots. But such burlesque plots, which turn on the
early folly of the heroine, make it difficult to establish her as the central moral intelligence of the novel in
which she appears. An alternative model, taken from the moralistic tradition of female writing in which
contrasting sister-heroines are portrayed, and utilised in Sense and Sensibility, also proved to have intractable
difficulties. Austen’s earlier attempts at the adjustment and correction of such schemas must be considered
before going on to Mansfield Park and Emma.

Sense and Sensibility

The schema used in Sense and Sensibility— that of contrasted heroines, one representing female good sense
and prudence, the other led into error and difficulty by impulsiveness and excesses of feeling and
conduct—was to be found in many women novelists, especially those of an ‘improving’ tendency. In Maria
Edgeworth’s Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795) and Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story (1796) this schema is
used in a straightforward, didactic way. The sensible sister judges aright all the time and eventually, partly as
a result of the homilies she delivers, the imprudent sister is brought to acknowledge her faults and amend her
ways. The purpose is simply to recommend prudence and self-control without emphasis upon the abilities of

39
the heroines, which make them the proper judges of what is prudent and how self control should be exercised.

Sense and Sensibility is an early work, probably less drastically revised than Northanger Abbey or Pride and
Prejudice, and Jane Austen shows some uncertainty about her own purposes in employing the schema, but she
modifies it in two important ways, both of which increase the stature of her pair of heroines. She shows that
both sisters have superior abilities, neither being totally lacking in either sense or sensibility, and she
introduces a range of other characters against whose defects Elinor and Marianne shine.

In the first chapter, we are told that Elinor ‘possessed a strength of understanding and coolness of judgement’,
and that ‘she had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong, but she
knew how to govern them’. Marianne, although over-eager and immoderate, is not represented as lacking
more solid powers of mind: ‘She was sensible and clever.’

As the novel develops, Marianne and Elinor each begin to take on the rounded character of a single, central
heroine. Elinor’s response to the contrite Willoughby goes beyond what is quite appropriate in a
representative of Sense. Marianne’s critical self-analysis after her illness, which is induced by her own
reflections and not the moralising of her sister, is too intelligent to fit a representative of Sensibility. Austen
may have started off with the intention of using this type of schematic plot and characterisation much as it had
been used before, merely pruning it of its tendency to encourage moralising and solemnity. But, because she
creates heroines fully representative of human nature in a larger sense than the schema allows, she discovers
its inadequacies. They become particularly clear in the final chapters, where Marianne’s marriage to Colonel
Brandon fulfils the requirements of the schematic design, but is felt as a betrayal of the developed character
she has become. The schema entailed the showing up of one sister against the other, rather than the
endorsements of their superior judgement in the face of prejudice and error in less sensitive and sensible
people. It did not therefore permit the adequate representation of a single heroine with a good head and a
sound heart.

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is developed from a schema used by Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752), by
Beckford in The Elegant Enthusiast (1796), and by Eaton Stannard Barrett in The Heroine (1813), which
Austen was later to enjoy, and by a number of other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers of
burlesque. It presented particular difficulties for a feminist since, although it turned on the condemnation of
romantic illusions inspired by literature, it characteristically made a heroine the victim of such delusions, and
called on a hero of sense, perhaps aided by a sensible clergyman, to dispel them. Northanger Abbey follows
the schema in making its heroine the subject of absurd delusions following on the reading of romantic novels,
but it corrects the schema in several important ways. First, the heroine, although young and naïve, is always
shown as possessing sound, healthy affections and a good deal of native common sense. Her errors, it is pretty
plain, are not likely to be long-lasting, for her own abilities, with a little experience, are bound to correct them.
Second, the hero, although he is also a clergyman, is not shown as always superior in his judgements. He has
the sense to value novels, saying—in reply to Catherine’s suggestion that ‘gentlemen read better
books’—‘“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who had not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably
stupid.”’ He knows how to admire and how to read Ann Radcliffe:

‘I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries
of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again;—I remember finishing it
in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.’

(p. 106)

40
And he learns to see in Catherine’s unaffected character qualities which inspire true affection. But he is not
without some of the affections of a clever young man as is shown in his strictures on Catherine’s use of ‘nice’,
and in his expounding of the fashionable doctrines of the ‘picturesque’ in chapter XIV. In both instances he is
clever, rather than sensible. Third, although the heroine’s delusions about General Tilney and the ‘forbidden
gallery’ at Northanger are exposed as absurd, they lead the reader to something more substantial. Austen’s
handling of this episode amounts to a major criticism of assumptions associated with the schema of the
burlesque novel in which a heroine learns that her romantic notions are all mistaken, and that the world of the
everyday is better ordered than that of imagination. Catherine accepts the truth of things as Henry Tilney puts
them to her, and is bitterly ashamed of herself for having indulged in wild fantasies about the General’s
conduct to his late wife but, as events show, she was not so far out as might at first appear.

Henry Tilney’s account of his mother’s life and death makes it clear that she did suffer greatly during her
years as the General’s wife and his abstract arguments, in support of the idea that English wives in the
Midland counties of England are protected by better laws and more humane customs than those to be found in
Mrs Radcliffe’s Alps and Pyrenees, ought to raise doubts in the intelligent reader’s mind, though they satisfy
Catherine. Dismissing her dreadful suspicions, he says:

‘What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live.
Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your
own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such
atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a
country where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is
surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay
everything open?’

(pp. 197-8)

This is a powerful rejection of the gothic fantasy of the wicked husband who secretly murders his wife, or
locks her up for years on end in a turret, and Catherine, on reflection, accepts it. However things might be in
Italy, Switzerland and France,

in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence of a wife not
beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated,
servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb,
from every druggist.

(p. 200)

This can be read as a complete dismissal of Catherine’s nonsense, yet there is something really evil about the
General, and his wife had, in a sense, been imprisoned by her marriage to him, perhaps even brought to an
early grave through unhappiness; for General Tilney is allowed by the laws of England and the manners of the
age to exert near absolute power over his wife and daughter, and he does so as an irrational tyrant. What must
a more experienced Catherine see in observing what passes around her? What do our marriage laws connive
at? What does our education prepare us for? A wife not beloved cannot easily be murdered, but perhaps the
’laws of the land and the manners of the age’ do little to protect her as an equal citizen. Servants are not
slaves, but how does a wife’s status differ from that of a slave? Is she not her husband’s property?

In view of the General’s subsequent conduct, it is clear that the correct answers to these questions are not
quite so straightforward as Henry Tilney thinks. As to the matter of sleeping potions, as Austen was to show
through Lady Bertram, these are scarcely needed in a country where a woman, if ‘well married’, may pass
away thirty years half asleep on a sofa, with a lap-dog, and a tangled, useless bit of needlework, and still be

41
reckoned a respectable wife of a respected public man.

Northanger Abbey includes some of Austen’s strongest criticism of the society in which she lived, but the
schema does not permit her to make the heroine herself sufficiently aware of its real defects. Ann Radcliffe’s
novels, which ought, according to the schema, to be exposed as foolish, are here made into something more
complex: a test of the literary intelligence of the hero and heroine. Henry Tilney shows his superiority by
responding to Radcliffe’s powers of invention and imagination without supposing that The Mysteries of
Udolpho is an imitation of life. Catherine also shows her responsiveness, but is required to make a childish
confusion of life and art. Austen then, through her own more realistic invention, shows that there is a further
truth which neither of them has quite seen. This modifies and correct the schema, but at risk of confusing
readers.

15 Pride and Prejudice

Under its earlier title of First Impressions what was to become Pride and Prejudice was thought ready for
publication as early as 1797. As its first title suggests, it must have been at that stage fairly close to a
burlesque schema similar to that of Northanger Abbey —a novel in which the heroine’s romantic confidence
in first impressions (a common article of faith in such heroines) was corrected by experience. Pride and
Prejudice, as it eventually appeared in 1813, had been extensively and recently revised by the author who had
already published Sense and Sensibility, and had begun to think about Mansfield Park. In its final form,
therefore, it comes closer to the later work than either of the other early novels and the schema is very
drastically modified. Elizabeth Bennet’s role, as the heroine who puts too high a value on first impressions,
can still be seen in her infatuation with Mr Wickham, and in her initial dislike of Mr Darcy, but it becomes
unimportant as the novel develops. Half way through the second volume Elizabeth receives the letter from Mr
Darcy in which a true account of past events is made plain to her. Once she has read it and reflected upon its
contents, which she does with speed and a remarkable display of judicious critical acumen, taking due note of
the interest of the writer and the quality of his language, as well as of events and conduct which she had
previously misunderstood, she becomes the best informed, as well as the most intelligent character in the
entire novel. Quicker and cleverer than the hero, she soon sees that he has solid virtues of head and heart
which largely outweigh his tendency to solemnity and self-importance—qualities which his education and
upbringing, as well as his wealth, have imposed upon a naturally affectionate heart and a critical mind. From
this point onwards Elizabeth Bennet takes on the character of the later Austen heroine; she becomes the
central intelligence through whose eyes and understanding events and character are mediated to the reader.
Through the use of the ‘indirect free style’ of narration, Elizabeth’s powers of rational reflection, as well as
her personal point of view, are made plain.

None of the Austen heroines is more attractive than Elizabeth Bennet, none more clearly possessed of
intelligence and warm affections, but as she develops she effectively destroys the role she is supposed to play.
The result is that she begins to look too much like a heroine without a part, a real-life character, not a creature
in print, and this will not do, for her extreme, and improbable, good luck in marriage is acceptable only if it is
properly distanced from life by the formal requirements of plot and part. That is why Jane Austen spoke of
Pride and Prejudice as ‘too light and bright and sparkling’, and why she developed new ways of dealing with
the heroine’s role, so that the plot should no longer turn on a major reversal of her beliefs or judgment. The
later heroines may make mistakes, sometimes serious ones like Emma’s, and their author continues to mock
their absurdities,but they are conceived, from the start, as the central and most enlightened minds of the novels
in which they appear. They no longer (except incidentally) miscast themselves, their difficulties arise from a
miscasting imposed upon them by the society in which they live, where intelligent young women of the
middle class have no role appropriate to their abilities.

In the three late novels, the main thrust of irony is against the errors of law, manners and customs, in failing to
recognise women as the accountable beings they are, or ought to be; and against those forms of contemporary

42
literature which render them ‘objects of pity, bordering on contempt’, by sentimentalising their weaknesses
and making attractive what ought to be exposed as in need of correction. Austen’s adherence to the central
convictions of Enlightenment feminism becomes more marked and more forceful, and the scope of her
comedy is enlarged, not by taking in a wider social spectrum, but by widening and deepening the range of
allusive irony. The catalyst was the popular German dramatist, August von Kotzebue.

Kotzebue and Theatrical Allusion in Mansfield Park and Emma

I am sure that though none of my plays will be staged in fifty years yet the poets of posterity
will use my plots and more often my situations . . . Turn the play into a story and if it still
grips it will live.

(August von Kotzebue)9

Had Jane Austen not made Kotzebue’s Das Kind Der Liebe (Lovers’ Vows) the play-within-the-novel in
Mansfield Park it is unlikely that his name would be familiar to many English readers. His importance to her
later work is, however, not confined to this one novel, but plays a part in the plot of Emma and is still, though
more weakly, felt in Persuasion. In the first two, Austen used his plots and situations and turned the plays into
stories which still grip and still live, but perhaps not quite in the way Kotzebue hoped. Kotzebue becomes the
grit which irritates Austen into the production of pearls, but her obvious scorn for his plays has not been fully
understood as in line with her views as a feminist moralist to whom Kotzebue was the latest and most
influential of those disciples of Rousseau, castigated by Wollstonecraft.

Kotzebue’s plays enjoyed an enormous success in England from 1798 to about 1810. L. F. Thompson says
that, at this time, his ‘name was a household word from John O’Groats to Land’s End’, and his plays,
‘especially The Stranger, Pizzaro, The Birthday and The Natural Son [Lovers’ Vows], were represented not
only in London season after season but on the boards of every market town that could boast such an
ornament’.10

Kotzebue’s great popularity, however, did not make him admired among the intelligentsia. He became a
figure of controversy and was condemned by a good many writers, including Wordsworth, de Quincey,
Coleridge and Scott. The chief complaint against him was that he pandered to the public love of sensational
plots, created characters who did not resemble human beings as we know them to be, and, through excesses of
sentimentality, aroused disgust rather than compassion. Since Kotzebue was also attacked in some right-wing
periodicals on account of his revolutionary political sympathies, the view that all hostility to him was on this
account has gained ground, especially in studies of Jane Austen which discover in her novels the point of view
of an anti-Jacobin. But this is simplistic and hides differences which ought to be considered.

A review of Lovers’ Vows, which appeared in Cobbett’s Porcupine and Anti-Gallican Monitor in 1801, has
been much quoted in support of the belief that Austen’s contempt for this play is a mark of her political
conservatism. In it, the reviewer says:

It is the universal aim of German authors of the present day to exhibit the brightest examples
of virtue among the lower classes of society; while the higher orders, by their folly and
profligacy, are held up to contempt and detestation. This is fully exemplified in Lovers’ Vows.
The Cottager and his Wife are benevolent and charitable; Frederick, the hero of the piece, a
common soldier, the offspring of cupidity, presents an amiable pattern of filial love; while
Count Cassel, a travelled nobleman, is a caricature of every odious and contemptible vice.11

This view of Lovers’ Vows is further discussed below in connection with Mansfield Park, but it ought also to
be considered together with what Wordsworth had to say in the following year. In the Preface to Lyrical

43
Ballads, in which he sets out his purposes in representing such examples of virtue as appear in men like
Michael, Simon Lee the Huntsman, and the Leech-Gatherer, he says that such portraits as these are especially
needed at a time when

a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to
blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to
reduce it to a state of savage torpor.

Among the causes named is the ‘craving for extraordinary incident’ which is encouraged not only by the
press, but the corruption of contemporary literature:

The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and
Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and
deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.

There can be little doubt that Kotzebue was high on Wordsworth’s list of those German dramatists who thus
corrupted the ability of the public to think or feel adequately.

It might, of course, be said that Wordsworth, even in 1802, had strong conservative impulses and that
therefore to quote him, in arguing that an objection to Kotzebue was not necessarily the mark of a reactionary,
carries little weight. But even if there are signs in the Preface of the conflict between Wordsworth’s ‘levelling
muse’ and his conservatism, it must surely be difficult to deny that part of his purpose in Lyrical Ballads
comes close to what the Porcupine reviewer complains of in Kotzebue. If it must be allowed that the great
poet of ‘humble and rustic life’, in the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, objected to Kotzebue as corrupt, we
ought not to convict Jane Austen of a reactionary political motive in making him the target of her scorn,
unless we can be sure that she had no other interest more obviously germane to her subject-matter and
consistent with the whole development of her work.

Jane Austen must have thought little of Kotzebue and less perhaps of the public taste which clamoured for his
works, on account of the extreme silliness of his plays, but she had also a feminist motive in satirising him.
Here it is important to insist that, whatever later readers and critics may think of Kotzebue’s sentimentalising
of innocent adulteresses, or pathetic victims of ‘noble’ seducers, as revolutionary and liberationist, this view is
not in accord with that of Enlightenment feminism. We can see why if we consider L. F. Thompson’s
remarks, bearing in mind what Wollstonecraft had to say about Rousseauist attitudes to women:

Kotzebue’s plays were excellently suited for a female audience. He is never guilty of an
expression to which one can take exception. . . . One of Shakespeare’s plays held the stage
only a night or two because the cast was too exclusively male. Kotzebue gave almost undue
prominence to the other sex and catered especially for their taste with his humanitarianism,
his happy endings, his introduction of children and his appeal rather to the heart than to the
head.12

This explanation of why ‘Kotzebue found favour with the ladies’ is surely a sufficient explanation of why he
did not find favour with the Lady who first appeared in print with Sense and Sensibility, and who may have
wondered, as she watched Bath audiences lapping him up (they can’t have included many revolutionaries),
whether men or women were really much guided by Reason or Nature, at least in their buying of theatre
tickets.

Jane Austen’s ability to use the most depressing evidence of folly to advantage came to the rescue. We know
that she saw the first performance in Bath of Thomas Dibdin’s The Birthday (a version of Kotzebue’s Die
Versöhnung) in 1799. It may have been the first time she had seen a Kotzebue play in the theatre at all. It must

44
have stirred her a good deal, for fifteen years later it provided the schema against which Emma was
constructed. We may assume that she did not share the view of the Bath Herald and Register (surely not a
journal controlled from Paris by Jacobins) reviewer, who said:

The pleasing spectacle of Bluebeard . . . was again brought forward Saturday evening last . . .
preceded by Kotzebue’s admirable drama of The Birthday. If the German author has justly
drawn down censure for the immorality of his productions for the stage—this may be
accepted as his amende honorable—it is certainly throughout unexception-ably calculated to
promote the best interests of virtue and the purest principles of benevolence and, though
written much in the style of Sterne, it possesses humour without a single broad Shandyism.13

The Birthday is about two brothers who have quarrelled over ‘a garden’, and been at daggers drawn about it
for fifteen years. They are eventually reconciled by the heroine, Emma, the daughter of one of them, who
believes (falsely as it turns out) that she can never marry because of her duty to devote herself to her irascible
and stupid father. How Jane Austen used this schema in Emma is discussed below; all that I wish to establish
here is that she became acquainted with Kotzebue’s work almost as soon as his success in England came
about, and that her opinion of it was not in accord with that of the reviewer of a respectable Bath newspaper
whose circulation was maintained by its bourgeois (or better) readership, in a city never much associated with
revolutionary sympathies. Her use of ironic allusion to Kotzebue in two of the new novels begun after 1812
shows how strongly she reacted to him, and also suggests, as is confirmed by other evidence, that, although
the writing of Mansfield Park did not begin until 1813, the working on ideas that eventually came to fruition
in the later work began much earlier under the stimulus of influences away from Steventon.

In developing her later comedy as a criticism of contemporary literature and theatre as well as life, Jane
Austen made use of Shakespeare, the touchstone of truth and nature in art not only for Dr Johnson, but for the
major poets of her own generation. Johnson says, in the 1765 Preface to his edition of Shakespeare:

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by

fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances
invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of
human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no
heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he
should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion. Even where the agency is
supernatural the dialogue is level with life.

Jane Austen’s references to Shakespeare in Mansfield Park (chapter III of the third volume) show that she is
here invoking him in such a light to contrast with Kotzebue. Coleridge also contrasts the two. In Shakespeare
there is a ‘signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to attract and temper each other’.
This adherence prevents him from exaggeration of vice and virtue and from the sentimentalising of morals, in
the interest of particular classes or groups:

Keeping at all times in the high road of life, Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no
interesting incests, no virtuous vice: he never renders that amiable which religion and reason
alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher,
the Kotzebues of the day . . . Let the morality of Shakespeare be contrasted with that of the
writers of his own, or the succeeding, age, or of the present day, who boast their superiority in
this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of
Shakespeare . . . he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,—does not make every
magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate; he has
no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental rat-catchers.

45
 (Lectures, 1818)

Jane Austen’s view, as shown in her later novels, is partly in accord with this, for she too sees Shakespeare as
upholding what ‘religion and reason alike’ teach us about Nature and morals, and Kotzebue as distorting it by
the sentimental treatment of a particular class of characters. But the class which concerns her is not that of the
poor contrasted with the rich, but of women contrasted with men. What she thought about benevolent butchers
and sentimental rat-catchers, the figures who, in Coleridge’s rhetoric, become the representatives of ‘the
poor’, we can only guess for she avoids dealing with them, but we can see, from her treatment of schemas
derived from Kotzebue, that she thought his treatment of women, whether village girls or aristocrats,
objectionable, because he does not depict them as full human beings accountable for their own actions, but as
relative creatures whose highest moral function is to excite compassion in men.

Austen’s criticism of Kotzebue is, above all, that he does not draw women as ‘mixed characters’, whereas
Shakespeare, ‘who has no heroes’ and no heroines either, if by these we mean ‘pictures of perfection’, does.
Kotzebue’s innocent female victims may not be guilty of broad Shandyisms, but their language ought to
excite disgust, for it was not fit for Englishwomen of sense. Beside it, the languages of a Portia or a Rosalind
(allowing for a little coarseness, common in a less polished age) was from a pure and undefiled well, fit for
Englishwomen who valued their liberty under the law of reason and nature.

Some of the most perceptive nineteenth-century critics of Austen—Whately, G. H. Lewes, Richard

Simpson—found themselves comparing her with Shakespeare as a humourist and as a faithful portrayer of
human nature. And it was her greatest achievement that she brought the central argument and subject matter
of English feminists from Astell to Wollstonecraft under the humane influence of Shakespearian comedy,
seeing in the poet of Nature an enlarged understanding of men and women which might guide her own age
towards something better than Kotzebue. Of course, she also rejoiced, like Shakespeare, in human folly, and
relished her own role of female-philosopher-turned-Puck—never more so, perhaps, than when she associated
Mansfield Park with the truths of the woods near Athens. For Mansfield Park, in which the domestic
government of an English estate is exposed as based on false principles, makes the education of Sir Thomas
Bertram, Bart, MP, rather than of Miss Fanny Price, one of its central ironic themes. The benevolent, but
mistaken, Patriarch lives to profit by such ’a contrast . . . as time is for ever producing between the plans and
decisions of mortals, for their own instruction, and their neighbours’ entertainment’ (p. 472; my italics). The
sparkle of confident, feminist intelligence was never more boldly displayed than in Austen’s invocation of
Puck’s ‘Lord what fools these mortals be’, in her presentation of the august and formidable Sir Thomas,
whose Northamptonshire seat cannot have been many miles distant from that of Sir Charles Grandison.

Notes

Page references to the novels of Jane Austen are to R. W. Chapman’s The Novels of Jane Austen, Oxford,
1926, and to his Minor Works, Oxford, 1954. Page references to the letters are to Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. R.
W. Chapman, Oxford, 1952. Page references to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
are to the Penguin edition, ed. Miriam Kramnick, 1975.

1. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, Princeton, 1953, p. 489.

2. Lloyd W. Brown, ’The Comic Conclusions of Jane Austen’s Novels’, PMLA., no. 84, 1969, passim.

3. ‘Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen’, Introduction to the Riverside edn of Emma, reprinted in Emma: A
Casebook, ed. David Lodge, London, 1968, p. 154.

4. ‘Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’, Scrutiny, VIII, 1940.

46
5. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 139.

6. ‘Jane Austen and the Moralists’, Critical Essays [Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. B. C. Southam,
London, 1968], p. 117.

7. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, London, 1960, p. 29.

8. ibid., p. 155.

9. Introduction to Neue Schauspiele, quoted by L. F. Thompson, Kotzebue, A Survey of His Progress in

England and France, Paris, 1928, p. 47.

10. ibid., p. 55.

11. Quoted by William Reitzel, ‘Mansfield Park and Lovers’ Vows‘, R.E.S. [Review of English Studies], vol.
9, no. 36, October 1933, p. 453.

12. Thompson, op. cit., p. 103.

13. Bath Herald and Register, 29 June 1799, quoted by Jean Freeman, Jane Austen in Bath, 1969, p. 15.

Title Commentary: Emma

LIONEL TRILLING (ESSAY DATE 1965)

SOURCE: Trilling, Lionel. "Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen." In Beyond Culture:
Essays on Literature and Learning, pp. 28-49. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.

In the following essay, Trilling argues that Emma is the greatest of Austen's novels.

It is possible to say of Jane Austen, as perhaps we can say of no other writer, that the opinions which are held
of her work are almost as interesting, and almost as important to think about, as the work itself. This
statement, even with the qualifying "almost," ought to be, on its face, an illegitimate one. We all know that the
reader should come to the writer with no preconceptions, taking no account of any previous opinion. But this,
of course, he cannot do. Every established writer exists in the aura of his legend—the accumulated opinion
that we cannot help being aware of, the image of his personality that has been derived, correctly or
incorrectly, from what he has written. In the case of Jane Austen, the legend is of an unusually compelling
kind. Her very name is a charged one. The homely quaintness of the Christian name, the cool elegance of the
surname, seem inevitably to force upon us the awareness of her sex, her celibacy, and her social class.
"Charlotte Brontë" rumbles like thunder and drowns out any such special considerations. But "Jane Austen"
can by now scarcely fail to imply femininity, and, at that, femininity of a particular kind and in a particular
social setting. It dismays many new readers that certain of her admirers call her Jane, others Miss Austen.
Either appellation suggests an unusual, and questionable, relation with this writer, a relation that does not
consort with the literary emotions we respect. The new reader perceives from the first that he is not to be
permitted to proceed in simple literary innocence. Jane Austen is to be for him not only a writer but an issue.
There are those who love her; there are those—no doubt they are fewer but they are no less passionate—who
detest her; and the new reader understands that he is being solicited to a fierce partisanship, that he is required
to make no mere literary judgment but a decision about his own character and personality, and about his

47
relation to society and all of life.

And indeed the nature of the partisanship is most intensely personal and social. The matter at issue is: What
kind of people like Jane Austen? What kind of people dislike her? Sooner or later the characterization is made
or implied by one side or the other, and with extreme invidiousness. It was inevitable that there should arise a
third body of opinion, which holds that it is not Jane Austen herself who is to be held responsible for the faults
that are attributed to her by her detractors, but rather the people who admire her for the wrong reasons and in
the wrong language and thus create a false image of her. As far back as 1905 Henry James was repelled by
what a more recent critic, Professor Marvin Mudrick, calls "gentle-Janeism" and he spoke of it with great
acerbity. James admired Jane Austen; his artistic affinity with her is clear, and he may be thought to have
shared her social preferences and preoccupations. Yet James could say of her reputation that it had risen
higher than her intrinsic interest warranted: the responsibility for this, he said, lay with "the body of
publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of magazines, which have found their 'dear,' our dear, everybody's
dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose."1 In our own day, Dr. Leavis's admiration for Jane Austen is
matched in intensity by his impatience with her admirers. Mr. D. W. Harding in a well-known essay2 has told
us how the accepted form of admiration of Jane Austen kept him for a long time from reading her novels, and
how he was able to be at ease with them only when he discovered that they were charged with scorn of the
very people who set the common tone of admiration. And Professor Mudrick, in the preface to his book on
Jane Austen,3 speaks of the bulk of the criticism of her work as being "a mere mass of cozy family adulation,
self-glorif[ication] … and nostalgic latterday enshrinements of the gentle-hearted chronicler of Regency
order." It is the intention of Professor Mudrick's book to rescue Jane Austen from coziness and nostalgia by
representing her as a writer who may be admired for her literary achievement, but who is not to be loved, and
of whom it is to be said that certain deficiencies of temperament account for certain deficiencies of her literary
practice.

The impatience with the common admiring view of Jane Austen is not hard to understand and sympathize
with, the less so because (as Mr. Harding and Professor Mudrick say) admiration seems to stimulate
self-congratulation in those who give it, and to carry a reproof of the deficient sensitivity, reasonableness, and
even courtesy, of those who withhold their praise. One may refuse to like almost any author and incur no
other blame from his admirers than that of being wanting in taste in that one respect. But not to like Jane
Austen is to put oneself under suspicion of a general personal inadequacy and even—let us face it—of a want
of breeding.

This is absurd and distasteful. And yet we cannot deal with this unusual—this extravagantly
personal—response to a writer simply in the way of condemnation. No doubt every myth of a literary person
obscures something of the truth. But it may also express some part of the truth as well. If Jane Austen is
carried outside the proper confines of literature, if she has been loved in a fashion that some temperaments
must find objectionable and that a strict criticism must call illicit, the reason is perhaps to be found not only in
the human weakness of her admirers, in their impulse to self-flattery, or in whatever other fault produces their
deplorable tone. Perhaps a reason is also to be found in the work itself, in some unusual promise that it seems
to make, in some hope that it holds out.

II

Of Jane Austen's six great novels Emma is surely the one that is most fully representative of its author. Pride
and Prejudice is of course more popular. It is the one novel in the canon that "everybody" reads, the one that
is most often reprinted. Pride and Prejudice deserves its popularity, but it is not a mere snobbery, an affected
aversion from the general suffrage, that makes thoughtful readers of Jane Austen judge Emma to be the
greater book—not the more delightful but the greater. It cannot boast the brilliant, unimpeded energy of Pride
and Prejudice, but that is because the energy which it does indeed have is committed to dealing with a more
resistant matter. In this it is characteristic of all three novels of Jane Austen's mature period, of which it is the

48
second. Persuasion, the third and last, has a charm that is traditionally, and accurately, called "autumnal," and
it is beyond question a beautiful book. But Persuasion, which was published posthumously and which may
not have been revised to meet the author's full intention, does not have the richness and substantiality of
Emma. As for Mansfield Park, the first work of the mature period, it quite matches Emma in point of
substantiality, but it makes a special and disturbing case. Greatly admired in its own day—far more than
Emma—Mansfield Park is now disliked by many readers who like everything else that Jane Austen wrote.
They are repelled by its heroine and by all that she seems to imply of the author's moral and religious
preferences at this moment of her life, for Fanny Price consciously devotes herself to virtue and piety, which
she achieves by a willing submissiveness that goes against the modern grain. What is more, the author seems
to be speaking out against wit and spiritedness (while not abating her ability to represent these qualities), and
virtually in praise of dullness and acquiescence, and thus to be condemning her own peculiar talents.
Mansfield Park is an extraordinary novel, and only Jane Austen could have achieved its profound and curious
interest, but its moral tone is antipathetic to contemporary taste, and no essay I have ever written has met with
so much resistance as the one in which I tried to say that it was not really a perverse and wicked book. But
Emma, as richly complex as Mansfield Park, arouses no such antagonism, and the opinion that holds it to be
the greatest of all Jane Austen's novels is, I believe, correct.

Professor Mudrick says that everyone has misunderstood Emma, and he may well be right, for Emma is a very
difficult novel. We in our time are used to difficult books and like them. But Emma is more difficult than any
of the hard books we admire. The difficulty of Proust arises from the sheer amount and complexity of his
thought, the difficulty of Joyce from the brilliantly contrived devices of representation, the difficulty of Kafka
from a combination of doctrine and mode of communication. With all, the difficulty is largely literal; it
lessens in the degree that we attend closely to what the books say; after each sympathetic reading we are the
less puzzled. But the difficulty of Emma is never overcome. We never know where to have it. If we finish it at
night and think we know what it is up to, we wake the next morning to believe it is up to something quite else;
it has become a different book. Reginald Farrer speaks at length of the difficulty of Emma and then goes on to
compare its effect with that of Pride and Prejudice. "While twelve readings of Pride and Prejudice give you
twelve periods of pleasure repeated, as many readings of Emma give you that pleasure, not repeated only, but
squared and squared again with each perusal, till at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never
understood anything like the widening sum of its delights."4 This is so, and for the reason that none of the
twelve readings permits us to flatter ourselves that we have fully understood what the novel is doing. The
effect is extraordinary, perhaps unique. The book is like a person—not to be comprehended fully and finally
by any other person. It is perhaps to the point that it is the only one of Jane Austen's novels that has for its title
a person's name.

For most people who recognize the difficulty of the book, the trouble begins with Emma herself. Jane Austen
was surely aware of what a complexity she was creating in Emma, and no doubt that is why she spoke of her
as "a heroine whom no one will like except myself." Yet this puts it in a minimal way—the question of
whether we will like or not like Emma does not encompass the actuality of the challenge her character offers.
John Henry Newman stated the matter more accurately, and very charmingly, in a letter of 1837. He says that
Emma is the most interesting of Jane Austen's heroines, and that he likes her. But what is striking in his
remark is this sentence: "I feel kind to her whenever I think of her." This does indeed suggest the real question
about Emma, whether or not we will find it in our hearts to be kind to her.

Inevitably we are attracted to her, we are drawn by her energy and style, and by the intelligence they generate.
Here are some samples of her characteristic tone:

"Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; it is poverty only which makes celibacy
contemptible to a generous public!"

49
 Emma was sorry; to have to pay civilities to a person she did not like through three long
months!—to be always doing more than she wished and less than she ought!

"I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they
are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly
is not always folly."

"Oh! I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.…"

[On an occasion when Mr. Knightley comes to a dinner party in his carriage, as Emma thinks
he should, and not on foot:] "… There is always a look of consciousness or bustle when
people come in a way which they know to be beneath them. You think you carry it off very
well, I dare say, but with you it is a sort of bravado, an air of affected unconcern; I always
observe it whenever I meet you under these circumstances. Now you have nothing to try for.
You are not afraid of being supposed ashamed. You are not striving to look taller than any
body else. Now I shall really be happy to walk into the same room with you."

We cannot be slow to see what is the basis of this energy and style and intelligence. It is self-love. There is a
great power of charm in self-love, although, to be sure, the charm is an ambiguous one. We resent it and resist
it, yet we are drawn by it, if only it goes with a little grace or creative power. Nothing is easier to pardon than
the mistakes and excesses of self-love: if we are quick to condemn them, we take pleasure in forgiving them.
And with good reason, for they are the extravagance of the first of virtues, the most basic and biological of the
virtues, that of self-preservation.

But we distinguish between our response to the self-love of men and the self-love of women. No woman
could have won the forgiveness that has been so willingly given (after due condemnation) to the self-regard
of, say, Yeats and Shaw. We understand self-love to be part of the moral life of all men; in men of genius we
expect it to appear in unusual intensity and we take it to be an essential element of their power. The
extraordinary thing about Emma is that she has a moral life as a man has a moral life. And she doesn't have it
as a special instance, as an example of a new kind of woman, which is the way George Eliot's Dorothea
Brooke has her moral life, but quite as a matter of course, as a given quality of her nature.

And perhaps that is what Jane Austen meant when she said that no one would like her heroine—and what
Newman meant when he said that he felt kind to Emma whenever he thought of her. She needs kindness if she
is to be accepted in all her exceptional actuality. Women in fiction only rarely have the peculiar reality of the
moral life that self-love bestows. Most commonly they exist in a moonlike way, shining by the reflected moral
light of men. They are "convincing" or "real" and sometimes "delightful," but they seldom exist as men
exist—as genuine moral destinies. We do not take note of this; we are so used to the reflected quality that we
do not observe it. It is only on the rare occasions when a female character like Emma confronts us that the
difference makes us aware of the usual practice. Nor can we say that novels are deficient in realism when they
present women as they do: it is the presumption of our society that women's moral life is not as men's. No
change in the modern theory of the sexes, no advance in status that women have made, has yet contradicted
this. The self-love that we do countenance in women is of a limited and passive kind, and we are troubled if it
is as assertive as the self-love of men is permitted, and expected, to be. Not men alone, but women as well,
insist on this limitation, imposing the requirement the more effectually because they are not conscious of it.

But there is Emma, given over to self-love, wholly aware of it and quite cherishing it. Mr. Knightley rebukes
her for heedless conduct and says, "I leave you to your own reflections." And Emma wonderfully replies:
"Can you trust me with such flatterers? Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?" She is 'Emma, never
loth to be first," loving pre-eminence and praise, loving power and frank to say so.

50
Inevitably we are drawn to Emma. But inevitably we hold her to be deeply at fault. Her self-love leads her to
be a self-deceiver. She can be unkind. She is a dreadful snob.

Her snobbery is of the first importance in her character, and it is of a special sort. The worst instance of it is
very carefully chosen to put her thoroughly in the wrong. We are on her side when she mocks Mrs. Elton's
vulgarity, even though we feel that so young a woman (Emma is twenty) ought not set so much store by
manners and tone—Mrs. Elton, with her everlasting barouchelandau and her "caro sposo" and her talk of her
spiritual "resources," is herself a snob in the old sense of the word, which meant a vulgar person aspiring to an
inappropriate social standing. But when Emma presumes to look down on the young farmer, Robert Martin,
and undertakes to keep little Harriet Smith from marrying him, she makes a truly serious mistake, a mistake of
nothing less than national import.

Here it is to be observed that Emma is a novel that is touched—lightly but indubitably—by national feeling.
Perhaps this is the result of the Prince Regent's having expressed his admiration for Mansfield Park and his
willingness to have the author dedicate her next book to him: it is a circumstance which allows us to suppose
that Jane Austen thought of herself, at this point in her career, as having, by reason of the success of her art, a
relation to the national ethic. At any rate, there appears in Emma a tendency to conceive of a specifically
English ideal of life. Knightley speaks of Frank Churchill as falling short of the demands of this ideal: "No,
Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very 'aimable,'
have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of
other people: nothing really amiable about him." Again, in a curiously impressive moment in the book, we are
given a detailed description of the countryside as seen by the party at Donwell Abbey, and this comment
follows: "It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture [agriculture,
of course, is meant], English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being oppressive." This is a larger
consideration than the occasion would appear to require; there seems no reason to expect this vision of
"England's green and pleasant land." Or none until we note that the description of the view closes thus: "…
and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in
front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it." Abbey-Mill Farm is the property of young
Robert Martin, for whom Emma has expressed a principled social contempt, and the little burst of strong
feeling has the effect, among others, of pointing up the extremity of Emma's mistake.

It is often said, sometimes by way of reproach, that Jane Austen took no account in her novels of the great
political events of her lifetime, nor of the great social changes that were going on in England. "… In Jane
Austen's novels," says Arnold Hauser in his Social History of Art, "social reality was the soil in which
characters were rooted but in no sense a problem which the novelist made any attempt to solve or interpret."
The statement, true in some degree, goes too far. There is in some sense an interpretation of social problems in
Jane Austen's contrivance of the situation of Emma and Robert Martin. The yeoman class had always held a
strong position in English class feeling, and, at this time especially, only stupid or ignorant people felt
privileged to look down upon it. Mr. Knightley, whose social position is one of the certainties of the book, as
is his freedom from any trace of snobbery, speaks of young Martin, who is his friend, as a "gentleman
farmer," and it is clear that he is on his way to being a gentleman pure and simple. And nothing was of greater
importance to the English system at the time of the French Revolution that the relatively easy recruitment to
the class of gentlemen. It made England unique among European nations. Here is Tocqueville's view of the
matter as set forth in the course of his explanation of why England was not susceptible to revolution as France
was:

It was not merely parliamentary government, freedom of speech, and the jury system that
made England so different from the rest of contemporary Europe. There was something still
more distinctive and more far-reaching in its effects. England was the only country in which
the caste system had been totally abolished, not merely modified. Nobility and commoners
joined forces in business enterprises, entered the same professions, and—what is still more

51
 significant—intermarried. The daughter of the greatest lord in the land could marry a "new"
man without the least compunction.…

Though this curious revolution (for such in fact it was) is hidden in the mists of time, we can
detect traces of it in the English language. For several centuries the word "gentleman" has had
in England a quite different application from what it had when it originated.… A study of the
connection between the history of language and history proper would certainly be revealing.
Thus if we follow the mutation in time and place of the English word "gentleman" (a
derivative of our gentilhomme), we find its connotation being steadily widened in England as
the classes draw nearer to each other and intermingle. In each successive century we find it
being applied to men a little lower in the social scale. Next, with the English, it crosses to
America. And now in America, it is applicable to all male citizens, indiscriminately. Thus its
history is the history of democracy itself.5

Emma's snobbery, then, is nothing less than a contravention of the best—and safest—tendency of English
social life. And to make matters worse, it is a principled snobbery. "A young farmer … is the very last sort of
person to raise my curiosity. The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel that I can have
nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful
to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as
much above my notice as in every other he is below it." This is carefully contrived by the author to seem as
dreadful as possible; it quite staggers us, and some readers will even feel that the author goes too far in
permitting Emma to make this speech.

Snobbery is the grossest fault that arises from Emma's self-love, but it is not the only fault. We must also take
account of her capacity for unkindness. This can be impulsive and brutal, as in the witticism directed to Miss
Bates at the picnic, which makes one of the most memorable scenes in the whole range of English fiction; or
extended and systematic, as in her conspiracy with Frank Churchill to quiz Jane Fairfax. Then we know her to
be a gossip, at least when she is tempted by Frank Churchill. She finds pleasure in dominating and has no
compunctions about taking over the rule of Harriet Smith's life. She has been accused, on the ground of her
own estimate of herself, of a want of tenderness, and she has even been said to be without sexual
responsiveness.

Why, then, should anyone be kind to Emma? There are several reasons, of which one is that we come into an
unusual intimacy with her. We see her in all the elaborateness of her mistakes, in all the details of her wrong
conduct. The narrative technique of the novel brings us very close to her and makes us aware of each misstep
she will make. The relation that develops between ourselves and her becomes a strange one—it is the relation
that exists between our ideal self and our ordinary fallible self. We become Emma's helpless conscience, her
unavailing guide. Her fault is the classic one of hubris, excessive pride, and it yields the classic result of
blindness, of an inability to interpret experience to the end of perceiving reality, and we are aware of each
false step, each wrong conclusion, that she will make. Our hand goes out to hold her back and set her straight,
and we are distressed that it cannot reach her.

There is an intimacy anterior to this. We come close to Emma because, in a strange way, she permits us
to—even invites us to—by being close to herself. When we have said that her fault is hubris or self-love, we
must make an immediate modification, for her self-love, though it involves her in self-deception, does not
lead her to the ultimate self-deception—she believes she is clever, she insists she is right, but she never says
she is good. A consciousness is always at work in her, a sense of what she ought to be and do. It is not an
infallible sense, anything but that, yet she does not need us, or the author, or Mr. Knightley, to tell her, for
example, that she is jealous of Jane Fairfax and acts badly to her; indeed, "she never saw [Jane Fairfax]
without feeling that she had injured her." She is never offended—she never takes the high self-defensive
line—when once her bad conduct is made apparent to her. Her sense of her superiority leads her to the

52
"insufferable vanity" of believing "herself in the secret of every-body's feelings" and to the "unpardonable
arrogance" of "proposing to arrange everybody's destiny," yet it is an innocent vanity and an innocent
arrogance which, when frustrated and exposed, do not make her bitter but only ashamed. That is why, bad as
her behavior may be, we are willing to be implicated in it. It has been thought that in the portrait of Emma
there is "an air of confession," that Jane Austen was taking account of "something offensive" that she and
others had observed in her own earlier manner and conduct, and whether or not this is so, it suggests the
quality of intimacy which the author contrives that we shall feel with the heroine.

Then, when we try to explain our feeling of kindness to Emma, we ought to remember that many of her wrong
judgments and actions are directed to a very engaging end, a very right purpose. She believes in her own
distinction and vividness and she wants all around her to be distinguished and vivid. It is indeed unpardonable
arrogance, as she comes to see, that she should undertake to arrange Harriet Smith's destiny, that she plans to
"form" Harriet, making her, as it were, the mere material or stuff of a creative act. Yet the destiny is not
meanly conceived, the act is meant to be truly creative—she wants Harriet to be a distinguished and not a
commonplace person, she wants nothing to be commonplace, she requires of life that it be well shaped and
impressive, and alive. It is out of her insistence that the members of the picnic shall cease being dull and begin
to be witty that there comes her famous insult to Miss Bates. Her requirement that life be vivid is too often
expressed in terms of social deportment—she sometimes talks like a governess or a dowager—but it is, in its
essence, a poet's demand.

She herself says that she lacks tenderness, although she makes the self-accusation in her odd belief that
Harriet possesses this quality; Harriet is soft and "feminine," but she is not tender. Professor Mudrick
associates the deficiency with Emma's being not susceptible to men. This is perhaps so; but if it is, there may
be found in her apparent sexual coolness something that is impressive and right. She makes great play about
the feelings and about the fineness of the feelings that one ought to have; she sets great store by literature
(although she does not read the books she prescribes for herself) and makes it a condemnation of Robert
Martin that he does not read novels. Yet although, like Don Quixote and Emma Bovary, her mind is shaped
and deceived by fiction, she is remarkable for the actuality and truth of her sexual feelings. Inevitably she
expects that Frank Churchill will fall in love with her and she with him, but others are more deceived in the
outcome of this expectation than she is—it takes but little time for her to see that she does not really respond
to Churchill, that her feeling for him is no more than the lively notice that an attractive and vivacious girl
takes of an attractive and vivacious young man. Sentimental sexuality is not part of her nature, however much
she feels it ought to be part of Harriet Smith's nature. When the right time comes, she chooses her husband
wisely and seriously and eagerly.

There is, then, sufficient reason to be kind to Emma, and perhaps for nothing so much as the hope she
expresses when she begins to understand her mistakes, that she will become "more acquainted with herself."
And, indeed, all through the novel she has sought better acquaintance with herself, not wisely, not adequately,
but assiduously. How modern a quest it is, and how thoroughy it confirms Dr. Leavis's judgment that Jane
Austen is the first truly modern novelist of England. "In art," a critic has said, "the decision to be
revolutionary usually counts for very little. The most radical changes have come from personalities who were
conservative and even conventional …"6 Jane Austen, conservative and even conventional as she was,
perceived the nature of the deep psychological change which accompanied the establishment of democratic
society—she was aware of the increase of the psychological burden of the individual, she understood the new
necessity of conscious self-definition and self-criticism, the need to make private judgments of reality.7 And
there is no reality about which the modern person is more uncertain and more anxious than the reality of
himself.

III

53
But the character of Emma is not the only reason for the difficulty of the novel. We must also take into
account the particular genre to which the novel in some degree belongs—the pastoral idyll. It is an archaic
genre which has the effect of emphasizing by contrast the brilliant modernity of Emma, and its nature may be
understood through the characters of Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates.

These two people proved a stumbling-block to one of Jane Austen's most distinguished and devoted admirers,
Sir Walter Scott. In his review of Emma in The Quarterly Review, Scott said that "characters of folly and
simplicity, such as old Woodhouse and Miss Bates" are "apt to become tiresome in fiction as in real society."
But Scott is wrong. Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates are remarkably interesting, even though they have been
created on a system of character portrayal that is no longer supposed to have validity—they exist by reason of
a single trait which they display whenever they appear. Miss Bates is possessed of continuous speech and of a
perfectly free association of ideas which is quite beyond her control; once launched into utterance, it is
impossible for her to stop. Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's father, has no other purpose in life than to preserve his
health and equanimity, and no other subject of conversation than the means of doing so. The commonest
circumstances of life present themselves to him as dangerous—to walk or to drive is to incur unwarrantable
risk, to eat an egg not coddled in the prescribed way is to invite misery; nothing must ever change in his
familial situation; he is appalled by the propensity of young people to marry, and to marry strangers at that.

Of the two "characters of folly and simplicity," Mr. Woodhouse is the more remarkable because he so
entirely, so extravagantly, embodies a principle—of perfect stasis, of entire inertia. Almost in the degree that
Jane Austen was interested in the ideal of personal energy, she was amused and attracted by persons capable
of extreme inertness. She does not judge them harshly, as we incline to do—we who scarcely recall how
important a part in Christian feeling the dream of rest once had. Mr. Woodhouse is a more extreme
representation of inertness than Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park. To say that he represents a denial of life
would not be correct. Indeed, by his fear and his movelessness, he affirms life and announces his naked
unadorned wish to avoid death and harm. To life, to mere life, he sacrifices almost everything.

But if Mr. Woodhouse has a more speculative interest than Miss Bates, there is not much to choose between
their achieved actuality as fictional characters. They are, as I have said, created on a system of character
portrayal that we regard as primitive, but the reality of existence which fictional characters may claim does
not depend only upon what they do, but also upon what others do to or about them, upon the way they are
regarded and responded to. And in the community of Highbury, Miss Bates and Mr. Wood-house are sacred.
They are fools, to be sure, as everyone knows. But they are fools of a special and transcendent kind. They are
innocents—of such is the kingdom of heaven. They are children, who have learned nothing of the guile of the
world. And their mode of existence is the key to the nature of the world of Highbury, which is the world of the
pastoral idyll. London is but sixteen miles away—Frank Churchill can ride there and back for a haircut—but
the proximity of the life of London serves but to emphasize the spiritual geography of Highbury. The weather
plays a great part in Emma; in no other novel of Jane Austen's is the succession of the seasons, and cold and
heat, of such consequence, as if to make the point which the pastoral idyll characteristically makes, that the
only hardships that man ought to have to endure are meteorological. In the Forest of Arden we suffer only
"the penalty of Adam, / The seasons' difference," and Amiens' song echoes the Duke's words:

Here shall he see

No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

Some explicit thought of the pastoral idyll is in Jane Austen's mind, and with all the ambivalence that marks
the attitude of As You Like It toward the dream of man's life in nature and simplicity. Mrs. Elton wants to
make the strawberry party at Donwell Abbey into a fête champêtre: "It is to be a morning scheme, you know,
Knightley; quite a simple thing. I shall wear a large bonnet, and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my
arm. Here,—probably this basket with pink ribbon. Nothing can be more simple, you see. And Jane will have

54
such another. There is to be no form or parade—a sort of gipsy party.—We are to walk about your gardens,
and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees;—and whatever else you may like to provide, it is to
be all out of doors—a table spread in the shade, you know. Every thing as natural and simple as possible. Is
not that your idea?" To which Knightley replies: "Not quite. My idea of the simple and natural will be to have
the table spread in the dining-room. The nature and the simplicity of gentlemen and ladies, with their servants
and furniture, I think is best observed by meals within doors. When you are tired of eating strawberries in the
garden, there will be cold meat in the house."

That the pastoral idyll should be mocked as a sentimentality by its association with Mrs. Elton, whose
vulgarity in large part consists in flaunting the cheapened version of high and delicate ideals, and that
Knightley should answer her as he does—this is quite in accordance with our expectation of Jane Austen's
judgment. Yet it is only a few pages later that the members of the party walk out to see the view and we get
that curious passage about the sweetness of the view, "sweet to the eye and to the mind." And we cannot help
feeling that "English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being
oppressive" make an England seen—if but for the moment—as an idyll.

The idyll is not a genre which nowadays we are likely to understand. Or at least not in fiction, the art which
we believe must always address itself to actuality. The imagination of felicity is difficult for us to exercise.
We feel that it is a betrayal of our awareness of our world of pain, that it is politically inappropriate. And yet
one considerable critic of literature thought otherwise. Schiller is not exactly of our time, yet he is remarkably
close to us in many ways and he inhabited a world scarcely less painful than ours, and he thought that the
genre of the idyll had an important bearing upon social and political ideas. As Schiller defines it, the idyll is
the literary genre that "presents the idea and description of an innocent and happy humanity."8 This implies
remoteness from the "artificial refinements of fashionable society"; and to achieve this remoteness poets have
commonly set their idylls in actually pastoral surroundings and in the infancy of humanity. But the limitation
is merely accidental—these circumstances "do not form the object of the idyll, but are only to be regarded as
the most natural means to attain this end. The end is essentially to portray man in a state of innocence, which
means a state of harmony and peace with himself and the external world." And Schiller goes on to assert the
political importance of the genre: "A state such as this is not merely met with before the dawn of civilization;
it is also the state to which civilization aspires, as to its last end, if only it obeys a determined tendency in its
progress. The idea of a similar state, and the belief in the possible reality of this state, is the only thing that can
reconcile man with all the evils to which he is exposed in the path of civilization.…"

It is the poet's function—Schiller makes it virtually the poet's political duty—to represent the idea of
innocence in a "sensuous" way, that is, to make it seem real. This he does by gathering up the elements of
actual life that do partake of innocence, and that the predominant pain of life leads us to forget, and forming
them into a coherent representation of the ideal.9

But the idyll as traditionally conceived has an aesthetic deficiency of which Schiller is quite aware. Works in
this genre, he says, appeal to the heart but not to the mind. "… We can only seek them and love them in
moments in which we need calm, and not when our faculties aspire after movement and exercise. A morbid
mind will find its cure in them, a sound soul will not find its food in them. They cannot vivify, they can only
soften." For the idyll excludes the idea of activity, which alone can satisfy the mind—or at least the idyll as it
has been traditionally conceived makes this exclusion, but Schiller goes on to imagine a transmutation of the
genre in which the characteristic calm of the idyll shall be "the calm that follows accomplishment, not the
calm of indolence—the calm that comes from the equilibrium reestablished between the faculties and not
from the suspending of their exercise.…"

It is strange that Schiller, as he projects this new and as yet unrealized idea, does not recur to what he has
previously said about comedy. To the soul of the writer of tragedy he assigns the adjective "sublime," which
for him implies reaching greatness by intense effort and strength of will; to the soul of the writer of comedy he

55
assigns the adjective "beautiful," which implies the achievement of freedom by an activity which is easy and
natural. "The noble task of comedy," he says, "is to produce and keep up in us this freedom of mind." Comedy
and the idyll, then, would seem to have a natural affinity with each other. Schiller does not observe this, but
Shakespeare knew it—the curious power and charm of As You Like It consists of bringing the idyll and
comedy together, of making the idyll the subject of comedy, even of satire, yet without negating it. The mind
teases the heart, but does not mock it. The unconditioned freedom that the idyll hypothecates is shown to be
impossible, yet in the demonstration a measure of freedom is gained.

So in Emma Jane Austen contrives an idyllic world, or the closest approximation of an idyllic world that the
genre of the novel will permit, and brings into contrast with it the actualities of the social world, of the
modern self. In the precincts of Highbury there are no bad people, and no adverse judgments to be made. Only
a modern critic, Professor Mudrick, would think to call Mr. Woodhouse an idiot and an old woman: in the
novel he is called "the kind-hearted, polite old gentleman." Only Emma, with her modern consciousness,
comes out with it that Miss Bates is a bore, and only Emma can give herself to the thought that Mr. Weston is
too simple and open-hearted, that he would be a "higher character" if he were not quite so friendly with
everyone. It is from outside Highbury that the peculiarly modern traits of insincerity and vulgarity come, in
the person of Frank Churchill and Mrs. Elton. With the exception of Emma herself, every person in Highbury
lives in harmony and peace—even Mr. Elton would have been all right if Emma had let him alone!—and not
merely because they are simple and undeveloped: Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston are no less innocent than
Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates. If they please us and do not bore us by a perfection of manner and feeling
which is at once lofty and homely, it is because we accept the assumptions of the idyllic world which they
inhabit—we have been led to believe that man may actually live "in harmony and peace with himself and the
external world."

The quiet of Highbury, the unperturbed spirits of Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates, the instructive perfection of
Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston, constitute much of the charm of Emma. Yet the idyllic stillness of the scene
and the loving celebration of what, for better or worse, is fully formed and changeless, is of course not what is
decisive in the success of the novel. On the contrary, indeed: it is the idea of activity and development that is
decisive. No one has put better and more eloquently what part this idea plays in Jane Austen's work than an
anonymous critic writing in The North British Review in 1870:10

Even as a unit, man is only known to [Jane Austen] in the process of his formation by social
influences. She broods over his history, not over his individual soul and its secret workings,
nor over the analysis of its faculties and organs. She sees him, not as a solitary being
completed in himself, but only as completed in society. Again, she contemplates virtues, not
as fixed quantities, or as definable qualities, but as continual struggles and conquests, as
progressive states of mind, advancing by repulsing their contraries, or losing ground by being
overcome. Hence again the individual mind can only be represented by her as a battle-field
where contending hosts are marshalled, and where victory inclines now to one side and now
to another. A character therefore unfolded itself to her, not in statuesque repose, not as a
model without motion, but as a dramatic sketch, a living history, a composite force, which
could only exhibit what it was by exhibiting what it did. Her favourite poet Cowper taught
her,

"By ceaseless action all that is subsists."

The mind as a battlefield: it does not consort with some of the views of Jane Austen that are commonly held.
Yet this is indeed how she understood the mind. And her representation of battle is the truer because she could
imagine the possibility of victory—she did not shrink from the idea of victory—and because she could
represent harmony and peace.

56
The anonymous critic of The North British Review goes on to say a strange and startling thing—he says that
the mind of Jane Austen was "saturated" with a "Platonic idea." In speaking of her ideal of "intelligent
love"—the phrase is perfect—he says that it is based on the "Platonic idea that the giving and receiving of
knowledge, the active formation of another's character, or the more passive growth under another's guidance,
is the truest and strongest foundation of love."11 It is an ideal that not all of us will think possible of
realization and that some of us will not want to give even a theoretical assent to. Yet most of us will consent
to think of it as one of the most attractive of the idyllic elements of the novel. It proposes to us the hope of
victory in the battle that the mind must wage, and it speaks of the expectation of allies in the fight, of the
possibility of community—not in actuality, not now, but perhaps again in the future, for do we not believe, or
almost believe, that there was community in the past?

The impulse to believe that the world of Jane Austen really did exist leads to notable error. "Jane Austen's
England" is the thoughtless phrase which is often made to stand for the England of the years in which our
author lived, although any serious history will make it sufficiently clear that the England of her novels was not
the real England, except as it gave her the license to imagine the England which we call hers. This England,
especially as it is represented in Emma, is an idyll. The error of identifying it with the actual England ought
always to be remarked. Yet the same sense of actuality that corrects the error should not fail to recognize the
remarkable force of the ideal that leads many to make the error. To represent the possibility of controlling the
personal life, of becoming acquainted with ourselves, of creating a community of "intelligent love"—this is
indeed to make an extraordinary promise and hold out a rare hope. We ought not be shocked and repelled if
some among us think there really was a time when such promises and hopes were realized. Nor ought we be
entirely surprised if, when they speak of the person who makes such promises and holds out such hopes, they
represent her as not merely a novelist, if they find it natural to deal with her as a figure of legend and myth.

Notes

1. The Question of Our Speech; The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures, 1905.
2. "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen," Scrutiny VIII, March 1940.
3. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, 1952.
4. "Jane Austen," Quarterly Review 228, July 1917.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Anchor edition, pp. 82-83.
Tocqueville should not be understood as saying that there was no class system in England but only
that there was no caste system, caste differing from class in its far greater rigidity. In his sense of the
great advantage that England enjoyed, as compared with France, in having no caste system,
Tocqueville inclines to represent the class feelings of the English as being considerably more lenient
than in fact they were. Still, the difference between caste and class and the social and political
importance of the "gentleman" are as great as Tocqueville says.
6. Harold Rosenberg, "Revolution and the Idea of Beauty," Encounter, December 1953.
7. See Abram Kardiner, The Psychological Frontiers of Society, 1945, page 410. In commenting on the
relatively simple society which is described in James West's Plainville, U.S.A., Dr. Kardiner touches
on a matter which is dear, and all too dear, to Emma's heart—speaking of social mobility in a
democratic, but not classless, society, he says that the most important criterion of class is "manners,"
that "knowing how to behave" is the surest means of rising in the class hierarchy. Nothing is more
indicative of Jane Austen's accurate awareness of the mobility of her society than her concern not so
much with manners themselves as with her characters' concern with manners.
8. "On Simple and Sentimental Poetry" in Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical, 1875.
9. Schiller, in speaking of the effectiveness that the idyll should have, does not refer to the
pastoral-idyllic element of Christianity which represents Christ as an actual shepherd.
10. Volume LXXII, April, pp. 129-152. I am grateful to Professor Joseph Duffy for having told me of this
admirable study.

57
 11. Emma's attempt to form the character of Harriet is thus a perversion of the relation of Mrs. Weston
and Mr. Knightley to herself—it is a perversion, says the North British critic, adducing Dante's
"amoroso uso de sapienza," because it is without love.

Title Commentary: Pride and Prejudice

SUSAN FRAIMAN (ESSAY DATE 1989)

SOURCE: Fraiman, Susan. "The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennett." In Refiguring the

Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth
Kowaleski-Wallace, pp. 168-87. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Fraiman views Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice as a father figure for
Elizabeth Bennett and therefore reads the novel as transferring patriarchal power from one
generation to the next as Elizabeth passes from her father's care to Darcy's.

I belong to a generation of American feminist critics taught to read by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The
Madwoman in the Attic (1979) both focused our regard on women writers of the nineteenth century and
formed in us invaluable habits of attention. It alerted us to eccentric characters, figures off to the side, to the
lunatic fringe. We learned to see certain transients—required by the plot to move on before things can work
out—as feminist doubles for the author as well as heroine. Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and Lady Catherine de
Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, unexemplary as they are expendable, register nonetheless the screams and
tantrums of Charlotte Brontë's and Jane Austen's own rage. These marginal women voice anger and defiance
that split open ostensibly decorous texts.

I want, in keeping with this tradition, to stress the accents of defiance in Pride and Prejudice, but I locate
these less at the edges than at the very center of the book; my argument concerns the much-admired Elizabeth
Bennet and the two major men in her life, Mr. Bennet and Mr. Darcy. I read Pride and Prejudice as the ceding
of Mr. Bennet's paternity to Mr. Darcy, with a consequent loss of clout for Elizabeth. Austen's novel
documents the collapse of an initially enabling father into a father figure who, in keeping with his excessive
social authority, tends to be rather disabling. As Elizabeth passes from Bennet to Darcy, her authorial powers
wane: she goes from shaping judgments to being shaped by them. I want to look at Elizabeth's gradual
devaluation, her humiliation, in terms of this double father.1 Austen, I believe, stands back from her decline,
ironizing both the onset of marriage and the father-daughter relation. She shows us a form of violence against
women that is not hidden away in the attic, displaced onto some secondary figure, but downstairs in the
drawing room involving the heroine herself.

Elizabeth's first father is a reclusive man and seemingly ineffectual; beside the rigid figure of Northanger
Abbey's General Tilney, Mr. Bennet may well appear flimsy. But the general (his love of new gadgets
notwithstanding) is an old-fashioned father whose authoritarian style was all but outmoded by the end of the
eighteenth century.2 Mr. Bennet is not really a bad father—just a modern one, in the manner of Locke's
influential text on education. Smoothbrowed advocate of instruction over discipline and reason over force, he
typifies the Lockean father. As Jay Fliegelman points out, however, Locke's concern "is not with
circumscribing paternal authority, but with rendering it more effective by making it noncoercive."3 Mr.
Bennet, apparently benign to the point of irresponsibility, may seem to wield nothing sharper than his
sarcasm. But what he actually wields is the covert power of the Lockean patriarch, all the more effective for
its subtlety.

This aloof, unseen power of Mr. Bennet's suggests to me, for several reasons, the peculiar power of an author.
His disposition is emphatically literary. Taking refuge from the world in his library, Mr. Bennet prefers the

58
inner to the outer life, books to people. He asks two things only: the free use of his understanding and his
room—precisely those things Virginia Woolf associates with the privilege of the male writer, the privation of
the female. Most important, among women whose solace is news, he keeps the upper hand by withholding
information. Mr. Bennet is a creator of suspense. In the opening scene, for example, he refuses to visit the new
bachelor in town, deliberately frustrating Mrs. Bennet's expectation and desire. Actually, "he had always
intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his wife that he should not go; and till the evening
after the visit was paid, she had no knowledge of it."4 Mr. Bennet relishes the power to contain her pleasure
and finally, with his dénouement, to relieve and enrapture her.

But the suspense is not over. Elizabeth's father is, even then, as stingy with physical description as some
fathers are with pocket money. He controls his family by being not tight-fisted but tight-lipped, and in this he
resembles Austen herself. George Lewes first noted the remarkable paucity of concrete details in Austen, her
reluctance to tell us what people, their clothes, their houses or gardens look like.5 If female readers flocked to
Richardson for Pamela's meticulous descriptions of what she packed in her trunk, they must surely have been
frustrated by Austen's reticence here.6 So Mr. Bennet only follows Austen when, secretive about Bingley's
person and estate, he keeps the ladies in the dark. Their curiosity is finally gratified by another, less
plain-styled father, Sir William Lucas, whose report they receive "second-hand" from Lady Lucas. Much as
women talk in this novel, the flow of important words (of "intelligence") is regulated largely by men. In this
verbal economy, women get the trickle-down of news.

FROM THE AUTHOR

AUSTEN EXPLAINS HER REASONS FOR KEEPING TO THE NARROW SUBJECT OF ENGLISH
COUNTRY LIFE

You are very very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and
I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to
the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I
could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance
under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax
into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No,
I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am
convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

Austen, Jane. Letter to James Stanier Clarke of April 1, 1816. In Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister
Cassandra and Others, 2nd ed. Edited by R. W. Chapman, pp. 452-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1932.

When Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth, Mr. Bennet again contrives to keep his audience hanging. Pretending
to support his wife, he hides until the last moment his real intention of contradicting her. After a stern
prologue he continues: "An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger
to one of your parents.—Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will
never see you again if you do" (112). Not only this particular manipulation but indeed the entire scene goes to
show the efficacy of paternal words. Throughout his proposal, to Elizabeth's distress and our amusement, Mr.
Collins completely ignores her many impassioned refusals. He discounts what she says as "merely words of
course" (108); even his dim, self-mired mind perceives that a lady's word carries no definitive weight. Mr.
Collins accuses Elizabeth of wishing to increase his love "by suspense, according to the usual practice of
elegant females" (108). Yet creating suspense is exactly what Elizabeth, rhetorically unreliable, cannot do.
She has no choice but "to apply to her father, whose negative might be uttered in such a manner as must be
decisive" (109). Mr. Bennet's power resides, as I say, in his authorial prerogative: his right to have the last
word.

59
Though Mr. Bennet uses this right to disparage and disappoint his wife, regarding his daughter he uses it
rather to praise, protect, apparently to enable her. Like many heroines in women's fiction (think of Emma
Woodhouse or Maggie Tulliver) Elizabeth has a special relationship to her father. She is immediately
distinguished as a family member and as a character by his preference for her and hers for him. The entail
notwithstanding, she is in many respects his heir. To her he bequeaths his ironic distance from the world, the
habit of studying and appraising those around him, the role of social critic. In this role, father and daughter
together scan Mr. Collins's letter, dismissing man and letter with a few, skeptical words. Mr. Bennet enables
Elizabeth by sharing with her his authorial mandate, which is Austen's own: to frame a moral discourse and
judge characters accordingly. Through her father, Elizabeth gains provisional access to certain authorial
powers.

But Mr. Bennet also shares with her, illogically enough, his disdain for women; he respects Elizabeth only
because she is unlike other girls. This puts his exceptional daughter in an awkward position—bonding with
her father means breaking with her mother, even reneging on femaleness altogether. Elizabeth is less a
daughter than a surrogate son. Like a son, by giving up the mother and giving in to the father, she reaps the
spoils of maleness. We can understand her, alternatively, in terms of Freud's scheme for girls. Freud contends
that girls first turn to the father because they want a penis like his. They envy, as Karen Horney explained, the
social power this organ signifies under patriarchy.7 To complete their oedipal task, however, girls must shift
from wanting a penis for themselves to wanting a man who has one; ceasing to identify with the powerful
father, they must accept instead their own "castration."8 In these terms the cocky Elizabeth we first encounter
is charmingly arrested in the early phase of male-identification. We can see her, then, in one of two ways: as
an honorary boy who has completed his oedipal task, or as a backward, wayward girl who refuses to complete
hers.

The point is, first, that whatever discursive acuity Elizabeth has derives from an alliance and identification
with her father. As the Mr. Collins scene demonstrates, the force of her words is highly contingent. Elizabeth's
authority is vicarious, second-hand; like a woman writing under a male pseudonym, her credibility depends on
the father's signature. In addition, however enabling, Mr. Bennet is essentially ambivalent toward Elizabeth.
"They have none of them much to recommend them," he says of his daughters in chapter I. "They are all silly
and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters" (5). Insisting that all
of his daughters are silly and ignorant, that none of them have much to recommend them, Mr. Bennet blithely
classes Elizabeth with "other girls," even as he appears to distinguish her from them. So we find, already in
the opening scene, a tension between Elizabeth's "masculine" alacrity and the slow-witted "femininity"
threatening to claim her. Mr. Bennet's double vision of her suggests right away the basic ambiguity of
Austen's father-daughter relationship, coded not only diachronically in the Mr. Bennet-Mr. Darcy sequence,
but also synchronically in Mr. Bennet's duplicity regarding Elizabeth.

For in Austen the male-bonding between father and daughter is set up to collapse. Eventually the economic
reality asserts itself, the axiom of the famous first line held up to a mirror and read backward: a single woman
not in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband. Sooner or later what Adrienne Rich calls
"compulsory heterosexuality" (conspiracy of economic need and the ideology of romance) forces Elizabeth
out of the library, into the ballroom, and finally up to the altar.9 The father's business in this ritual is to give
the daughter away. If Mr. Bennet is enabling up to a point, the marriage ceremony requires him to objectify
his daughter and hand her over. He not only withdraws his protection and empowerment, but also gives away
(reveals) her true "castrated" gender, her incapacity for action in a phallocentric society. This
ceremony—posing father as giver, daughter as gift—underlies and ultimately belies the father-daughter
relationship in Pride and Prejudice.

So Elizabeth's gradual falling out with her father, which means forfeiting her authorial status, is built into the
institution of marriage. Austen makes it quite clear that Mr. Bennet neglects Lydia, failing to protect her from
ruinous male designs. Yet, is not the father's letting go of the daughter precisely what the wedding ritual

60
requires?10 Mr. Bennet's profligacy with Lydia is simply a starker form of his cheerful readiness to give away
any and all of his daughters. "I will send a few lines by you," he tells his wife, "to assure [Bingley] of my
hearty consent to his marrying which ever he chuses of the girls" (4). Exposing a pattern intrinsic to the
nuptial plot, Mr. Bennet's abandonment of Lydia provides a crude paradigm for Elizabeth's milder
estrangement from her father and for the literal distance between father and heroine in Northanger Abbey and
Mansfield Park.11 Bennet, by retiring as Elizabeth's champion, is not ineffectual as a father, but correct.

In his discussion of marriage and the incest taboo, Lévi-Strauss proposes that the exchange of women among
kin groups serves, like the exchange of money or words, to negotiate relationships among men. Women are, in
effect, a kind of currency whose circulation binds and organizes male society.12 It seems to me that Pride and
Prejudice offers a similar anthropology. Here, too, marriage betrays the tie between father and daughter in
favor of ties among men. I have the idea that Elizabeth's economic imperative is not the only motive for her
marriage, that the fathers have an agenda of their own, involving considerations of class.

Mr. Bennet's class interest in a Bennet-Darcy match is fairly obvious and similar to Elizabeth's own. He may
laugh at Mrs. Bennet's schemes, but the fact remains that a liaison to aristocracy will benefit him significantly.
And in spite of his philosophic detachment, Mr. Bennet is not without a streak of pragmatism—after all, he
has always intended to visit Mr. Bingley. Nor is he unimpressed by wealth and rank. He is frankly delighted
that Darcy has used his money and influence to straighten out the Lydia-Wickham affair. "So much the
better," he exults. "It will save me a world of trouble and economy" (377). Sounding even, for a moment,
strangely like Mr. Collins, he consents to Elizabeth's marriage with little of his habitual irony. "I have given
him my consent," he tells her. "He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare refuse any thing,
which he condescended to ask" (376).

Though Mr. Darcy's class interests may seem to rule against a connection to the Bennets, they too are subtly at
work here. In her remarks on eighteenth-century marriage, Mary Poovey notes that Cinderella matches
frequently allayed not only middle-class status anxiety, but also the financial anxiety increasingly rife among
the well-born.13 Cinderella's family may be obscure, but her share in merchant profits is attractive to a prince
who is poor. Austen does not fully represent, until Persuasion's Sir Walter Elliot, the material as well as moral
impoverishment of the landed class in her day. Yet as early as Sense and Sensibility (1811) she gives us
Willoughby who, unsure of his aristocratic heritage, leaves Marianne for a certain Miss Grey with fifty
thousand pounds. Of course in Pride and Prejudice cash flows the other way: Darcy has it and Elizabeth
needs it. But a decline in aristocratic welfare is nevertheless suggested by the sickly Miss De Bourgh. It may
well be the enfeeblement of his own class that encourages Darcy to look below him for a wife with greater
stamina. As a figure for the ambitious bourgeoisie, Elizabeth pumps richer, more robust blood into the
collapsing veins of the nobility, even as she boosts the social standing of her relatives in trade. Most
important, however—to the patriarchs of both classes—she eases tensions between them. By neutralizing
class antagonism, she promotes the political stability on which industrial prosperity depends.14

I turn, now, to the handing of Elizabeth from Bennet to Darcy, which is prefigured by a scene on the Lucas
dance floor. Here Sir William Lucas stands in for Mr. Bennet, jockeying for power with Mr. Darcy, who has
the upper hand. Sir William begins to despair, when suddenly he is "struck with the notion of doing a very
gallant thing" (26). Laying claim to Elizabeth, he offers her up to Darcy as "a very desirable partner." Sir
William understands that gift-giving can be an "idiom of competition." As anthropologist Gayle Rubin
explains, there is power in creating indebtedness.15 We imagine the three of them: Elizabeth between the two
men, her hand held aloft by Lucas, Lucas eager to deposit it, Darcy "not unwilling to receive it" (26). The
fathers' device here is synecdoche. Elizabeth is reduced to a hand, extended in friendship or hostility, the
means of fraternal intercourse. Suddenly, however, Elizabeth pulls back. With startling resolution she
withdraws herself from the debt nexus. Indeed, throughout much of the novel Elizabeth resists the
conventional grammar of exchange. She would not only extract herself as object but, contesting the fathers'
right to control the action, insert herself as subject. Saboteur, Elizabeth threatens to wreck the marriage

61
syntax. Needless to say, this makes for one of the stormier courtships in nineteenth-century fiction.

It was, as I have noted, Lévi-Strauss who first saw marriage as a triangulated moment, a woman exchanged
between two (groups of) men. Gayle Rubin went on to identify this kind of traffic, its organization of a
sex-gender system, as the basis for female subordination. But the immediate model for my placing such an
exchange at the heart of Pride and Prejudice is provided by Eve Sedgwick; her recent book, Between Men,
examines the way men bond across the bodies of women in a range of English texts.16 Her mapping of "male
homosocial desire" posits, however, an essentially passive female term. It imagines a triangle that is stable and
uncontested; even women who begin active and ambitious, once drawn into the space between two men, fall
automatically still. What I have tried to suggest above is that Elizabeth does not readily accept a merely
pivotal role. The book stretches out because she puts up a fight before acceding (and never entirely) to the
fathers' homosocial plot. The site of her resistance, as well as her compromise, is language.

This brings us to Mr. Darcy—a father by virtue of his age, class, and a paternalism extending to friends and
dependents alike. A man given to long letters and polysyllables, a man with an excellent library and even
hand, Darcy may also be seen as an aspiring authorial figure. If Bennet sets out to create suspense, Darcy
hankers to resolve it. Their relation is one of literary rivals, with Elizabeth the prize. The complication is
Elizabeth's own formidable way with words. As surrogate son, father's heir, Elizabeth is herself a contender
for the authorial position. Instead of rewarding Darcy for his accession, she competes with him for it. In these
terms, Elizabeth's and Darcy's matching of wits is more than flirtation—it is a struggle for control of the text.
There are two heated and definitive moments in this struggle: Elizabeth's refusal of Darcy's first proposal and
the day after, when he delivers his letter.

Chapter II of the second volume finds Elizabeth alone at the Collins's house in Kent. Concerned sister and
conscientious reader, she is studying Jane's letters. Suddenly Darcy bursts in and blurts out a proposal, more
an admission of weakness than a confession of love. The chapter closes by resuming Elizabeth's internal
dialogue, "the tumult of her mind" (193) after Darcy's departure. But have we, throughout this chapter, been
anywhere but in Elizabeth's mind? By all rights this should be Darcy's scene, his say. In fact, we get relatively
few of his actual words. His amatory discourse is quickly taken over by a narrator who represents the scene,
renders Darcy's language, from Elizabeth's point of view: "His sense of her inferiority … [was] dwelt on with
a warmth which … was very unlikely to recommend his suit" (189). The text of Darcy's proposal is
completely glossed, and glossed over, by her interpretation of it. Of Elizabeth's refusal, by contrast, Austen
gives us every unmediated word, a direct quotation four times as long as that permitted Darcy. This sets the
pattern for what follows. Every time Darcy opens his mouth, he is superseded by a speech of greater length
and vehemence. She answers his question—Why is he so rudely rejected?—with a tougher question of her
own: "I might as well enquire … why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell
me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character? Was not this
some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil?" (190). Conceding nothing, she accuses him at some length of
everything: of breaking Jane's heart and unmaking Wickham's fortune, of earning and continually confirming
her own dislike. She betters his scorn for her family by scorning him. "I have every reason in the world to
think ill of you" (191), she asserts. Her language, her feelings, her judgments overwhelm his and put them to
shame. They drive him to platitude, apology, and hasty retreat. This rhetorical round leaves Elizabeth clear
victor.

The following day, however, she is obsessed by Darcy: "It was impossible to think of any thing else" (195).
She receives his letter. As the man has crowded out all other thoughts, so now his letter crowds out all other
words, monopolizing the narrative for the next seven pages. Longer than the entire preceding chapter, it
completely dispels Elizabeth's inspired performance of the day before. If Darcy was not "master enough" of
himself then, he regains his mastery now. He takes back his story and, in a play for literary hegemony (to be
author and critic both), tells us how to read him. The letter is a defense of his judgment, its impartiality and
authority. About Jane he insists: "My investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or

62
fears.—I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it;—I believed it on impartial conviction"
(197). As for Wickham, the letter documents Darcy's early suspicions and the events that proved him right. It
further demonstrates the power of Darcy's moral discourse over others. Bingley has "a stronger dependence on
[Darcy's] judgment than on his own" (199). Georgiana, fearing her brother's disapproval, decides not to elope
after all.17

Only after Darcy's unabridged epistle do we get Elizabeth's response to it. She reads "with an eagerness which
hardly left her power of comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring,
was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes" (204). Darcy's letter saps her power to
comprehend, disables her attention. It addresses her as reader only to indispose her as reader. At first
Elizabeth protests: "This must be false! This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!" (204). She
rushes through the letter and puts it away forever. But the text, unrelenting, demands to be taken out, read and
reread. Against the broad chest of Darcy's logic, Elizabeth beats the ineffectual fists of her own. Putting down
the paper, she "weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality … but with little success"
(205). Her interruptions, procrastinations, do nothing to stop the inexorable drive of Darcy's narrative to its
foregone conclusion. In what Roland Barthes might call its "processive haste," it sweeps away Elizabeth's
objections and has its way with her.18

In its second sentence, the letter disclaims "any intention of paining" (196). It apologizes for wounding, yet
proceeds all too knowingly to wound. There is indeed a disturbing insistence on its hurtfulness, a certain
pleasurable recurrence to the violence of its effect. "Here again I shall give you pain" (200), the writer
unhesitatingly announces. But now Darcy's determination to inflict seems matched by Elizabeth's to be
afflicted. They coincide in their enthusiasm for her humiliation: "'How despicably have I acted!' she cried.—'I,
who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often
disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How
humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!'" (208). Vindicating Darcy's judgment and
debasing Elizabeth's, disqualifying her interpretation of things in favor of his, the letter leaves her "depressed
beyond any thing she had ever known before" (209).

This is the point, the dead center, on which the whole book turns. Darcy's botched proposal marks the nadir of
his career, after which, launched by his letter, he rises up from infamy in an arc that approaches apotheosis. In
the ensuing chapters he turns deus ex machina, exerting an implausible power to set everything straight—a
power Mr. Bennet conspicuously lacks. It is Darcy who arranges for three lucky couples to be, each, the
happiest couple in the world. Like the authorial persona of Northanger Abbey, Darcy herds us all to "perfect
felicity." The nature of his unseen influence is precisely authorial. Darcy's letter proves his textual prowess.
At this point he succeeds Mr. Bennet as controlling literary figure and displaces Elizabeth as her father's
scion. From now on the pen, as Persuasion's Anne Elliot might say, is in his hands.

Soon after receiving Darcy's letter, Elizabeth meets up with Kitty and Lydia. Officer-crazy as ever, Lydia
gushes on about Brighton and her plans to join the regiment there for its summer encampment. This first
reference to Brighton unfolds into an unexpectedly earnest seduction plot that might seem more at home in a
novel by Richardson or Burney. It is latent, however, in Lydia's very character, throwback to those too
sentimental heroines so mercilessly parodied by Austen's juvenilia. That such a plot should surface now, seize
center page and, brash as its heroine, hold the spotlight for more than seven chapters, is by no means
accidental. The Lydia-Wickham imbroglio creates, for one thing, a situation before which Mr. Bennet will
prove inadequate, Mr. Darcy heroic. Elizabeth first doubts her father regarding his decision to let Lydia go to
Brighton, and she blames her father bitterly for the subsequent scandal. For Mr. Darcy, by contrast, the
calamity is a chance to prove his nobility both of heart and of purse, his desire to rectify and his power to do
so. The Lydia plot therefore accomplishes Elizabeth's separation from her father and her reattachment to
another. It works a changing of the paternal guard.

63
By showcasing Darcy, the upstart plot that seems to delay and even briefly to replace Elizabeth's and Darcy's
courtship serves actually to advance it. Yet there is another reason that Lydia's story, a classic case of
seduction, moves into the foreground at this moment. It fills the curious gap between Elizabeth's first, private
softening and her final, public surrender. I would argue that, at this juncture, Elizabeth's narrative is displaced
onto that of her sister. Lydia's seduction registers an emotional drama—of coercion, capitulation, and
lamentation—missing from but underlying Elizabeth's story proper. Of course Elizabeth is a foil for Lydia,
one sister's wisdom held up to the other's folly. Yet there remains a sense in which their positions are
scandalously similar. At one point, in response to Lydia's rudeness, Elizabeth admits, "However incapable of
such coarseness of expression herself, the coarseness of the sentiment was little other than her own breast had
formerly harbored" (220). And perhaps this is more generally the case: that Elizabeth and Lydia differ more in
style than in substance. In other words, far from being an alternative plot, Lydia's is, albeit in cruder terms, a
parallel one. Like the interpolated tales in that protonovel Don Quixote, Lydia's tale works less to distract
from the central narrative than to distill its meaning. It does not defer Elizabeth's progress toward marriage so
much as code the seduction and surrender on which her marriage relies.

We leave Elizabeth at the end of volume 2, chapter 13, completely, under Darcy's influence. "She could think
only of her letter" (209). As the next chapter explains, "Mr. Darcy's letter, she was in a fair way of soon
knowing by heart" (212). The unusual syntax here is succinct indication of the new order—Mr. Darcy and his
text come pointedly before Elizabeth, would-be subject. The narrator continues, "When she remembered the
style of his address, she was still full of indignation; but when she considered how unjustly she had
condemned and upbraided him, her anger was turned against herself" (212). Elizabeth's reversal here, the
introversion of her anger, is again revealing. Her initial judgment of Darcy is now recanted as unjust, its
accusation redirected against herself.

When we first meet Elizabeth, daughter of a social critic resembling Austen herself, she is proud of her ability
to know things deeply and to judge them knowingly. Yet by the end of the novel she claims only to be
high-spirited. Sorry to have refused Darcy, she longs to be schooled by his better judgment: "By her ease and
liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information,
and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance" (312). It should not
surprise us to find, in an Austen novel, that judgment, information, and knowledge rate higher than ease and
liveliness. While these are all Austen's professional virtues, the former are fundamental to her moral lexicon.19
(Thus her impatience with Jane's dumb neutrality.) What may surprise and sadden us, however, is that a
heroine who began so competent to judge should end up so critically disabled, so reliant for judgment on
somebody else. Not that Elizabeth lapses into sheer Lydiacy. Just that by the closing chapters her eye is less
bold, her tongue less sharp, the angularity—distinguishing her from the rest of her more comfortably
curvaceous sex—less acute.

According to one critical truism, Pride and Prejudice achieves a kind of bilateral disarmament: Elizabeth
gives up her prejudice, while Darcy relinquishes his pride.20 I am arguing, however, that Darcy woos away
not Elizabeth's "prejudice," but her judgment entire. While Darcy defends the impartiality of his opinion,
Elizabeth confesses the partiality and thus worthlessness of hers. His representation of the world is taken to be
objective, raised to the level of universality; hers is taken to be subjective—prejudiced—and dismissed. True,
Elizabeth was wrong about Wick-ham. But was she really that wrong about Darcy? He may warm up a bit,
and his integrity is rightly affirmed, yet the fact remains that he is hardly less arrogant than Elizabeth at first
supposed. Her comment to Fitzwilliam can stand: "I do not know any body who seems more to enjoy the
power of doing what he likes than Mr. Darcy" (183).

And is Darcy's own record of accuracy much better? His judgment of Jane is just as mistaken, and as partial,
as Elizabeth's of Wickham. Yet his credibility remains intact. Finally admitting to having misinterpreted Jane,
Darcy explains that he was corrected not by Elizabeth, but by his own subsequent observations (371). On the
basis of his new appraisal he readvises the ever-pliant Bingley. His error, far from disqualifying him to judge,

64
only qualifies him to judge again. Elizabeth's error, on the other hand, is irreparably discrediting. What
happens in Pride and Prejudice is not that an essentially prejudiced character finally sees the error of her
ways. Rather, a character initially presented as reliable, who gains our and Austen's respect precisely for her
clear-sightedness, is ultimately represented as prejudiced. The real drama lies not in the heroine's "awakening"
to her true identity, but in the text's reidentification of her.

If Elizabeth does not overcome her "prejudice," neither does Darcy abandon his pride. Early in the book
Elizabeth declares, "I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine" (20). Yet by the last volume
her feelings have changed considerably: "They owed the restoration of Lydia, her character, every thing to
him. Oh! how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she had ever encouraged, every saucy
speech she had ever directed towards him. For herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him" (326-27).
Elizabeth and Darcy begin skeptical of each other, proud of themselves, and they reach a connubial consensus
that is altogether different: at last both are skeptical of her, both proud of him.

But wait. Does not Darcy make a pretty speech to his bride confessing, "By you, I was properly humbled"
(369)? Here it is useful to see how the text itself defines "pride," and how this definition relates to Mr. Darcy.
The bookish Mary—another figure for Austen, if a self-mocking one—distinguishes "pride" from "vanity":
"Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us" (20). As for
Darcy, Charlotte Lucas suggests that his pride is excusable: "One cannot wonder that so very fine a young
man, with family, fortune, every thing in his favor, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he
has a right to be proud" (20). A younger Lucas puts it more bluntly: "If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy … I
should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine every day"
(20). The practical Lucases have a point. Darcy's richness gives him if not a "right," then a careless readiness
to be proud. A man in his social position need not consider any opinion but his own. Darcy is proud because
he does not have to be vain—others' opinions do not affect him. His pride, we might say, comes with the
territory. It is less a psychological attribute than a social one, and as such it is only heightened by Darcy's
enhanced status—as husband, hero, and authorial figure—in Pride and Prejudice's last act.

Of course we continue to admire Elizabeth. She may care for Darcy's regard, but she is not so utterly enslaved
by it as Miss Bingley. She may hesitate to laugh at Darcy, but she does show Georgiana that a wife may take
(some) liberties. We admire her because she is not Charlotte, because she is not Lydia. I am insisting,
however, that Elizabeth is a better friend to Charlotte, a closer sister to Lydia—that her story runs more
parallel to theirs—than previous readings have indicated. The three women live in the same town, share the
same gossip, attend the same balls—why, as some critics have claimed, should Elizabeth alone be above the
social decree?21 There are, in Elizabeth's marriage, elements both of crass practicality and of coercion.
Elizabeth is appalled by Charlotte's pragmatism, and yet, choosing Darcy over Wickham, she is herself
beguiled by the entrepreneurial marriage plot.22 If she is embarrassed by her personal connection to Lydia, she
is also implicated by the formal intersection of their plots: in the course of the novel she loses not her virginity
but her authority.

Elizabeth marries a decent man and a large estate, but at a certain cost. Though she may stretch the marriage
contract, it binds her nonetheless to a paternalistic noble whose extensive power is explicitly ambiguous:
"How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow!—How much of good or evil must be done by
him!" (250-51, emphasis added). If Mr. Bennet embodies the post-Enlightenment, modified patriarch, Mr.
Darcy harks back to an earlier type—before fathers were curbed by Lockean principles, before aristocrats
began to feel the crunch. Darcy disempowers Elizabeth if only because of the positions they each occupy in
the social schema: because he is a Darcy and she is a Bennet, because he is a man and she is his wife. If Mr.
Bennet permits Elizabeth to fill the role of "son," she marries another father figure only to revert, in terms of
privilege, to "daughter."

65
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen shows us an intelligent girl largely in the grasp of a complex mechanism
whose interests are not hers. She does this, I think, less in resignation than in protest; here, as in Northanger
Abbey, Austen is concerned to ironize girls and novels that hasten to the altar for conclusive happiness.23 I
should stress, however, that my purpose in outlining a trajectory of humiliation has been not to displace but to
complexify the reading that takes for granted connubial bliss. We can experience the ending as euphoric (most
readers do) and still recognize those aspects of the novel working strenuously against this. I want, as Gilbert
and Gubar suggest, to appreciate the doubleness that characterizes the work of nineteenth-century women
writers, the tension between conventionality and subversion. This tension is, on the one hand, produced by an
author who knows what she is doing, whose art is a deliberate shaping, whose ironic tendencies were manifest
at fifteen. To ignore any such intentionality is to slight Austen's mastery. But the ideological slipperiness of
Pride and Prejudice is, on the other hand, finally a matter of the text's own logic, its own legibility. Beyond
any fully conscious intention on Austen's part, a pattern of duplicity is at work in the narrative itself, with a
consistency amounting to design.

As I have argued, part of this novel's design is to reveal a system of homosocial relations underlying the
institution of heterosexuality. Anticipating Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Sedgwick, it
recognizes in marriage a displacement of the father-daughter bond by a bond between fathers. Elizabeth's
humiliation has everything to do with transactions between various fathers that take place behind her back,
over her head, and apart from, if not against, her will. I want to close by offering some further support for this
view.

By the end of the book, Mr. Bennet's paternal role has been assumed by his brother-in-law, Mr. Gardiner. Mr.
Gardiner, though "gentleman like," is not technically a gentleman. Living by trade "and within view of his
own warehouses" (139), he represents, more than Mr. Bennet, the rising middle class. No wonder Elizabeth
fears that Darcy will rebuff him, unkind as Darcy has been toward her bourgeois relations. She is quite
unprepared for Darcy's civility to Gardiner, and for the apparent power of fishing to overcome class
differences. Perhaps their shared fondness for Elizabeth, their lengthy haggle over Lydia, as well as their
equal passion for trout, serve to reinforce the social/economic advantages of a Darcy-Gardiner alliance. They
become, in any case, suggestively close. The very last paragraph of the novel informs us that: "With the
Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and
they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into
Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them" (388).

At first this seems a peculiarly insignificant note on which to end. On second glance it appears to confirm the
notion I have had: that just as the Gardiners have been the means of uniting Darcy and Elizabeth, so Elizabeth
has been the means of uniting Mr. Darcy and Mr. Gardiner. Pride and Prejudice attains a satisfying unity not
only between a man and a woman, but also between two men. Austen's novel accomplishes an intercourse not
merely personal, but social—as much a marriage of two classes as a marriage of true minds.

Notes

1. My title and my argument are a turn on Mark Schorer's "The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse"
(1959), in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1963), 98-111. Here he remarks: "The diminution of Emma in the social scene, her
reduction to her proper place … is very beautiful" (102).
2. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977), 239-58.
3. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 13. See Beth Kowaleski-Wallace's discussion of the
Lockean father in "Milton's Daughters: The Education of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers,"
Feminist Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 275-95.

66
 4. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1932), 6. Future references are to this edition.
5. Lewes's observation is cited by Judith O'Neill in her introduction to Critics on Jane Austen: Readings
in Literary Criticism, ed. Judith O'Neill (London: George Allen, 1970), 8.
6. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 153.
7. Karen Horney, "The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity Complex in Women as Viewed by
Men and by Women" (1926), in Psychoanalysis and Women, ed. Jean Baker Miller (New York:
Penguin Books, 1973), 19.
8. For a useful recapitulation of Freud on fathers and daughters, see Nancy Chodorow, The
Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), 94, 114-16.
9. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980), in Powers of Desire:
The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York:
Monthly Review, 1983), 177-205.
10. See, for example, Lynda E. Boose, "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," PMLA 97, no. 3
(1982): 325-47. According to Boose, King Lear's faux pas is his unwillingness to release
Cordelia—he "casts her away not to let her go but to prevent her from going" (333)—thereby
obstructing the ritual process of her marriage to France.
11. In these terms, Emma's conclusion may have certain advantages for its heroine. It is true that Emma
defers to Knightley's worldview much as Elizabeth does to Darcy's. But remaining under her father's
roof may preserve some of the authority she has had, in his household and the community, as Mr.
Woodhouse's daughter.
12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 61.
13. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 11.
14. See Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel
Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 15.
15. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an
Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 172.
16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985).
17. Georgiana's position as "daughter" in relation to Darcy contributes to our sense of him as "paternal,"
as does his fatherly advice to Bingley.
18. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975),
12.
19. See Austen's famous defense of the novel as a "work in which the greatest powers of the mind are
displayed … the most thorough knowledge of human nature … the liveliest effusions of wit and
humour" (Northanger Abbey, 1818, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd edition [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1933], 38).
20. John Halperin's recent biography, The Life of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984) is notably complacent toward this formulation: "It is unnecessary to rehearse again the
process by which Darcy's pride is humbled and Elizabeth's prejudice exposed—' your defect is a
propensity to hate every body,' she tells him early in the novel; 'And I yours … is wilfully to
misunderstand them,' he replies" (70).
21. I have in mind D. W. Harding and Marvin Mudrick, old guard of Austen criticism's "subversive
school" (as opposed to Alistair Duckworth, Marilyn Butler, et al., who see Austen as a social
conservative): D. W. Harding, "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen," Scrutiny 8
(1940): 346-62; Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1952); Alistair M. Duck-worth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane
Austen's Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and
the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). While I am taking Harding's and Mudrick's side, I

67
 disagree with their view that Austen challenges her society by allowing Elizabeth somehow to
transcend it, that Elizabeth represents the "free individual." Pride and Prejudice is not, in my opinion,
about the heroine's independence of the social context; it is about her inextricability from it.
22. See Karen Newman, "Can This Marriage Be Saved: Jane Austen Makes Sense of an Ending," ELH
50, no. 4 (1983): 693-710. Newman points out that critics as early as Sir Walter Scott have noticed
Elizabeth's fascination with Pemberly: "Austen is at pains from early in the novel to show us
Elizabeth's response to Darcy's wealth" (698). It is interesting that Hollywood, of venal habits and
puritanical tastes, should recognize and be uneasy with Elizabeth's suspicious position as Austen
wrote it. In the 1940 film version of Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine threatens to cut Darcy out
of her will if he goes ahead and marries a Bennet. Elizabeth proves her romantic integrity by vowing
to marry him anyway. Needless to say, Austen conspicuously chose not to test Elizabeth in such a
manner.
23. In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), Gilbert and Gubar refer us to Lloyd W. Brown (Bits of
Ivory: Narrative Techniques in Jane Austen's Fiction [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1973]) for
"the most sustained discussion of Austen's ironic undercutting of her own endings" (667). Karen
Newman also sees the happy ending in Austen as parodic: despite its comic effect, there remain
"unresolved contradictions between romantic and materialistic notions of marriage" (695). The idea of
a fairy-tale union is falsified by Austen's clairvoyance about why women need to marry. My reading
accords a good deal with Newman's, though I am less confident than she that Austen's heroines
manage nevertheless to "live powerfully within the limits imposed by ideology" (705).

Title Commentary: Mansfield Park

MOIRA FERGUSON (ESSAY DATE 1991)

SOURCE: Ferguson, Moira. "Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender." Oxford
Literary Review 13, nos. 1-2 (1991): 118-39.

In the following essay, Ferguson explores the connection between the restrictions on
Mansfield Park 's Fanny Price and the slave trade also discussed in the novel.

Mansfield Park (1814) is a eurocentric, post-abolition narrative that intertwines with a critique of gender
relations and posits a world of humanitarian interactions between slave-owners and slaves. As such, following
the successful passage of the Abolition Bill in 1807, Mansfield Park initiates a new chapter in colonialist
fiction. Nonetheless, although the novel works against the idea of the traditionally closed and brutal world of
plantocratic relations, it entertains the option of emancipation—as opposed to abolition—only through the
sound of muffled rebel voices. In order to stage a future society peaceably perpetuating British rule, Jane
Austen transforms Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park—who is also a plantation-owner in Antigua—from
a characteristically imperious 'West Indian' planter—stock figure of ridicule in contemporary drama, poetry
and novels—into a benevolent, reforming land-owner.1

Given the state of agitation in the Caribbean in the early 1800s, the unreality of this scenario forces textual
contradictions and eruptions. No African-Caribbean people speak, no mention is ever made of slave plots or
insurrections, and even slaves' white counterparts—Anglo-Saxon women in rebellion in one form or
another—are assimilated or banished.2 Thus gender relations at home parallel and echo traditional
relationships of power between the colonialists and colonized peoples: European women visibly signify the
most egregiously and invisibly repressed of the text—African-Caribbeans themselves. They mark silent
African-Caribbean rebels as well as their own disenfranchisement, class and gender victimization.

68
Let me contextualize these remarks by noting that Mansfield Park was begun by Jane Austen in early 1811
and published in 1814, with its novelistic chronology extending from 1808 through 1809. As a result of the
energetic abolition movement and parliamentary compromise with the West India lobby in 1792, slaveowners'
efforts to resist legal abolition, let alone emancipation, were notorious.3

A transatlantic land-owner, Sir Thomas Bertram is fictionally characterized as one of those members of
parliament who defended plantocratic interests.4 He belonged to the 'outer ring' of absentee planters and
merchants who never, or rarely, visited the colonies, although their connections remained solid.5 In Raymond
Williams' words:

Important parts of the country-house system, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
were built on the profits of … trade [with the colonies]. Spices, sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco,
gold and silver: these fed, as mercantile profits, into an English social order, over and above
the profits on English stock and crops.…The country-houses which were the apex of a local
system of exploitation then had many connections to these distant lands.…[Moreover], the
new rural economy of the tropical plantations—sugar, coffee, cotton—was built by [the] trade
in flesh, and once again the profits fed back into the country-house system: not only the
profits on the commodities but … the profits on slaves.6

After a brief, quiescent period following the passage of the Bill, however, fierce contestations over slavery
began anew at home and abroad. As the British press reported news of increasing atrocities in 1809, 1810, and
1811, it became obvious that the abolitionists' utopian vision of a Caribbean plantocracy committed to
ameliorating the conditions of their only remaining slaves was palpably false.7 This rise in atrocities, in
addition to vigorous illicit trading, spurred parliamentary proposals that all Caribbean slaves be registered.8
Old colonial legislatures that included Antigua opposed slave registries on constitutional grounds because
such a procedure violated their right of internal taxation; not until 1820 did colonialists assent.

In fact, the time during which Mansfield Park was written marked a turning point in the fortunes of the gentry,
to which social class Sir Thomas, as a baronet, arguably belonged.9 In England the Luddite riots fomented
unrest, the prime minister was assassinated, war was declared against the United States, and the gentry
endured a general economic crisis. Mrs Norris, Sir Thomas' sister-in-law, informs us that Sir Thomas'
financial stability depends on maintaining his Caribbean property:10 his 'means will be rather straitened if the
Anti-guan estate is to make such poor returns.11 Sir Thomas needs his Caribbean profits to stay financially
afloat in England; colonialism underwrites his social and cultural position.

Thus, ongoing news of Caribbean economic crises exacerbates Sir Thomas' already straitened circumstances.
Sugar prices had plummeted as a result of a major depression after 1807. The ensuing urgency to diversify the
imperiled sugar monoculture made the physical presence of customarily absentee landlords expedient, and so
Sir Thomas was obliged 'to go to Antigua himself, for the better arrangement of his affairs.12 The task at hand
was to maintain his estates at a profit and in the process, since trading was now illegal, to ensure the survival
of his slaves as steady, well-nourished workers. Sadistic overseers, with whom Sir Thomas may have been
content in the past, provided returns were satisfactory, would no longer do. His appearance when he returns to
England suggests not only an exhausting engagement with his overseers and a severe reaction to noisome
conditions, but through metonym it also emphasizes his affiliation with the Creole class. He 'had the burnt,
fagged, worn look of fatigue and a hot climate' (178).

The society to which Sir Thomas traveled was dominated by aggressive oppositional relations between
colonialists and colonized people, although absentee landlordism was unusual on Antigua compared to its
frequency on neighboring islands. As a near-noble landowner, Sir Thomas would socialize with the
commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands, the Right Honorable Ralph, Lord Lavington, who, in 'real life',
chose to set a constant pointed public example of desirable relations between colonizers and colonized:

69
 His Christmas balls and routs were upon the highest scale of magnificence; but he was a great
stickler for etiquette, and a firm upholder of difference of rank and colour [Flanders'
underlining].…He would not upon any occasion, receive a letter or parcel from the fingers of
a black or coloured man, and in order to guard against such horrible defilement, he had a
golden instrument wrought something like a pair of sugar tongs, with which he was
accustomed to hold the presented article.13

Back home, abolitionists contested the condoned maltreatment of slaves encapsulated in Lord Lavington's
insidious public behaviour; they decried the atrocities that his cultural practice validated: violations of the
Abolition Act, as well as individual cases of heinous maltreatment and murders of slaves by planters in 1810
and 1811.14 Since the powerful proslavery lobby indefatigably suppressed these events as far as their power
allowed, only those with access to ongoing revelations in the press and through rumor could stay abreast of
daily developments. The centuries-long ideological battle over the humanity of Africans constantly and
variously manifested itself.

Plantocratic Paradigms in Mansfield Park

Power relations within the community of Mansfield Park reenact and refashion plantocratic paradigms; those
who work for Sir Thomas and his entourage both at home and abroad are locked into hierarchical and abusive
patterns of behaviour, though under widely different circumstances. The cruel officiousness of protagonist
Fanny Price's aunt, Mrs Norris, who is effectively Sir Thomas' overseer and lives in the suggestively named
white house 'across the park' from the Great House underlines his plantocratic style of administration.

Mrs Norris' surname recalls John Norris, one of the most vile proslaveryites of the day. Austen was well
aware of Norris' notoriety, having read Thomas Clarkson's celebrated History of the Abolition of the Slave
Trade in which Norris is categorically condemned. Clarkson's text was published in 1808 and read by Jane
Austen while she was working out the plot of Mansfield Park.15 Not only had Clarkson's history astounded
her but she admitted to her sister Cassandra that she had once been 'in love' with the famous abolitionist
whose devotion, industry, and total lack of regard for his own life in the cause was legend.16 Clark-son
chronicles how Norris represented himself to Clarkson in Liverpool as an opponent of the slave trade, then
arrived in London as a pro-slavery delegate representing Liverpool.17 After contacting Norris for an
explanation, Clarkson notes Norris' unctuously self-serving response:

After having paid high compliments to the general force of my arguments, and the general
justice and humanity of my sentiments on this great question, which had made a deep
impression upon his mind, he had found occasion to differ from me, since we had last parted,
on particular points, and that he had therefore less reluctantly yielded to the call of becoming
a delegate,—though notwithstanding he would gladly have declined the office if he could
have done it with propriety.18

Underscoring the intertextual designation of Mrs Norris as sadistic overseer, Sir Thomas himself is
centerstaged as 'master', especially in his treatment of niece Fanny Price. With very little ceremony and
offering Fanny Price's family no say in the matter, Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris engineer the transference of
this ten-year-old poor relation from her home in Portsmouth to Mansfield Park. A marginalized, near-despised
family, the Prices lose one of their own to accommodate Mrs Norris' need to appear charitable; Sir Thomas
eventually concurs in her decision although he reserves his judgment to return Fanny Price if she threatens
domestic stability. Portsmouth, by this account, is the uncivilized other; its members overflow with energies
that menace the security of Mansfield Park. Epitomizing the clash of epistemologies in the text, Portsmouth
signifies a way of living that negates the tightly controlled social order and challenges the sovereign law
embodied in Sir Thomas by ignoring it altogether. On the other hand, in a different way, since Portsmouth as
a naval town serves to uphold Sir Thomas' position by enforcing British control of the West Indies, what

70
might be more important is that in the domestic arena of England, the link between the two must be separated.
The expropriated Fanny Price hails from the milieu of transgressors who always signify the target of their
activities: kidnapped and captive slaves.

Young Fanny Price's removal from her family is described in terms often reserved for epiphanic moments in
the narrative of slavery:

The remembrance … of what she had suffered in being torn from them, came over her with
renewed strength, and it seemed as if to be at home again, would heal every pain that had
since grown out of the separation.

(370)

This mercantilist attitude toward human relationships, represented as disinterested benevolence toward Fanny
Price, invokes traditionally conservative rationales for the 'trade-in-flesh'. Family feeling or unity never
becomes an issue, since proslaveryites do not recognize African and slave families as social formations. On
the contrary, the West Indian lobby argued that bringing slaves to the Caribbean was a good deed, a way of
civilizing those whose environment provided them with nothing but barbarism—precisely the same basis for
the justification of bringing Fanny Price to Mansfield Park.

So, when Fanny arrives at Mansfield Park, she is closely watched for evidence of her uncouth otherness. She
must accept Sir Thomas' authority unconditionally or she will be removed. Sir Thomas scrutinizes her
'disposition', anticipating 'gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of
manner' (10-11). Eventually he decides she has a 'tractable disposition, and seemed likely to give them little
trouble' (18). She will acclimatize well. Nonetheless, his children 'cannot be equals [with Fanny Price]. Their
rank, fortune, rights, and expectations will always be different' (11).

Fanny herself begins to adapt to the value system at Mansfield, learning 'to know their ways, and to catch the
best manner of conforming to them'. Fanny thinks 'too lowly of her own claims' and 'too lowly of her own
situation' to challenge values that keep her low.19 Underscoring class difference and alluding to the
colonial-sexual nexus, profligate elder son Tom, the heir apparent to Sir Thomas' colonial enterprise, assures
Fanny Price that she can be a 'creepmouse' all she wants as long as she obeys his commands.

Just as markedly, when Fanny Price years later is deciding what to wear at the ball, the point of contention is
whose chain (or necklace) she will wear. The lurking question is to whom will she subject herself or belong.
To what extent has Mansfield Park and its values begun to construct her subjectivity? Gladly, she decides on
the chain of her future husband, Sir Thomas' younger son, Edmund. Moreover, when Sir Thomas leaves for
Antigua, she steps into his moral shoes; she opposes Mrs Norris' opportunism and informally assumes the role
of the 'good' overseer, her aunt's alter ego. Mimicking Sir Thomas, willingly cooperating in her own
assimilation, she speaks for and through him. Fanny Price helps to foreshadow and map a new colonialist
landscape that upholds the moral status quo but draws the line at arbitrary judgment and excessive indulgence.
In the chapel scene at Sotherton, for instance, Fanny Price identifies herself as an opponent of change.20
Edmund, on the other hand, underscores Fanny's complicity in her own assimilation when he confides—to her
delight—as she leaves for Portsmouth that she will 'belong to [them] almost as much as ever' (26-7).

Yet Fanny Price is still the daughter of Ports-mouth—Mansfield Park's relegated other, reared to succeed
pluckily against the odds. Her master-slave relationship with Sir Thomas operates on the register of two
opposing discourses: complicity and rebellion. Her stalwart refusal to marry Henry Crawford and the
punishment of summary banishment she incurs identifies Mansfield Park ideologically as an institution that
rallies to disempower anyone who jeopardizes Sir Thomas' feudal reign. This is especially true in the case of
the déclassé Fanny Price, to whom Mansfield Park has opened its portals. In return she opposes its patriarchal

71
demands on females as property by claiming one form of autonomy, thereby rendering herself an unregenerate
ingrate in ruling class eyes. Sir Thomas even describes her in language reserved for slave insurrectionaries:

I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency
to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women,
and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. But you
have now shewn me that you can be wilful and perverse.

(318)

To Sir Thomas, Fanny Price's feelings are as irrelevant as slaves' feelings; she is his object. In Tzvetan
Todorov's words, 'those who are not subjects have no desires.21

Fanny Price responds to her natal family almost exclusively as an other, after Sir Thomas banishes her to
Portsmouth. Such is the enormity of his ideological power. His risk in sending her to resist Portsmouth and
embrace Mansfield Park values pays off. Her home is nothing but 'noise, disorder, impropriety', her
overworked impecunious mother pronounced 'a dawdler and a slattern' (388, 390). Portsmouth reconstitutes
Fanny Price as Sir Thomas' transformed daughter, no longer the exiled object; while at Portsmouth she
barricades herself ideologically, as it were, inside Mansfield Park, functioning as its representative. Her
mother's features that she has not seen in over a decade endear themselves to her—not because she has missed
seeing them—but because they remind Fanny Price of Lady Bertram's, her mother's sister and Sir Thomas'
wife: 'they brought her Aunt Bertram's before her' (377). Fanny Price has come to resemble the
eurocentrically conceived 'grateful negro' in pre-abolition tales who collaborated with kind owners and
discouraged disobedience among rebel slaves.22 Her embrace of Mansfield Park's values dissolves any
binding association with her family and her old life.

After leaving Portsmouth for the second time, Fanny 'was beloved' by her adopted family in Mansfield Park,
the passive tense affirming her surrender of agency. When Edmund decides she will make him an appropriate
wife, her parents' response is not mentioned. We assume they are neither told nor invited to the wedding. The
only Portsmouth members who textually reappear are the conformists: sister Susan, coded as a second Fanny,
ready to satisfy Lady Bertram's need for a round-the-clock assistant, and impeccable sailor-brother William,
who exercised 'continued good conduct' (462).

Sir Thomas' commercial approach to Fanny Price reformulates the treatment he previously accorded her
mother, Frances Price, who 'disoblig[ed]' her family when she married a lieutenant of marines 'without
education, fortune, or connections'; as a result, the Mansfield Park inner circle acts almost as if Frances Price
senior did not exist; certainly she has no rights as a parent, so her children can be more or less removed at
will. The text hints, too, that having ten babies in nine years is tantamount to a reprehensible lack of restraint.
Neither Mrs Price's continuing independence in not seeking help nor her maintenance of a large family on a
pittance elicit textual approbation. Rather, she is lucky, in the text's terms, to be the recipient of Sir Thomas'
charity. With almost all immediate family ties severed, her status, mutatis mutandi, parallels that of her sister
Lady Bertram, whose dowry has doomed her to the borders in a different sense. Within a phallocratic
economy, their lives elicit contempt and condescension.

Lady Bertram, Mrs Norris, and Frances Price make up the trio of sisters who collectively display the
degradation of colonial-gender relations. In the opening sentence of Mansfield Park, which highlights Sir
Thomas' hegemonic order, the trope of capture and control that infuses the text first appears:

About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds,
had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of
Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts

72
 and consequences of an handsome house and large income.

The text thus describes her alleged initial conquest of Sir Thomas in arrestingly ironic tones and in doing so,
as in the famous opening assertion in Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park's first sentence also celebrates its
opposite: Sir Thomas' acquisition of a desirable social object. Maria Ward instantly drops out of sight, both in
nomenclature and in self-led behaviour. Occupying the role of a slatternly plantation mistress—'she never
thought of being useful' (179), Lady Bertram's prominent class status through marriage collides with the
posture of an undermined female. The lap dog upon which she lavishes attention—'no one is to tease my poor
pug'—emblematizes her pathetically protected status.23 When Sir Thomas has to break news to her, he
approaches her as he would a child. During his absence, she rather tellingly works on 'yards of
fringe'—appropriate for a marginalized wife—and when he returns, in recognition of her imposed vacuity, she
waits to have 'her whole comprehension' filled by his narrative (196). She epitomizes emptiness, a vacant
object-status, a slave or constructed subject who commits spiritual suicide. Only once does a hint of spunky
self-respect surface. On Sir Thomas' departure for Antigua when she comments that she does not fear for his
safety, a momentary ambiguity nags the text. Is she overly confident he will be safe because she is oblivious
to maritime danger due to the Napoleonic wars? Or does she not care? Does her comment speak
unconsciously about her recognition of powerlessness? Does it quietly express repressed anger?

Sir Thomas' behaviour on both sides of the Atlantic signals a plantocratic mode of behaviour. Through the
trope of his journey to Antigua, his long absence, and his sparing commentary about his experiences when he
returns, Austen stresses his planter-like detachment from humanity, or his playing down of the facts, or both.
One of the few things he did in Antigua—we learn—is attend a ball in the company of creoles—as white
planters were mockingly termed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; culturally and economically, Sir
Thomas is inextricably linked to his Antiguan counterparts. And given certain much-touted facts about
planters, contemporaries could have amplified Sir Thomas' character in a way that would expressively inflect
Lady Bertram's remark about not being concerned about his safety. Planters were infamous for taking slave
mistresses and fathering children.

Edward Long, who wrote the immensely popular History of Jamaica (1774), describes Creole activities as
follows:

Creole men … are in general sensible, of quick apprehension, brave, good-natured, affable,
generous, temperate, and sober; unsuspicious, lovers of freedom, fond of social enjoyments,
tender fathers, humane and indulgent masters; firm and sincere friends, where they once
repose a confidence; their tables are covered with plenty of good cheer …; their hospitality is
unlimited …; they affect gaiety and diversions, which in general are cards, billiards,
backgammon, chess, horse-racing, hog-hunting, shooting, fishing, dancing, and music.…With
a strong natural propensity to the other sex, they are not always the most chaste and faithful of
husbands.24

Lowell Joseph Ragatz points out, furthermore, that from the mid-eighteenth century:

private acts enabling white fathers to make generous provision for their illegitimate half-breed
children, despite existing laws prohibiting the transmission of extensive properties to blacks,
were passed in all the island legislatures with painfully increasing regularity. The number of
free persons of color in Barbados, largely recruited through illicit relations with white men
and negresses, rose from 448 to 2,229 between 1768 and 1802, while the number in Dominica
soared from 600 in 1773 to more than 2,800 in 1804. This rapid growth of a mixed blood
element in the British West Indies after 1750 arose chiefly from the Anglo-Saxon's now
merely transitory residence there and the small number of white women remaining in the
islands. Concubinage became well-nigh universal in the second half of the eighteenth century

73
 and the system pervaded all ranks of society. During the administration of Governor Ricketts
in Barbados in the 1790s, a comely negress even reigned at government house, enjoying all a
wife's privileges save presiding publicly at his table.25

According to August Kotzebue's well-known play that the characters in Mansfield Park choose to rehearse for
their recreation, Lovers' Vows, no love/lust exists in England, only 'in all barbarous countries'.26 Austen uses
this play to intertextualize the characters' motives and interactions. A remark from the play's philandering
Count Cassel that comments on sexual exploitation in the Caribbean matches contemporary accounts and
illumines the character of Sir Thomas.27

Jane Austen was well aware of these infamous activities. She knew about the estate of the Nibbs family in
Antigua because the Reverend George Austen, Jane Austen's father, was a trustee; she also knew of the Nibbs'
'mulatto' relative.28 As one critic concretely contends: 'Jane Austen would certainly have been aware of the
likelihood of a family such as her fictional Bertrams having numerous mulatto relatives in Antigua'. Sir
Thomas' condemnation of Mrs Price marrying low and his anger at Fanny Price's refusal to accommodate him
by marrying Henry Crawford mocks planters' infamous, quotidian practices.

A question then crops up: Does Sir Thomas banish his daughter, Maria, and censure Henry Crawford because
their sexual indulgences mirror his Antiguan conduct? Is one dimension of his behaviour a form of
self-projection, an unconscious denial of his dual and contradictory realities in the Caribbean and Britain?

Another victim of Sir Thomas' mercantilist attitudes, elder daughter Maria refuses to be Lady Bertram's clone.
Instead she stands with her exiled Aunt Frances and cousin Fanny in claiming sexual independence. Her
actions are even more morally outré since she has already been manipulated into marriage with Rushworth, a
man whom her father financially desires. For example in the gate scene at Sotherton, Maria symbolically and
literally refuses to be imprisoned. Maria, that is, falls for the ideological trap that is set for her and is punished
for trying to release herself.29 Mary Crawford, who also disregards Sir Thomas' authority and is coded as a
predator of sorts, similarly contests for personal autonomy and is configured as more evil because she
disregards Sir Thomas' values. Linked by their given names, they are different versions of a gendered bid for
identity.30

In the text's terms, none of these spirited acts by women in multiple postures of subjection can be vindicated
except that of the conflicted Fanny Price. The Crawfords are reduced to the social margins, Henry for visible
rakishness, Mary for 'evil' and bold collaboration in her brother's escapades. The possibility smoulders that Sir
Thomas cannot contain an English reflection of his Antiguan self. He represents men who control the general
slave population and the female slave population in particular through varieties of abuse. When women like
Frances and Fanny Price, Maria Bertram, and Mary Crawford articulate a counterdiscourse against their
objectification, Sir Thomas stands firm. Insurgent women become deleted subjects, objects of his wrath who
must be appropriately punished, usually for keeps. At the conscious and unconscious level, the text
continually inscribes challenges to the assumed inferiority of women and the right of a hegemonic patriarch to
use women as he pleases.

Most systematically of all, however, Lovers' Vows intertextualizes property-owning attitudes that characterize
planter-slave relations, including Sir Thomas' flagrant neglect of female welfare.31 At the same time, the
dramatic resolution of these corrupt interrelationships appears to exonerate Sir Thomas and validate
patriarchal rule. Clearly coded as Sir Thomas, the Baron is multiply conflicted. In former days, he had
abandoned naive and pregnant Agnes, who bore Frederick. Like the 'deserted and neglected negroes' of
Antigua who will become a later focus of national concern, Agnes is now starving to death and homeless.
Eventually, however, the Baron's callous desertion is mitigated by information that he has hired helpers to
search constantly till they find her. In the end the Baron decides to marry Agnes though he fails to consult her
about his plan. Like Maria Ward, she is assumed to desire such a splendid match.

74
In like manner, the Baron's efforts to marry off his daughter Amelia to silly Count Cassel are soon revealed as
nonbinding. When he learns that Amelia loves Pastor Anhalt, the Baron readily consents, a scenario that
comments on the marital imbroglio of Fanny Price, Henry Crawford, and Edmund Bertram. The case of
Frederick, who strikes the Baron in the course of trying to save his mother's life, allusively invokes the nature
of Sir Thomas' power: the Baron orders Frederick killed even though 'a child might have overpowered him',
for 'to save him would set a bad example'.32 Only when the Baron discovers that Frederick is his son, does
parental feeling induce him to relent. In doing so, the Baron earns permission to be readmitted to the human
community. Feudal laws and relations in Lovers' Vows sign those of the plantocracy.

Conclusion

Mansfield Park initiated a new chapter in colonialist fiction as old and new abolitionists came to terms with
the fact that the Abolition Bill did not fulfil its minimum requirement—amelioration of inhuman conditions.
Jane Austen's repugnance toward the slave trade, moreover, is well documented—her brother Francis was a
vigorous abolitionist—and by the time she writes Emma in 1816 her condemnation is forthright.33 Hence Sir
Thomas' chastening is one way of prescribing this letting-up process among a seemingly unregenerate
plantocracy. He reconstitutes himself as a moral rather than a profit-oriented planter, a condition inveterately
resisted among the colonial ruling class. Recent experience in the House of Commons as well as the
Caribbean have persuaded Sir Thomas, Jane Austen subtly argues, that the old order may be doomed and
disappearing. As a Parliamentary member, Sir Thomas would have been witnessing at first hand the efforts of
Wilberforce and his supporters to initiate corrective legislation. In admitting his errors and curbing his
selfishness, Sir Thomas comes to represent the liberal-conservative ideal of humanitarian plantation
ownership at a time when outright manumission is effectively a non-issue.

It hardly seems to be a coincidence that Mansfield Park echoes the name of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield,
who wrote the legal decision for the James Somerset case in 1772, stipulating that no slaves could be forcibly
returned from Britain to the Caribbean, which was widely interpreted to mean that slavery in Britain had been
legally abolished.34 Austen's invocation of Lord Mansfield's name suggests the novel's intrinsic engagement
with slavery and a view of Sir Thomas' plantations as a place where feudal relations are beginning to
dissolve.35 To underscore that point, the word 'plantation' is frequently used to denote Sir Thomas' property on
both sides of the Atlantic.

At another level, the intertextualizing of Lord Mansfield's ruling warns and censures all those who try to
further impose their will on the already subjugated, in Sir Thomas' case, Fanny Price and by extension his
Antiguan slaves. The choice of Mans field for the title underscores the idea of property in the hands of a
patriarch—one man's plantations—and in its compression of several frames of meaning and reference, it
connects the Caribbean plantation system and its master-slave relationships to tyrannical gender relations at
home and abroad.

Jane Austen's recommendations for a kinder, gentler plantocracy, however, do anything but confront that
institution head on. Not to put too fine a point on it, the opposite is virtually true. En route to the new
dispensation, Sir Thomas' change of heart is accompanied and contradicted by his challenge to the
heterogenous utterances of those who flout his power. Hence paradoxically, his moral reformation reconfirms
his control. With unruly elements purged or contained and his unitary discourse intact though refashioned, the
same power relations persist in slightly different guise between the ruling class elite and dominated people,
between male and female. Thus to read Mansfield Park as a text with closures that favour more benevolent
socio-political relationships only serves to mask textual undercurrents that threaten to explode its tightly
controlled bourgeois framework.

Let me briefly recite some of these closures that purport to foretell future felicity and a more uniform culture
groping toward harmony. First, Lovers' Vows is intended to demonstrate how well the Baron (Sir Thomas)

75
suppresses anarchic expression and restores peace after learning his lesson. Second, protagonist Fanny Price,
despite announcing her right to autonomy, attains the status of an insider because she mirrors Sir Thomas'
values and rather coldly rejects her origins. She embraces an imposed identity as a bona fide member of the
Mansfield Park community. Sir Thomas, in turn, offers himself as a father: 'Fanny was indeed the daughter
that he wanted. His charitable kindness had been rearing a prime comfort for himself' (472). Third, the Price
family in Portsmouth is exposed as decisively inferior except for those who agreeably adapt. Disobedience
and heady self-determination are penalized by lifetime expulsion from the old order: Maria Bertram and Mary
Crawford are excluded from the ruling class coterie while younger daughter Julia's repentance and her more
accommodating disposition gain her a second chance.

Also to the point is Lady Bertram's languid life, which is criticized yet accepted as a familiar though
inconsequential existence while the mettlesome spirit of the Price survivors goes unapplauded. That is,
although Lady Bertram may draw sympathetic attention as a witless figure, the necessity for a social
appendage in female form to round out plantocratic control is never gainsaid. But perhaps the most morally
ambiguous textual judgment concerns Mrs Norris herself whose downfall is treated as her just deserts. Former
overseer and exposed renegade, she is banished for good, like her sister Frances, from the family circle. That
she encourages Maria Bertram to claim a certain kind of freedom is sweepingly condemned. The text
obliterates the fact that she represents Sir Thomas' interests, but in excess of how the text wants him
portrayed.36 She is his avatar, Sir Thomas at his most acquisitive and self-indulgent. He cannot countenance
the reflection of himself in Mrs Norris, who represents his displaced tacit approval of heinous cruelties and
ensuing reduced profits. When he rejects her, he rejects part of his former self and life; he becomes part of the
new order that seeks more wholesome relations at home and abroad. Since his regeneration cannot mean that
he continues to treat people unfeelingly, Mrs Norris has to be reconstructed as a villain, tidily demolished, and
eliminated as a speaking subject.

These methodical but artificial closures, however, in their blanket effort to smother opposition, only highlight
ideological antagonisms that decentre Sir Thomas' power and question its validity. They elicit an insistent
counterdiscourse. His posture also underwrites a certain anxiety about outsiders, regardless of former familial
or friendly relationships. Human connections count for naught compared to the obsession with control.

Most ironically, textual imbeddings surface in the person of Sir Thomas' major vindicator, the Baron, who
turns out in one sense to be his most damning accuser. As Sir Thomas' autocratic counterpart, the medieval
Baron has no compunction about killing an innocent man who defies his authority. Similarly, Sir Thomas
himself can order severe punishment, if not death, against slaves he arbitrarily deems insubordinate. Such was
the authority of planters. And not uncoincidentally, the Baron is execrating Frederick in Lovers' Vows while
that other Baron, Sir Thomas, administers the Antiguan plantations, by implication in the same way. The
Baron denies Frederick's humanity as planters deny the humanity of slaves, relenting only when he discovers
Frederick is his son. In a remarkably unconscious self-projection, the Baron commands Frederick in words
that would make more sense in reverse: 'Desist—barbarian, savage, stop!!' (526). Moreover, by summarily
terminating the theatricals, Sir Thomas reestablishes his authority over a symbolically uncontrollable
situation.37

Most materially, the sparse counterdiscourse concerning slaves pinpoints a fundamental textual repression.
Having affirmed her pleasure in Sir Thomas' stories of his Caribbean visit, Fanny inquires about the slave
trade. After absorbing her uncle's answer—significantly unreported—she expresses amazement to Edmund
about the ensuing 'dead silence' (198), a phrase that requires careful unpacking. Let me back up for a moment.

In this transitional post-abolitionist period that features a shaky British-Caribbean economy and multiple slave
insurrections, no safe space, from a eurocentric perspective, is available for colonized others as speaking
subjects, let alone as self-determining agents. Put baldly, slave subjectivity has to be effaced. As the oppressed
daughter of an exigent family, Fanny Price becomes the appropriate mediator or representative of slaves'

76
silenced existence and constant insurrectionary potential. In her role as a marginalized other (though in a
vastly different cultural context), Fanny Price can project and displace personal-political anxieties and mimic
her servile subject position.

As a brief for plantocratic gradual reform, the text disintegrates at 'dead silence', a phrase that ironically
speaks important debarred and smothered voices. As Mansfield Park's unofficial spokesman for Antiguan
society, the beleaguered Sir Thomas has cut slaves off from representation. Lovers' Vows, besides, has already
voiced and even accentuated the major topoi of a muzzled colonialist discourse: brutality, fractured families,
and the violated bodies and psyches of innocent people. Thus the conceptualizations of 'dead' and 'silence' that
parallel the play's metonyms of bondage further indict the gaps in Sir Thomas' discourse. Beyond that, these
loaded inscriptions of death and muteness accost the taboo enforced on dissent in the colonies. 'Dead silence'
affirms Sir Thomas' seeming pretence that power relations are stable in Antigua. For what other than
dissimulation of some sort—most likely an obfuscation or omission—could explain Fanny Price's ready
acceptance of his lengthy speech on the slave trade. 'Dead' and 'silence', in other words, forswear the reality of
ubiquitous slave insurrections. For example, plots were organized and carried out in Jamaica, Tobago, and
especially in Dominica, where the second maroon war was led by Quashie, Apollo, Jacko, and others.38
Uncontainable conflicts are further unmasked by textual allusions to several issues of the Quarterly Review,
which carried many troublesome facts about slavery in 1811:39 for one, the periodical reported that the
progressive diminution in slave population levels persisted, despite abolition of the trade, a fact that threw
doubt on promises made by planters and colonial legislatures to ameliorate conditions. Old planters in
Jamaica and Antigua were in the news, too, as zealous competitors of the 'new' planters. The Quarterly
Review also confirmed that the bottom had dropped out of the sugar market by 1808, that estates were in
disrepair, and growers could not be indemnified.40 What's more, the seemingly univocal colonial discourse of
Mansfield Park that upholds a singular view of slavery as 'working', belies domestic agitation inside and
outside Parliament for improved conditions.41

Antigua, then, tropes an anxiety-creating unknown venue, falsely coded as a run-down locale in need of an
individual planter's semi-altruistic, definitively ethnocentric intervention. Profits are down, but workers and
administrators suffer too. Antigua also correlates with Portsmouth, both being symbolic sites of indeterminacy
near water and places where the allegedly uncivilized cluster. As a port and an island intimately involved with
slavery, Portsmouth and Antigua witness slave ships arriving and departing; scenes involving the sale of
people and naval engagements are in constant view. Sir Thomas may subsume Antigua within his monocular
vision and Fanny Price may fail to see (or evade) Portsmouth's obvious immersion in the slave trade as she
gazes at the sights of the town, but their buried knowledge and realities intertextually circulate nonetheless.
Like the Orient in Edward Said's formulation, Antigua and Portsmouth are Mansfield Park's wild, colonized
others, signs of potential disruption and sexual conflict.42 They signal that the women of Mansfield Park are
ideologically absorbed or unceremoniously expelled—or even obliterated (as the slavewomen of Antigua are)
as autonomous beings.

In this space as Mansfield Park's other, Antigua satirizes Sir Thomas' authority. He may conduct his
relationships in a recognizably plantocratic mode that solidifies his power, but both vocal and mute
suppressions are evident. Sir Thomas' return assumes that he leaves behind a certain order, even harmony, on
his plantations. He controls superficially obedient slaves, but that illusion will soon be fractured. By
implication, other apparent fixtures might also turn out to be less enduring.

This is not to argue that the possibility of slave emancipation in Mansfield Park parallels a potential liberation
for Anglo-Saxon women. But it is to posit that challenges to ossified thought and the received cultural
representation of women are at least conceivable. Lady Bertram is comatose, but can that state last? The
condition of indolent plantocratic wives is certainly coming to an end. Besides, the self-determining duo of
Maria-Mary will not tolerate permanent disappearance. Their independent natures will soon reassert
themselves, the text having forced them into a closure, demonstrably false. Fanny Price, however, the

77
obedient daughter who replaces the ungovernable overseer, is pinioned in a conflict of searing and
unresolvable tensions. So little room is available for repudiation of her place in Mansfield Park's social
situation that it threatens to bind and fix her.43 Ultimately the rebellious acts of Fanny Price and her
ideological companions, Maria, Frances Price, and Frederick are paradigmatic of slave resistance: Fanny Price
signifies a bartered slave and the sign of the absent female slave. The deported Maria, in turn, is a variant of
the marginalized Portsmouth family.

By contrast, Sir Thomas' authority is scarcely denied by the men of the text who fare somewhat differently.
Each of them projects a part of that complex Sir Thomas, even the sybaritic Bishop Grant, symbolically linked
to his malignant niece and nephew as Sir Thomas is linked to Mrs Norris. Despite debauchery, elder son Tom
will take up his inheritance, as does the foolish Rushworth, whose wealth and aristocratic status enable him to
transcend a temporary setback. Henry Crawford continues to seduce women and Edmund settles down into
married life.

Mansfield Park, then, I am arguing, is a post-bolition narrative that intertwines with a critique, conscious or
unconscious, of gender relations. Although the text superficially presents itself at the end as an agreeable
synthesis that has incorporated its contradictions—the hermeneutics of an attempted restoration of power—the
text's relationship to emancipationist ideology creates irrepressible contradictions and signals incompletion.
As a colonialist script, it features epistemological ethnocentrisms, blanks, ellipses, substitutions, and the
homogenizing of silent slaves, occupying a space between old and new modes of discourse and agitation. It
projects the end of an uncompromising proslavery lobby by fusing commentary on slaves and Anglo-Saxon
women who are concurrently exhibiting forms of autonomy and powerlessness. Thus the reformed planter's
voice in itself becomes a nullified force. His contradictory positions cancel themselves out. The indirectness
of the commentary, moreover, indicates Jane Austen's temporary reluctance to sound the controversy over
slavery into recognizable audibility. Not until Emma does she do so unmistakably.

As a quasi-allegory of colonial-gender relations, Mansfield Park offers itself as a blueprint for a new society
of manners. Relationships in the colonies will match those at home, for domestic manners have been
transformed for the better. But as we have seen, Sir Thomas' brand of eurocentric benevolence is dubious at
best and the socio-political recommendations are decidedly and perhaps necessarily constrained. Nonetheless,
the attempt to show the positive consequences of a kinder, gentler world in action, together with many potent
silences and irruptions of nuanced subaltern voices, signifies the desirable, though possibly not attainable,
transition to a new colonialist dispensation of gradualist politics at home and abroad. Despite this slow but
positive evolution, however, emancipation still cannot be named.

Notes

1. Wylie Sypher, 'The West-Indian as a 'Character' in the Eighteenth Century', in Studies in Philology
vol. 36 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 504-5, 509.
2. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains. Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982).
3. Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). See also D. J. Murray, The West Indies and the
Development of Colonial Government 1801-1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Dale Herbert
Porter, The Defense of the British Slave Trade, 1784-1807, Dissertation University of Oregon, June
1967, 25-166.
4. Mary Millard points out that Northampton squires were rarely sugar-planters and speculates that 'an
earlier Bertram married a lady who brought an estate in Antigua, as her dowry'. Mary Millard, '1807
and All That', Persuasions, 50-1. I thank Professor Kenneth Moler for invaluable discussions on the
question of Sir Thomas's slave-owning status.

78
 5. Sir Thomas probably belonged to the 'outer ring' of absentee planters and merchants who had never
visited the colonies. Between 1807 and 1833 forty-nine planters and twenty merchants belonged to
this group. B. W. Higman, 'The West India 'Interest' in Parliament 1807-1833', Historical Studies 13
(1967-69) 4, 1-19. See also Lowell Joseph Ragatz, Absentee Landlordism in the British Caribbean,
1750-1833 (London: Bryan Edwards Press, n.d.), 1-19).
6. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 279-80.
7. Sir George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections: in a Series of Letters Addressed to Mrs. Beecher
Stowe, written by Sir George Stephen, at Her Request (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 36-7. Note also
that as a result of information about ongoing inhumane treatment, British abolitionists were shortly to
publicize the condition of slaves in Antigua even more decisively in forming a committee for the
'Neglected and Deserted Negroes' of that island. See John Rylands Memorial Library 'The Case of the
Neglected and Deserted Negroes in the Island of Antigua', pamphlet 21.5, pt. 8.
8. Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England. A Study in English Humanitarianism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), 131, 171-2. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the
British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). See also
James Walvin, 'The rise of British popular sentiment for abolition 1787-1832', Anti-Slavery, Religion,
and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, eds Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher
(Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 154 and passim; Sir George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections, 25-27
and passim.
9. Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park. An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1967), 40-2.
10. Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park, 35-6.
11. R. W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen. The Text based on Collation of the Early Editions, vol. 3
(London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 30. Further references to Mansfield Park will be given in
the text. The enormous chain of expenses that emanated from the Great House included a host of
people from servants and overseers to waiters, 'brownskin gals' of no official function, and the estate's
managing attorney who received 60% of the gross. Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire. A Short
History of British Slavery (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 132-9).
12. Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park, 37. William B. Willcox touches briefly on the turmoil that
would have precipitated Sir Thomas's decision, in The Age of Aristocracy 1688-1830 (Lexington, MS:
D. C. Heath and Company, 1971), 174-179. Willcox also points out that: 'Though Miss Austen's two
brothers were in the navy throughout the war, her world is untouched by anything outside itself; it is
tranquil and timeless' 168. See also Mansfield Park, 65.
13. With respect to Sir Thomas's 'near-noble' status, Fleishman argues that 'only some four hundred
families could qualify for the higher class, and despite an economic fluidity which enabled some
baronets and even commoners to enter it, this was an aristocracy composed mainly of noblemen' (40).
Mrs. Flanders, Antigua and the Antiguans: A Full Account of the Colony and its Inhabitants From the
Time of the Caribs to the Present Day, Interspersed with Anecdotes and Legends. Also, an Impartial
View of Slavery and the Free Labour Systems; the Statistics of the Island, and Biographical Notices of
the Principal Families, vol. 2 (London, 1844), 136.
14. Sir George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections, 8-19; Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery
Movement in England, 176-81.
15. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, 553-6.
16. Frank Gibbon, 'The Antiguan Connection: Some New Light on Mansfield Park ', in The Cambridge
Quarterly, 11 (1982), 303.
17. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the
African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, vol. 1 (London: 1808; rpt. Frank Cass, 1968), 378ff;
477ff. In reading Clarkson, Jane Austen would have been abreast of fierce abolitionist and pro-slavery
infighting both inside and outside Parliament and of the literature on the subject of the slave trade.
18. Clarkson, History, vol. 1, 479.

79
19. Johanna M. Smith, '"My only sister now": Incest in Mansfield Park ', Studies in the Novel 19:1
(1987), 1-15.
20. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 'The Boundaries of Mansfield Park', in Representations, 6 (1984), 133-152.
21. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Harper & Row, 1982), 130.
22. In Popular Tales (1804) Maria Edgeworth, for example, has a story entitled 'The Grateful Negro', that
exemplifies exactly this familiar binary opposition. It is possible, given Jane Austen's admiration for
Maria Edge-worth (Chapman, vol. 5, 299), that she had read some of Edgeworth's tales as well as her
novels. Given the popularity of The Farmer of Inglewood Forest (1796) by Elizabeth Helme that also
features a 'grateful negro', Austen may well have read that novel or others featuring that motif.
23. Mansfield Park, 217. The connection of indolent house-mistresses despised by their authors
frequently appears. Two examples are Lady Ellison in Sarah Robinson Scott's novel, The History of
George Ellison (1766) and Mary Wollstonecraft's polemical attack on such practices in A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1792).
24. Sypher, 'The West Indian', 503, 506.
25. Ragatz, Absentee Landlordism, 1-21. Note also how Sir Thomas's 'burnt, fagged, worn look' (178)
matches signs of the contemporary West Indian in fiction. 'A yellowish complexion, lassitude of body
and mind, fitful spells of passion or energy, generosity bordering on improvidence, sentimentality
combined with a streak of naughtiness and cruelty to subdeviates'; see also Sypher, The West Indian,
504.
26. Lovers' Vows. A Play, in five acts. Performed at the Theatre Royal Covent-Garden. From the German
of Kotzebue. by Mrs. Inchbald (London, 1798) in Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, 475-538.
27. Lovers' Vows, 534.
28. Gibbon, 'The Antiguan Connection', 298-305.
29. Gerald L. Gould, 'The Gate Scene at Sotherton in Mansfield Park ', in Literature and Psychology,
20:1 (1970), 75-8.
30. For the discussions of subjectivity and interpellation in ideology here and elsewhere in the essay, I am
indebted to Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1975).
31. I am assuming here and elsewhere in the text the reader's conversancy with Lovers' Vows, an
assumption I think Jane Austen makes.
32. In Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), Michel Foucault
argues that feudal torture of the criminal's body and subsequent death 'made everyone aware … of the
unrestrained presence [and power] of the sovereign' 'The ceremony of the public torture and execution
displayed for all to see the power relation that gave his force to the law …'. 'We must regard the
public execution, as it was still ritualized in the eighteenth century, as a political operation' 49-53.
33. Jane Austen, Emma (first published 1816) (Boston: The Riverside Press, 1933), 233.
34. See F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially
77-124 and 237-43. See also James Walvin, The Black Presence. A documentary history of the Negro
in England, 1555-1860 (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 95-114.
35. Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1986), 116-119.
36. I am indebted for the argument about the text's excess and unconsciousness to Pierre Macherey's A
Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 75-97
and passim.
37. Yeazell, 'The Boundaries of Mansfield Park ', 133.
38. Craton, Testing the Chains, 337-8.
39. Mansfield Park, 104. I would add data from the Quarterly Review to Chapman's list of sources for
Mansfield Park and refashion his chronology of the novel from 1800-1809 accordingly.
40. See Quarterly Review, 164.
41. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, 13.

80
 42. I am thinking here of Edward Said's conceptualization of orientalizing in Chapter One, 'The Scope of
Orientalism', in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), and passim.
43. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, 156-7.

Austen, Jane: Further Reading

Bibliographies

Handley, Graham. Jane Austen: A Guide Through the Critical Maze. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992, 139
p.

Provides a guide to Austen criticism from early reviews through the 1980s.

Roth, Barry. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984-94, Athens: Ohio University Press,
1996, 438 p.

Offers a bibliography of studies on Jane Austen.

Biographies

Austen-Leigh, James. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: R. Bentley, 1870, 364 p.

Presents an affectionate biography of Austen by her nephew.

Chapman, R. W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948, 224 p.

Provides an early biography by one of Austen's twentieth-century critics.

Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, 399 p.

Links Austen's life to her works.

Jenkins, Elizabeth. Jane Austen: A Biography. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1948, 286 p.

Offers a detailed treatment of Austen's life and works.

Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 512 p.

Attempts to correct the portrait of the sweet maiden aunt painted by Austen's family;
considered by critics to be somewhat speculative in its alternative interpretation of Austen's
life.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1997, 352 p.

Offers a popular biography focusing on Austen's family.

Criticism

Auerbach, Nina. "Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought About Fanny Price." Women and
Literature 3 (1983): 11-28.

81
 Considers the character Fanny Price from Mansfield Park as a version of the "Romantic
monster."

Benedict, Barbara M. "Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female
Literacy." In Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century 'Women's Fiction' and Social Engagement, pp. 147-99.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Links Austen's treatment of women as readers to the rise of consumer society in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 310 p.

Contends that Austen's novels are a conservative reaction to the more liberal novels that
preceded them but that she is innovative in narrative style and technique.

Craik, W. A. Jane Austen: The Six Novels. London: Methuen, 1965, 210 p.

Sees in Austen's novels a harmonic combination of the artist and the moralist; emphasizes the
economy of Austen's style and plotting and the serious intent of the novels.

Devlin, D.D. Jane Austen and Education. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975, 140 p.

Interprets Austen's novels as delineating the educative process of their protagonists.

Duane, Anna Mae. "Confusions of Guilt and Complications of Evil: Hysteria and the High Price of Love at
Mansfield Park." Studies in the Novel 33, no. 4 (winter 2001): 402-15.

Discusses the treatment of feminine desire with respect to the ending of Mansfield Park.

Duckworth, Alistair. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1971, 239 p.

Focuses on the settings of Austen's novels and their social context.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Inside the House of Fiction: Jane Austen's Tenants of Possibilities." In
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, pp.
107-86. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Comprises two essays, the first on gender and genre in Austen's juvenilia, the second on the
novels; discusses Austen's representation of the social and political history of women in her
works.

Harding, D. W. "Regulated Hatred." Scrutiny 8, no. 4 (March 1940): 346-62.

Focuses on Austen's satire and caricature and reads her novels as variations on the
Cinderella tale.

Harris, Jocelyn. "Silent Women, Shrews, and Bluestockings: Women and Speaking in Jane Austen." In The
Talk in Jane Austen, edited by Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg, pp. 3-22. Edmonton: University of
Alberta Press, 2002.

82
 Examines the treatment of female speech and female silence in Austen's novels.

Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988,
186 p.

Asserts that Austen's novels contain a political element.

Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, 261 p.

Applies a sociolinguistic approach to issues of gender, performance, and authority in

Austen's novels.

Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952,
267 p.

Examines Austen's use of irony throughout her novels as well as in her letters and juvenilia.

Poovey, Mary. "Ideological Contradictions and the Consolations of Form: The Case of Jane Austen; True
English Style." In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, pp. 172-207. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Compares Austen's style to that of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, placing her between
Wollstonecraft's direct manner of expression and Shelley's self-effacing style, and connects
narrative mode to the authors' ideology of femininity.

Said, Edward. "Jane Austen and Empire." In Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by Terry
Eagleton, pp. 150-64. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.

Interprets Austen's personal ideology as conservative, focusing on Mansfield Park.

Sulloway, Alison. "Emma Woodhouse and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Wordsworth Circle 7
(autumn 1976): 320-32.

Examines Austen's portrayal of women within the context of Mary Wollstonecraft's work,
calling Emma a subversive and Romantic text.

Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, 291 p.

Acknowledges Austen's conservatism but nonetheless views her as a social critic; observes
the close connection between Austen's controlled and precise prose and her morality.

Todd, Janet. "Who's Afraid of Jane Austen." Women and Literature 3 (1983): 107-27.

Considers Virginia Woolf's response to Jane Austen as intimidated; a comparative study of

the novelists as women authors.

——. "Jane Austen, Politics, and Sensibility." In Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan
Sellers, Linda Hutcheon, and Paul Perron, pp. 71-87. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

83
 Analyzes Sense and Sensibility in the context of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cult of
sensibility and its implications for women's sexuality.

Weldon, Faye. Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. London: Michael Joseph, 1984, 127 p.

Fictional letters from Weldon's persona Aunt Faye to her niece, a "punk" college student,
attempting to convince her of Austen's merits; humorous but also scholarly.

Woolf, Virginia. "Jane Austen at Sixty." Athenaeum (15 December 1923): 433.

A speculative essay on the paths Austen's career might have taken after Persuasion.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Austen's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale
Group: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 19; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol.
3; British Writers, Vol. 4; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective Supplement,
Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.
116; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition;
DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring
Novels; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times
Supplement, Ed. 1; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 13, 19, 33, 51, 81, 95, 119; Novels for
Students, Vols. 1, 14, 18; Twayne's English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; World Literature
Criticism; and Writers for Young Adults Supplement, Vol. 1.

Austen, Jane (1775 - 1817): Introduction

JANE AUSTEN (1775 - 1817)

English novelist.

Originally written between 1798 and 1799, but not published until 1818, Northanger Abbey is considered Jane
Austen's first significant work of fiction, and is her only work to be widely studied as part of the Gothic
literary tradition. The novel is in part a burlesque of the Gothic and sentimental fiction that was popular in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries particularly of Ann Radcliffe's novels, such as The Mysteries of
Udolpho. In addition to its parodic elements, Northanger Abbey also follows the maturation of Catherine
Morland, a naive eighteen-year-old, ignorant of the workings of English society and prone to self-deception.
Influenced by her reading of novels rife with the overblown qualities of horror fiction, Catherine concocts a
skewed version of reality by infusing real people, things, and events with terrible significance. However,
Catherine's impressions, though clouded by Gothic sentiment, often hint at an insightful, if unconscious,
judgment of character that cuts through the social pretensions of those around her. In this respect Austen's
novel carries on an ironic discourse which makes it not only a satire, but also a sophisticated novel of social
education.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Austen began writing while she was still living at her childhood home at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire,
England. Her life at Steventon, though sheltered from the world at large, gave her an intimate knowledge of a
segment of English society—the landed gentry—that was to provide the material for most of her fiction, and
by 1787 Austen had already begun to produce stories, dramas, and short novels. In 1795 she commenced

84
writing Elinor and Marianne, an early version of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811). One
year later, she started First Impressions, the work that eventually evolved into Pride and Prejudice (1813).
When Austen finished First Impressions in 1797, her father submitted it to a London publisher. Although
rejected, the story remained a popular favorite among the circle of relations and acquaintances with whom
Austen shared her writings. In 1798 and 1799 Austen wrote most of a novel that was later revised, bought by
the publisher Richard Crosby, and advertised in 1803 as "In the Press, SUSAN; a novel, in 2 vols." It
remained unpublished, however, and was later revised again and published in 1818, after Austen's death, as
Northanger Abbey, along with the novel Persuasion.

MAJOR WORKS

Austen's career is generally divided into an early and a late period, the former encompassing the juvenilia, as
well as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, the latter including Emma (1816),
Mansfield Park (1814), and Persuasion. They are separated by a hiatus of eight years. There is a remarkable
consistency in the work of the early and late periods, marked by a certain mellowing of tone in the later
works. The plots of Austen's novels revolve around the intricacies of courtship and marriage between
members of the upper class. Austen's detractors in more egalitarian eras find fault with what they perceive to
be a rigid adherence to a repressive class system. Also, in commenting on the narrowness of her literary world
and vision, some critics wonder if novels of such small scope can truly reflect the human condition. However,
Austen's talents are uniquely suited to her chosen subject. Her realm is comedy, and her sense of the comedic
in human nature informs her technique, which is judged as superb for its delineation of character, control of
point of view, and ironic tone. Although Austen chose as her subject the people she knew best, she
illuminated in their characters the follies and failings of men and women of all times and classes.

While ostensibly a burlesque of the conventional modes of Gothic horror fiction, Northanger Abbey is also a
novel of education that focuses on the theme of self-deception. Austen portrays Catherine as an inversion of
the typical Gothic heroine, making her neither beautiful, talented, nor particularly intelligent, but rather
ordinary in most respects. In contrast, several other characters in the novel are presented as pastiches of stock
Gothic characters—Isabella and General Tilney, for example, are parodies of the damsel and the domestic
tyrant. These individuals seem to fit into Catherine's deluded perspective of the world which, in the tradition
of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, leaves her unable to distinguish between reality and the romanticized
version of life she finds in popular novels. Other characters in the novel serve to balance the work. Henry
Tilney is often regarded by critics as Austen's mouthpiece—though he, too, is occasionally an object of irony
and ridicule. For example, he fails to realize that Catherine's delusions, though excessive, hint at the true
nature of people and events. Thus, Catherine is the first to understand that General Tilney, although not a
murderer, is cruel and mercenary. This ironic aspect of the novel alludes to a larger theme in the work, that of
the moral significance of social conventions and conduct—a subject that Austen explored in greater detail in
later novels.

Catherine's introduction into society begins when Mr. and Mrs. Allen, her neighbors in Fullerton, invite her to
vacation with them in the English town of Bath. There she meets the somewhat pedantic clergyman Henry
Tilney and the dramatic Isabella Thorpe, who encourages Catherine in her reading of Gothic fiction. Her
circle of acquaintances widens with the arrival of James Morland, Catherine's brother and a love interest for
Isabella, and John Thorpe, Isabella's rude, conniving brother. The setting shifts from Bath to Northanger
Abbey, the ancestral home of the Tilneys, when John deceives General Tilney, Henry's father, into believing
that Catherine is an heiress. Austen's satire of Gothic horror novel conventions begins as Henry and Catherine
drive up to the Abbey and the former plays on the heroine's romantic expectations of the estate. When
Catherine reaches her destination she is disappointed to find a thoroughly modern building, completely
lacking in hidden passageways, concealed dungeons, and the like. Later, Austen allows Catherine's
imagination to run amok, only to reveal the objects of her fears as ordinary and mundane. At the climax of the
novel, General Tilney—whom Catherine suspects of having murdered or shut up his wife somewhere in the

85
abbey—turns the heroine out after learning that she does not come from a wealthy family. At the close of the
novel, the outraged Henry proposes marriage to Catherine, now divested of her delusions by Henry and his
sister Eleanor. General Tilney, who proves to be not a murderer, but rather an individual of questionable
moral and social character, eventually gives his consent to the marriage after learning that his daughter
Eleanor is also engaged—to a wealthy Viscount.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critics have generally regarded Northanger Abbey to be of lesser literary quality than Austen's other mature
works. Some scholars have observed occasional lapses in her narrative technique of a sort that do not appear
in later novels. By far the greatest debate surrounding Northanger Abbey, however, is the question of its
aesthetic unity. Critics have traditionally seen the work as part novel of society, part satire of popular Gothic
fiction, and therefore not a coherent whole. Detractors, focusing on the work as a parody, have found its plot
weak, its characters unimaginative and superficial, and its comedy anticlimactic due to its reliance on an
outmoded style of fiction. Others, while conceding the lack of an easily discernible organizing principle, argue
that the work is unified on the thematic level as not merely a satire of popular fiction, but also an ironic
presentation of a self-deceived imagination that is quixotically wrong about reality but right about human
morality. In addition, critics have considered Northanger Abbey a transitional work, one that moves away
from the burlesque mode of juvenilia and toward the stylistic control of such masterpieces as Mansfield Park
and Emma.

Austen, Jane (1775 - 1817): Representative Works

Sense and Sensibility (novel) 1811
Pride and Prejudice (novel) 1813
Mansfield Park (novel) 1814
Emma (novel) 1816
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) 1818
Lady Susan (novel) 1871
The Watsons (unfinished novel) 1871
Love and Friendship and Other Early Works (juvenilia) 1922
[Sanditon] Fragments of a Novel (unfinished novel) 1925
Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others (letters) 1932
Volume the First (juvenilia) 1933
Volume the Third (juvenilia) 1951
Volume the Second (juvenilia) 1963

Austen, Jane (1775 - 1817): Primary Sources

SOURCE: Austen, Jane. "Chapter 14." In Northanger Abbey. 1818. Reprint edition, pp.
107-16. New York: Signet, 1996.

In the following excerpt from Northanger Abbey, first published in 1818, Catherine discusses
the pleasure she derives from reading Gothic fiction—Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho,
in particular—versus what she perceives as the drudgery of reading nonfiction works, such as
histories.

The next morning was fair, and Catherine almost expected another attack from the assembled party. With Mr.
Allen to support her, she felt no dread of the event: but she would gladly be spared a contest, where victory
itself was painful, and was heartily rejoiced therefore at neither seeing nor hearing anything of them. The

86
Tilneys called for her at the appointed time; and no new difficulty arising, no sudden recollection, no
unexpected summons, no impertinent intrusion to disconcert their measures, my heroine was most unnaturally
able to fulfil her engagement, though it was made with the hero himself. They determined on walking around
Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from
almost every opening in Bath.

"I never look at it," said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, "without thinking of the south of
France."

"You have been abroad then?" said Henry, a little surprised.

"Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her
father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?"

"Why not?"

"Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books."

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have
read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had
once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the
whole time."

"Yes," added Miss Tilney, "and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was
called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the
Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it."

"Thank you, Eleanor—a most honourable testimony. You see, Miss Morland, the injustice of your suspicions.
Here was I, in my eagerness to get on, refusing to wait only five minutes for my sister, breaking the promise I
had made of reading it aloud, and keeping her in suspense at a most interesting part, by running away with the
volume, which, you are to observe, was her own, particularly her own. I am proud when I reflect on it, and I
think it must establish me in your good opinion."

"I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really
thought before, young men despised novels amazingly."

"It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do—for they read nearly as many as women. I myself
have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and
Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of 'Have you read this?' and
'Have you read that?' I shall soon leave you as far behind me as—what shall I say?—I want an appropriate
simile.—as far as your friend Emily herself left poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt into Italy.
Consider how many years I have had the start of you. I had entered on my studies at Oxford, while you were a
good little girl working your sampler at home!"

"Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?"

"The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding."

"Henry," said Miss Tilney, "you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his
sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same
liberty with you. The word 'nicest,' as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as

87
you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way."

"I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not
I call it so?"

"Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very
nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied
only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their
sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word."

"While, in fact," cried his sister, "it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are
more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety
of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best. It is a most interesting work. You are
fond of that kind of reading?"

"To say the truth, I do not much like any other."

"Indeed!"

"That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real
solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?"

"Yes, I am fond of history."

"I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The
quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and
hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great
deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and
designs—the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books."

"Historians, you think," said Miss Tilney, "are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination
without raising interest. I am fond of history—and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In
the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much
depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one's own observation; and as for the
little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well
drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made—and probably with much greater, if the
production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the
Great."

"You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it.
So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of
history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling
great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the
torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and
necessary, I have often wondered at the person's courage that could sit down on purpose to do it."

"That little boys and girls should be tormented," said Henry, "is what no one at all acquainted with human
nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that they
might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are
perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb
'to torment,' as I observed to be your own method, instead of 'to instruct,' supposing them to be now admitted

88
as synonymous."

"You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor
little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be
for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing
almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that 'to torment' and 'to instruct' might sometimes be
used as synonymous words."

"Very probably. But historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read; and even you
yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may
perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth-while to be tormented for two or three years of
one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider—if reading had not been taught, Mrs.
Radcliffe would have written in vain—or perhaps might not have written at all."

Catherine assented—and a very warm panegyric from her on that lady's merits closed the subject. The Tilneys
were soon engaged in another on which she had nothing to say. They were viewing the country with the eyes
of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the
eagerness of real taste. Here Catherine was quite lost. She knew nothing of drawing—nothing of taste: and she
listened to them with an attention which brought her little profit, for they talked in phrases which conveyed
scarcely any idea to her. The little which she could understand, however, appeared to contradict the very few
notions she had entertained on the matter before. It seemed as if a good view were no longer to be taken from
the top of an high hill, and that a clear blue sky was no longer a proof of a fine day. She was heartily ashamed
of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come
with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a
sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing
anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister
author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more
trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion
of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.
But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate
heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are
particularly untoward. In the present instance, she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared
that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately
followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by
him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural
taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and
shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she
voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her
progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline,
and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its
summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he
shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence. The general pause
which succeeded his short disquisition on the state of the nation was put an end to by Catherine, who, in rather
a solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, "I have heard that something very shocking indeed will soon
come out in London."

Miss Tilney, to whom this was chiefly addressed, was startled, and hastily replied, "Indeed! And of what
nature?"

89
"That I do not know, nor who is the author. I have only heard that it is to be more horrible than anything we
have met with yet."

"Good heaven! Where could you hear of such a thing?"

"A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday. It is to be uncommonly
dreadful. I shall expect murder and everything of the kind."

"You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend's accounts have been exaggerated; and if such
a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by government to prevent its
coming to effect."

"Government," said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, "neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters.
There must be murder; and government cares not how much."

The ladies stared. He laughed, and added, "Come, shall I make you understand each other, or leave you to
puzzle out an explanation as you can? No—I will be noble. I will prove myself a man, no less by the
generosity of my soul than the clearness of my head. I have no patience with such of my sex as disdain to let
themselves sometimes down to the comprehension of yours. Perhaps the abilities of women are neither sound
nor acute—neither vigorous nor keen. Perhaps they may want observation, discernment, judgment, fire,
genius, and wit."

"Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot."

"Riot! What riot?"

"My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has
been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three
duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two
tombstones and a lantern—do you understand? And you, Miss Morland—my stupid sister has mistaken all
your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as
any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she
immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George's Fields, the Bank
attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light
Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant
Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a
brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of
the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general."

Catherine looked grave. "And now, Henry," said Miss Tilney, "that you have made us understand each other,
you may as well make Miss Morland understand yourself—unless you mean to have her think you intolerably
rude to your sister, and a great brute in your opinion of women in general. Miss Morland is not used to your
odd ways."

"I shall be most happy to make her better acquainted with them."

"No doubt; but that is no explanation of the present."

"What am I to do?"

90
"You know what you ought to do. Clear your character handsomely before her. Tell her that you think very
highly of the understanding of women."

"Miss Morland, I think very highly of the understanding of all the women in the world—especially of
those—whoever they may be—with whom I happen to be in company."

"That is not enough. Be more serious."

"Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature
has given them so much that they never find it necessary to use more than half."

"We shall get nothing more serious from him now, Miss Morland. He is not in a sober mood. But I do assure
you that he must be entirely misunderstood, if he can ever appear to say an unjust thing of any woman at all,
or an unkind one of me."

It was no effect to Catherine to believe that Henry Tilney could never be wrong. His manner might sometimes
surprise, but his meaning must always be just: and what she did not understand, she was almost as ready to
admire, as what she did. The whole walk was delightful, and though it ended too soon, its conclusion was
delightful too; her friends attended her into the house, and Miss Tilney, before they parted, addressing herself
with respectful form, as much to Mrs. Allen as to Catherine, petitioned for the pleasure of her company to
dinner on the day after the next. No difficulty was made on Mrs. Allen's side, and the only difficulty on
Catherine's was in concealing the excess of her pleasure.

The morning had passed away so charmingly as to banish all her friendship and natural affection, for no
thought of Isabella or James had crossed her during their walk. When the Tilneys were gone, she became
amiable again, but she was amiable for some time to little effect; Mrs. Allen had no intelligence to give that
could relieve her anxiety; she had heard nothing of any of them. Towards the end of the morning, however,
Catherine, having occasion for some indispensable yard of ribbon which must be bought without a moment's
delay, walked out into the town, and in Bond Street overtook the second Miss Thorpe as she was loitering
towards Edgar's Buildings between two of the sweetest girls in the world, who had been her dear friends all
the morning. From her, she soon learned that the party to Clifton had taken place. "They set off at eight this
morning," said Miss Anne, "and I am sure I do not envy them their drive. I think you and I are very well off to
be out of the scrape. It must be the dullest thing in the world, for there is not a soul at Clifton at this time of
year. Belle went with your brother, and John drove Maria."

Catherine spoke the pleasure she really felt on hearing this part of the arrangement.

"Oh! yes," rejoined the other, "Maria is gone. She was quite wild to go. She thought it would be something
very fine. I cannot say I admire her taste; and for my part, I was determined from the first not to go, if they
pressed me ever so much."

Catherine, a little doubtful of this, could not help answering, "I wish you could have gone too. It is a pity you
could not go all go."

"Thank you; but it is quite a matter of indifference to me. Indeed, I would not have gone on any account. I was
saying so to Emily and Sophia when you overtook us."

Catherine was still unconvinced; but glad that Anne should have the friendship of an Emily and a Sophia to
console her, she bade her adieu without much uneasiness, and returned home, pleased that the party had not
been prevented by her refusing to join it, and very heartily wishing that it might be too pleasant to allow either
James or Isabella to resent her resistance any longer.

91
Austen, Jane (1775 - 1817): Title Commentary
[Text Not Avilable]

[Text Not Avilable]

[Text Not Avilable]

[Text Not Avilable]

[Text Not Avilable]

SYNDY MCMILLEN CONGER (ESSAY DATE 1987)

SOURCE: Conger, Syndy McMillen. "Austen's Sense and Radcliffe's Sensibility." Gothic,
n.s., 2 (1987): 16-24.

In the following essay, Conger argues that rather than denouncing Ann Radcliffe's Gothic
"sensibility" in Northanger Abbey, Austen affirms its essence and expands upon its utility as
both a heroic virtue and a means of achieving growth.

The intrinsic value of Northanger Abbey is still disputed, but its significance in literary history generally is
not: it is viewed as a key moment in the history of the novel. Here Ann Radcliffe's Female Gothic, the last
representative of a century of literary emotionalism, is parodied to death by the novel of social realism: here
Louis Bredvold's "natural history of sensibility"1 comes to an end. Recent revisionists2 see Austen as more
indebted to her predecessor but still believe that she resists Radcliffe's endorsement of the heart. Marilyn
Butler insists that Austen's heroines "are rebuked for letting interiority guide them" (140, 145), and Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar also argue that Catherine Morland, foreshadowing Austen's later heroines, must
"relinquish" her "subjectivity" to save herself (121, 129, 144).3 This vision of Austen sacrificing Radcliffe's
subjectivity on the altar of realism or propriety or common sense wants some revision itself, for it rests on
cursory assumptions about Radcliffe's achievement. The two authors are not poles apart at all on the question
of sensibility; they are, on the contrary, two of the most prominent of many women writers involved in a
late-century enterprise best briefly described as "saving sensibility."4

By the time Radcliffe completed The Italian, she had also reformed the English Gothic novel, divorcing it
from sensation and wedding it to sentiment. She focuses her fictions not on the supernatural and irrational
forces that drive forward Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto but rather on the sensitive human psyche
responding to such forces; and the effect is to establish that special form of eighteenth-century sensitivity,
sensibility, as the behavioral norm. In Radcliffe's world sensibility is not confined to a few amiable eccentrics:
all her good characters have it; conversely, all her wicked characters are without it, are, instead, slaves to the
brute passions. Yet she never recommends sensibility blindly. First she reconstructs it,5 then tests it for
viability in the laboratory of Gothic terrors.

This rehabilitation of sensibility6 was no small undertaking. A cult term that emerged midcentury but eluded
precise definition, at first it referred to a bundle of loosely compatible but positive ideas: "delicate
sensitiveness of taste" or "the capacity for refined emotion"; most specifically the "readiness to feel
compassion for suffering," to forgive, and to be charitable (OED, cf. Hagstrum 5-9). Especially after the
appearance of The Sorrows of Young Werter in England in 1779, however, it began to seem suspect, to raise a
number of troubling questions. Was its cultivation more apt to lead to emotional refinement or excess,
sensitivity to others or egotism, morality or pathological behavior? It declined in status, mocked and

92
abandoned by leading authors and rendered lugubrious by minor ones. Radcliffe's guarded endorsement of it
in The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests that she was well aware of this tarnished reputation.

Mr. St. Aubert, the heroine's father, is willing to defend sensibility only as the lesser of two evils: "Whatever
may be the evils resulting from a too susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an insensible one" (1.20).
For St. Aubert, sensibility is a central, even an indispensable human attribute, but not a sufficient virtue unto
itself. "Sentiment is a disgrace," says the dying man to his daughter, "instead of an ornament, unless it lead us
to good actions" (1.80). Since it too easily invites self-indulgence or "the pride of fine feeling" (1.79), both of
these being obstacles to fellow-feeling, its necessary companions are self-control and moderation: "I would
not annihilate your feelings, my child, I would only teach you to command them"; "All excess is vicious"
(1.20). Actually, his praise of sensibility, when compared to the successes of its avatars in Udolpho and The
Italian, is unnecessarily faint. These characters do occasionally succumb to excessive emotionality; but, more
often, the special gifts of sensibility serve them well, helping them to survive in a hostile world.

First, they are acutely perceptive. They use their senses: visual, common, moral. They combine an awareness
of their own hearts with a scrutiny of others' faces to gain an intuitive knowledge or "emotional
consciousness" (OED) of their situations. When left alone, they tend to scan their minds, sorting out and, if
necessary, challenging their feelings or their ideas; they tend to set their inner lives in order. At other times,
the same sensitivity and capacity for fine discernment turns outward—they are all skilled physiognomists:
they scan eyes, study gestures, and draw accurate inferences about the emotional or moral state of persons
around them (Ellena de Rosalba's study of her jailor Spalatro's face, for instance, saves her life). This special
consciousness of inside and outside, coupled with their capacity for intense concentration, often grants them
the advantage in self-control.7 They are conversant with their own hearts and this habitual rational attention to
emotion sets them free from passion's tyranny. Under stress their minds are nearly always clear, agile and
strong. Witness Emily talking to Count Morano just as he has decided to abduct her by force: "Calm, Intreat
you, these transports, and listen to reason, if you will not to pity. You have equally misplaced your love, and
your hatred" (2.264).

These characters of sensibility are clearly designed to be stronger than the creations of mid-century ironists
Mackenzie and Sterne, Harleys and Yoricks who were frequently immobilized by their own or others'
emotions. Radcliffe's sensibility is much more than passive capacity for refined emotions, even for
compassion. It energizes the whole mind, heightening its ordinary powers of perception, communication,
concentration, and self-control. It is a new normative, moderate, rational subjectivity; and it is worth saving
because it is a saving grace. The startling fact about recent Radcliffe criticism, seen in this light, is that it sees
her fictions as hypocritical and deeply subjective. Radcliffe indulges in "every excess of sensibility which she
explicitly warns against" (Kahane 52); her fictions "might virtuously proclaim the merits of self-control," but
what they show is a "world governed by subjectivity." They are pure "exploration of her heroines' inner state
of being at various levels of consciousness," one such level being "'inner rage and unspecified … guilt'"
(Butler 133).

This preoccupation with Radcliffe's supposed covert message at the expense of her overt one focuses attention
on a single but essential fact about Gothic fiction, one amply discussed by students of the genre from Eino
Railo to Tzvetan Todorov—its subrational appeal. But Gothic fiction appeals to us, such students are quick to
add, because it brings some order to the chaotic subrational realm.8 The Gothic objectifies fears and desires in
specific events, characters, and objects and then rationalizes them, making the latent manifest and, at the same
time, usually less threatening. This objectifying process leads Todorov to suggest that Gothic fiction is ersatz
psychoanalysis; and recent studies of the Female Gothic support his claim. Tania Modleski argues that the
Female Gothic enables women readers to "work through profound psychic conflicts," that it legitimizes a
temporary paranoia in readers by allowing them to identify with guiltless heroines placed in a hostile
environment (83). These fictions give vent to terror and hostility but without finally recommending such
attitudes (Fleenor 17).

93
Political persuasion may determine whether critics view this textual doubleness as therapeutic or repressive,
but I doubt if it justifies their refusing to see the doubleness at all, of insisting that Radcliffe, for Austen saw
that doubleness, even if she responded to it with characteristic tact. She worried about Radcliffe's affective
appeal but without condemning it; and she did not let it undermine her admiration for the ethic of sensibility
that Radcliffe's texts manifestly defend. In fact, Northanger Abbey moves towards a subtle endorsement of
that ethic, while Catherine acts out a confrontation with the problem of the Gothic's special subjective appeal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR "GOTHIC EXTRAVAGANCE" IN NORTHANGER ABBEY

The meaning of Catherine's adventures, including her Gothic aberrations at Northanger, is indissolubly a part
of the formal structure of the novel. Without the dual form in which pairs of opposites are dramatically
illustrated, especially the contrast between reason and imagination, the growth of wisdom and experience in
Catherine Morland would be not only incomplete but also formally chaotic and therefore aesthetically
meaningless. In the penultimate chapter, where the contrast between romance and common life is repeated
from Chapter ii (Vol. I), Jane Austen achieves a resolution of the antithes is between Gothic romance and the
reality of everyday life in the achievement of her own novel: Gothic extravagance does have a place in
literature if it serves an aesthetic rather than an empirical function. She seems to banish romantic material
from the novel in the comic finality of Catherine's humiliation, but ironically allows it a legitimate existence
by the formal success with which she has employed the Gothic episode.

SOURCE: Glock, Waldo S. "Catherine Morland's Gothic Delusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey." Rocky
Mountain Review of Language and Literature, no. 32 (1978): 33-46.

Catherine's misreadings and misadventures have been much discussed, but a few points need to be made about
them for present purposes. Catherine is a naive reader, consuming Udolpho without ever activating her
analytical faculty: she reads for plot and for thrills (1.25). Moreover, she allows Mrs. Radcliffe to activate her
dream-making process; and that leads her to confuse fiction and reality as had her cervantick predecessor and,
also as he had, to imitate the heroines of her idol. In this case, by practicing physiognomy, by reading a man's
character in his face: General Tilney's "silent thoughtfulness," "downcast eyes," and "contracted brow" add up
in her roused imagination to the "air and attitude of a Montoni!" (2.150).

Catherine's muddle reflects clear recognition on Austen's part of the danger of Gothic fiction—its activation of
passive-agressive fantasies and volatile emotions; but her response to that danger is neither to condemn the
reader nor the author, but simply to insist on the separateness of fiction and reality (Glock 44-45) and, even
more important, on the inapplicability of emotions depicted and elicited in fiction to life. As Catherine sadly
notes to herself after Henry's astonished lecture—"Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been
admitting?" (2.159)—we had best confine our "craving to be frightened" (2.160) to the aesthetic realm.

Northanger Abbey does not limit its evaluation of Radcliffe's subjective appeal, however, to these few
negative moments. On the contrary, it contains many suggestions that Udolpho presents Catherine with
psychological benefits as well as dangers. It may not enhance her power of selfcontrol, but it nevertheless
does increase her abilities to see and to converse. While she views Bath from the hills with the Tilneys,
Catherine is able to compare the new scene to Radcliffe's "the south of France" and to chat, as a result, more
easily with Henry; and if it guides her aesthetic appreciation of landscape in Bath, it intensifies her moral
awareness at the Abbey. On the one hand, this results in a mistaken inference about the General, but, on the
other, it also provides a helpful bridge in Catherine's education between the moral idyll of her childhood and
the crasser actual world outside her home.

Catherine notices herself that she feels somehow protected by Udolpho—a neglected insight of hers that
anticipates Modleski's thesis by 200 years: "While I have Udolpho to read," she assures Isabella Thorpe, "I
feel as if nobody could make me miserable" (1.25). The reviewers of Austen's day might have insisted that

94
such an attitude endangered Catherine's virtue; Austen's text, however, demonstrates that Catherine is right,
that Udolpho shields her from graver actual dangers, a delightful reversal of the reviewers' favorite cliche. At
the Allens', Catherine's "raised, restless, and frightened imagination" busies itself with Udolpho while her
adult chaperone worries about dressmakers (1.34). In town Catherine ponders the mystery of the black veil
whenever Isabella chatters to her mindlessly about clothes or men or her brother John rattles about carriages
and women's faces (1.22-23). Upon arrival at the Tilney abbey, Catherine views the spotless well-lit,
modernized interior with the eye of a disappointed Gothic addict, oblivious to the General's struggle to
impress her with his riches (1.128). Udolpho may burden Catherine temporarily with a few embarrassing
fantasies, but it is often the best of the offered leisure pursuits and a positive preventive to vanity, frivolity, or
materialism—a position on novel reading, incidentally, also taken by Mr. Rambler and another of his
admirers, Mary Wollstonecraft.9

Implicit in Catherine's story is at least one other tribute to Udolpho: a subtle endorsement of Radcliffe's ethic
of sensibility. Those who persist in seeing Catherine as progressing away from such an ethic may be dazzled
by the parody into believing that its presence somehow magically banishes everything Radcliffe stood for
from Austen's fictive world. If Northanger Abbey moves its heroine away from one kind of subjectivity,
however, it is only to move her towards another. It is not so much a progress as a process of refinement, one
in which the heroine is gradually divested (Moler 36) of certain excessive traits and certain false friends until
she stands before us, at the end, as an approximation of Radcliffe's ideal (granted, that in Austen's fiction there
are only approximations of ideals) of rational sensibility (Duckworth 8).

Catherine begins her story as a tomboy, a reluctant scholar, and a naif, still "ignorant and uninformed as the
female mind at seventeen usually is" (1.5). She is also burdened, however, by excessive sensibility; she is
indiscriminately goodnatured and the difficulties she has at Bath stem as much from her "too susceptible
heart" as they do from her inexperience. She thinks well of nearly everyone, and refuses to pass judgment on
her brother James's new friends, the Thorpes. It seems harsh to infer from this, however, as Stuart Tave has
done, that Catherine is an "amiable idiot" (60); for even in the brisk round of mindless activity she is caught
up in at Bath, she shows signs of awakening sensitivity, discernment, and self-control. She doubts Henry's
playful assertions, she worries about the impropriety of riding in carriages and missing appointments, and she
finally sees that she must, for the sake of her own and her friends' feelings, sometimes say no to the whims of
others. Her sensibility, even if it renders her gullible, at the same time makes her teachable and flexible, two
valuable assets in the complex moral world of Austen's novels.

Isabella presents a particular danger to Catherine in her still malleable condition, that of tempting her to
become a heroine of false sensibility. Isabella's mode of discourse, which Catherine begins to echo during her
Bath period, is exaggerated and insincere, the vocabulary of sentiment without the substance to back it up that
St. Aubert deplores. The Tilneys are a better influence on Catherine. Eleanor Tilney is presented as Isabella's
foil, the genuine version of what Isabella professes to be: all decorum, sensitivity, and fellow-feeling. She is
very much like her analogue Emily St. Aubert, but with one important exception: she does not wear her heart
on her face. Her sensibility is concealed by a quiet reserve (1.38).

In contrast, Henry enters the novel in the role of a talkative antic commentator. He mocks the Bath society's
attention to surfaces so much that Catherine concludes, shortly after meeting him, that he indulges "himself a
little too much with the foibles of others" (1.15). Gilbert and Gubar agree, pegging him as "his father's son,"
opinionated, condescending, even insensitive and misogynistic to a degree (140); but the fact remains that he
is by far the more sympathetic of Catherine's two suitors. John Thorpe's remarks begina and end with himself
and his own concerns; he remains blind to his weaknesses and essentially unaware of the needs of others. In
contrast, Henry, even if his discerning mind is sometimes "more nice than wise" (1.84), knows himself and
attends to others. He is his sister's counterpart: a complete man of sensibility disguised in motley. He has
moral sense, common sense, a keen capacity for empathy, acuteness of apprehension, refined taste, and a
capacity for forgiveness too, even of a young woman who sees his father as a murderer! Henry generally

95
keeps this sensibility under cover of his wit; but when he is pressed by his father to abandon Catherine and to
consider a financially more advantageous marriage, his sentimental values emerge. He rejects the advice of
his father and hastens to Catherine's house to bring about a visibly sentimental unraveling: "He felt hemself
bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland" (2.202).10

At Northanger Abbey, then, Catherine is taught to distinguish sentimental fiction from reality, but, as might
be surmised by the company she keeps, she is not stripped of her sensibility. Her abbey experiences rather
refine her character than revolutionize it. Much that is affected and adolescent falls away at the abbey—the
extravagance of diction, imagination, and curiosity. What remains is essentially Radcliffe's ideal: the
well-regulated, yet sensitive and charitable, mind. After the General has peremptorily ordered Catherine to
leave, even though she is stunned and deeply shamed, she checks her own grief to minister to Eleanor's. When
Eleanor begs her, with a "look of sorrow," to write her despite her father's interdict, Catherine's pride melts "in
a moment" and she instantly says "Oh, Eleanor, I will write to you indeed" (2.185). Eleanor is equally
generous in these last moments, pressing her pocket money on Catherine for the unexpected journey. Not just
their tears and words on this occasion, but their acute consciousness of the moral and emotional dimensions of
the crisis, their giving and forgiving natures, and their self-control for each others' sakes, mark them as
heroines of sensibility in Radcliffe's sense.

Radcliffe's special subjectivity does not seem to me to be sacrificed in this scene or elsewhere in Northanger
Abbey. What has been sacrificed, if anything, is the assumption that sensibility is necessarily on the face or in
the self-consciousness of the characters. Sensibility here and elsewhere in Austen's works has become so quiet
that it is often overlooked. It has no unmistakable surface characteristics.11 It can underlie Henry's teasing
conversation as well as the sweet, serious discourse of his sister; Mrs. Allen's absent-minded permissiveness
but also Mrs. Morland's gentle scrutiny and periodic lectures. In this context, it should be fairly obvious why
Austen seems skeptical of the Gothic frame that Radcliffe had given to sensibility. Austen needed to divest it
of the Gothic atmosphere of exaggeration to save it for her own more subtle fictional reality, one where faces
more often serve as masks than as windows to the heart.

One can only be sure that someone else has sensibility in an Austen novel after a lapse of time and events:
only if a professed concern for others has been translated, as St. Aubert recommends, into actions, tested by
adversity, and remains unshaken, is it true sensibility. Three characters in Northanger Abbey clearly fail this
test of time, even though they imagine themselves in firm possession of aesthetic and moral sense: both the
Thorpes' and the General's attentiveness to Cathe-rine melt away with their misconceptions of the Morland
fortune. In contrast, there is no special awareness in Eleanor, Henry, Mrs. Morland, or Catherine that their
actions can be identified with a code called sensibility, yet they obviously can. It is as if, to survive, sensibility
has gone underground. Radcliffe had declared it to be normative; Austen rather clearly but unobtrusively
assumes it to be, mentioning it less often than Radcliffe but nevertheless granting it a central position in
Northanger Abbey that it never after relinquishes. People with it in her novels—Catherine, Marianne
Dashwood, Colonel Brandon, Anne Elliott, and Fanny Price—need never be given up for lost; and those
without it (just as St. Aubert had assured Emily)—the Thorpes, the Misses Steele or Bertram—are seldom to
be saved. For Austen not only is sensibility, as it is for Radcliffe, a measure of moral excellence and the key to
true propriety; it has also become the leaven for growth, the secret ingredient of her Bildungsroman. Clearly,
Northanger Abbey does not mark the death of Radcliffe's sensibility but rather its fruitful transfiguration.

Notes

1. Stuart M. Tave argues persuasively for this keen distinction between Radcliffe and Austen. Others who do
so include Frank W. Bradbrook, Waldo S. Glock, Kenneth Moler, and Mary Lascelles.

2. They base their arguments on Harold Bloom's assumptions about authors and their predecessors and the
"anxiety of influence." Judith Wilt offers a similar reading but her focus is not so conspicuously feminist. My

96
own revisionist reading is closest to Jean Hagstrum's, who sees Austen's novels as contemplative
reconsiderations of the values of sensibility. I draw on Hans-Robert Jauss's reception theory; particularly, on
his convictions that texts are best considered in contexts, in relationship to analagous works in their time
(synchronic study) and in the past (diachronic study), and that these relationships are nearly always complex
ones.

3. Cf. the similar readings of David Levine, of Judith Wilt, who sees Austen's heroines trying to "cut …
destructive emotion down to size" (135), and of Coral Ann Howells, who emphasizes Austen's greater atten
tion to "balance" in matters of feeling.

4. Katharine Rogers has suggested that eighteenth-century English women writers felt, to some degree,
liberated by the literary mode of sensibility, even though they were often ambivalent about it. It authorized the
expression of emotions which the culture-at-large (and their conduct books) did not. Sensibility may have
appealed to women on a number of other levels as well: linguistic, social, ethical. Women at the time were
encouraged to be silent, or if allowed to speak, were untrained to speak the language of pure logic. Sensibility
valued the non-verbal forms of communication fostered by silence—sympathy, facial expression,
gesture—and it spoke characteristically in a language that was alogical, that blended together thought and
emotion. They faced poverty, even disgrace, if they were ever judged harshly by parents or husbands. The
literature of sensibility emphasized suitors, husbands, and fathers who forgave. The fascination of women
writers and readers of fiction with sensibility in the eighteenth century received attention early in our century
from J. M. S. Tompkins. More recently, their interest in foreign literature of sensibility has been under
investigation by Grieder and Conger.

5. Gary Kelly (51) sees the importance of sensibility for Radcliffe but believes that reason constitutes for her
an opposing set of values. Howells does, too, discussing feeling in various Gothic novelists, including Rad
cliffe, in a much more general sense.

6. Useful critics on sensibility besides Louis Bredvold are Ronald S. Crane, Jean Hagstrum, John K. Sheriff,
and Ian Watt. For special attention to women, see also Carol Gilligan, Katharine Rogers, and Patricia M.
Spacks.

7. Nina da Vinci Nichols (205) has recently made an important distinction between Radcliffe's and Matthew
G. Lewis's Gothic fiction. Radcliffe's characters are concerned about identity and "power over the self";
Lewis's Ambrosio is motivated by a desire for "power over others."

8. Theodore Ziolkowski reiterates the necessity of reason in the making of Gothic literature in Disenchanted
Images.

9. See Samuel Johnson's Rambler No. 4 and Mary Wollstoncraft's Vindication (18.2). See also the works by
Robert Scholes on Johnson and Austen and by Lloyd W. Brown and Margaret Kirkham on Austen and
Feminism.

10. The conclusion of Northanger Abbey is a visibly sentimental unraveling. Radcliffe could hardly have done
better. The heroine sits over her needlework, "sunk again, without knowing it herself, into languor and
listlessness." The hero suddenly arrives and is introduced by a "conscious daughter" to her mother; and he is
doing his best to apologize for the lack of propriety in his sudden appearance "with the embarrassment of real
sensibility." The mother, too, manages a good-natured response: "He did not address himself to an uncandid
judge or a resentful heart. Far from comprehending him or his sister in their father's misconduct, Mrs.
Morland … received him with the simple professions of unaffected benevolence … (2.196).

11. Spacks sheds valuable light on Austen's interest in concealment.

97
Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey Ed. John Davie. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.

Bloom Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and Her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.

Bredvold, Louis I. The Natural History of Sensibility. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962.

Brown, Lloyd W. "Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973): 321-38.

Butler, Marilyn. "The Woman at the Window: Ann Radcliffe in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane
Austen." Women and Literature 1 (1980): 128-48.

Conger, Syndy M. "Fellow Travellers: Englishwomen and German Literature." Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture 14 (1984): 143-71.

Crane, Ronald S. "Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the 'Man of Feeling.'" English Literary History 1
(1934): 205-30.

Duckworth, Alistair. The Improvement of the Estate. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971.

Fleenor, Julian E. Ed. "Introduction," The Female Gothic. Montreal, Quebec: Eden, 1983. 3-28.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Glock, Waldo. "Catherine Morland's Gothic Illusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey." Rocky Mountain
Review of Language and Literature 32.1 (1978): 33-46.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werter: A German Story. Trans. Richard Graves.
London: Dodsley, 1779.

Grieder, Josephine. Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England:
The History of a Literary Vogue. Durham: Duke UP, 1975.

Hagstrum, Jean. Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1980.

Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. London: Athlone, 1978.

Jauss, Hans-Robert. Literaturgeschichte Als Provokation Der Literaturwissenschaft. Muenchen (Munich):

Wilhelm Fink, 1979.

Kahane, Claire. "Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity." The Centennial Review (Winter 1980): 43-64.

Kelly, Gary. "'The Constant Vicissitude of Interesting Passions' Ann Radcliffe's Perplexed Narratives."
Ariel-E 10 (1979): 45-64.

98
Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983.

Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1939.

Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon,
1982.

Moler, Kenneth. Jane Austen's Art of Allusion. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968.

Nichols, Nina da Vinci. "Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Brontë." In The Female Gothic see under
Fleenor).

Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. London: Oxford UP, 1968. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed.
Bonomy Dobree. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.

Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle. New York: Humanities, 1964.

Rogers, Katharine M. "The Liberating Effect of Sentimentalism." Ch. 4 in Feminism in Eighteenth-Century

England. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982.

Scholes, Robert. "Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen." Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 380-90.

Sheriff, John K. The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660–1800. University: U of
Alabama P, 1982.

Spacks, Patricia M. "Taking Care." Ch. 3 of The Female Imagination. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976.

Tave, Stuart M. Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 1973.

Tompkins, J.M.S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961.

Watt, Ian. "Sense Triumphantly Introduced to Sensibility." In Jane Austen: "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride
and Prejudice," and "Mansfield Park": A Casebook. Ed. B. C. Southam. New York: Macmillan, 1976.
119-29.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. New York:
Norton, 1967.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

CLAIRE LAMONT (ESSAY DATE 1995)

SOURCE: Lamont, Claire. "Jane Austen's Gothic Architecture." In Exhibited by Candlelight:

Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter
Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 107-15. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

99
 In the following essay, Lamont discusses the significance and symbolic use of Gothic
architecture in Northanger Abbey.

When Catherine Morland is invited to visit the Tilneys at Northanger Abbey these are her reflections:

She was to be their chosen visitor, she was to be for weeks under the same roof with the
person whose society she mostly prized—and, in addition to all the rest, this roof was to be
the roof of an abbey!—Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for
Henry Tilney—and castles and abbies made usually the charm of those reveries which his
image did not fill. To see and explore either the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters
of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be more than the visitor of an
hour, had seemed too nearly impossible for desire. And yet, this was to happen. With all the
chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an
abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined
chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some
traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.1

This paper is about Jane Austen's Gothic architecture. I have started with a quotation which expresses
Catherine Morland's view of Gothic architecture, that it is a matter of "castles and abbies". The Gothic novels
of the late-eighteenth century make frequent use of these two types of medieval building, the castle and the
monastery, both of which had a domestic function but were not primarily defined by that function. As these
two settings figure repeatedly in Gothic novels they come to take on features of two opposing signifying
systems. The castle is associated with aggression, extroversion and the male; it dominates its landscape. The
monastery is associated with repression, introversion and the female, and lies half-hidden in a valley. It is
typical of early Gothic novels to be set in remote parts of continental Europe, and in an earlier century.
However vestigial the historical sense of the novelists they set their novels in some sort of medieval world. In
Northanger Abbey, however, the setting is in the south-west of England in Jane Austen's present, the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Medieval castles and monasteries were visible in her world but both
would have lost their raison d'être, military or spiritual. They would be visible as ruined, restored or imitated.

In Northanger Abbey the heroine makes her first visit from home to Bath, apparently one of the least Gothic
of settings. Having been originally a Roman settlement, it was rebuilt in the eighteenth century with
neo-classical architecture as the medicinal properties of its waters were exploited. From Bath Catherine
Morland makes two Gothic excursions. The first is the abortive trip to Blaize Castle; the second is the visit to
Northanger Abbey. Catherine imagines Blaize Castle to be "an edifice like Udolpho" (102), and before
agreeing to go on the trip asks "may we go all over it? may we go up every staircase, and into every suite of
rooms?" (102) She anticipates "the happiness of a progress through a long suite of lofty rooms" or "along
narrow, winding vaults" (104). The party never reaches Blaize Castle, and it is never actually pointed out in
the novel that it was it was not, as John Thorpe had asserted, an old castle, "the oldest in the kingdom" (101),
but an eighteenth-century Gothic imitation.2

There is no doubt about the age of Northanger Abbey. Catherine learns its history from Eleanor Tilney:

Many were the inquiries she was eager to make of Miss Tilney; but so active were her
thoughts, that when these inquiries were answered, she was hardly more assured than before,
of Northanger Abbey having been a richly-endowed convent at the time of the Reformation,
of its having fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its dissolution, of a large
portion of the ancient building still making a part of the present dwelling although the rest
was decayed, or of its standing low in a valley, sheltered from the north and east by rising
woods of oak.

100
Critics of the Gothic motif of the monastery usually stress imprisonment rather than the spiritual role of such a
building. A monastic building in the Gothic novel is a place where someone is kept either against their will or
at least in denial of the full range of their passions. Catherine Morland shares this view; she expects to find
evidence of "an injured and ill-fated nun" (150). Eleanor Tilney's account of the history of Northanger Abbey,
however, does not appear to invite that interpretation. Northanger had been "a well-endowed convent at the
Reformation" which had "fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its dissolution" ("fallen"
implies either coming down, or chance). The word "convent" was in the late eighteenth century just acquiring
its specific modern meaning of a religious house3 We may read the convent as a safe and spiritual retreat for
women, which has now become the personal property of one man. What was endowed as a convent has
become a private house where women are oppressed by one man, and a man significantly called General
Tilney. His name indicates that he would be more at home in a castle. Catherine Morland, who is not
interested in history, and particularly not the "quarrels of popes and kings" (123), does not meditate on this
paradox. For her a castle or an abbey would do. She does not detect that although castles may have lost their
original purpose with the cessation of fighting, it is a question whether the same can be said of a convent. One
thing that the English Reformation has achieved is to give the powerful male, whose attributes are reflected in
the castle, ownership also of the convent.

General Tilney exercises his ownership of Northanger Abbey in a way that no other man does in Jane
Austen's novels. In her other novels a woman is mistress of the house and is in charge of the domestic
arrangements. This is still the case when the mistress is not a wife but an unmarried daughter. Even Sir Walter
Elliot in Persuasion does not deny his daughter her rights as mistress of the house. General Tilney issues
invitations on behalf of his daughter and orders meals, overriding his daughter in each case (148, 171, 186).
Catherine expects the domestic arrangements at Northanger to be in Eleanor's hands: after Henry Tilney's
frightening account of a Gothic bedroom she takes comfort from the belief that "Miss Tilney, she was sure,
would never put her into such a chamber as he had described!" (167) (She does not say that the Abbey would
not have such a chamber.)

Jane Austen's norm of village Anglicanism does not imply that society is any the better for the dissolution of a
convent. Catherine Morland's progress in the novel is from her parsonage home at Fullerton to the vicarage
she will share with Henry Tilney at Woodston. Between these two havens of integrity she visits Bath and
Northanger. Both of these, built as places of healing, have lost their proper function and are now given over to
fashion and materialism.

Catherine's Gothic reveries are filled with "castles and abbies": "To see and explore either the ramparts and
keep of the one, or the cloisters of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish …" (150). For Catherine
a Gothic castle should contain, besides its defining architectural features of ramparts and keep, towers and
long galleries, suites of lofty rooms, many staircases, and narrow, winding vaults (101-102, 104). An abbey
should have cloisters, long, damp passages, narrow cells and a ruined chapel (150). That much she has
gathered from her reading of Gothic novels, before her conversation with Henry Tilney in the curricle on the
way to Northanger. He confirms her view that a Gothic house has staircases, gloomy passages and lofty
rooms, not to mention "a secret subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St
Anthony, scarcely two miles off" (164, 166).

How are these expectations fulfilled at Northanger Abbey? Jane Austen does not usually spend much time
describing a house from the outside. She is more interested in a house as a living space, and with its interior
dynamics. However, the approach to a Gothic building is an important descriptive moment in the Gothic
novel, and Catherine's first sight of Northanger Abbey cannot be passed over:

every bend in the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls
of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sun playing in
beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows. But so low did the building stand, that she

101
 found herself passing through the great gates of the lodge into the very grounds of
Northanger, without having discerned even an antique chimney.

(167)

In the Gothic that draws on architecture the façade is frequently presented as the face in front of the
labyrinthine brain behind (Poe's House of Usher is perhaps the most famous example). Northanger Abbey will
not be read from the outside, and the heroine enters with no guidance.4

Once inside, Catherine is first shown into "the common drawing-room". The architectural feature mentioned
in that room is the Gothic window:

The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the General
talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her
fancy had portrayed. To be sure the pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was
Gothic—they might be even casements—but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To
an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for
painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.

(168)

Catherine is obviously in a house which has undergone modern restoration. The General has preserved the
pointed arches of the windows, but has made a compromise with history in not restoring painted glass, small
divisions in the panes, dirt, and cobwebs. He has picked on a characteristic feature, the pointed arch, for
preservation and discreetly modernized the rest. The Gothic here appears to be optional; it is not structurally
necessary. Catherine may criticize this compromise, but then she has no clear sense of the implications of
what she is asking for. She wants not only the original windows, but also the dirt derived, presumably, from
many years of subsequent neglect. As her mother was to remark of her, "Catherine would make a sad heedless
young house-keeper to be sure …" (245).

Of all Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey gives the most detailed description of a domestic interior. It is
the only one of her novels to make serious use of architecture in its plot. The Gothic house with its
complicated interior, its subterranean vaults, or, especially in later novels, its attics, lends itself to
interpretation which sees these architectural features as representing aspects of life which have been frustrated
or repressed. For all Henry Tilney's terrifying description of the subterranean passage that leads from the
heroine's bedroom to the ruined chapel of St Anthony (166) Northanger Abbey is not described as having any
subterranean passages, not even a decent cellar. Nor is it described as having an attic. The architecture, and
any psychological reading of it, is not based on a vertical view of the house with "normal life" on one or two
floors and the suppressed abnormal in basement or attic below or above. The important architectural feature of
Northanger Abbey is not its vertical dimensions, but its horizontal ones. Catherine expected an abbey to have
cloisters; Northanger Abbey does; it is based on a quadrangle.

On her first evening Catherine sees that the house is built on a quadrangle (168). The next day she is given a
tour. The house surrounds a court (181), and it has two floors. On the ground floor are the public rooms and
offices, and on the upper floor the bedrooms. The rooms on the ground floor are tall, which is why the "broad
staircase of shining oak" required "many flights and many landing-places" to reach the upper floor (168).
Catherine is first taken round the building on the ground floor. She is taken through a suite of rooms: the
"common drawing-room", which led into "a useless anti-chamber" which led in turn into "the
real-drawing-room" which led into the library (186). Catherine had expected a Gothic building to offer "suites
of rooms", that is rooms leading off each other, rather than each going off a hall or corridor. Northanger
Abbey offers such a suite, though not quite up to Catherine's wishes (186). As she is taken round the

102
quadrangle she is told that three sides retain the original Gothic architecture, and that of these one was more
Gothic than the other two in that it retained elements of its convent origin in the remains of a cloister and cells
(187). The fourth side of the building was modern. After being shown round the ground floor, Catherine is
taken upstairs. There, the organization of the rooms was different. The rooms did not open off one another in a
suite, but there was on the inner side of the quadrangle a corridor or gallery, whose windows looked across the
quadrangle, and off this gallery were the bedrooms whose windows therefore looked outwards (168). Eleanor
Tilney shows Catherine round the upper floor, but she is twice interrupted by an imperious request from her
father before they can get right round. On both occasions they are stopped at a folding door, on the far side of
which is the room which Eleanor's mother had occupied (189, 194). The consequence is that Catherine has
been taken round the house on the ground floor; but only round part of it on the upper floor.

Catherine had glimpsed beyond the folding door on the upper floor "a narrower passage, more numerous
openings, and symptoms of a winding stair-case" (189). She deduced that this was the side of the house where
the remains of the original abbey were most preserved (191). She had seen that it had a staircase, and her
Gothic imagination had speculated that Mrs Tilney could have been taken down it "in a state of well-prepared
insensibility" (191). On the third attempt to see Mrs Tilney's room Catherine goes alone.5 She walks round the
gallery, through the folding door, and enters Mrs Tilney's room (196). She is disappointed. It is a pleasant
modern room, with sash windows, through which the western sun was shining. Gothic rooms, as had been
established earlier, have casement windows (168). It was usually the east wing in a Gothic novel that was the
most ruinous.6 Catherine had wanted to visit a Gothic house; she has done so, and has been muddled by its
architecture. She realizes her mistake in interpreting the upper floor of Northanger Abbey in terms of her
Gothic expectations rather than in the light of her knowledge of the ground floor. She knew that the fourth
side of the quadrangle was modern; but she had not supposed Mrs Tilney's room to be at one end of that side
(196).

I have suggested that an important feature of the Gothic interior is the suite of rooms, one room leading off
another. In the Gothic building the room does not have have certain bounds. This is true on the ground floor of
Northanger Abbey, where one room leads off another in wealthy show. It is of more threatening significance
in the Gothic bedroom. As Henry Tilney points out, a Gothic heroine hoping to have safety at last in a
bedroom finds that the room has no lock, or that some hidden door opens off it (165-66). The Gothic bedroom
is not a place of security because its bounds are not secure; there might be a hidden opening within it leading
to a succession of vaulted chambers containing who knows what horrors, most of which are not at first
noticed.7 This is the parodic version of the splendid suite of rooms. The two versions of the suite of rooms
may be thought of as representing public show and private neurosis. At Northanger Abbey Catherine was
relieved to find that her room was decorated with wallpaper (169). The Gothic bedroom would be hung with
tapestry, and there would be no knowing, until some storm of wind revealed an irregularity in the wall behind,
what sort of hidden entrance it might conceal. It is an indication of the all-revealing nature of modern
architecture, and the speedy collapse of her Gothic fantasies, that Catherine was so sure that the doors that she
observed in Mrs Tilney's modern room led only to dressing-closets that she did not even bother to check that
that was so: "she had no inclination to open either" (196).

It is a feature of recent criticism of Northanger Abbey to acknowledge but not stress Catherine's Gothic
disappointments. Feminist critics in particular have drawn attention to the fact that while Catherine may have
been mistaken in thinking that Mrs Tilney had been either murdered or imprisoned, no one believes that she
had been a happy woman. The patriarchal power of General Tilney over the women in his household is the
modern equivalent of the authoritarian power of the Gothic hero.8 The fact that Catherine's three
disappointments (over the chest, the ebony cabinet and Mrs Tilney's room) all involve her expectations of
Gothic evidence being followed by an extremely domestic reality (the folded counterpane, the laundry list,
and the well-kept bedroom) can be read as a reproof to Catherine for her failure to realize the progress of
society which has allowed a comfortable home to supersede the discomforts of the Gothic. Or, following
Katherine Ferguson Ellis, her discoveries can be read as representing the tyranny of the home-as-haven ideal

103
on the woman who inhabits it.9 In such readings Northanger Abbey is a Gothic novel in spite of itself.

Northanger Abbey is a Gothic novel which uses architecture as a way of exploring unacknowledged areas of
human psychology. If one such area is patriarchal power, another is the nature of the attraction which
Catherine feels for Henry Tilney. Repeatedly, Catherine's interest in Gothic architecture is matched by her
interest in Henry Tilney: "Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney"
(149). On the way to Blaize Castle she had "meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches,
phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trapdoors" (103). On the road to Northanger she had "an abbey
before, and a curricle behind" (162). In deciding to explore Mrs Tilney's room on her own she chooses a day
when Henry Tilney is away. But he returns before he is expected. Catherine has just let herself out of the
bedroom and closed the door:

At that instant a door underneath was hastily opened; some one seemed with swift steps to
ascend the stairs, by the head of which she had yet to pass before she could gain the gallery.
She had no power to move. With a feeling of terror not very definable, she fixed her eyes on
the staircase, and in a few moments it gave Henry to her view.

"Mr Tilney!" she exclaimed in a voice of more than common astonishment. He looked
astonished too. "Good God!" she continued, not attending to his address, "how came you
here?—how came you up that staircase?"

"How came I up that staircase!" he replied, greatly surprised. "Because it is my nearest way
from the stable-yard to my own chamber; and why should I not come up it?"

(196-97)

Catherine had not experienced Gothic terror in the bedroom; she was feeling it now. Catherine knew that
Gothic buildings had staircases, and she knew of the existence of this one. She is surprised because the only
function she had had for that staircase was for Mrs Tilney to be brought down it "in a state of well-prepared
insensibility". The staircase had not delivered an unconscious woman, however, but a lover come back before
he was expected.

Northanger Abbey is the only novel by Jane Austen in which the heroine goes to stay in the hero's home, and
there is sexual tension in her use of its architecture. Catherine's love of Henry Tilney and her love of the
Gothic had always been confused. In her search for Mrs Tilney's room she manages to put herself in the direct
route between the stables and Henry's bedroom. As Henry points out where she stands is in his space rather
than in hers:

"This passage is at least as extraordinary a road from the breakfast-parlour to your apartment,
as that staircase can be from the stables to mine."

(197)

There seems to be sexual adventure in Catherine's Gothic enquiries. Her conscious mind is exploring a Gothic
bedroom; but in so doing she is suppressing knowledge she had about the house. Henry Tilney rushing up the
staircase while she is frozen at the top of it is a powerful image. Her astonished question, "how came you
here?" is a statement of her failure to understand the architecture which had so engrossed her imagination.

Notes

1. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, Penguin, 1972, 149-50.

104
2. Andor Gomme, Michael Jenner and Bryan Little, Bristol: An Architectural History, London, 1979, 174-75.

3. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1989, convent, sb., 6.

4. In contrast, Emma remarks of the other abbey in Jane Austen's novels, Donwell Abbey, home of Mr
Knightley, "It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was" (Emma [1816], ed. Ronald Blythe,
Penguin, 1966, 353).

5. Catherine's solitary exploration of Northanger may draw on Blanche's exploration of Chateau-le-Blanc in

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford, 1966, 479-80.

6. For instance in The Mysteries of Udolpho, 377. This detail was picked up by Walter Scott in a humorous
account of the types of novel popular in his day, "… must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle
scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited …" (Waverley [1814],
ed. Claire Lamont, Oxford, 1981, 3).

7. This is true of Emily's bedroom at Udolpho (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 235) and Adeline's in Ann
Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791), ed. Chloe Chard, Oxford, 1986, 144.

8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven and London, 1979, 135.

9. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, 1989,
x-xii.

Austen, Jane (1775 - 1817): Further Reading

Bibliographies

Handley, Graham. Jane Austen: A Guide Through the Critical Maze. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992, 139
p.

Provides a guide to Austen criticism from early reviews through the 1980s.

Roth, Barry. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984–94, Athens: Ohio University Press,
1996, 438 p.

Offers a bibliography of studies on Jane Austen.

Biographies

Austen-Leigh, James. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: R. Bentley, 1870, 364 p.

Presents an affectionate biography of Austen by her nephew.

Chapman, R. W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948, 224 p.

Provides an early biography by one of Austen's twentieth-century critics.

Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, 399 p.

105
 Links Austen's life to her works.

Jenkins, Elizabeth. Jane Austen: A Biography. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1948, 286 p.

Offers a detailed treatment of Austen's life and works.

Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 512 p.

Attempts to correct the portrait of the sweet maiden aunt painted by Austen's family;
considered by critics to be somewhat speculative in its alternative interpretation of Austen's
life.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1997, 352 p.

Offers a popular biography focusing on Austen's family.

Criticism

Auerbach, Nina. "Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment." In Jane Austen in a Social Context, edited by
David Monaghan, pp. 9-27. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981.

Discusses tone, satire, and Gothic elements in Northanger Abbey.

Clarke, Stephen. "Abbeys Real and Imagined: Northanger, Fonthill, and Aspects of the Gothic Revival."
Persuasions 20 (1998): 93-105.

Compares Austen's depiction of Gothic architecture and the monastery to Gothic conventions,
within the context of Gothic Revival architecture.

Derry, Stephen. "Freud, the Gothic, and Coat Symbolism in Northanger Abbey." Persuasions 18 (December
1996): 49-53.

Theories of Sigmund Freud inform this assessment of the use of the coat as a symbol of
Catherine Morland's sexuality in Northanger Abbey.

Dussinger, John A. "Parents against Children: General Tilney as Gothic Monster." Persuasions 20 (1998):
165-74.

Explores Austen's gothicism in her representation of General Tilney as an example of cruelty

in parent-child relations in Northanger Abbey.

Gay, Penny. "In the Gothic Theatre." Persuasions 20 (1998): 175-84.

Offers parallels between the handling of anxiety and fear in Northanger Abbey and in Ann
Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest.

Hermansson, Casie. "Neither Northanger Abbey: The Reader Presupposes." Papers on Language and
Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 36, no. 4 (fall 2000): 337-56.

Assesses Northanger Abbey as a parody of a Gothic novel.

106
Hoeveler, Diane. "Vindicating Northanger Abbey: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Gothic Feminism."
In Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, pp. 117-35. New York: St. Martin's,
1995.

Studies correlations between the feminist ideals expressed in Northanger Abbey and in Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Jerinic, Maria. "In Defense of the Gothic: Rereading Northanger Abbey." In Jane Austen and Discourses of
Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, pp. 137-49. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Rejects the classification of Northanger Abbey as a parody of the Gothic novel and argues
that it is "an imitation, and not a complete rejection, of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of
Udolpho."

Levine, George. "Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Abbey." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3
(December 1975): 335-50.

Maintains that General Tilney's "monstrousness is part of Jane Austen's literary

imagination," and argues that the fact that Northanger Abbey is "to a certain extent trapped
by the materials of literary gimmickry it rejects" is an intentional, integral part of parodic
style and is evocative of Austen's later novels.

Mudrick, Marvin. "The Literary Pretext Continued: Irony versus Gothicism: Northanger Abbey." In Jane
Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, pp. 37-49. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952.

Regards Austen's juxtaposition of the "Gothic and bourgeois worlds" in "ironic contrast" in
Northanger Abbey as the author's method of "invalidat[ing]" the Gothic narrative form.

Roberts, Bette B. "The Horrid Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey." In Gothic Fictions:
Prohibition/Transgression, edited and with an afterword by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 89-111. New York:
AMS, 1989.

Compares Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho to Northanger Abbey, identifying elements

in the latter work as parody of the former.

Sears, Albert C. "Male Novel Reading of the 1790s, Gothic Literature and Northanger Abbey." Persuasions
21 (1999): 106-12.

Views Northanger Abbey in terms of its perspective on male readers of Gothic fiction at the
end of the eighteenth century.

Tandrup, Birthe. "Free Indirect Style and the Critique of the Gothic in Northanger Abbey." In Romantic
Heritage: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 81-92. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1983.

Highlights Austen's use of free indirect discourse to denounce Gothic literature in Northanger
Abbey.

Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. "Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody." Studies in the Novel 20 (1988):
262-73.

107
 Remarks on the roles of the narrator and the reader in the parodic discourse in Northanger
Abbey.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1980, 307 p.

Full-length analysis of gothicism in the works of Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, and D. H.

Lawrence.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Austen's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson
Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 19; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3;
British Writers, Vol. 4; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol.
2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789–1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 116;
DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering
Authors: Modules, Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels;
Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and
Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center;
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 13, 19, 33, 51, 81, 95, 119, 150; Novels for Students, Vols.
1, 14, 18, 20; Twayne's English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; World Literature Criticism;
and Writers for Young Adults Supplement, Vol. 1.

Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia

Epstein: Introduction
Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen Julia Epstein

One of England's most celebrated authors, Austen ranks among the most widely studied and read authors in
the English language, as well as in translations in thirty-five other languages. Though Austen is sometimes
criticized by modern scholars as lacking innovation, her novels offered an often humorous and subtle critique
of English society. Austen has been lauded for her intricate plots and dynamic characters, and noted for the
sense of morality with which she infuses the aristocratic settings of her work.

Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia

Epstein: Chronology
The following chronology offers an overview of Austen's life and career. The topics presented here are
discussed in greater detail in the critical essay that follows.

1775: Jane Austen is born on 16 December at Steventon, Hampshire, near Basingstoke, to the Reverend
George Austen, Rector of Steventon (1731-1805) and Cassandra Leigh Austen (1739-1827), who had married
in 1764. The Austens lived in Deane, Hampshire, where their first three children were born, then moved to
Steventon and had five more children. Jane is the seventh of eight children: James (1765-1819), George
(1766-1838), Edward (1768-1852), Henry (1771-1850), Cassandra Elizabeth (1773-1845), Francis [Frank]
(1774-1865), and Charles John (1779-1852). The Austens were Tories in the country village of Steventon, and
associated with the local gentry. George Austen earned a respectable but not large income of £600 a year from
the Deane and Steventon livings, which he supplemented by taking in boarding pupils from neighboring
families from 1773 until 1796. Before 1773, the family experienced financial problems that were eased by a

108
loan from Mrs. Austen's wealthy brother, James Leigh Perrot (1735-1817).

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play, The Rivals, one of the most enduring late eighteenth-century comic dramas,
and one that Jane Austen came to know well, is performed in London. The actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831)
makes her theatrical debut at the Drury Lane Theatre.

1777: Philadelphia Austen Hancock (George Austen's sister) and her daughter Eliza travel on the European
continent, then settle in Paris in 1779.

1778: The Franco-American Alliance is formed. Britain declares war on France.

Frances Burney's Evelina is published, as well as Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children. Two key
Enlightenment thinkers and writers in Europe—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss philosopher and political
theorist, and François Arouet (Voltaire), French philosopher and polymath—die.

1779: James Austen (age fourteen), the eldest Austen child, enters St. John's College, Oxford, on a “Founder's
Kin” scholarship, as his father had done before him.

1780: The Gordon Riots occur in London in June. This action begins as an anti-Catholic demonstration and
develops into ten days of rioting; 700 people die; 450 arrests are made, which result in twenty-five executions.

1781: Austen cousin Eliza Hancock marries Jean-François Capot de Feuillide (1750-1794) in France. Her
husband is a captain in the Queen's Regiment of Dragoons and calls himself the Comte de Feuillide.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions are
published. Friedrich Schiller's play The Robbers is performed.

1782: The Austens perform the first of their home theatricals, encouraged by James Austen. Amateur
theatricals at Steventon became a tradition and were performed in the dining room or the nearby barn. Eliza de
Feuillide influenced these activities.

1783: Jane and Cassandra Austen are sent to school with their cousin Jane Cooper (age twelve), to be taught
by Ann Cawley (Mrs. Cooper's aunt) at a boarding school at Oxford in the spring. In the summer the school
moves to Southampton. The girls are brought home after an infectious disease (probably typhus) breaks out.
After the girls return home, Jane Cooper's mother contracts the illness and dies in October.

Edward Austen, the third son, is adopted by Thomas Knight II (1735-1794) and his wife Catherine, née
Knatchbull, (1753-1812) of Godsmersham, Kent, about eight miles southwest of Canterbury.

The Reverend George Lefroy (1745-1806) and his wife Anne, née Brydges, (1749-1804) take up residence at
Ashe, next to Steventon, when Lefroy becomes rector, and the Lefroys become close friends of the Austens.
“Madam Lefroy” becomes a trusted advisor to Jane Austen.

William Pitt (1759-1806) becomes Prime Minister.

Britain recognizes American independence when the Peace of Versailles ends the war.

1784: Eliza de Feuillide accompanies her husband to France.

William Pitt is reelected Prime Minister and passes the India Act, establishing political control over British
territories in India.

109
Samuel Johnson, English essayist, dictionary-maker, poet, and playwright, and Denis Diderot, a leader of the
French Enlightenment philosophes, die.

1785-87: Jane and Cassandra Austen and Jane Cooper attend the Abbey House School in Reading, Berkshire,
where they board.

1786: Austen probably begins to write her juvenilia sometime in 1786 or 1787.

Edward Austen goes on the Grand Tour to Switzerland and Italy, then spends a year in Dresden financed by
his adoptive parents, the Knights. He returns in 1788.

Frank Austen (almost twelve) enters the Royal Naval Academy, Portsmouth. His experience figures
prominently in the portrayal of Fanny Price's naval brother in Mansfield Park.

James Austen (age twenty-one) leaves to spend a year in France and may also have traveled to Spain and
Holland.

Jane and Cassandra Austen leave the Abbey School in Reading and return home to Steventon in December.

Eliza de Feuillide returns from France to London where her son, Hastings, is born. He is named for Warren
Hastings.

1787: James Austen returns from Europe and is ordained deacon at Oxford.

A major public campaign to abolish the slave trade begins in Britain. The Somerset case in 1772 had
effectively outlawed slavery in England when Lord Mansfield (1705-1793), lord chief justice, ruled that
slaves could not be sold abroad by their masters.

1787-90: These dates are speculative, but the following juvenile writings from Volume the First probably date
from this period: “Frederic and Elfrida,” “Jack and Alice,” “Edgar and Emma,” “Henry and Eliza,” “Mr.
Harley,” “Sir William Mountague,” “Mr. Clifford,” “The Beautifull Cassandra,” “Amelia Webster,” “The
Visit,” and “The Mystery.”

1788: Henry Austen (age seventeen) enters St. John's College, Oxford, as his father and his older brother
James had done.

Eliza de Feuillide and Philadelphia Hancock return to France.

Edward Austen returns from Europe and takes up permanent residence with the Knight family at
Godsmersham.

In December, Frank Austen finishes his studies in Portsmouth and sails for the East Indies on board HMS
Perseverance.

King George III has his first attack of “madness,” creating a Regency crisis.

In May, there is a motion in Parliament to abolish the slave trade.

1789: James Austen begins to publish a weekly magazine at Oxford, The Loiterer. His brother Henry
participates in this venture, and the two of them are the primary writers.

110
James Austen is ordained as a priest at Oxford.

George Austen lets Deane parsonage to the recently widowed Martha Craven Lloyd (1728-1805) and her
daughters, Martha (1765-1843) and Mary (1771-1843), who soon become close friends with Jane and
Cassandra Austen.

King George III recovers and the Regency crisis ends. The Bastille falls in Paris on 14 July and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man is signed, beginning the French Revolution.

1790: Jane Austen writes Love and Freindship [sic], the key piece in Volume the Second of her juvenile
writings.

James and Henry Austen cease publication of the magazine The Loiterer when James leaves Oxford to
become curate at Overton near Steventon.

Philadelphia Hancock and Eliza de Feuillide return to England from revolutionary France.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men are published. Burke's Reflections inaugurates a war
of ideas.

1791: Charles Austen (age twelve and the youngest Austen son) enters the Royal Naval Academy at
Portsmouth, which his brother Frank attended.

Jane Austen writes The History of England.

James Austen becomes vicar of Sherborne, St. John, Hampshire, just north of Basingstoke.

Edward Austen marries Elizabeth Bridges (1773-1808) of Goodnestone Park, about seven miles east of
Canterbury, and they live at Rowling House nearby.

Frank Austen remains in the East Indies, but changes ships and becomes midshipman on HMS Minerva.

1791-92: The dates are speculative, but Jane Austen probably composes “A Collection of Letters” and the
play Sir Charles Grandison (based on Samuel Richardson's 1751 novel of the same title) in these years.

1792: Jane Austen writes “Lesley Castle,” “The Three Sisters,” “Evelyn,” and “Catharine,” all from Volume
the Second.

Philadelphia Hancock dies of breast cancer on February 26.

James Austen marries Anne Mathew (1759-1795), granddaughter of the Duke of Ancaster.

Jane Austen attends her first balls (she is sixteen).

Cassandra Austen becomes engaged to marry the Reverend Thomas Fowle (1765-1797), of the Fowle family
of Kintbury. Tom's father Thomas Fowle and George Austen had been friends since their undergraduate days
at Oxford, and a third Lloyd daughter, Elizabeth, is married to Tom's brother, the Reverend Fulwar Craven
Fowle.

Britain experiences the beginnings of increasingly repressive legislation against “Jacobins,” including a
proclamation against seditious writings.

111
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman appears.

1793: Most of Jane Austen's juvenile writings, Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third,
have been composed and are fair-copied.1

The collected “Scraps” are possibly composed or revised—including “The Female Philosopher,” “The First
Act of a Comedy,” “A Letter from a Young Lady,” “A Tour through Wales,” and “A Tale,” all in Volume the
Second.

Edward Austen's first child and Jane Austen's oldest niece, Fanny, is born at Rowling.

Henry Austen becomes a lieutenant in the Oxfordshire Militia.

James Austen's first child, Anna, is born at Deane.

Jane Austen writes the final pieces collected as the Juvenilia and dedicates them to her second niece Anna as
“Detached Pieces”: “A Fragment,” “A Beautiful Description of the Different Effects of Sensibility on
Different Minds,” and “The Generous Curate.” She also writes “Ode to Pity.” These pieces, which appear in
Volume the First, complete the writings collected as the juvenilia.

After six years, Frank Austen returns from the East Indies.

King Louis XVI of France is tried and guillotined in Paris on 21 January. France declares war on Holland and
Great Britain in January and on Spain in February. The Terror ensues in France, the Committee of Public
Safety under Robespierre comes to power, Jean-Paul Marat is murdered, and in October Queen Marie
Antoinette is executed.

Sedition trials in England and Scotland lead to harsh sentences and exile to Botany Bay, Australia.

1793-95: This is probably the period during which Jane Austen writes the untitled epistolary novel published
as Lady Susan by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh as an appendix to the 1871 edition of his A
Memoir of Jane Austen.

1794: Jane Austen possibly begins to write Elinor and Marianne, the epistolary first version of Sense and
Sensibility.

Eliza de Feuillide's husband is found guilty of attempting to bribe a witness during the trial of an aristocratic
friend charged with conspiracy against the French republic, and he is guillotined in Paris on February 22.

Charles Austen (fifteen) leaves the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth and serves as midshipman to Captain
Thomas Williams (1761-1841), husband of his cousin Jane Cooper, on HMS Daedelus.

Thomas Knight II, Edward Austen's adoptive father, dies and leaves his large estates to his widow, to be
inherited by Edward after her death.

The law of habeas corpus is suspended in 1794 with the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act and again in 1798,
prompted by increased anxiety among the aristocratic classes.2

Georges-Jacques Danton (April) and Maximilien-François-Marie-Isadore de Robespierre (July) are executed.

The Terror ends in France and is followed by the Directorate.

112
1795: Jane Austen probably composes most of Elinor and Marianne.

The Reverend Thomas Fowle, Cassandra Austen's betrothed, becomes involved with the West Indian
campaign when he joins Lord Craven as his private chaplain.

James Austen's wife Anne dies, and Jane Austen's niece Anna, still a toddler, comes to live with the Austens
at Steventon.

Tom Lefroy visits his uncle George Lefroy at Ashe Rectory on his way from Ireland to study law in London.
His and Jane Austen's mutual attraction is serious enough that his family sends him away to forestall an
inconvenient commitment. Lefroy later settled in Ireland, married and had a family, and became Lord Chief
Justice of Ireland.

The Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable Practices Act pass after George III's coach is attacked on the
way to Parliament.3

Napoleon Bonaparte becomes commander of the French armed forces.

1796: Austen's surviving letters begin on 9 January. She completes Elinor and Marianne and beginsFirst
Impressions, an early version of Pride and Prejudice, and she probably also works on Sir Charles Grandison.

Charles Austen is involved in a battle when three French ships are intercepted in British waters.

1797: James Austen marries Mary Lloyd, his second wife, and his young daughter Anna returns from
Steventon to live with her father and step-mother at Deane.

Edward Austen's adoptive mother, Mrs. Knight, moves to Canterbury and makes Edward the immediate
inheritor of the Knight properties in Kent and Hampshire. Edward and his family move to Godsmersham in
Kent.

First Impressions, the first version of Pride and Prejudice, is offered to London publisher Thomas Cadell by
George Austen and declined by return of post. Austen works on Sense and Sensibility, the new title for Elinor
and Marianne.

Mrs. Austen, Jane, and Cassandra stay with Mrs. Austen's brother and his wife, James and Jane Leigh-Perrot,
in Jane Austen's first known visit to Bath.

Henry Austen marries his cousin, the widow Eliza de Feuillide, in London.

1798: Jane Austen is courted by Samuel Blackall, whom she discourages.

Austen completes Sense and Sensibility and begins Susan, which was published posthumously and given the
title Northanger Abbey by Henry Austen.

The mechanization of paper manufacture reduces printing costs. Iron printing presses are introduced.

Mrs. Inchbald's version of Lovers' Vows (August von Kotzebue's Natural Son) is performed at the Theatre
Royal, Covent-Garden, and published in London. This is the play whose attempted staging forms a key
episode in Mansfield Park.

113
Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes Fears in Solitude, France, an Ode, and Frost at Midnight. Thomas Malthus's
Principles of Population, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads appear. Wordsworth begins to write The Prelude. Mary Hays's
Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of the Women, and Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy are
published.

1799: Jane Austen visits Bath with her mother and Edward and his wife. Susan is probably completed by the
end of the year. The family also visits the Leighs at Adlestrop, the Coopers at Harpsden, another of Mrs.
Austen's cousins in Surrey, and then spends the rest of the year in Steventon.

Mrs. Leigh-Perrot, Jane Austen's aunt, is accused of stealing a one-pound card of lace from a shop in Bath and
is sent to Ilchester Gaol. This episode is a family embarrassment. Such a theft (over twelve pence) was
considered grand larceny and would have been punishable by death or deportation to Australia.

1800: George Austen retires from his position as Rector of Steventon and leaves his eldest son, James, in
charge.

Food shortages spark nationwide food riots.

1801: The Austens move to Bath. At some point between 1801 and 1804 Jane Austen may have had a
romance, but no firm evidence survives.

Henry Austen gives up his commission in the Oxfordshire Militia and becomes a banker and army agent in
London.

William Pitt resigns as Prime Minister when King George III refuses to agree to Catholic Emancipation, and
Henry Addington becomes Prime Minister.

1802: Harris Bigg-Wither (1781-1833) proposes marriage to Jane Austen. She accepts in the evening, then
declines the next morning.

Sometime late in 1802 or early in 1803, Jane Austen revises and makes a fair copy of Susan.

The Peace of Amiens is signed with France on 25 March, concluding the war. Napoleon Bonaparte is made
First Consul for life.

The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act spearheads safety regulation and reform in British factories.

1803: Richard Crosby and Co. purchases the copyright to Susan for £10 through a business associate of Henry
Austen, but they do not publish it despite a promise to do so by 1804.

Henry and Eliza Austen travel to France to try to reclaim some of the Comte de Feuillide's property, and they
narrowly escape detainment. Napoleon had broken the Peace of Amiens, and the war with France resumes in
May.

Frank and Charles Austen return to active naval service. Frank is stationed at Ramsgate and given the charge
of organizing the coastal defense forces (the “Sea Fencibles”).

Battles resume between France and England, beginning the Napoleonic wars.

1804: Jane Austen begins writing The Watsons this year, but never completes it.

114
Frank Austen returns to sea as captain of HMS Leopard, flagship of Rear Admiral Thomas Louis, and is
stationed off Boulogne as part of the blockade of Napoleon's fleet.

Charles Austen is promoted to command HMS Indian and sent to patrol the Atlantic coast of America to
prevent American trade with France. Charles remains headquartered in Bermuda until around 1810.

Anne Brydges Lefroy dies after a riding accident on 16 December, Jane Austen's birthday.

Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor in France in May.

Spain declares war on England.

1805: George Austen dies on 21 January in Bath. Jane Austen abandons The Watsons and makes a fair copy
of Lady Susan, adding the narrated conclusion.

Frank Austen is commanding HMS Canopus in the Mediterranean and participates in the chase of Admiral
Villeneuve's fleet to the West Indies and back. Frank is sent to Malta.

Martha Craven Lloyd dies at Ibthorpe, and her daughter Martha Lloyd comes to live permanently with the
Austens.

Jane Austen composes “Lines Supposed to Have Been Sent to an Uncivil Dressmaker.”

1806: Frank Austen marries Mary Gibson at Ramsgate, Kent in July and arranges to set up house with his
mother, his sisters, and Martha Lloyd.

Jane Austen writes “Lines to Martha Lloyd” and verses on the marriage of her brother Frank Austen.

1807: Frank Austen is put in command of HMS St. Albans, with duties to travel to South Africa, China, and
the East Indies. In June, he departs for the Cape of Good Hope.

Jane Austen writes “On Sir Home Popham's Sentence, April, 1807” and possibly composes “Verses to Rhyme
with ‘Rose.’”

Charles Austen marries Fanny Palmer (1790-1814) in Bermuda.

The slave trade is abolished in Britain.4 France invades Spain and Portugal.

1808: Edward Austen's wife, Elizabeth, dies in October at Godsmersham. Later that month, Edward offers his
mother and sisters a choice of houses, and they choose Chawton Cottage in Hampshire.

Jane Austen writes “To Miss Bigg with Some Pockethandkerchiefs” and, on the anniversary of Anne Brydges
Lefroy's death, “To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy.”

1809: Jane Austen uses a pseudonym to Richard Crosby to inquire about the status of Susan and to offer to
send a second copy. Crosby responds that he has no current plans to publish the work, but will not give up the
copyright unless it is purchased from him.

Mrs. Austen, Cassandra, and Jane settle with Martha Lloyd at Chawton Cottage on 7 July.

115
Jane Austen writes a verse letter to celebrate the birth of Frank Austen's first son. She also makes some
revisions to Volume the Third and begins to revise Sense and Sensibility, a process that continues into the next
year.

1810: Jane Austen continues to revise Sense and Sensibility, and it is accepted for publication on commission
late this year or early in 1811 by Thomas Egerton.

Frank Austen returns from China.

Jane Austen possibly composes “Mock Panegyric on a Young Friend.”

George III suffers a mental breakdown.

1811: Jane Austen stays with Henry and Eliza Austen in London to correct the proofs of Sense and Sensibility.

Jane Austen writes a number of poems: “Lines on Maria Beckford,” “On the Weald of Kent Canal Bill,” “I
am in a Dilemma,” “On a Headache,” “Mr. Gell and Miss Gill.”

Charles Austen returns to England with his wife, Fanny, and two children, and the family sees him for the first
time in seven years and meets his family. He is given command of the guardship HMS Namur, and he and his
family live on board, off Sheerness.

Jane Austen makes substantial revisions to First Impressions and retitles it Pride and Prejudice, and she
begins work on Mansfield Park. Thomas Egerton publishes Sense and Sensibility in November in three
volumes for the price of fifteen shillings; the title page says “By a Lady,” and about 750 copies are printed.
None of Jane Austen's works appears under her name during her lifetime.

The Regency Act appoints the Prince of Wales to the Regency. (He rules as Regent until 1820, when George
III dies, and then becomes George IV.)

Luddites (organized machine-breakers) stage actions in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. Machine-breaking

becomes punishable by death.

Nationwide food riots break out in response to economic depression.

1812: Edward Austen's adoptive mother, Mrs. Knight, dies on 14 October, and Edward officially takes the
name Knight.

Jane Austen possibly composes “A Middle-Aged Flirt.”

Jane Austen sells Thomas Egerton the copyright to Pride and Prejudice for £110. She corrects the proofs in
December 1812 and January 1813.

England is at war with America (the War of 1812). Napoleon invades Russia in June and retreats from
Moscow in October.

The main streets of London are lit by gas.

1813: Pride and Prejudice is published on 28 January, with a title page that says “By the Author of Sense and
Sensibility.” About one thousand copies are printed, at eighteen shillings a copy. Sense and Sensibility and
Pride and Prejudice receive second printings in October. When the first edition of Sense and Sensibility sells

116
out, Jane Austen receives £140 in profit.

Jane Austen stays with Henry Austen in London through his wife Eliza's final illness and death in April.

Jane Austen completes Mansfield Park.

In November, Jane Austen returns to London to stay with Henry Austen. During this visit, they probably
negotiate the publication terms for Mansfield Park with Thomas Egerton, who agrees to publish it on
commission.

Robert Southey is made Poet Laureate. The following works appear: Eaton Stannard Barrett's The Heroine, or
Adventures of Chirubina, George Gordon, Lord Byron's Bride of Abydos and The Giaour, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's Remorse, Sir Walter Scott's Rokeby, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen Mab, and Robert Southey's
Life of Nelson.

1814: In January, Jane Austen begins work on Emma. Austen corrects the proofs in February, and Mansfield
Park is published in May in an edition of around twelve hundred copies at eighteen shillings each. The first
edition of Mansfield Park sells out by November, and Jane Austen receives a profit of between £310 and
£350. She and Henry try to arrange a second edition, but Thomas Egerton refuses to issue one.

Charles Austen's wife, Fanny, dies on 6 September on board HMS Namur after the birth of their fourth child.

England and its allies invade France and enter Paris on 31 March. Paris falls; Napoleon Bonaparte abdicates in
April and is exiled to Elba.

The first steam press is used to print The Times. Steam locomotives become increasingly efficient.

The Treaty of Ghent ends the Anglo-American war in December (though the Battle of New Orleans occurs in
January 1815).

Frances Burney's The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, George Gordon, Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon,
Lara, and Corsair, Henry Francis Cary's complete translation of Dante'sDivine Comedy, Maria Edgeworth's
Patronage, Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Refutation of Deism, Robert Southey's
Roderick, and William Wordsworth's The Excursion are published.

1815: Jane Austen completes Emma at the end of March and begins to write Persuasion (titled posthumously
by Henry Austen).

Jane Austen copies out “Lines of Lord Byron, in the Character of Buonaparté” (Byron's “Napoleon's
Farewell”).

Jane and Henry Austen negotiate the publication of Emma with publisher John Murray, who receives a
positive reader's report by the end of September.

Jane Austen spends most of the end of the year in London with Henry, who becomes seriously ill. He is out of
danger within a month, but she remains to nurse him.

Jane Austen is invited to visit the Prince Regent (later George IV) at Carlton House in November. She is
asked to dedicate her next novel to him, and although Austen has misgivings, she agrees. The response comes
from the Reverend James Stanier Clarke (1765-1834), the regent's chaplain and librarian, and in subsequent
correspondence he urges Jane Austen to compose a novel about a clergyman. This suggestion is the basis for

117
her comic Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters, written in 1816, possibly with the help
of her niece Fanny Knight.

John Murray offers £450 for the copyright of Emma if copyrights for Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield
Park are included in the package. Henry and Jane Austen refuse this offer, and Murray declines to raise it.
However, he agrees to publish an edition of 2,000 copies of Emma on commission, along with a second
edition of 750 copies of Mansfield Park. Jane Austen corrects proofs for Emma and makes revisions for the
second edition of Mansfield Park. Emma appears at the end of December (with the title page marked 1816) in
an edition priced at twenty-one shillings. It is dedicated to the Prince Regent, and a special presentation set is
sent to Carleton House prior to the novel's general publication.

Raison et Sensibilité (Sense and Sensibility) is published in France, the first foreign translation of an Austen
novel.

The landlords carry the Corn Law Act; the price of bread rises in consequence and causes hardship for the
poor.5 Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba and begins the Hundred Days (from March to June), restarting
the war. After the Battle of Waterloo of 18 June, Napoleon surrenders (15 July), the war ends, and he goes
into exile on St. Helena. King Louis XVIII is restored to the throne in France and a “holy Alliance” of
Europe's monarchs forms when the Congress of Vienna establishes the Quadruple Alliance between Britain,
Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

1816: Jane Austen revises Susan after Henry buys back the rights from Crosby and Co. She changes the title
to Catharine, writes the “Advertisement, by the Authoress,” and intends to seek another publisher. A second,
revised edition of Mansfield Park is issued. Le Parc de Mansfield (Mansfield Park) and La Nouvelle Emma
(Emma) are published in France.

Charles Austen's ship, HMS Phoenix, is wrecked off the coast of Asia Minor in a hurricane. Charles and his
crew survive.

Henry Austen's bank collapses in March. Several family members suffer major losses, including Edward
Knight (£20,000) and uncle James Perrot (£10,000).

Jane Austen's health begins to weaken, and she goes with Cassandra to take the waters at Cheltenham.

Jane Austen completes the first draft of Persuasion on 18 July and revises the ending by 6 August.

By October, Emma has sold 1,248 copies, with a theoretical profit of £221. However, the second edition of
Mansfield Park is creating losses that offset the profit, so she receives only £38 for Emma during her lifetime.
In any event, the first edition did not sell out: 539 copies were remaindered in 1821, as well as 498 copies of
Mansfield Park.

In December, Henry Austen is ordained deacon and takes the curacy of Chawton. He becomes a priest in
1817.

The Spa Fields riot occurs in December amidst the beginnings of economic depression and discontent.6

Richard Brinsley Sheridan dies and George Gordon, Lord Byron, leaves England. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
Christabel, Kubla Khan, Pains of Sleep, and Stateman's Manual appear.

1817: Jane Austen begins to write Sanditon, titled posthumously by the family; she seems to have meant the
title to be The Brothers. She stops work around mid-March because of illness, and Sanditon remains

118
unfinished. She makes her will in April, leaving everything to her sister, Cassandra, except for a legacy of £50
to her brother Henry and another of the same amount to his French housekeeper, Madame Bigeon.

Jane and Cassandra Austen move to Winchester on 24 May to obtain better medical care for Jane. Jane Austen
writes her last work, “Venta,” some verses on the Winchester Races and St. Swithin.

Jane Austen dies on 18 July in the early morning. On 22 July, she is publicly identified in the Hampshire
Courier obituary as the author of her novels. She is buried in the north aisle of Winchester Cathedral on 24
July.

When Jane Austen's will is proved in September and funeral costs (£239) and other payments deducted,
Cassandra is left with £561.2.0. At the time of her death, Austen's earnings from her novels amount to about
£630. Posthumous profits, which include selling the five remaining copyrights to publisher Richard Bentley,
place her total earnings from her work at about £1,625.

In December, Northanger Abbey, a revision of Susan, is published by Murray with Persuasion in a

four-volume set. Included is a “Biographical Notice of the Author” by Henry Austen. Henry probably gave
these novels their titles, and negotiated this publication on a commission basis on Cassandra Austen's behalf.
The copies number 1,750 and are sold at twenty-four shillings each. By the start of 1821, Cassandra had
netted a profit of £519, at which time 283 copies were remaindered.

Pride and Prejudice sells out in its second edition, and Thomas Egerton publishes a third edition.

Habeas Corpus is suspended in March, and the Seditious Meetings Bill is enacted. Princess Charlotte dies.

POSTHUMOUS DATES

1827: Jane Austen's mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, dies at age 88.

1833: A collected edition of Jane Austen's novels is published with a “Biographical Notice” by her brother
Henry Austen.

1845: Jane Austen's sister, Cassandra Elizabeth Austen, dies.

1848: Francis Austen appointed Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indian Station.

1852: Admiral Charles John Austen, Jane Austen's youngest brother, is made Commander-in-Chief of the
East India state.

1863: Sir Francis Austen, Jane's Austen's other naval brother, is made Admiral of the Fleet.

1866: The first publication of Jane Austen's verses “To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy.”

1870: James Edward Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen's nephew, publishes A Memoir of Jane Austen (it appears on
16 December 1869 but is dated 1870). A second, expanded edition of the Memoir is published, and this
edition includes Lady Susan, The Watsons, and a cancelled chapter of Persuasion. Austen-Leigh's work is the
basis for all subsequent biographies, and it sparked increased interest in Jane Austen.

1884: Jane Austen's great-nephew, Edward, Lord Brabourne, son of Lady Knatchbull (née Fanny
Austen-Knight) publishes Letters of Jane Austen.

119
1895: Publication of Charades, Written a Hundred Years Ago by Jane Austen and Her Family.

1902: Constance Hill's Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends is published, with additional biographical
information.

1906: Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers, by Frank Austen's grandson and great-granddaughter, is published with
new family information, family prints, the poem “Venta,” and letters to Frank.

1913: Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, by William Austen-Leigh, James Edward's son, and his nephew
Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, is published. This has come to be a primary source record.

1920: Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, by Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, James Edward's daughter, is
published.

1922: Volume the Second, a collection of the juvenilia appears under the title Love and Freindship [sic].

1923: The Novels of Jane Austen, the Oxford edition of the novels, is published under the editorship of R. W.
Chapman. This is the first scholarly edition and remains the standard edition. The second edition is issued in
1926 and the third in 1932-1934, with many subsequent reprintings.

1925: The unfinished Sanditon is published. Lady Susan is reprinted. R. W. Chapman edits both.

1926: Chapman re-edits the original manuscript ending of Persuasion, correcting the ending transcription
from the 1871 Memoir. Chapman also edits Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters and
Austen's “Opinions of Mansfield Park and Opinions of Emma accompany this printing.”Two Poems by Jane
Austen (“Mr. Gill and Miss Gell” and “On a Headache”) is published.

1927: R. W. Chapman's edition of The Watsons is published.

1932: R. W. Chapman publishes Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others. This volume
includes new letters.

1933: Volume the First of the juvenilia is published.

1940: W. M. Roth edits Jane Austen's Three Evening Prayers.

1942: R. A. Austen-Leigh publishes Austen Papers 1704-1856, a collection of previously unpublished

material.

1951: Volume the Third of the juvenilia is published.

1952: Caroline Mary Craven Austen (1805-1880), James' daughter, publishes My Aunt Jane Austen: A
Memoir.

1954: R. W. Chapman publishes Jane Austen's Minor Works, which includes all three volumes of the juvenilia
and some other previously unpublished pieces of writing. This volume is reprinted in 1965 and further revised
in 1969.

1975: B. C. Southam edits The MS of Sanditon.

120
1977: The manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison is discovered. Scholar B. C. Southam publishes it as Jane
Austen's “Sir Charles Grandison” in 1980. The handwriting in the manuscript is Jane Austen's. Family
tradition had ascribed the authorship to Austen's niece Anna, but scholars believe that Austen herself wrote it.

1995: Deirdre Le Faye publishes a new edition of Jane Austen's Letters with further additions.

1996: David Selwyn edits Jane Austen: Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family.

Notes

1. A “fair copy” is a neatly recopied manuscript. This is what would have been sent to the printers for
publication.
2. Habeus corpus is a law that requires a person to be brought before a judge or court to investigate a
restraint of the person's freedom, and was used as a protection against illegal imprisonment.
3. These acts represented the response of the government of William Pitt to the mob attack on George
III, and derived from efforts to suppress dissidents and to restrict political discussion.
4. Slavery itself was not abolished until 1833.
5. The Corn Law Act restricted imports and thus shored up the price of wheat; the bill was supported by
landowners.
6. In this uprising, rioters attempted to seize the Bank of England and the Tower of England but were
dispersed. Marilyn Butler suggest that this event may be the subject of a brief reference in Northanger
Abbey, in which Henry Tilney mentions a riotous mob trying to seize the Tower. See Marilyn Butler,
Romantics, Revolutionaries, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760-1830
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 106.

Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia

Epstein: About Jane Austen
Julia Epstein (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Epstein, Julia. “An Overview of the Life and Career of Jane Austen.” In Nineteenth-Century
Literature Criticism, vol. 119, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Edna Hedblad, and Russel Whitaker. Farmington
Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2003.

[In the following essay, Epstein discusses the major aspects of Austen's life and career, focusing on
biographical, textual, and critical avenues of exploration into the author's enduring popularity.]

Born: 16 December 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, England.

Marital Status: Single

Education: Jane Austen's only formal schooling consisted of a year in 1783 with Mrs. Cawley at Oxford and
Southampton, and two years in 1785-87 at the Abbey School in Reading.

Died: 18 July 1817 in Winchester, Kent, England, at age forty-two.

Jane Austen has been described in multiple ways: as a spinster recluse; as a satirical and biting wit; as a shy
and retiring woman of prim moral views; and as a paragon of femininity who never complained and had a
kind word for everyone. Yet after her death, a kind of beatification process took place, and over time Jane
Austen has become a cultural icon and the patroness of English fiction. The Austen family zealously guarded

121
her memory and her image. Her sister Cassandra and niece Fanny Austen destroyed many of her letters, her
brother Henry wrote a eulogy that praises his sister as brilliant and long-suffering, and her nephew James
Edward Austen-Leigh published his influential A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, in which he described her
as a sheltered, unruffled woman whose life was uncommonly uneventful. It has, therefore, been difficult for
scholars and biographers to meet the real Jane Austen.

Was she merely an observer of others, without an inner life? Was she a resentful, repressed woman who used
her sharp pen to skewer a society that had injured her? Was she the cheerful and tolerant favorite aunt
described by her descendants? Was she ignorant of everything that happened in politics, or did she follow the
activities of her military brothers Francis and Charles and her Francophile cousin Eliza Hancock de Feuillide
with an educated grasp of history and social change? Few writers have been perceived in such varied and
contradictory ways.

There is one central fact that we can glean from the existing letters, published books, and memoirs by the
Austen family members, and from the archival record of the period in which Austen lived. While Jane Austen
was a member of the landed gentry, she was never without financial anxieties. She was a country
gentlewoman without economic security. The gentry class suffered enormous changes during Austen's
lifetime, which profoundly affected her material circumstances. Her father, George Austen, was the local
rector and took in boarding students; his income was merely adequate. Austen eventually earned enough from
her writing to supplement their income and to leave something for Cassandra and her mother, but after her
father's death in 1805, the women depended for the rest of their lives on the generosity of the Austen brothers.
Jane Austen spent her childhood surrounded by an already large family that was expanded by her father's
boarding pupils—enough of them to amount to a boys' school.1 One of Austen's biographers, Claire Tomalin,
describes the young Jane as “a tough and unsentimental child, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black
jokes.”2 George Austen had an ample library, and the children were great readers. They attended church
regularly, where their father presided. They kept chickens, a dairy, and a vegetable garden, baked bread and
brewed beer, milked cows and churned cream for butter, made preserves, raked hay, played in the barn, and
generally enjoyed a country existence.

The second Austen son, George, suffered from ill health and seizures from a young age; he may have had
cerebral palsy. George lived most of his life with his Uncle Thomas in Monk Sherburne, another Hampshire
village. Thomas, his mother's younger brother, had similar disabilities. He only occasionally returned to
Steventon as a young boy. Although there is little mention of George in the Austen archival record, he may
have been deaf or lacked language, because there is some evidence that Jane Austen knew sign language.

Living with the crowd of assorted siblings and boarding schoolboys, Jane Austen was perhaps especially
comfortable with boys. But she often enjoyed the company of her cousin Eliza Hancock, later Comtesse de
Feuillide and ultimately the wife of Jane's brother Henry. Eliza was an important worldly influence, who
instructed Jane Austen at a young age how to handle complex social situations with all sorts of people.

The Austen brothers were schooled at home with other boys until they were about twelve. But Jane Austen
and her sister Cassandra were sent away to school at a younger age, perhaps to make room for additional
paying pupils. Jane was seven in the spring of 1783, when she was sent to a school in Oxford run by a Mrs.
Cawley. She joined her cousin Jane Cooper, who was eleven years old. Mrs. Cawley ran her school from her
home, which was the usual practice and one of the few respectable ways a woman could make a living in late
eighteenth-century England. Many accounts of such schools are depressing, and many girls were wretched in
them.3 Although we know little of what went on at Mrs. Cawley's, Jane Austen later wrote scathingly of
schoolmistresses. And we do know that in the summer of 1783, Mrs. Cawley decided to move her school to
Southampton without informing the girls' families.

122
As a port, Southampton was home to various military encampments, and the soldiers and sailors stationed
there apparently brought an infectious disease (probably typhus) that soon spread through the town. Many of
the schoolgirls became ill, including the Austen cousins. Mrs. Cawley did not inform their parents, but Jane
Cooper had the sense to write to her mother in Bath, and Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Austen immediately retrieved
their daughters. Jane Austen was by then dangerously ill, and her mother had to nurse her back to health
before taking her home. The other girls also recovered, but Mrs. Cooper caught the fever and died in Bath.
Jane Cooper began to spend a good deal of her time in Steventon and became part of the Austen family.

Austen's aunt Philadelphia Walter, her father's sister and mother of Eliza Hancock de Feuillide, provides the
first physical description we have of Jane, from the summer of 1788. She was “whimsical and affected,” Aunt
Phila wrote in a letter to her daughter Eliza, and “not at all pretty” but “very prim.” Jane was then twelve
years old, and was often contrasted with her more “sensible” sister Cassandra.

Jane was about twelve when she began to write her bitingly satirical first experiments with social comedy. Her
later novels develope a subtle irony; but in her juvenile writings, Austen boldly unmasked polite society with
characters who are openly rude, or adulterous, or downright murderous. And she makes great fun of most of
them.

In a letter sent from Chawton to her niece Anna Austen on 9 September 1814, Jane Austen made one of her
memorable comments about writing novels. Anna was an aspiring novelist, and had sent several manuscripts
to her published aunt for a critique.

You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into 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—& I
hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so favourably
arranged.4

Indeed, in addition to describing the circumstances of much of Austen's own fiction, which focuses on details
of social interaction and the daily conspiracies of polite society, this passage also seems to describe the world
in which Jane Austen lived, the world of country village English gentry.

Austen was always conscious of her choice of literary subject matter. In an equally famous letter to her sister
Cassandra on 4 February 1813, she described an evening during which the family read aloud—a common
form of household entertainment—her Pride and Prejudice. As an authorial description of Pride and
Prejudice, the phrase “light, and bright, and sparkling” is apt and modest and rightly memorable.

Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough and well satisfied enough. The work 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 Buonaparté, or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with
increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.5

Yet the rest of the passage is also significant. She was not unaware, either of the political or military upheaval
in early nineteenth-century Europe or of the literary activities that surrounded her own writing. Rather, Jane
Austen reveals her deliberate decision to focus her literary skills on the ways in which the social world
impinges upon and dictates how people live with one another.

So to answer Austen's nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote fifty years after his aunt's death that
“Of events, her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its
course,” we need to ask how this could possibly have been the case. Austen's life spanned the American and

123
French Revolutions, the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812, and the depths of European involvement in the
slave trade. She witnessed the rise of middle-class culture as the ancient English landed aristocracy slowly
declined. Two of her brothers served in the British navy and traveled around the world. Another brother was a
banker. Her sister's betrothed died of yellow fever during a voyage to the West Indies. Her cousin married a
Frenchman who was guillotined during the Terror in France. Austen's was not a barren life. Even in some of
her earliest writings, such as Catharine, or the Bower and, in an odd way, The History of England, Jane
Austen conveys dismay at characters that cultivate a blithe ignorance of the history and politics that shape
their worlds.

Austen's daily life involved only the circuit of visits and household duties that she experienced in the villages
of the English countryside, and that is where she found her creative home. The West Indies and India appear
briefly, but political concerns remain subtle and offstage in Austen's fiction. International events are great
catalysts in the novels, however, because the economic system at the center of Austen's English gentry
depended on inherited wealth and land and on an entangling colonial system that was the British Empire—and
supported the social lives of Austen's characters. Austen's brothers—naval officers, clergymen, and
bankers—visited the world and returned home with news. And Austen understood the political and economic
structure on which she built her fictional society.

Austen herself lived the only life approved for women of her time, learning household skills such as sewing,
gardening, and kitchen work, and developing the feminine talents of drawing, needlework, playing the piano,
speaking French, and writing letters. From an early age, she found her creative outlet in composing stories and
sharing them with her family.

We do not know exactly when Jane Austen began to write her stories, but by her early teens, she supplied
stories and plays for her family to read aloud and perform. She copied many pages of her juvenile writings
into three carefully kept notebooks. Most of this work is satirical and reveals her prodigious use of her father's
extensive library at Steventon. She was familiar with the poetry, drama, and fiction of her day, and she often
used her stories to lampoon the popular excesses of sentimentality or Gothicism. The Austens performed
amateur theatricals at home, a common entertainment at the time (and more than somewhat morally suspect,
as Austen illustrated in a crucial sequence in Mansfield Park).

Jane Austen did not travel beyond the several counties in southern England where she had family members,
and she spent relatively little time in London. Yet her brothers and her cousin Eliza brought home tales of a
larger world, and she took a great interest in their exploits abroad. So she had reason to be acquainted with
India and the European continent as well as with the West Indies and Asia. She chose not to include any direct
depictions of these outside worlds in her novels, but many of Austen's characters—from Thomas Bertram of
Mansfield Park to Captain Wentworth of Persuasion—come and go from the circumscribed worlds of
Austen's country villages to the greater world of colonial plantations and the slave economy and military
exploits. The emotional action of Austen's novels takes place inside the houses of rural country gentlefolk, but
it is clear that Jane Austen knew what went on outside those houses in some detail, and understood as well
how the country life of her characters reflected the society in which they lived.

Jane Austen's knowledge of family life was vast. Several members of her extended family, such as her cousin
Jane Cooper and her brother James' sister-in-law, Martha Lloyd, spent time living with them. Her brothers
married and provided her with many nieces and nephews, and she frequently visited neighboring families. The
Knights, a wealthy, childless couple, adopted her brother Edward. He took their name and inherited their
estates, and he provided Jane and Cassandra Austen and their mother with some further domestic and
economic security earlier you say they depended and some knowledge of life in a large country manor. Her
brother Henry was reputed to be Austen's favorite and helped her with her publishing activities. Henry
married Austen cousin Eliza de Feuillide in 1797, three years after her husband, the Comte de Feuillide, was
guillotined. Henry Austen tried a variety of careers and suffered some financial difficulties.

124
Most of Jane Austen's life was spent either at home or visiting among her numerous family members and
neighboring acquaintances, a life that was, by all accounts, profoundly social for a woman who also clearly
enjoyed her solitude. She moved around a good deal—from Steventon to Bath to Chawton—and changed
lodgings many times.

Austen's knowledge of how human beings interact in complex and delicate social situations, her deep
understanding of individual and social psychology, and a lapidary prose style that captures emotional nuances,
give us timeless novels that continue to entertain us even as they hold up mirrors to our own contemporary
society.

Jane Austen died on 18 July 1817 in Winchester, attended by her beloved sister, Cassandra. She had suffered
for months with fevers and weakness, was sometimes irritable, and was often too unwell to sit up in bed. Her
skin was pale and mottled, “black & white and every wrong colour” and as she wrote to her niece Fanny, “I
must not depend upon ever being blooming again.”6Sanditon, which she was unable to complete, concerns
illness and invalidism, and perhaps her condition led her to this subject matter. When her health forced her to
stop writing, she turned to prayers and poetry.

Jane Austen's final literary production was a dictated set of comic verses about the Winchester horse races.
She also wrote letters about the devoted attention of her family. Her brothers visited, and of Cassandra she
wrote, “Words must fail me in any attempt to describe what a nurse she has been to me.”7 Cassandra
described her final hours to their niece Fanny, ending with this description: “She gave me the idea of a
beautiful statue, & even now in her coffin, there is such a sweet serene air over her countenance as is quite
pleasant to contemplate.”8 Scholars have concluded, using what evidence there is, that Jane Austen died from
Addison's disease, a condition that could have caused the progressive debility she experienced. We will never
have a complete diagnosis, and we can only imagine what works of literature she might have contributed to
the canon of English letters had she lived longer.

Notes

1. The Austen family followed the common practice of the time of boarding their infants with local
cottagers until they were weaned.
2. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 31.
3. Perhaps the best-known literary depiction of such a girls' school is the oppressive Lowood School in
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, although Lowood is a charitable institution run by the Church and a
much bigger establishment than Mrs. Cawley's small home school. In Emma, however, Jane Austen
depicts Mrs. Goddard's school as a relatively benign institution, and this is probably much closer to
her own experience than the horrors of Brontë's Lowood.
4. Jane Austen's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 275.
5. Ibid., p. 203.
6. Ibid., pp. 335-36.
7. Ibid., p. 340.
8. Ibid., p. 345.

Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia

Epstein: Jane Austen At Work
GETTING ESTABLISHED

As a child, Jane Austen seems to have been relatively unsentimental, humorous, and teasing, perhaps because
the boys' school run by her father provided an environment of rowdiness and high jinks. She began writing

125
down her ideas on scraps of paper almost as soon as she could write, and she wrote sketches for her own
amusement, and soon for the amusement of her parents, siblings, and extended family members. The first
pieces we have were probably composed between 1787 and 1793, when she was twelve to eighteen. Few of
the juvenile writings are dated, so the dates scholars have assigned are derived from the little evidence that
exists and the recollections of family members.

Austen fair copied her juvenile writings into three carefully tended notebooks consisting of twenty-seven
pieces of varying lengths and levels of polish. These quarto notebooks were likely gifts; we know that her
father gave her the one she used for Volume the Second. She took these productions seriously, including tables
of contents, page numbers, and dedications—all the details of a published book. She transcribed these pieces
over fifteen or twenty years, and continued to make revisions as late as 1809. But because the original
manuscripts from which she made the copies have not survived, we cannot follow the evolution of her craft.
Clearly, however, these early pieces were important to her.

Brian Southam offers the following dating of the juvenile writings1:

• 1787-1790 (Volume the First)

♦ “Frederic and Elfrida”
♦ “Jack and Alice”
♦ “Edgar and Emma”
♦ “Henry and Eliza”
♦ “Mr. Harley”
♦ “Sir William Mountague”
♦ “Mr. Clifford”
♦ “The beautifull Cassandra”
♦ “Amelia Webster”
♦ “The Visit”
♦ “The Mystery”
• 1790 (Volume the Second)
♦ Love and Freindship
• 1791 (Volume the Second)
♦ The History of England
♦ “Collection of Letters”
• 1792
♦ “Lesley Castle” (Second)
♦ “The Three Sisters'” (First)
♦ “Evelyn” (Third)
♦ “Catharine” (Third)
• 1793
♦ “Scraps” (Second)
♦ “Detached Pieces” (First)
♦ “Ode to Pity” (First)

In Volume the First, the handwriting is childish and the compositions appear to be the earliest of Austen's
literary efforts, even though the one date they carry is 1793. The contents of Volume the Third are dated 1792.
Volume the First resides in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Volume the Third is in the British
Museum, and Volume the Second has a private owner. The publisher Chatto & Windus first published Love
and Freindship [sic] in 1922 with an introduction by English writer G. K. Chesterton.

Family lore maintains that Austen composed these lighthearted and often hilarious early writings simply as
family amusements to be read aloud. Many of the pieces are dedicated to family members, and no doubt the

126
evening readings produced much mirth. Still, Austen must have taken this composition seriously, given the
copies she made and the revisions she continued to make.

In addition to humor, her juvenile writings display a characteristic toughness. Austen shows little or no mercy
to her satirical targets. She goes beyond simple literary parody to skewer some notable excesses in human
behavior, and she already gives evidence of her keen eye and no-nonsense approach to social interactions. She
has little patience for arrogance, self-absorption, vanity, or hypocrisy. She spots human weaknesses from a
great distance, and she targets them in her character portraits. Even the pieces that seem purely silly ridicule
superficiality and self-importance. Still, mischievousness prevails in Austen's early work.2

Some of these qualities appear in Austen's later fiction. Several of her characters have exaggerated personality
traits. There is Mrs. Allen's obsession with clothes in Northanger Abbey; Mr. Palmer's rudeness to his wife in
Sense and Sensibility; and Mr. Woodhouse's concern with health in Emma, reinforcing his portrayal as a
fussbudget. However, in her mature fiction, while such characters have a ruling passion or trait, their
personalities function in a larger social context, and Austen presents them with real affection and a deep
knowledge of the human heart, whereas in the juvenilia, one-dimensional characters are simple puppets for
Austen's burlesque effects. As the pieces become more sophisticated, they offer outlines of Austen's later
themes and literary techniques. Her characters evolve into complex individuals who interact in more elaborate
ways with the society in which they live, and who grow and change in the course of those interactions.

TECHNIQUES

Austen's extensive reading prepared the way for her writing career. Her father apparently placed no
restrictions on the books she read as a child. As her biographer Claire Tomalin puts it, “if she was allowed to
read Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison as a child, which gives detailed accounts of maternal drunkenness
and paternal adultery, and lays out the correct attitude to adopt towards a father's mistress and illegitimate
half-brothers, Mr. Austen cannot have kept much from her.”3 Henry Austen remembers his sister as a
precocious reader, but he also emphasizes her piety, and he focuses on her reading of Samuel Johnson's
essays, William Cowper's poetry, and sermons.4 But Austen also enjoyed Henry Fielding's comedy Tom
Thumb and his ribald novel Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy (an
experimental comic novel based in part on the philosophy of John Locke), and the fiction of Charlotte
Lennox, Frances Burney d'Arblay, and Charlotte Smith.5 The family read plays together, and Austen would
have been especially familiar with Shakespeare's plays, which are mentioned throughout her own novels:
Edmund Bertram and Henry Crawford discuss Shakespeare in Mansfield Park; Catherine Morland mentions
Shakespeare in Northanger Abbey; and the Dashwood sisters read Hamlet with Willoughby in Sense and
Sensibility. She was familiar with Johnson's philosophical novel Rasselas and his essays, and she read James
Boswell's work. The Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Milton's poetry were, of course, important
elements of Austen's formation and education.

We know that Austen's favorite novel was Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1753 and
1754. The novel is a seven-volume work about a paragon of gentlemanliness, the woman he falls in love with
after rescuing her from a kidnapping and possible rape, an Italian lady to whom Sir Charles has pledged
himself and from whom it takes him many volumes to get honorably extricated, and their families and friends.
Austen's only attempt at playwriting was a dramatic version of this story, a manuscript preserved by the
Austen family for years but not discovered until the late 1970s, when it was edited and published by Austen
scholar Brian Southam.6

Given Austen's novelistic preoccupations, some of the features of the plot of Sir Charles Grandison are
particularly intriguing.7 For example, Sir Charles's outspoken younger sister Charlotte rails against marriage
as a form of imprisonment. When in the end Charlotte agrees to marry, she misbehaves at her own wedding,
will not let her new husband sit beside her in the carriage afterwards, and teases him so relentlessly that he

127
smashes her harpsichord. This novel is full of discussions about women's roles and social place. The marriage
between Harriet Byron and Sir Charles exemplifies an ideal for which Austen's heroines also strive: a
marriage partnership that represents not only romantic love but a highly developed and respectful friendship
between a man and a woman.

Austen's reading gave her philosophical insights, subject matter, and social attitudes to mine for her own work
and a firm grasp of novelistic techniques. Her early writings were fictions in the form of letters. Letters also
figure prominently in her novels: Darcy writes letters and the characters discuss letter-writing as an activity in
Pride and Prejudice, and a letter-writing scene provides the climax of Austen's final completed novel,
Persuasion. Letters were a form of writing practiced by women, and worked easily as a narrative technique
that introduced women's voices into fiction. As her craft evolved, Austen developed the early epistolary
versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice into third-person narratives
with her trademark omniscient and ironic voice as the controlling narrative authority.

Austen wrote many of her early pieces and the first versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and
Pride and Prejudice in epistolary form—a frequent mode of presenting novels in the eighteenth century, and
Richardson's particular technique. She uses the mishaps of letters gone astray not only to create plot
complications, but to poke fun at the crises and confusions that result. In “Lesley Castle,” one letter begins: “I
have but just received your letter, which being directed to Sussex while I was at Bristol was obliged to be
forwarded to me here, & from some unaccountable Delay, has but this instant reached me—.”8 Austen often
made fun of herself, and of authorship in general. Her hilariously concise history of England, called The
History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st, is prefaced with an
epigraph that reads: “By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian.” A note follows this epigraph and
promises: “N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History.”9

Jane Austen used a narrative method that has often been misunderstood, in part because of her own
self-deprecating references. In December 1816, she wrote to her nephew James Edward Austen about his
writings, which she refers to in a bantering tone as “strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow”
in contrast to her own productions, “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a
Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”10 She seemed to see herself as a miniaturist, writing
occasional, offhand portraits. In fact, she used a technique of concentration, placing her characters in close
proximity and in complex social situations, and then watching them interact and work out their relationships
through revealing mechanisms of social negotiation. The “little bit” of ivory tells a bigger tale.

Jane Austen's own writing process itself could have been a scene in one of her novels. Her nephew James
Edward Austen-Leigh's memoir of his aunt describes the loss of privacy for writing that Austen suffered when
the family left Steventon and moved to Chawton. At Chawton Cottage, she had to write in the public sitting
room. Because she didn't want servants or visitors to know that she was writing, she wrote on small scraps
that could be quickly hidden under a piece of blotting paper if someone entered the room. As Austen-Leigh
tells it, the door to the sitting room creaked when it opened or closed, and Austen did not wish it to be
repaired because it signaled to her that she needed to spirit away her writing.

Jane Austen's irony and the brilliant thematic structure of her carefully wrought stories are legendary. Her
brilliance begins at the level of the individual sentence. Almost any randomly selected sentence from one of
her six major novels is a model of prose style. Her syntax is clever and elaborate, with flowing punctuation
and lengthy, connected clauses; yet her sentences are never muddled or confusing. To parse them
grammatically, or to analyze their vocabulary or their punctuation, might tax most readers; but each sentence
satisfies because its complexity never gets in the way of its easy good sense. Austen's syntax is entangled, her
points of view and manipulation of perspective are elaborately contrived, but the complexities of her prose
flatter as well as speak to her readers' intelligence.

128
Austen was one of the first and most innovative practitioners of a narrative style known as style indirect libre,
or free indirect style. While her fame derives largely from her straightforward, canny reportage of ordinary
details and personal quirks, she also excels at painting a scene by combining one character's voice or point of
view with the perspective of an omniscient narrating voice that speaks from outside the action. Sometimes
these voices belong to multiple characters, as in the tour de force of indirect style that describes the strawberry
sequence at the Donwell Abbey picnic in Emma.

The whole party was assembled, excepting Frank Churchill, who was expected every moment
from Richmond; and Mrs. Elton, in all her appartus of happiness, her large bonnet and her
basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—strawberries, and
only strawberries, only now be thought or spoken of.—“The best fruit in England—every
body's favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to
gather for one's self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best
time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the
others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of
all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple
Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no
general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be
eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering
strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go
and sit in the shade.”11

This passage comes largely from the perspective of vain Mrs. Elton, who has positioned herself as the hostess
at Donwell; but it also contrives to deliver a group or community voice that moves from lively pleasure to
lethargy in the course of this deliberately disjointed, galloping paragraph. It is not altogether clear who is
speaking, and the indeterminacy of the phrases forms part of how they convey a communal sense of the
initially delightful and then irritating activity of picking strawberries. The passage is both stylized and almost
stream-of-consciousness in its flow.12

Austen's prose style welcomes and pleases her readers because she cultivates a rich relationship between the
narrator and the reader. The narrator speaks directly to us, and with us consents to view the novel's characters
from a certain perspective. Austen's narrative voice assumes that she is speaking to a sensible audience who
understands and agrees with her right-minded standards of behavior and morality. There is an amused, critical
irony that embraces the reader in the inner circle of those who have insight and perspicacity, those who know
and can judge.

Austen nearly independently invented a new and revolutionary form of the English novel. The novel played
an increasingly important role in popular literature during the century that preceded Austen, and her work
owes a debt to Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney in particular. But she combined the external
observations of eighteenth-century adventure fiction (the picaresque novels of Henry Fielding and Tobias
Smollett) with the interior analyses of women's moral fiction of the period (the psychological novels of Ann
Radcliffe and Burney) to achieve a quiet but startlingly influential innovation in the genre of the novel.

Women's domestic experience was circumscribed by gender roles and expectations, and women's lives
centered primarily on family activities. Yet women also needed to use their domestic choices to fit themselves
into the larger social and economic structures into which they were born. Austen took this confluence of
private limitation and public necessity and wove it into some of the most psychologically insightful, socially
astute, and complex literature we have in the English language. Given her inauspicious and utterly normal
surroundings, one might ask how this was possible.

129
Austen's narrative voice is her most powerful and influential invention. Writing with distance and judgment,
her narrators manage to be didactic and aloof, conversational and charming and, above all, ironic. They testify
to the technical prowess and craftsmanship of Austen's mature prose. While her subject matter seems
small—the subtle ways in which people interact and form judgments of one another, the nuances of space and
language at a public gathering, the meanings of gestures and silences—she painted an overarching and highly
moral portrait of social life.

As a stylist, Austen is best known for her use of irony, and this technique already emerges in sharp form in her
juvenile writings. Austen's juvenile work frequently turns to wicked satire. One of her favorite targets was the
vogue for sentimentality. When Emma learns that Edgar is away at college in “Edgar and Emma,” she retires
to her room, where she “continued in tears the remainder of her Life.”13 In Love and Freindship [sic], the
friends Sophia and Laura shriek and faint, swoon and run mad, a circumstance that leads to some judicious
advice.

Beware of swoons … A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an excerise to the
Body & if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to health in its consequences.—Run mad as
often as you chuse; but do not faint—.14

To understand the finely honed production of Austen's irony, we should look closely at a couple of her mature
sentences, because it is at the level of the sentence that Austen's narrative voice succeeds. Here is the famous
opening sentence (and paragraph) of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a
single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”15 This sentence opens the novel with a
proposition that the novel's plot proves: Charles Bingley has moved into the neighborhood of the Bennets,
who have five unmarried daughters and an entailed estate, and Mrs. Bennet, with every other mother in the
area, plans to ensnare him as a marriage partner for one of her girls, preferably the eldest. And in the end, after
many vicissitudes and misunderstandings and illnesses and humiliations, the marriage is certain.

But plot foreshadowing is the least of this sentence's importance. It sets up the comical yet deadly serious
dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet about the necessity of paying a visit to the new neighbors, and thus
initiates the tone of the whole novel: the nature of the Bennet marriage and thus the question of marriage
generally and so the social necessities and economic maneuverings that are requirements in this society. The
sentence embodies an idea that is both practical and philosophical; it is an opinion both on economics and on
social structure. This sentence, critic Julia Prewitt Brown observes, starts a chain reaction because it
“reverberates throughout the entire first chapter, indeed the entire novel, and derives its brilliance from that
reverberation.”16 The sentence is meaningful in a straightforward way and yet quite outrageous in its
implications.

Brown mentions another classically and somewhat cruelly ironic sentence from Emma. This sentence also
opens a chapter, and it also stands alone as a paragraph: “Human nature is so well disposed towards those who
are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken
of.”17 What occasions this ironic blast is one of the most awkward circumstances into which Emma
Woodhouse contrives to trap herself. Emma encourages her friend Harriet Smith to consider Mr. Elton. Mr.
Elton misinterprets her manipulations as a sign that Emma herself is well-disposed towards him. Emma is
mortified, Harriet is humiliated, and Mr. Elton recovers from his disappointment by affiancing himself to
Miss Hawkins and returning to town to tout her merits.

Mrs. Elton, née Hawkins, becomes one of Austen's best satirical targets for self-importance and social
obliviousness. The sentence from Emma introduces the embarrassing fact that Miss Hawkins becomes an
instant celebrity in Highbury, where everyone suddenly thinks well of her. The operative phrase “interesting
situations” in the sentence makes it at once a humorous and a significant statement. The word “interesting”
had more complex meanings in Austen's time than it does now, when it represents merely the opposite of dull

130
or boring. Then, it meant something more like “intriguing” or “provocative.” But however we understand the
word, it seems staggeringly cruel to call someone's dying “interesting.” (We might note that Mrs. Churchill is
not spoken well of in Emma until after her offstage death.) Death, of course, is just what we least expect in a
comedy of manners, where what we look for is a wedding. Austen subtly made marriage analogous to death in
this neat sentence and illuminated another element of her fiction: It investigates the larger scope of human
nature.

Saying as little as possible to convey the crux of a situation or a character constitutes another of Austen's
ironic techniques. Her lovers' confessions of love and proposals of marriage perfectly illustrate her economy
of language. Whole books lead up to these moments, of course, after a range of obstacles and discomfiting
circumstances and embarrassments. At the climactic proposal scene in Emma, for example, even though the
narrator provides two pages of indirect discourse on the agitations of Emma's mind when she realizes that she
herself is the object of Mr. Knightley's affections, the moment of truth is delivered only in these lines: “She
spoke then, on being so entreated.—What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always
does.”18 The scene continues with the tactic of indirect speech, a clipped series of confessions and revelations
between the lovers who are to be husband and wife.

Jane Austen also pioneered the use of style indirect libre to convey what her characters are thinking without
quoting them directly. Austen often used this technique, especially during the climactic scenes when her
lovers finally unburden themselves to one another and recapitulate the various musings, miscommunications,
and circumstances that have led to plot entanglements and at last to an understanding of mutual love. The
revelations between Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot in Persuasion that follow much misreading,
self-doubt, and emotional upheaval are preceded by indirect discourse during a concert scene that involves
Wentworth's anxious jealousy of Anne's cousin Mr. Elliot, who ends the scene by interrupting them.19 This
conversation has nothing really to do with the concert, but conveys the subtlety and edginess of the unspoken
history and feelings between the interlocutors.

When the most important words are spoken in an Austen novel, the reader rarely gets to hear them. The
second proposal scene between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice also uses indirect speech.
When it comes to the central moment, the narrator tells us that Darcy “expressed himself on the occasion as
sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.”20 And after the exchange between
Knightley and Emma in Emma, the narrator offers a now famous Austenian observation.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom does it
happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case,
though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.21

This sentence tells us a great deal about Austen's novelistic technique. Even as her narrators choreograph their
plots around a thicket of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, the characters mature and learn to give
one another and themselves the benefit of the doubt.

SUBJECT TO REVISION

Jane Austen's brother Henry, in a “Biographical Notice of the Author,” his preface to his posthumous edition
of his sister's first and last novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, presented the first public glimpse of his
sister's working process as a writer. He stated that she became interested in literature and in her own language
abilities at an early age in her father's library. Her novels were polished and sent out for publication from
Chawton, but she began many of them, he noted, in earlier periods of her life. In Henry Austen's portrait, Jane
Austen appears as a meticulous editor of her own work. “For though in composition she was equally rapid and
correct,” he wrote, “yet an invincible distrust of her own judgement induced her to withhold her works from
the public, till time and many perusals had satisfied her that the charm of recent composition was resolved.”22

131
As Henry Austen remarked in his “Biographical Notice,” Jane Austen read and reread, corrected and revised
her work until she was satisfied that she had said what she wanted to say. Thus she began to write what would
become her major works at a young age, and she spent many years rereading, revising, and correcting the
manuscripts. The origins of the first three of Jane Austen's six great novels overlap with the writing of the
juvenile works.

Austen may have begun her first completed novel, Lady Susan, as early as 1793 or 1794. We have a fair-copy
manuscript with few corrections from 1805, so scholars have had to speculate from other evidence.23 She
began to write First Impressions, later called Pride and Prejudice, in 1796, when she was just twenty-one, and
she completed the first version in 1797. Her family enjoyed it right away. Her father offered it to a publisher,
but it was rejected sight unseen. By 1800, Jane Austen had completed a novel she titled Susan, and she had
revised a third book called Elinor and Marianne, written before First Impressions. These works were the first
versions of Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. All three were originally composed in epistolary
form.

Austen prepared Susan for publication in 1802 or 1803, and sold it to a publisher in 1803 for £10, but it was
not published, and in 1809 she arranged to buy back the copyright for the same amount. After her death it was
published as Northanger Abbey. In 1803, Austen also worked on a novel fragment called The Watsons; the
manuscript is written on paper watermarked 1803 and was probably composed in Bath. Austen's father died in
1805, and scholars assume that she abandoned this work in her bereavement. Her nephew James Edward
Austen-Leigh proposed another hypothesis for the abandonment of this promising manuscript: that the
Watson family has the most obscure social status of any of Austen's principal families, and that she thought
better of such a subject. Whatever the reason, The Watsons remains a promising story, if darker than much of
her other work, and it is a loss to literature that Austen chose not to complete it.

When the Austen women moved to Chawton Cottage in July of 1809, Jane was thirty-three. Chawton afforded
little privacy for writing, but it was here that Austen composed her great mature novels. The first of Austen's
completed major novels to be published was Sense and Sensibility in November 1811. It was followed in
January 1813, by Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park appeared in May of 1814, and Emma in December
1815, the year that Austen began Persuasion. She began to lose her health in 1816, but by July of that year she
had completed a first draft and a revised version of Persuasion, and in January of 1817 she began her last
novel, the unfinished Sanditon. Northanger Abbey (the first of the six major novels in date of composition)
and Persuasion were published together, with a biographical note by Henry Austen, in December of 1818,
five months after Jane Austen died in Winchester on 18 July at the age of forty-two.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Contrary to popular views that Austen was an amateur who did not take her work seriously, she thought a
great deal about remuneration for her writings. Her first effort to publish was in November 1797. Her father,
the Reverend George Austen, offered First Impressions, later to become Pride and Prejudice, to Cadell and
Davies in November, offering to take on the costs and the risk himself. He compared the book in length and
subject matter to Frances Burney's Evelina, but the publisher declined to read it.

The literary marketplace was no longer completely inhospitable to women by Austen's time, but it was
difficult to enter. A century earlier, Aphra Behn became the first Englishwoman to support herself by her
pen—at the cost of her reputation. Fame for a woman automatically meant infamy, which explains Jane
Austen's typical decision to publish her work anonymously. Women could neither own property nor sign
personal contracts.24 She required a male relation to negotiate on her behalf, and her brother Henry performed
this service for her.

132
There were several publishing options in England. Authors could sell subscriptions to their books, printing
only the number for which they had prearranged sales. An author could negotiate a one-time sale of the
copyright, the method Austen chose for Susan (whose copyright she bought back six years after selling it) and
Pride and Prejudice. The copyright, then as now, was a license to print a book, and was understood to
represent property. The House of Lords had eliminated perpetual copyright in 1774, the year before Austen's
birth, but publishers still paid blanket fees for a limited copyright ownership of fourteen or twenty-eight years.
A copyright sale assured an author of money regardless of the book's sales. However, if the book sold well, its
author was not entitled to its profits. There were also various forms of profit sharing.

The method that Austen chose for Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma was to publish on
commission. For the author, commission publication entailed underwriting the cost of paper, printing, and
advertising, and the publisher distributed the copies and kept the accounts. In practice, the publisher usually
fronted the costs of printing and took reimbursements from the profits. The publisher got a ten percent
commission on each copy sold, and if things went well, the author made a profit. There was greater risk to
commission publication, but also a greater chance of monetary rewards. Of Austen's novels published on
commission, only the second edition of Mansfield Park lost money.25

Austen kept careful records of her literary earnings. Writing to her brother Frank on 15 September 1813, she
added a postscript.

You will be glad to hear that every Copy of S. & S. is sold & that it has brought me
£140—besides the Copyright, if that should ever be of any value.—I have now therefore
written myself into £250.—which only makes me long for more.26

In a letter to Martha Lloyd dated 29 November 1812, Austen informed her close friend that Thomas Egerton
had paid £110 for Pride and Prejudice. “I would rather have had £150,” she writes, “but we could not both be
pleased, & I am not at all surprised that he should not chuse to hazard so much.”27 Interestingly, because
publications and copyrights represented property and income potential, they also became associated with the
notion of authority.28

It was not until after her death that any of Jane Austen's novels appeared with her name attached to them, so
the reviews that were published during her lifetime never mentioned her by name.

Notes

1. Southam discusses his criteria for this dating in B. C. Southam, Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
2. Frances Beer provides a useful introduction to Austen's juvenile writings in the “Introduction” to The
Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, ed. Frances Beer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1986), pp. 9-19.
3. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 67.
4. Henry Austen added a “Biographical Notice of the Author” to his posthumous edition of Northanger
Abbey and Persuasion, and R. W. Chapman keeps this Notice in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V,
3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 3-9.
5. For accounts of Austen's reading, see the chapter “Reading and Response” in Mary Lascelles, Jane
Austen and Her Art (1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 41-83 and Margaret
Anne Doody, “Jane Austen's Reading,” in J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam, eds.
The Jane Austen Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 347-63.
6. Jane Austen's “Sir Charles Grandison,” transcribed and edited by Brian Southam (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980).
7. Austen wrote her own version of this story. See Ibid.

133
 8. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p.
119.
9. Ibid., 138.
10. Jane Austen's Letters, new ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 323.
11. The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p.
358-59.
12. For a useful discussion of Austen's language use, see Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). For a study of the satiric uses of indirect style before
Austen, see Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
from Swift to Cowper (London, 1985).
13. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p.
33.
14. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 102.
15. Ibid., p. 3.
16. Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 26.
17. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 181. Cited and discussed by Julia Prewitt Brown, op. cit., p. 26.
18. Ibid., p. 431.
19. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 190.
20. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933). p. 366.
21. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 431.
22. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed.,
ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 4.
23. See B. C. Southam, Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
24. Some property strictures applied differently to married and to single women. For a complete
discussion, see Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). A widow could inherit and manage property after
her husband's death, and individual family arrangements could override property laws by explicitly
stipulating alternative inheritance rules for an estate. This explains Lady Catherine de Bourgh's
powerful position in Pride and Prejudice. She owns the Rosings living and thus has the authority to
give it to Mr. Collins. She also makes the telling remark to Charlotte, on the subject of the
Longbourne estate, “I see no occasion for entailing estates away from the female line.—It was not
thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh's family” (The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed.
R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 164). It should be mentioned in this
context that Lady Catherine de Bourgh's title derives from her father rather than from her husband,
who was of a lower rank.
25. Jan Fergus offers a useful discussion of publishing practices in “Conditions of Authorship for
Women,” in Jane Austen: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), pp. 1-27.
26. Jane Austen's Letters, new ed., ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 217.
27. Ibid., p. 197.
28. For discussions of publishing income and its relation to authorship and authority, see Jan Fergus and
Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture 17 (1987), pp. 198-207.

134
Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia
Epstein: Jane Austen's Era
JANE AUSTEN'S ENGLAND

In the late eighteenth century, England and Wales comprised fifty-two counties, called shires until the time of
William the Conqueror. Jane Austen's novels, as her life, took place in the counties north and south of
London. She came from Hampshire, abbreviated as Hants., southwest of London. Industrial development
centered in the north, with heavy manufacturing beginning to grow in Birmingham, cotton factories in
Manchester, and coal mining in Newcastle. Bath, west of London, was the social center of fashionable
England, and figures prominently in Austen's life and art. Portsmouth, a featured location in Mansfield Park
and the place where Austen's naval brothers received their early training, was a naval base on the southern
coast of England. And London, on the river Thames, was the metropolis.

Change was the predominant characteristic of England during Jane Austen's brief life. Austen was a
paramount chronicler of that change in its social manifestations for a particular class: country landowners who
were being displaced by the rising mercantile classes. While Austen was discreet about the difficult subject of
money, in her life as in her novels, she was acutely aware of wealth: who had it, how it was earned, and what
happened when there was not enough of it. The relationship between people whose wealth derived from land
ownership and those whose wealth derived from commercial interests evolved in confusing ways during
Austen's life, and she was fully aware of this evolution. As social historian Raymond Williams wrote in The
Country and the City, Austen's world was set against the backdrop of a particularly unsettled time in English
social and economic history.1

Land—real property—dictated how this social world operated, and critic Tony Tanner usefully points out the
etymological and thematic connections between property and Austen's other preoccupation, propriety. As
Tanner shows, property rights were born as a sacred trust with John Locke's 1690 Second Treatise of
Government. Sir William Blackstone's famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four
volumes between 1765 and 1769, discussed property rights as a law of nature. Tanner notes that laws about
property offenses grew from fifty or so in 1688 to over 200 in 1820. Both economist Adam Smith and
political thinker Edmund Burke also weighed in importantly on the relations between property ownership and
the social order. Tanner points out that Austen's “proper” heroes all own land and, until Persuasion, her
heroines all require a propertied man.2 Similarly, Alistair Duckworth's important critical study of Austen's
novels starts with the premise that the estate and its inheritance and improvement are central to Austen's
imagined and real worlds.3

As the structure of the English economy changed during Austen's lifetime, so did English government and
society. Coal and iron technologies and steam power supported new industrial developments and brought
changes in agricultural and mechanical production. Material wealth increased and posed a challenge to the
monopoly of aristocratic interests, and British power grew across the globe as a consequence. Railroads and
free trade would come somewhat later, but the way was paved for these developments in the final decades of
the eighteenth century.

When Jane Austen was born, the family was the central institution in English life. It bestowed rank or the lack
of it on its members and dictated their place and expectations in the world. Eighteenth-century philosophers
built a moral perspective on the notion that order and orderliness could coexist with enlightened self-interest,
and that society should be utilitarian. The wealthy were expected to be benevolent and charitable, and the poor
hardworking and grateful. Property owners came in ranks as well, with titled proprietors of large holdings at
the top of the heap, those with smaller landed holdings beneath them, and the landed gentry, those whose land
holdings provided their upkeep and social standing, anchoring this group. Austen's family belonged to this last

135
group, the gentry, although her brother Edward became a substantial landowner through his adoptive parents
the Knights, and Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra, and their mother eventually lived in a cottage he provided
them on his estates.

At the same time, the new mercantile classes were gaining steadily in prestige and power. Trade allowed those
who were not born into landed wealth to acquire it through commerce; trade provided for the rise of the
“middling” or middle classes, those who could support themselves in comfort but without benefit of inherited
wealth or land. Trade led to the birth of the British empire, particularly through the activities of the East India
Company on the Indian subcontinent and sugar plantation owners in the West Indies. Below the merchant
classes were yeoman farmers, artisans or skilled laborers, and country people who supported themselves
directly from the land; and below these two groups were servants of the propertied and, increasingly, the
moneyed classes.

For landed gentry families, there were two tiers in the passing of generations. Under the system of
primogeniture, the eldest son inherited the whole of the estate. Daughters were provided a “portion” to
facilitate their marriages, and younger sons sometimes also received a monetary settlement or annuity. But for
the most part, younger sons, such as Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, had to enter a profession, generally
the military or the clergy. Jane Austen's novels depict many such men, from Admiral Crofts and Captain
Wentworth in Persuasion to the plethora of churchmen in Austen's novels: John Dashwood and Edward
Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Norris, Dr. Grant, and Edmund
Bertram in Mansfield Park, and Mr. Elton in Emma. The Church of England was the country's largest and
richest institution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; its twenty-six bishops each had a cathedral
with deans, canon, and prebends, and there were about 26,000 parishes that encompassed all of England and
formed part of the local government (parsons also often served as Justices of the Peace).

The church was thickly intertwined with politics and economics. Patronage was the key to clerical posts, and
the clergy became an overcrowded profession in Austen's time. At the end of the eighteenth century, there
were 11,600 benefices, or livings, which comprised a form of property that could be put up for sale or
bestowed on those their owners patronized, and there was a fair amount of trafficking and speculation in
church positions. Austen's clerical characters are rectors or vicars: the difference was that rectors received all
their parish's tithes, whereas vicars were paid a salary. Both augmented their income by farming the property
around the church and rectory. Both positions were forms of incumbency, but as they often paid little, many
clergymen held more than one post, a circumstance that was called “pluralism” and provoked some
controversy. In these cases, the vicar or rector often paid a stipend to a curate to perform the actual duties of
the parish church, baptizing babies, performing weddings and funerals, and conducting Sunday services, while
the incumbent served as an absentee. It was also difficult for clergymen to afford to retire, hence when livings
were offered for sale, the life expectancy of their incumbents was frequently part of the advertisement. Those
who had livings to bestow, such as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, could offer them for sale or as
gifts.4

As the eighteenth century progressed, new institutions that were devoted to caring for the very poor arose:
voluntary social organizations to care for foundlings, orphans, the elderly, and the ill. There also appeared
some class mobility for the first time. When they had acquired enough money, merchants could buy land and
the social status that came with estate ownership (Charles Bingley does this in Pride and Prejudice). So hard
work and talent could buy one's way up the social ladder. This occurred in politics as well, because
individuals could participate in local governance without benefit of aristocratic birth or title.

Industrial developments in the 1780s and 1790s—the Industrial Revolution—affected population and
demographics, the growth of cities, trade expansion, and the enormous increase in production of goods such
as cloth and copper. Edmund Cartwright set up the first power loom in 1786, which revolutionized cotton
spinning and weaving, and cotton manufacturing became the most powerful industrial interest in England. The

136
Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce was founded in 1754, and the
Manchester Committee for the Protection and Encouragement of Trade appeared in 1774. Coal and iron
replaced wood, wind, and water as power sources. Beginning in 1775, James Watt and Matthew Boulton
began to patent new types of steam engines. Factories and mines changed the natural landscape and brought
new ways of thinking, new social groups, and new social problems as well as wealth and global power to
England.

Two other areas experienced major advances: transportation, with an increase in roads and the use of rivers
and canals, and banking, with increased circulation and availability of capital, credit, and cash. Houses began
to be built of brick rather than timber; sewers were constructed and sanitation improved; and increased use of
soap and pottery led, in different ways, to improvements in hygiene and personal cleanliness.

At Austen's birth, England was still largely rural, with its population spread across the countryside and in
small villages. By the end of her life, towns and cities were becoming the centers of population. For example,
the population of Birmingham doubled in the last 40 years of the eighteenth century. There were industrial
towns (such as Manchester and Birmingham), market towns (such as Liverpool), ports (such as Portsmouth
and Southampton), and specialized centers such as watering places and university towns (for example, Bath
and Oxford). And, of course, London grew enormously during Austen's lifetime, with its population
accounting for ten percent of the people in England.

All of these changes produced a larger divide than ever between rich and poor. Individuals could become
enormously wealthy almost overnight, and the labor force that the new industries needed to sustain them also
expanded at a great rate. This represented a major change from the country squire who looked after the rural
poor in his neighborhood. Parish administrations could no longer handle the needs of their poor, and working
conditions for laborers in the new factories were often dismal. Philanthropy did not provide enough resources
to handle the problem, which required new forms of social organization.

Women and children worked in factories, especially in the cotton industry; in fact, children accounted for up
to two-thirds of the work force. Opposition to the new factory system was inspired by deplorable conditions
and long hours for many workers; and social philosophers and politicians responded to the new regime of
capital owners on the one hand and powerless laborers on the other with new laws. Along the way, traditional
views of the social order were altered, in part because of the advent of the modern idea of class.5

In political terms, the England into which Jane Austen was born was a state run according to a Constitution
written in 1688 and based on checks and balances as the guarantors of individual freedom, with the legislature
(Parliament), the nobility, the executive (Prime Minister), and the King maintaining the civil order by
regulating one another. The political order existed in tandem with the social order of property, the family, and
professional rank and education. So inherited hierarchies and the attributes of merit coexisted in the way
authority was conferred or denied. In Jane Austen's lifetime, the final decades of the eighteenth century and
the first decades of the nineteenth, social and political interests began to differentiate, the monarchy grew
somewhat in power, and what we would call “public opinion” became more politically organized.

George III's madness in the late 1780s inaugurated a prolonged period during which the King relinquished
most of the reins of state business, with the exception that he managed to achieve his goal of Catholic
emancipation. This lasted until George III's son took over in 1811. (George himself didn't die until 1820, but
the country was run by the Prince Regent, to whom Emma was dedicated at his request, from 1811 on.)
William Pitt became Prime Minister in 1783, partly as a result of the American War of Independence; the loss
of the war created a crisis in England. Pitt's administration set the tone of this period. Following the French
Revolution, war broke out between England and France and involved two of Austen's brothers. During this
period of turmoil abroad, Pitt restored national finances by reducing the national debt and expanding taxes on
everything from horses to bricks to candles; put into place administrative reforms by increasing the powers of

137
the Prime Minister; reorganized the workings of the British empire; and increased England's standing in
Europe by making controversial trade agreements with Ireland and France and consolidating British holdings
in Asia while the American colonies were being lost.

The American War of Independence was underway when Jane Austen was born, and the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic wars, the Peninsular War, and the War of 1812 that followed in its wake marked European
politics from the late 1780s until 1815, just three years before Austen's death. English political ideas were
strongly influenced by the events in France that brought an end to feudalism and the monarchy, with heated
debates between the Jacobins (radicals) and the anti-Jacobins (conservatives). As the French situation turned
from revolution to repression and France turned its attention to wider European activities and became
aggressive on military fronts, declaring war on Austria in 1792 and on England and Holland in 1793, the
British became more Francophobic in public opinion as well as in governmental attitudes. When the French
defeated the Austrians and Antwerp fell in 1792, new trade openings changed European diplomacy because
France defied long-standing commercial treaties. By 1793 the national mood in England was ready for war.
The British navy, the strongest of England's armed forces and the one to which Austen's brothers Francis and
Charles belonged, was the decisive military force in England.6

Starting in 1792, the English government became more repressive against those seen as agitators or as
treasonous, and in 1794, the law of habeas corpus was suspended. Two acts passed in 1795, one making some
kinds of speech and writing treasonous (the Treasonous Practices Act) and another that required a special
permit for large public gatherings (the Seditious Meetings Act). In 1796, stamp taxes were raised for
newspapers, and printing presses had to be registered. In 1799, two more acts made it difficult to organize
workers' groups.

At the same time, the English government was dealing with other kinds of pressing questions: Catholic
emancipation, the Irish question (there had been armed rebellion in Ireland in 1798), and the price of corn (the
Corn Law Act of 1815 barred foreign corn from Britain until a price goal was met). Once the wars ended, the
influx of former military personnel into the working ranks and a decrease in urban employment meant
difficult times.

JANE AUSTEN'S TIME IN HISTORY

Jane Austen was born into the end of the relatively stable world of the neoclassical Enlightenment, but almost
immediately, revolutionary wars and often violent and vehement renegotiations of social, political, economic,
and philosophical ideas interrupted that stability. Revolutionary claims battled anti-Jacobin resistance to
reform, so the massive industrial and social changes of the period occurred against a backdrop of strife that
fed into growing discrepancies between rich and poor. Aristocrats and landowners continued to enjoy their
comforts while towns grew without benefit of sanitation systems, urban planning, or decent working
conditions. When the writer and civil servant Daniel Defoe observed his country during Queen Anne's reign,
he noted the orderliness of the social and economic systems. A hundred years later, the social activist William
Cobbett noted that the poor had been disinherited and that rival social and economic interests dominated
England.7

England was at war during most of Jane Austen's life. English soldiers fought against colonists in the
American War of Independence, which ended with the defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781 when Austen
was six years old, although the official end did not come until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. From 1789 to 1799,
the French Revolution captured the imaginations of the English, who were bitterly divided over which side to
support. Beginning in 1793, England fought against France and Napoleon's bid for empire, a fight that did not
end until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. And during that same period, from 1812 to 1814, England fought
again with America in the War of 1812. There was periodic concern that England's coast would be invaded,
and southern ports were filled with military personnel.

138
The birth of the middle classes introduced a relatively new distinction between the public and the private
spheres. Such a distinction always existed between, for example, the state and its laws on the one hand and
what went on in people's homes on the other. But something new occurred toward the end of the eighteenth
century: a demarcation between the outside world of capitalist markets and rational economic and political
forces and the internal world of emotion, religion, and morality. Individuals, predominantly men, began to
amass power through their wealth and material activities, while behind them stood a network of family
support influenced largely by women. So a sexual division of labor derived from the structure of the family
itself and provided the foundation for capitalist values and enterprise outside the home.8 These private, family
activities served not only as a backdrop to public life, but dictated what happened to many social institutions
and ideologies.

The new middle classes had much in common with the aristocracy and the gentry in terms of their desires for
comfort. At the same time, they acquired their status through individual work, so they also had affinities with
the work ethic of the poor and with a desire for independence from the established orders of the past. The
revolutionary fervor of the period spoke to those desires, and nonconformist writers and thinkers as disparate
as William Cowper, Austen's favorite poet, and the political theorists Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine,
spoke out against the corruption of those in power and the need for liberatory reforms. Not surprisingly, there
was also a backlash of reaction against such calls for reform. Not until the Reform Act of 1832 (the backdrop
for George Eliot's 1872 novel, Middlemarch) did middle class households get some political clout, although,
ironically, that act explicitly excluded women from political enfranchisement. And through it all, land
remained the particular form of property ownership that conferred an authority unavailable from other forms
of wealth.

A religious revival in England accompanied these social changes, as people became interested in the idea of
individual salvation and turned to Evangelism.9 The notion of a shared moral code united people from
different walks of life—farmers and landowners, manufacturers and factory workers, Whigs and Tories,
Anglicans and Puritans. This Evangelism coupled Protestant individualism with humanitarian ideas, public
piety and strict morality, and unbending standards of personal conduct. Opponents of the French Revolution
made much of the revolutionaries' supposed atheism; to be a supporter of the Constitution meant to be a good
Christian, and to be a Jacobin was to be unpatriotic. Beginning as an anti-Jacobin reaction, the new religiosity
persisted into the Victorian era. The Church of England, of which Austen was a member, continued to control
the majority of England's religious activity, but dissenting groups such as the Evangelicals and the Wesleyan
Methodists, not to mention the Roman Catholics, raised issues about everything from spirituality to clerical
absenteeism (an issue for Austen in Mansfield Park) to political scandals. There was a staunch moral
earnestness that made manners and morals into social and philosophical issues.

Austen's novels illustrate, perhaps better than anything else from the period, the crucial ways in which private
behavior toward others stood in for broader questions of merit, social standing, and authority. Humanitarian
ideals fostered by increased religiosity brought many religious sects into anti-slavery activities, as public
opinion became more independent. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, despite powerful opposition from
vested economic interests, demonstrated this free thinking, and in 1834 all slaves in the British empire were
freed.10 There is evidence in Austen's novels that Jane Austen held abolitionist sympathies. In Emma, Mrs.
Elton and Jane Fairfax have a conversation concerning Mrs. Elton's offer of help in finding a situation for Jane
as a governess.

“When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed.
There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for
the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.”

“Oh! My dear, human flesh! You quite shock me: if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I
assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.”

139
 “I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I
assure you, was all that I had in view; widely differnt certainly as to the guilt of those who
carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.”11

In Mansfield Park, where the Bertram fortune derives from Sir Thomas's plantation holdings in Antigua and
the slave-driven economy of the West Indies, a conversation between Fanny Price and her cousin Edmund
turns to Sir Thomas's new esteem for his young niece after his return from Antigua. Edmund suggests that
Fanny should talk to her uncle more:

“But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the
slave trade last night?”

“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased
your uncle to be inquired of farther.”

“And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting
by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I
thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a
curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”12

Claire Tomalin argues that Fanny's abolitionist views are made clear by this exchange.13

Jane Austen's favorite poet was William Cowper, known as a vehement abolitionist. The Austens themselves
had family connections to the slave trade; Austen's father, George Austen, was a trustee of a plantation in
Antigua that belonged to one of his Oxford friends, James Nibbs. Claudia Johnson has made the persuasive
point that Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park represents the ideal of the benevolent slave-owner, and that
his kindness to Fanny stems from the same impulse of caring paternalism that assumes that dependents are
better off being looked after than being granted autonomy.14 In this way, Jane Austen may have made
connections between the plight of enslaved Africans and the situation of dependent women.

Home, or cottage, industries, became fewer because home manufacture could no longer compete with the new
machinery, particularly in the textile industry. This development impoverished many rural households and put
many women, especially single women, out of work. Many women joined men in fieldwork, and others went
to work in factories or as servants in the homes of people better off than they were. Women thus had access to
fewer roles and occupations, and they were beset by more expectations about what a “proper lady” should be.

Other than dancing and occasional equestrian exercise or walking, middle- and upper-class women got little
physical exercise. So in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet decides to visit her ailing sister at
Netherfield, her mother objects that there is too much dirt and that she will not be fit to be seen when she
arrives.

Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over
stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within
view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of
excerise.15

She is received with polite surprise by the Bingleys: “That she should have walked three miles so early in the
day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and
Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt for it.”16

140
Home and family dictated the world of women in Jane Austen's time. When capital became liquid and the
middle classes redefined notions of property, women could leave production and be supported by their
husbands (or fathers or brothers, as was the case for the Austen women after George Austen's death in 1805).
At the same time, as marriage became based on the idea of a contract, the position of married women with
respect to property became more encumbered by patriarchal ideologies of inheritance. Married women were
unable to hold property until the landmark Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882.17 Property was
the key determinant of wealth and status in Austen's lifetime, because ownership of land continued to
dominate the economic structure at the end of the eighteenth century. Commerce and credit were coming into
play, but “real property” still meant land.

LIFESTYLE AND CULTURE

Jane Austen's family was orthodox in its views: Church of England religious ideas and conservative Tory
politics. The Austen family belonged to what we would call the upper middle class; they were members of the
gentry class that produced landowners, clergymen, military officers, and women with domestic
accomplishments and a basic literary education. Austen's novels are justly famous for their highly detailed and
meticulously observed portrait of daily life among the English country gentry. Austen depicted a wide range
of character types, from the haughty, aristocratic, overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and
Prejudice to the misguided commonsensical Lady Russell in Persuasion, and from the caddishly charming
Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility to the moralistic but ambivalently motivated Edmund Bertram in
Mansfield Park and the self-deludedly intelligent title character of Emma. Austen had a brilliant ear for
realistic dialogue and an amazing intuition about human drama.

A woman of Austen's class was best situated to document the private world of human interaction: the subtle
ways that families were built or destroyed; the casual interactions between the sexes and the formal relations
that ensued and dictated family power, wealth, and lineage; and how people negotiated between moral
strictures and human desires.

Education was a major component of domestic change. Upper-class men had had access to an elite, formal
education in Europe since the Middle Ages. In the eighteenth century, forms of education also became
available to women and to the poor. Women were given greater access to book learning at home and
sometimes were sent off to schools, as the Austen girls were, for several years. The poor had charity schools,
though many still argued that these institutions would engender insubordination. One of the major proponents
of broad schooling was the reformist philanthropist Hannah More, who opened a school for the poor that local
farmers thought would incite children to be disaffected from their families and their lot in life.

Jane Austen received some formal training, but mostly she had the advantage of her father's extensive library.
Here is her brother Henry's account of her intellectual accomplishments:

Her reading was very extensive in history and belles letters; and her memory extremely
tenacious. Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse. It is
difficult to say at what age she was not intimately acquainted with the merits and defects of
the best essays and novels in the English language. Richardson's power of creating, and
preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in “Sir Charles
Grandison,” gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from
the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did not rank any work of Fielding quite
so high.18

So Austen had something a woman of her class and place might not have had even fifty years earlier: books
and the ability to read.

141
Education in history, philosophy, and poetry was especially important for women because conversation was
one of the arts an elegant, well-bred woman needed for social success. The Bertram sisters study at home in
Mansfield Park and know how to read maps, and in Emma, Harriet Smith receives her training at a boarding
school for girls. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Emma Woodhouse in Emma demonstrate most
powerfully the scope and importance of a woman's ability to be articulate.

In addition to religious training and an education in letters, Jane Austen participated in the range of activities
that were considered to be “feminine accomplishments” in the late eighteenth century. She was competent
with a needle and made clothing and household textiles; she could draw and paint; she sang and played the
pianoforte; and she was a prolific letter-writer. Darcy's sister plays the harp in Pride and Prejudice, as does
Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Art and music rounded out the most central of women's expected
accomplishments, which was needlework.

Much emphasis was placed on a woman's talent at embroidery and the neatness of her handwriting, and
Austen excelled in both of these areas—she made shirts for her brothers, stitched a shawl for Cassandra in
muslin with satin embroidery, and embroidered handkerchiefs. In 1811 Jane, Cassandra, and their mother
created a patchwork quilt. Sometimes young women worked a sampler to complete their education in
household skills. In Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Palmer demonstrates the fruits of her education by
displaying a landscape in colored silk. Lady Bertram spends her days doing needlework in Mansfield Park,
and Mrs. Jennings makes a rug in Sense and Sensibility. Other artistic hobbies in the home included cutting
paper, making designs with shells, and painting with watercolors. These skills fell into the sphere of women's
activities; each of them could be undertaken in one's own home or in the homes of others. And certainly one
of the goals of perfecting these accomplishments, like the goal of conversational decorum, was to draw the
admiration of a suitable young man.

Austen's early anti-heroine, Lady Susan, sends an account to her confidante that satirizes prevailing ideas
about women's accomplishments. After writing about her daughter Frederica's education, she remarks that she
herself lacks the usual feminine skills.

Not that I am an advocate for the prevailing fashion of acquiring a perfect knowledge in all
the Languages Arts & Sciences; it is throwing time away; to be Mistress of French, Italian,
German, Music, Singing, Drawing &c. will gain a Woman some applause, but will not add
one Lover to her list. Grace & Manner after all are of the greatest importance. I do not mean
therefore that Frederica's acquirements should be more than superficial, & I flatter myself that
she will not remain long enough at school to understand anything thoroughly.19

While ridiculing the conflation of surface talents with the pitched battle to win a socially and economically
appropriate husband, a battle fought feverishly in the novel, Lady Susan's speech nevertheless suggests the
stakes involved in preparing women for society. Compare it with the more sophisticated addition Darcy makes
to the usual list of “music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages” as well as “a certain
something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions” in Pride and
Prejudice. “All this she must possess,” he says, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial,
in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”20

Like Lady Susan, but utterly without her manipulative motives, Catherine Morland's mother in Northanger
Abbey “did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste.” Catherine's
happiest day is when her music-master is dismissed, and she is described as equally mediocre at drawing,
French, and accounts. On the other hand, Catherine's ignorance comes in for some satire when the narrator
suggests that her shame about her lack of accomplishments is misplaced, as ignorance is a virtue in a woman
who wants to attract a man. “To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of
administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid,” the narrator

142
writes. “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she
can.”21 Yet both Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey present, in very different ways, the necessity that a young
woman seek an acceptable husband. An unmarried woman risks poverty and humiliation and, as Elizabeth
Watson points out in The Watsons, “my Father cannot provide for us, & it is very bad to grow old & be poor
& laughed at.”22 This fear pervades Austen's writings.

Austen was also a competent dancer, card player, and dramatic reader, social endeavors that occupied leisure
time in country villages. Country dances and balls featured prominently in Austen's life, as they do in her
novels. Such dance assemblies had been around for several centuries, but they became especially ritualized
events in Austen's time, when dancing was the most popular and most important recreational activity. For a
local country dance, someone who could play the piano and wasn't dancing, often an older married woman,
provided musical accompaniment, and the music consisted of dance tunes that we would now label as baroque
or classical. Several couples (at least three) “stood up” with one another to dance, and they formed separate
lines, with the men and women facing one another. Then they proceeded through a sequence of movements or
figures in which they would advance and retreat, lock arms and swing one another around, or weave their way
through the other couples. Sometimes everyone danced at once, and other times each couple did their set of
figures in turn, following the lead couple, in groups that were called “sets.”

Austen made important narrative use of the time a couple stood and watched the others, as these moments
provided sanctioned time for an unmarried man and woman to be alone and to converse in private in an
acceptable way. These moments also provided useful narrative opportunities for eavesdropping. In Austen's
time, a country dance remained a highly social, even intimate, community gathering.

A ball differed from a country dance in that it was much larger, public, and entailed much stricter rules of
etiquette. A young girl might participate casually in a country dance at the home of friends or relations, but to
attend a ball required that she had officially “come out.” Coming out entailed a formal entry into womanhood
and into matrimonial availability. In Mansfield Park, for example, Mary Crawford asks whether Fanny Price
is out, because this is crucial information among young women looking for husbands.23

An orchestra provided the music at balls and the décor was often elaborate. Invitations went out weeks in
advance and replies were expected almost immediately. A supper room was set up in a space separated from
the dance floor, and a cloakroom was provided for attendees' wraps. At a very public gathering, a master of
ceremonies made sure that decorum was maintained and introduced gentlemen to ladies they did not know.
For example, Mr. King, the actual Master of Ceremonies of the Upper Rooms at Bath during the period the
novel takes place, introduces Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. Introductions are
also stressed at the assembly that opens Austen's unfinished fragment The Watsons, where readers can find
detailed information about such events and the way they worked. Events where dancing took place were
carefully chaperoned and regulated, and the highly codified rules of dancing informed Austen's plots.

A woman could not dance with a man to whom she had not been properly introduced, and it was considered
improper for a woman to dance more than two dances with the same partner unless they were engaged or
married. The hostess or her eldest daughter would begin the dancing with a gentleman of appropriate rank.
Emma is annoyed, for example, when Mrs. Elton's status as a new bride mandates that she be asked to begin
the ball in Emma. Once engaged to dance with a gentleman, a woman could not accept further offers to dance
with others. Dancers took time out for supper, and a standard refreshment was a hot spiked wine punch or
soup called negus, mentioned as the refreshment in The Watsons.24

A highly charged discussion of dancing as a social metaphor occurs in Northanger Abbey, when Henry Tilney
proposes that dancing serves as an analogue for marriage. He offers the theory that an engagement to dance
represents a contract between the parties. “I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage,” Henry says
to Catherine Morland. “Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not

143
chuse to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”
Catherine remonstrates that the two things are very different, in that “People that marry can never part, but
must go and keep house together” whereas “People that dance, only stand opposite each other in a long room
for half an hour.” Henry extends his metaphor in response, arguing that in both dancing and marriage, the man
has the advantage of choosing while the woman can only accept or refuse, that both contracts are exclusive
and involve duty and fidelity, and that the chief difference lies in a turnabout in the obligations. In marriage,
the man must support while the woman please, whereas in dancing, the man is expected to please “while she
furnishes the fan and the lavender water.”25

Those who did not dance often played cards, and card games took place in the evenings after dinner parties as
well. Popular card games in Austen's day consisted of, among others, whist, speculation, loo, casino, and
quadrille. Whist, like bridge, required a set number of players. Loo and speculation were “round” games,
which meant that any number could play. A set of games was called a “rubber.” The Watsons contains some
detailed discussions of card-playing both at the opening ball, where the game of choice is casino, and at a later
social visit, where there is a sharp competition between the games speculation and vingt-un (twenty-one) for
social superiority. Casino is the game of choice for Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility. This game
entailed trying to match your cards until they were all used up. Mrs. Bates in Emma favors quadrille, which
was played by four people using a deck from which the 8s, 9s, and 10s had been removed; it was a variant of
ombre, an older game that was disappearing by Austen's time. Quadrille resembled whist and had a trump
suit. A game of speculation figures in Mansfield Park. This is a round game with a trump suit: Players sought
to get a card higher than the one displayed as trump; and they could sell the card if they chose. The player
with the highest card won. Whist was played by two couples with the partners sitting opposite one another and
is the ancestor of bridge; the partners tried to match each other's suits. Round games seem to have been played
by younger people and entailed a rowdier, less serious demeanor. In Mansfield Park, the speculation players
are portrayed as enjoying themselves more than the older, stodgier whist players, who conducted their game in
silence.

More intimate social gatherings such as visits to neighbors and dinner parties occupied Jane Austen's time as
well. As with dances, there were more elaborate rules of etiquette required by these social rituals than exist
today. For example, visitors to one another's homes left a calling card, a small card bearing the visitor's name.
The use of cards presupposed a servant to answer the door and take the card to the master or mistress or (if
they were “not in”) to place it in the card tray for their later inspection. People often displayed these cards in a
dish in the hallway or on the mantel as signs of their social status, as they provided a way to show off one's
connections in society. And visits needed to be returned in kind in order not to risk impoliteness and social
censure. These visits occurred in the morning. The time category “morning” referred to daylight hours and
could last until dinner.

Later in the day, the social gathering of choice was the dinner party. In addition to serving one's guests food
and drink, these gatherings served as ways to increase one's social acquaintance. Dinner was prepared and
brought to the table by servants, but they were not addressed or spoken about during the meal. After dessert,
the women adjourned to the drawing (or “withdrawing”) room for tea while the men drank port and
sometimes smoked (neither of these activities was acceptable behavior in front of women). Later, the men
joined the women for tea and conversation. In London during the social “season,” dinner guests often
proceeded to a ball or assembly at this point.

Rules of etiquette were stringent and strictly defined by gender. Men were introduced to women and not the
other way around, and a man waited for a woman to acknowledge or speak to him before he approached or
nodded to her. Introductions in general were formal, ritualized, and based on hierarchies. For example,
Elizabeth Bennet is highly distressed in Pride and Prejudice when the obsequious Mr. Collins insists on
introducing himself to his social better, Mr. Darcy. A man also looked after women in various ways: walking
or riding along the street side, taking the backward-facing seat in a carriage, entering a public place first to

144
find a seat for his female companion, removing his hat when women were present, and so on. An unmarried
woman under thirty would not usually be in a man's company without a chaperone, and she did not often walk
alone other than in a park or to church in the morning. Outdoors, a man and woman could converse only while
walking; they would not simply stand in the street to talk, hence the occasional invitation in an Austen novel
to “take a turn” round the gardens or wherever the couple happened to be.

Throughout Austen's private correspondence and often in her novels, there is discussion of visiting the homes
of relations and friends for what appear to modern readers as extended periods of time. Explanations for these
lengthy visits involve the practical details of travel at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the days before the
railroad made long-distance travel more feasible, roads were poor and travel took place by horse-drawn
carriage or coach. So there was little point, and no practicality, to making a visit that lasted only a few days
when the getting there and returning was so arduous and uncomfortable (for example, springs were not
invented until the 1790s, and prior to the ability to suspend the coach, a coach ride was stiff and quite grim).
During these visits, men spent their days hunting and fishing, while the women went for walks, wrote letters,
or went on brief excursions to town; the day's big event was a formal dinner followed by cards or other games.

Mail or stage coaches (so called because they proceeded in stages with fresh horses) took ordinary people
long distances. Private carriages of different sorts—such as barouches and landaus, gigs and curricles—had
greater social status. These would be additional vehicles (on the order of a second or sports car today), as a
family of wealth required a coach-and-four for general transportation. In some cases, as with Mrs. Long and
the Hearst family in Pride and Prejudice, the family owned the coach but hired the horses. Most of Austen's
characters drive in gigs, which were one-horse carriages that could carry two people. In Northanger Abbey,
Catherine Morland favors the curricle, essentially a gig that accommodates two horses so costs more and has
more prestige value, over the chaise and four, a sturdier and more sedate means of transportation. The
coachman for the Bertrams in Mansfield Park worries about the scratches on his carriage as he is in charge of
maintaining the equipage. In general, these vehicles carried the kind of status symbolism that characterizes
today's cars. They are toys and prized possessions as well as the means of transportation.

As Austen's novels amply demonstrate, the point of the social life young women led was to yield an
appropriate marriage partner. Professional employment for women was out of the question. Jane Austen
herself earned money from her writing—enough to increase her comfort and that of her sister and
mother—but still an inadequate amount to offer them any real independence. Fanny Price considers with a
shudder the dire prospects of returning to life in an impoverished port city with a dissolute father and
ill-mannered mother and siblings in Mansfield Park.

The continuation of families and the consolidation and maintenance of real property depended upon the
orderly and socially acceptable marriages of a family's children, and it was especially crucial that daughters
find suitable men to take them off the hands of their fathers and brothers. A woman could not marry without
her parents' permission until 1823, a detail made stark in Pride and Prejudice when it is pointedly
underscored that Lydia and Wickham are in London and have not gone to Gretna Green, just across the border
in Scotland, to marry. (After 1823, girls and boys could marry without consent at the startlingly young ages of
twelve and fourteen, respectively.)

The institution of marriage underwent some change during the course of the eighteenth century, with the 1753
passage of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act the key event. After the Marriage Act took effect in 1754, only a
church wedding legally bound a couple to one another. Prior to 1754, marriage involving a propertied family
consisted of five parts: a written legal contract between the couple's parents, stipulating financial
arrangements; a formal exchange of oral vows, termed “spousals,” usually before witnesses; three public
proclamations of the banns in church to permit claims of pre-contract to be heard; a church wedding; and,
finally, the sexual consummation of the marriage. However, the spousals or oral contract were legally binding
in and of themselves: any sort of exchange before witnesses followed by cohabitation constituted a legally

145
valid marriage. In Scotland, Wales, and parts of the southwest of England, the “handfast” was considered an
adequate sign of marriage, and unscrupulous clergymen conducted a thriving trade in marriages performed
with no questions asked about age or parental consent. The Marriage Act changed that.26

After 1754, the only recourse for eloping couples was flight to Scotland, where the new Marriage Act did not
apply and a new trade in commercial marriage arose. Marriage was by and large indissoluble except by death;
divorce that permitted remarriage was not available within the Church of England, so an unhappy couple
could separate with a financial settlement, but neither of them was free to remarry. But by Scottish law, any
unchaperoned meeting or an elopement that crossed the border constituted a marriage—and was therefore
valid in England. Hence the feverish quality with which the Bennets and Gardiners speculate about whether
Lydia and Wickham are “gone to Scotland” (282 and 290) and their palpable relief when they learn that the
lovers are in London.27

As the frantic search for the eloped Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice illustrates, courtship is a solemn
matter of enormous consequence for all parties, and families often intervened. Once the principals and the
parents of the bride-to-be agreed upon an engagement, serious economic negotiations ensued and produced
detailed, legal marriage settlements. One's place in the larger society depended upon these family connections.
The financial health of the whole family often depended on one good marriage among its children. Elizabeth
Bennet's marriage to the generous and wealthy Fitzwilliam Darcy sets up the whole clan in comfort in Pride
and Prejudice. General Tilney opposes the connection between his son Henry and Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey when he discovers that he was mistaken in thinking Catherine an heiress. In Emma, Mr.
Knightley supports Harriet Smith's connection with the farmer Robert Martin; he recognizes that Emma's
ambitions for Harriet will be frustrated by the fact that Harriet's lack of family prevents her from aspiring
higher in social rank. And, perhaps most poignantly, Charlotte Lucas is willing to settle for Mr. Collins in
preference to a life of dependence in Pride and Prejudice.

Austen's lifetime represents the period when, some historians have argued, it became the norm for people to
marry for love—or at least to expect that they could find appropriate partners for whom they could feel esteem
and affection. This view has been hotly contested by social historians, and probably applies more to the upper
bourgeoisie and the aristocracy than to the poor or even the gentry.28 Nevertheless, Austen's novels are a study
in the development and care of the companionate marriage, and historical evidence supports the idea that
finding a mate with whom one could share conjugal love became a greater priority and subject of discussion
in the eighteenth century than it had been in earlier periods in England.29 A young woman's life could be
influenced in complex and fraught ways by the marital options at her disposal. All of Austen's novels attest to
the rich narrative possibilities represented by the courtship plot.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and throughout the European continent
produced an art and culture that has attracted scholars as well as appreciators of the visual arts, music,
architecture, and literature. In England, Franz Joseph Haydn composed music, J. M. W. Turner and John
Constable painted, and Georgian architecture lent itself to some of the finest domestic buildings in English
history, landscaped with the aesthetic ideas of garden designers such as Humphrey Repton and Lancelot
“Capability” Brown. Classical order still reigned when Austen was born, but was soon challenged by the
Romantic idealism engendered by revolutionary politics and social change. Austen's literary contemporaries
included William Blake and William Wordsworth among poets, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann
Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Maria Edgeworth among novelists, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
among social theorists who also wrote novels, and Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine among
economic and political thinkers. It was a time of cultural richness and diversity, and of artistic ferment.

Notes

1. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

146
 2. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 16-17. Neither Edward Ferrars in Sense
and Sensibility nor Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park are themselves inheritors of estates, but they
both come from established landowning families, and they both achieve clerical livings adequate for
the support of a family. For a broader discussion of land ownership and its social ramifications, see F.
M. L. Thompson, Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1963).
3. Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
4. For a discussion of the complexities of church positions, see Irene Collins, Jane Austen and the
Clergy (London: Hambledon Press, 1993).
5. The terms “common people” and “lower orders” referred to the working poor through most of the
eighteenth century; class terminology came into use during the 1790s.
6. For a detailed account of England's role in the Napoleonic wars, see Asa Briggs, The Age of
Improvement, 1783-1867 (London: Longman, 1959), pp. 129-83.
7. For a discussion, see G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to
Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1944), pp. 463-66.
8. A fine book about the role of gender in the development of modern capitalism is Leonore Davidoff
and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
9. Over 100 religious periodicals began publication between 1790 and 1820, and for many people these
would have been the main reading material in the home. See A. D. Gilbert and T. W. Laqueur,
Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780-1850 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1976).
10. After May 1807 ships could not legally sail with slaves from any port in the British empire. The slave
trade continued illegally, however, and remained divisive and controversial.
11. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. IV, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), pp. 300-01.
12. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. III, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 198. Brian Southam has argued that Mansfield Park takes place in the years 1810-1813,
after the abolition of the slave trade (that is, after it became illegal to transport slaves by ship; slavery
itself continued). Hence, the Bertram silence when Fanny raises the subject. See Brian Southam, “The
Silence of the Bertrams,” Times Literary Supplement (17 February 1995), pp. 13-14.
13. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 230.
14. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988), p. 107. Johnson discusses the passages in Mansfield Park and in Emma.
15. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 32.
16. The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd ed., Vol. II, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), pp. 32-33. This passage is a fine example of Austen's use of free, indirect style to represent the
thoughts of people without quoting them directly.
17. For a comprehensive history of married women and property law, see Susan Staves, Married
Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990).
18. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” published in 1818 as the front matter to the
posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and reprinted in Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion, Vol. V of The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1933), p. 7.
19. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI: Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1954), pp. 253.
20. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 39.

147
 21. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), pp. 14; 110-111.
22. Ibid., p. 317.
23. There are useful discussions of many of these issues in Susan Watkins, Jane Austen: In Style
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1990).
24. For a useful discussion of dancing and other social activities as Jane Austen depicted them, see David
Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure (London: The Hambledon Press, 1999).
25. Op. cit., pp. 76-77.
26. For a discussion of marriage practices, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
27. See the article on “Marriage” in The New Companion to Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1993),
pp. 208-10.
28. The theory of the development of “affective individualism” is connected largely with Lawrence
Stone's influential and controversial book, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800
(New York, Harper & Row, 1977); the phrase is Stone's. See also Edward Shorter, The Making of the
Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian
Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York:
Academic Press, 1978), and John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the
Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). The book that inaugurated the modern study of
family social history is Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New
York: Knopf, 1962).
29. For other discussions, see Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton
to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter
Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia

Epstein: Jane Austen's Works
JUVENILIA

VOLUME THE FIRST, VOLUME THE SECOND, VOLUME THE THIRD

Jane Austen's first literary efforts date from 1787, when she was almost twelve years old, and continue until
1793 or so, when she was nearly eighteen. Two of the juvenile works that bear commentary in their own
right—Love and Freindship [sic] and Sir Charles Grandison—are discussed below. One other, The History of
England, is a minor masterpiece of a sort, compressing centuries of English history into an uproarious
synopsis of monarchs and their foibles. Other early writings, such as Lady Susan and The Watsons, more
properly belong to Austen's minor works and are discussed in that section.

Austen divided her earliest works into three volumes and made fair copies of them. She continued to correct
and revise these volumes until 1809. She never intended to publish them—they were strictly written for
family and private amusement—but she kept them in good order. As Austen's extant letters date only from
1796, these volumes are the earliest surviving Austen writings, and they contain twenty-seven separate items.

In themselves, most of Austen's juvenile writings are slight literary games, fascinating for their window into
her stylistic and thematic development and often quite funny, but certainly not masterpieces. For Austen
students, however, this work reveals Austen's comprehensive knowledge of eighteenth-century prose
traditions, her interest in the nature of women's voices in eighteenth-century narrative, and her sense of how
those traditions and voices might be recast. The most common narrative device she used for this work is that
of presenting a series of letters. The juvenilia mimic and puncture the conventions of the popular sentimental

148
fiction of the decades that preceded them, and rework some of those conventions in what are Austen's earliest
experiments with narrative presence and narrative voice.

Some of the juvenile pieces are brief anecdotes, while others are more extended burlesques. Many are mere
fragments and remain static, and others begin in midstream. There is a tough mind at work here, as Austen
shows little mercy to the targets of her satire. As with her later fiction, she attacks vanity and hypocrisy and
ridicules superficiality and self-importance. The attacks are real, but so is the sense of mischief that softens
them. Austen's subject matter ranges from the decoration of a new carriage to murder, adultery, tea, fainting
fits, letter-writing, shoes and bonnets, and the trappings of domestic civility. She practices deploying various
rhetorical modes and moral stances, and hones her command of language and ironic wit.

LOVE AND FREINDSHIP

Love and Freindship (this was Austen's spelling) is the best known of Austen's juvenile writings, and the
earliest whose transcript bears a date (13 June 1790). She was not yet fifteen when she wrote it, and it is an
extended joke on epistolary form and on sentimental fiction. Already in this early work, Austen demonstrates
a literary sophistication capable of dissecting both the forms of storytelling and the inherent absurdity of
popular sentimental themes. Most comic epistolary intrigues depend upon a continuous revisionism: Each
letter corrects, amends, interprets, or contradicts the perceptions gathered in the letter before it. Love and
Freindship, however, opens with a jab at the conventional apologies that had been synonymous with
epistolary novels, undercutting the immediacy of “writing to the moment” that Samuel Richardson had
claimed for the form, in which the heroine traditionally fends off unwanted suitors with one hand while
writing frantically, and often in the present tense, with the other.

The subject of this hilarious burlesque is “[a] sensibility too tremblingly alive” and the moral is “beware of
fainting fits.… Beware of swoons.”1 The story revolves around exaggerated outbursts of emotion, or rather,
around the collected, objective, retrospective description of such outbursts, as “Sophia shrieked & fainted on
the Ground—I screamed and instantly ran mad—. We remained thus mutually deprived of our Senses some
minutes, & on regaining them were deprived of them again—” (p. 99). The humor derives not so much from
the instantaneous swooning depicted, which would be merely silly in a third-person narrative, as from the
absurdity of a retrospective account of such behavior. The epistolary framework of the story gives it a direct
address that claims an utter lack of self-consciousness: “It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and
myself—We fainted alternately on a Sofa” (p. 86).

Austen parodies her heroines' hothouse sensibilities by overemphasis as well as by a near-maniacal linguistic
skewering of the conventional gestures of sentimentalism in the eighteenth-century novel. Laura's and
Sophia's fainting fits also serve as an ironic commentary on the decorative role of women. These heroines
manipulate and exaggerate the outward appearance of frailty in order to gain power over others. The heroines'
helplessness is a façade, much like the epistolary form in which it is couched. As fainting suggests female
frailty and invalidism, so the letter promises an authentic intimacy and confidentiality that it does not deliver.

SIR CHARLES GRANDISON

Sir Charles Grandison or The Happy Man, billed as “A comedy in Five Acts,” is a slight dramatic work and
the only play of any length that Jane Austen wrote. It is based on Samuel Richardson's seven-volume novel,
The History of Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1753 and 1754. The manuscript remained in the family of
Austen's oldest brother, James, and was commonly thought to have been the work of James's oldest daughter,
Anna Austen Lefroy, but it is in Jane Austen's hand. The manuscript's existence was not widely known
outside the Austen family until it emerged in 1977, stunningly, as a “new” work by Jane Austen. Critical
consensus now makes it part of the Austen canon, and Brian Southam published a scholarly edition in 1980,
with a Foreword by Lord David Cecil.2

149
Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is not as well known as his earlier novels, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa
(1748), and remains virtually unread. But it was the favorite Richardson novel of the Austen family. Southam
refers to the book's “chilling reputation for long-windedness and tedium, and its unstomachably perfect hero.”
Grandison represents exemplary goodness as a Christian virtue, and is “a paragon of gentle gentlemanliness,
of English virtues and Christian benevolence, Chaucer's ‘verray parfit gentil knight’ translated into the
mid-Augustan chivalry of domestic honour, social cultivation, and the errantry of good works.”3 Given the
perfection of his hero, it is no wonder that the Austen family found Richardson's novel ripe for burlesque
treatment in a family theatrical performance.

Austen's Sir Charles Grandison belongs with her earlier, slight juvenile work; it is, essentially, an extended
joke. There are amusing moments for an Austen reader. Sir Hargrave Pollexfen announces, “I wish women
were not quite so delicate, with all their faints and fits!” (p. 42). Charlotte Grandison, Sir Charles's willful
sister, presents the satirical view to the heroine, “There is something monstrous frightful, to be sure, my dear
Harriet, in marrying a man that one likes” (p. 55). On the whole, however, Austen's Sir Charles Grandison
cannot compete for stylistic mastery or ironic meaning with the more accomplished of her early work such as
Love and Freindship [sic].

THE SIX MAJOR NOVELS

NORTHANGER ABBEY

The plot of Northanger Abbey uses a device standard to many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels: A
young woman is either bereft of parental, and especially maternal, guidance, or she finds herself in a situation
where this guidance is unavailable to her, or she is given parental figures who are unable or unwilling to
provide guidance. Thus the heroine is left on her own to form judgments, make decisions, and forge her way
in the world. Catherine Morland's childhood is unexceptional, and her key characteristic is an addiction to
reading gothic romances, especially those of Ann Radcliffe.4 At first glance, she does not appear to embody
the usual trappings of a heroine, as the novel's first sentence points out: “No one who had ever seen Catherine
Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.”5

Catherine visits Bath under the chaperonage of the Allens, kind but rather ineffectual people, so she is
separated from her family and set more or less on her own. In Bath, Catherine forms a friendship with the
vapid Isabella Thorpe, and she meets the Tilney siblings, Henry and Eleanor, when Henry arranges to be
introduced to her and asks her to dance. She forms an attachment to Henry without fully understanding her
own mind. In contrast to the manipulative and self-interested Thorpes, the Tilneys represent good breeding
and good family, as well as landed wealth. John Thorpe, Isabella's brother, is pushy, self-absorbed, and
boorish. The Thorpes incorrectly believe the Morlands to be wealthy, and Isabella sets out to capture
Catherine's brother James. John pursues Catherine, who is too naïve and blind to social nuances and
expectations to realize what he is about. The jealous John Thorpe thwarts Catherine's growing intimacy with
the Tilney family.

The central action of Northanger Abbey concerns Catherine's four-week visit to the house of the title's name,
the home of the Tilneys. There she receives her education, in the form of disenchantment from the illusions
and fantasies she has harbored about Gothic buildings and the secrets they might hold. Each time she wanders
into a corridor or room expecting darkness and cobwebs, she finds light and space. Having talked herself into
and out of various sinister surmises and suspicions, including the notion that General Tilney had mistreated
his wife, Henry finally sets her right with a famous speech.

Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained.
What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live.
Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understaning, your

150
 own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our
education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be
perpetuated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse
is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies,
and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open?

(Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, pp. 197-98)

Catherine retreats from this speech with tears of shame: “The visions of romance were over” (p. 199).

Yet, having been humbled by the absurdity of imagining General Tilney a murderer and Montoni-like villain,
she misses something more plausible but equally sinister. When General Tilney learns that she has no wealth
or portion and believes that she has imposed upon his family, he treats her with real cruelty by abruptly
sending her away to travel seventy miles alone by post, and without understanding her offense. When she
finally learns the truth, it appears that “in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his
wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty” (p. 247).

Catherine returns to Fullerton after an absence of eleven weeks, and the narrator gives us an ironic picture of
this homecoming to an ordinary country village. Her parents and siblings, who join her in the realization that
General Tilney has been inhospitable and dishonorable, greet Catherine warmly. Her heart has been broken
and her illusions shattered because of money. Throughout this novel, Austen offers detailed discussions of
estates and expectations in the form of raw numbers. In Northanger Abbey, more than in Austen's later novels
where economic foundations are equally present, the reader learns the details of exactly how much wealth
each character commands.

But, of course, Northanger Abbey is a comedy of manners and must end happily with the settling of the hero
and heroine into a marital bliss approved by both their families, and such does occur in due course. Henry
breaks faith with his father in a quarrel and follows Catherine home, where he behaves very much like an
Austen hero, making his professions of love without the narrative quoting him directly: “his first purpose was
to explain himself, and before they reached Mr. Allen's grounds he had done it so well, that Catherine did not
think it could ever be repeated too often” (p. 243). Among the earliest of Austen's six major novels in
composition date, Northanger Abbey is also the lightest. A comedy of manners like the other novels,
Northanger Abbey at the same time parodies the popular genre of the Gothic romance with which the
protagonists are so enamored, and whose heroines Henry Tilney refers to as “Julias and Louisa” (p. 107). At
the same time that she makes fun of this sensational, hothouse genre (while extolling the virtues of engrossing
fictional entertainments and giving Ann Radcliffe her due as a skillful and imaginative storyteller), Austen
also portrays her main character as wanting the life of a romance heroine while actually being a thoroughly
ordinary young bourgeois woman with a good heart, very little experience or psychological insight, and a
tendency to occasional lapses of rational judgment. Well-educated, widely read, worldly, and prone to
intelligent raillery, Henry Tilney represents the mentor figure who teaches Catherine how to read situations
and people, how to ascribe motives to others, and how to know her own mind. Henry is a younger and more
casual and forgiving version of Austen's later mentor-hero, Mr. Knightley, in Emma.

Catherine Morland remains bluntly straightforward in saying what she thinks, thinks the best of everyone until
forced to recognize that many people have flaws, and believes what she reads until humiliation makes her
realize that common sense does not always accord with romance fiction. People are not what they seem to be,
and neither are circumstances or even physical environments.

Northanger Abbey establishes Austen's novel-writing artistry by building on, playing off, and ultimately
differentiating itself from the popular strain of women's fiction of the period. Austen takes on a powerful
foremother in Ann Radcliffe, and she uses irony to turn General Tilney into a bourgeois villain and to make

151
his treatment of Catherine underscore the ways in which she represents an ordinary bourgeois woman who
slowly learns to think for herself and trust her own moral instincts. Disenchanted at the end, Catherine is
nevertheless rewarded with the love of a handsome, comfortable, and kind hero who understands her and
loves her for the artless person she is.

Like Don Quixote before her and Emma Bovary after her, Catherine Morland has read too much and believed
too much in her formative reading of romances and fantasies. Unlike them, she forms an adult mind of her
own in the course of the novel. The narrative irony of Northanger Abbey emphasizes these lessons, as
Catherine's views are formed in subtle moments of realization. Irony is nowhere used to greater effect than
when the narrator, largely through the consciousness of Henry Tilney, makes fun of the propensities of Gothic
fiction, as Catherine's “passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney” (p.
141).

Catherine and the Tilneys discuss literature and history in addition to theories of the picturesque in landscape
and attitudes toward drawing and taste. This extended conversation covers many kinds of reading and
intellectual reverie and includes remarks about the play between fact and invention in historical writings.
Catherine has little patience for the “quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the
men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome” (p. 108). Catherine also paints
an interesting picture of the sort of home schooling many children received when she comments that learning
one's letters can be torturous. “You think me foolish to call instruction a torment,” she tells Henry and Eleanor
Tilney, “but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and
then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how
tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you
would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words” (pp. 109-10).

In many ways, Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's novel of education. As reading is a central activity in
Northanger Abbey, the novel serves as a precursor to the more psychological focus on the cognitive
development of Austen's later and more complex protagonist, Emma Woodhouse of Emma, a woman who
begins many books but completes few.6

Because the parody of a popular genre so defines Northanger Abbey, it is especially compelling that this is the
work in which Austen offers up her most powerful defense of the novel as a legitimate genre of social
commentary and literary artistry. Thus Northanger Abbey represents Austen's most self-conscious and
self-reflexive work of fiction. While the Tilneys offer a spirited defense of the pleasures of serious history, in
the end Catherine Morland and the comic novel carry the day.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

During the final editing of Sense and Sensibility in April of 1811, Austen remarked to her sister Cassandra: “I
am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.”7
Written at around the same time as Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility bears some resemblance to
Austen's more overtly satiric effort. Both works contain ironic discussions about the picturesque and the
fashion for landscape appreciation; both involve a world where gossip reigns supreme; both delve in detail
into the economics of family alliances and marriages; both treat social hypocrisy with ironic contempt; and
both concern female protagonists whose romantic idealism causes them difficulties and requires them to suffer
disenchantment before they can gain real happiness. Yet Sense and Sensibility is notably darker than
Northanger Abbey. Austen's first published novel tasks its main characters, both female and male, with severe
disappointments in love.

Austen writes in Sense and Sensibility with a less mature ironic voice, more overt satire, and less sophisticated
narrative interventions than she was to develop in her later novels, but the story she tells is as complex and

152
fraught as any she ever invented. The central characters are the Dashwood women, a mother and her three
daughters. Left with little to live on after Mr. Dashwood dies, they leave Sussex for Devonshire, where they
encounter a dashing visitor to the neighborhood, John Willoughby, and he and the middle daughter, Marianne,
form a flamboyant and ill-disguised liaison that flouts propriety and flourishes on private outings and poetry.
When Elinor's beau Edward Ferrars proves to be engaged to another woman and Willoughby abruptly leaves,
publicly snubs Marianne, and marries an heiress, Elinor and Marianne are devastated, and each responds to
these severe disappointments in accordance with her temperament.

The novel opens with an extended discourse on the financial circumstances of the Dashwoods, and the
economic arrangements of John Willoughby and the Ferrars family come importantly into play as the plot
unfolds. When Willoughby marries Miss Grey, who brings him the vast sum of £50,000, the voluble Mrs.
Jennings reports the gossip: “Fifty thousand pounds! And by all accounts it won't come before it's wanted; for
they say he is all to pieces. No wonder! Dashing about with his curricle and hunters!” (p. 194). And when the
secret engagement between Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele is revealed to Edward's imperious mother, Mrs.
Ferrars disowns him and bestows the family estate on his younger brother, Robert.

Behind the unfolding of the economic and romantic dramas that take center stage in Sense and Sensibility lies
an embedded and centrally important story concerning one of Austen's most unprepossessing and unpromising
heroes, Colonel Brandon, the 35-year old who is described as “silent and grave”8 and who falls under
Marianne's spell almost immediately. Marianne and Willoughby make fun of him, and he remains a kind of
background figure in the novel's first volume. Yet in many ways, Brandon's situation reflects Austen's
extensive reading in eighteenth-century fiction and echoes the dark, mysterious circumstances that shadow the
romantic heroes created by Austen's predecessors. As a young man, Brandon had fallen in love with a
childhood friend named Eliza, who was forced to marry his brother and was mistreated by him in such a way
that they divorced. Eliza fell into sexual dissolution and penury, and she died of consumption, leaving an
illegitimate infant daughter. Colonel Brandon raises the daughter, also named Eliza, and local gossip purports
him to be her natural father. On a chaperoned visit to Bath, the second Eliza is seduced by Willoughby and
becomes pregnant, and Willoughby abandons her shortly before he meets the Dashwoods. Brandon sends her
and her child to the country and fights a duel with Willoughby.

The importance of the Eliza stories lies in the way the events of the novel echo the secret past that haunts
several of the characters. In Sense and Sensibility, none of the key romantic alliances that become permanent
derive from first loves. This is very much a novel about learning from disappointment, disillusionment, and
tragedy, and moving on to find a mature marital love. Elinor is Edward's second attachment, as Marianne is
Brandon's second love.

Sense and Sensibility speaks of settlements and annuities, jointures and income, the cost of keeping servants
and carriages, furniture and plate, and hunting dogs and horses. The characters all come from the landowning
classes, but they are constrained by intricate rules about the way property moves from one generation to the
next. The entrenched system of primogeniture—the inheritance by the first-born son of the entire estate, so
that younger brothers have to make their way in the world through a career in the Church or the
military—makes rivals of siblings. Family values may receive great lip service, but the property system as
Austen depicts it in fact divides rather than unites families, especially siblings, and it treats women most
unfairly.

Therein lies the novel's moral center. To gain comfort and social standing, a woman needs a man of a certain
status. At the same time, to maintain her moral worth, she must resist the goads to pursue and “catch” a
wealthy man. When the Dashwood sisters dispute how much money is necessary to maintain a comfortable
household, it is the sensible Elinor who speaks a central economic truth. To Marianne's question, “What have
wealth and grandeur to do with happiness?” her older sister replies, “Grandeur has but little … but wealth has
much to do with it” (p. 91).

153
While the novel's title appears to suggest that the Dashwood sisters' characters are to be compared and
contrasted, in a world in which marriage leads primarily to material prosperity, as critic Margaret Anne Doody
points out, the nature of a woman's temperament hardly matters.9 In many ways, the men are as much
reflected in these comparative terms as the women. Colonel Brandon becomes sensible and rational after
grievous and tragic disappointments, Edward Ferrars recovers from early impetuosity to become solemn but
happily rational, and Willoughby suffers more lastingly from the fruits of his own indulgence in sensibility
than any of the other characters. At the same time, Elinor and Marianne differ more in their surface behaviors
than in their deepest emotions.

Austen's narrator remains at the side of Elinor, through whose eyes the reader receives and judges the story.
The novel seems chilly to many readers, partly because Elinor, long-suffering and selfless, seems
insufficiently rewarded in the end with Edward Ferrars, who is one of the more melancholy and feckless men
in Austen's repertoire. Elinor thinks for herself and keeps her own counsel. Unlike Austen heroines such as
Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and Emma Woodhouse, Elinor does not require a moral or
romantic education. Until Austen created Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Elinor Dashwood represented her most
mature, intellectual protagonist, a woman who knows what she has to learn and learns what she has to know.

Much of the novel is told in style indirect libre (free indirect style) from Elinor's point of view. That is, Elinor
does not speak directly, but the narrator recounts what goes on in her mind in a nearly conversational way. As
Doody notes, Elinor's careful approach to the world of appearances is crucial because Sense and Sensibility is
a novel about knowing and about epistemology, the philosophy of what is knowable.10Sense and sensibility
are not so much modes of being or distinctions of character and temperament, as many critics have taken them
to be, as they are ways of approaching the world and taking in evidence.

In the world that Austen depicts in Sense and Sensibility, there is little hard evidence. Clues abound—rings
that contain locks of hair, faces that blush or go pale, behaviors that seem to communicate something but then
are followed by actions that communicate the opposite—but it is nearly impossible to know anything for
certain. Characters constantly wonder and conjecture, guess and assume, doubt and become misled. As one
critic has remarked, the novel's language is filled with modal verbs: “might,” “would,” and “should.”11 And
Elinor understands more than the others both the ways in which she can be misled and the stakes involved.
Yet despite this insight, a series of misapprehensions of just these sorts propels the novel's action. Austen's
irony serves to ensure that Sense and Sensibility, whatever its serious moral lessons, remains a comedy of
manners.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

While Northanger Abbey parodies the genre of the female Gothic, and Sense and Sensibility in part satirizes
the novel of sensibility, Pride and Prejudice is harder to categorize. The novel features a number of common
plot devices: an infelicitously married couple who bear their incompatibility for the sake of social propriety
(Mr. and Mrs. Bennet); proud, aristocratic heroes whose first declarations of love to the heroine offend her
because of their arrogant claim that only an inability to overcome their feelings prompts them to seek a wife in
a lower social circle (Fitzwilliam Darcy); heroes who initially accommodate the wishes of indomitably
judgmental elders whose belief in social rules thwarts individual desire (Darcy and Lady Catherine de
Bourgh); society women whose frustrations lead them to treat sarcastically those they resent (the Bingley
sisters); and hedonistic characters who ruin themselves and bring sorrow to others (Lydia Bennet and George
Wickham). But much as Pride and Prejudice emerges from various eighteenth-century novel traditions, it
does not depend upon the literary forms or conventions of the past, but forges a new and ironic comedy of
manners all its own. The verbal sparring between Elizabeth and Darcy perhaps recalls the depiction of
courtship in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, but it is new to prose fiction.

154
The plot of Pride and Prejudice is better known than that of any other Austen novel. The Bennet family has
five daughters, and with no male heir, their family home at Longbourn and its £2,000 a year will go to a
distant cousin, the obsequious Mr. Collins, upon Mr. Bennet's death. Hence the famous opening line—“It is a
truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a
wife”12—might be better phrased, as Isobel Armstrong points out, as “It is a truth universally acknowledged,
that a single woman without possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a husband.”13 This novel tells a
story about the possibility of social mobility at the turn of the nineteenth century. Can class be overcome,
either by moving from the bourgeoisie to the landed gentry as Bingley does, or by forging a contract between
the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as Darcy and Elizabeth arguably do in the end through their marriage?
Most readers have understood Pride and Prejudice to concern only social and personal relations, but the
presence of the army and the allusion in the last pages to “the restoration of peace” (p. 387), a reference to the
1802 Peace of Amiens, would have situated the work clearly for contemporary readers as a story set after the
French Revolution and during the Napoleonic wars. This was a period in which the merchant and professional
classes took up their positions in a challenge to the landed aristocracy, of which Darcy represents one of the
last scions.

Charles Bingley rents Netherfield Park with money earned from trade, and brings his sisters to the
neighborhood of Longbourn to take up residence there and his friend Darcy to visit. The local families,
principally comprising the Bennets and the Lucases, immediately want to be included in this new and high
social circle, and everyone meets at the Meryton assembly. The Bingleys admire the eldest Miss Bennet, Jane,
and invite her to visit. While at Netherfield she falls ill, prompting her younger sister Elizabeth to walk several
miles across muddy fields to tend to her, arriving in the flush of exercise to the ridicule of the Bingley sisters,
who think her unrefined. Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley develop an attachment during this visit, while the
“lively, playful” (p. 12) Elizabeth judges Darcy cold and critical as he begins to find himself admiring her
intelligence and becoming bewitched by her “fine eyes” (p. 27). The key to this courtship lies in the gradual
change from Darcy's original contempt for Elizabeth as a dance partner and her persistent dislike of him to
something that comes about precisely because she so firmly resists him. The attractiveness of an uninterested
woman also plays a role in the later Mansfield Park, in which Henry Crawford pursues Fanny Price more
intently as she makes it increasingly clear that she will not change her mind and accept him.

Two key subplots augment and interrupt the romantic and satiric conquests of the elder Bennet sisters. The
distant cousin upon whom Longbourn is entailed, Mr. Collins, a clergyman, comes to visit because he has
heard it reported that the Bennet daughters are amiable, and his position as inheritor of their home leads him
to feel obliged to court one of them as a recompense for taking his cousins' estate. Finding that Jane's
affections are elsewhere drawn, he settles on Elizabeth. Mr. Collins is one of Austen's finest comic creations,
a delightful caricature who is by turns ridiculous and pathetic, oily and awkward; he represents obeisance to
the older aristocratic classes in the way that he fawns on Lady Catherine de Bourgh. When Elizabeth declines
him, Collins proposes to Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth's closest friend and a woman who sees the practical need
that she marry with clear-eyed sense.

A militia corps encamps at Meryton, and Elizabeth develops an attachment to the charming George Wickham,
an officer who tells her that his boyhood friend Darcy has betrayed him by refusing him a living that he had to
bestow, fueling Elizabeth's already settled dislike of Darcy into real hostility.

Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth is one of the most amazing and brilliantly contrived scenes in Austen's
repertoire and perhaps in all English fiction. Agitated and uncomfortable, he opens his declaration with “In
vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how
ardently I admire and love you” (p. 189). The rest of the discussion follows in free indirect style with Darcy
alluding not only to his emotional attachment but also to his sense that a connection with the inferior Bennets
will degrade his family. Elizabeth's response, equally indirect at first, consists largely of resentful anger. This
unprecedented anti-courtship exchange between an unmarried wealthy man and a comparatively poor

155
unmarried women remains a literary classic, capped by Elizabeth's pronouncement that “I had not known you
a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry” (p.
193).

Darcy leaves with dignity, and he writes to Elizabeth to explain his history. “How differently did every thing
now appear in which he was concerned!” thinks Elizabeth (p. 207). “Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she
think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd,” and she feels shame at herself and
humiliation at her actions: “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (p. 208). Shortly, Lydia Bennet is invited
to Brighton, where the regiment is encamped, “a situation of such double danger as a watering place and a
camp” (p. 237). Lydia's heedless behavior produces a key goad to the plot of Pride and Prejudice when she
runs off with Wickham. Much of the rest of the novel is taken up with laborious efforts to find Lydia and
Wickham, to discharge Wickham's debts, and to arrange their marriage, much of it brought about by Darcy's
good offices. When Elizabeth learns the details, her view of Darcy undergoes a final metamorphosis: “For
herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him. Proud that in a cause of compassion and honour, he had
been able to get the better of himself” (p. 327).

The marriage, however, does not take place until a second unprecedented scene occurs in which Lady
Catherine de Bourgh condescends to visit Elizabeth in order to warn her away from her nephew, calling her “a
young woman of inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to the family” (p. 355) and
famously asking, with reference to the scandal of Lydia and Wickham, “Are the shades of Pemberley to be
thus polluted?” (p. 357). Elizabeth refuses to promise that she will not marry Darcy, asks Lady Catherine to
leave, and assets that she is “resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my
happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me” (p. 358).

On one if its surfaces, Pride and Prejudice might appear to be a Cinderella fairy tale: two deserving but poor
women win the hearts of handsome, rich, and kind men. The Collins and Wickham subplots, however, mar
this surface appearance. Wickham's elopement with Lydia rocks even the somewhat fatuous Bennets in its
production of gossip, scandal, and threat of ruin, even though Darcy's money and influence salvage the
connection. Less obviously, Collins's indiscriminate courting of whoever looks game to be his wife and his
acceptance by a talented and sensible woman raises more profound questions about marital arrangements.
Charlotte's decision to marry Collins represents the most straightforward comment Austen ever made on the
economic constraints that dictate women's ability to choose a husband.

Charlotte bears her lot because marriage to the painfully formal Collins is preferable to the alternative of
dependent spinsterhood. Obsequious Collins may be, and embarrassingly gauche in his slavish obeisance to
Lady Catherine, but he is neither improper nor evil. Charlotte has become accustomed to being the one
sensible person in a silly family, and her marriage will conform to that experience. Mr. Collins saves Charlotte
from the even greater humiliation of poverty and dependence, and for her part, Charlotte sees her marriage for
exactly what it is and no more.

In contrast, George Wickham is a true if light-hearted and charming villain. Importantly, he first appears in
the novel with “all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and a very pleasing address” (p.
72). Like John Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, Wickham has been brought up and educated with many
advantages and has intelligence, good looks, and an easy glibness in conversation. Also like Willoughby,
Wickham's tastes are expensive, he grows dissipated and unable to command his own desires, and he adds
manipulative economic contrivances and near blackmail to these faults. Unlike Willoughby, Wickham never
sees the folly of his ways and repents, nor does he snare a wealthy woman to subsidize his pleasures (although
arguably he gains access to Darcy's wealth through his marriage to a Bennet). The Wickham story takes up
much of the novel and synthesizes its themes of appearance versus reality and the trials of what people say
and think against how they behave.

156
When the characters fail to understand the nature of social interaction—most notably in the Bennet parents'
failure to realize that Lydia cannot be safe in Brighton—misunderstandings ensue. Much of Pride and
Prejudice turns on the nature of gossip, news, and information in a circumscribed society, where judgments
are formed by hearsay and innuendo. What, finally, can be told and what must remain secret? That question
haunts the novel as does a related question concerning whether it is ever possible to know others with justice
and to judge rightly other people's motives (not to mention one's own).

The original title of this novel, First Impressions, alludes to personal characteristics. The changed and final
title, Pride and Prejudice, is more philosophical. A similar change of title occurs in the predecessor novel
when Elinor and Marianne, with its lens trained on two particular women, becomes Sense and Sensibility,
with a focus on more abstract concepts. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen does not simply contrast a proud man
who learns to be humble and a prejudiced woman who learns to ask more questions before she passes
judgment. Rather, she asks the reader to consider to what degree any of us can ever know another fully,
without tainting our knowledge with our preconceptions and our wishful thinking. In this sense, Austen's first
two published novels resemble one another as works about epistemology, the ability to know. Austen portrays
a world where appearances reign and social stature depends on public perception. At the same time, she tells
her readers that true knowledge may not be visible through a social lens.

MANSFIELD PARK

Whereas Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice all had their beginnings in the
1790s when Austen was in her early twenties, Mansfield Park dates from the years immediately preceding its
publication, when Austen was in her late thirties. Austen remarked of Mansfield Park, “Now I will try to write
of something else;—it shall be a complete change of subject—Ordination.”14 This passage also presents
Austen's sense that this novel would be a departure from her earlier marriage plots.

Although ordination indeed forms an aspect of the novel—and Austen had asked her sister to inquire about
some of its details from their ordained brother James Austen—service to the Church and ideas about
Evangelicalism form only a small portion of the concerns of Mansfield Park. Indeed, given that the
stupefyingly inane Mr. Collins was her previous clergyman character, ordination seems an odd choice for a
subject. The story opens with a portrayal of the Ward sisters and their history. Maria Ward married Sir
Thomas Bertram and became Lady Bertram, the mistress of a large estate and the mother of two sons and two
daughters; Miss Ward had to settle for the Reverend Mr. Norris, a friend of Sir Thomas who was given the
Mansfield living (neither member of this couple has a given name and Mr. Norris dies before becoming a real
character in the story); and Frances imprudently married a Lieutenant in the Marines, broke with her sisters,
and began to have “a superfluity of children.”15 Fanny Price, Frances' eldest daughter, arrives as a charity
project at the age of ten amid some concerns on the part of the Bertrams that she can never be an equal to her
cousins and might become a burden.

The diffident Fanny Price comes to Mansfield and is lodged in an attic room and treated as though she
belongs in a rank somewhere between a servant and a poor relation. She is of no importance to the elder
Bertram son, Tom, and is held in contempt by her cousins Maria and Julia. The younger Bertram son,
Edmund, befriends her and becomes a welcome companion. Sir Thomas and Tom leave to tend to unspecified
troubles on their plantations in the West Indies. During their absence, Maria, the older daughter, becomes
engaged to a wealthy neighboring landowner, Mr. Rushworth, “a heavy young man, with not more than
common sense” (p. 38) who has little beyond his wealth and family connections to recommend him. The
Mansfield living was destined for Edmund but the reversion was sold to help pay Tom's gaming debts; upon
Mr. Norris's death it is assumed by the purchaser, Dr. Grant, and Mrs. Grant's half-brother and sister, Henry
and Mary Crawford, come to visit. If Fanny and Edmund are the novel's heroine and hero, Mary Crawford and
her brother Henry are its anti-heroine and anti-hero.

157
The first volume of Mansfield Park contains two of Austen's great set pieces, the visit to Rushworth's
Sotherton estate and the family's plan to put on a play, Lovers' Vows, Elizabeth Inchbald's version of August
Kotzebue's Natural Son. As Northanger Abbey had introduced the subject of the landscape picturesque into
Austen's works, and Pride and Prejudice turns part of its plot on Elizabeth Bennet's visit to Pemberley with
the Gardiners into an occasion for disquisitions on views and houses, so Mansfield Park uses the houses and
grounds of its title location and of Sotherton to depict the domestic spaces, the furnishings, and the gardens of
the landed classes, using these geographical and spatial markers as metaphors for the scope of their class
influence. This was an age of “improvements” and “prospects” and competing theories of landscape
architecture. Several of Austen's novels, most notably Mansfield Park, contain references to the chief garden
designer of the day, Humphrey Repton. The playacting episode focuses on the morality of the particular play
Lovers' Vows and of acting more generally, and sets up the novel's key plot developments in the intricate
erotic dance of jealousy between Edmund and Mary and Fanny, and Maria and Henry and Julia and
Rushworth.

At Sotherton, Mary and Edmund discuss the clergy, the expectations of second sons, and morality and wit. As
they fall into a dispute about the size of the woods, they leave Fanny alone on a bench, and Maria Bertram,
Rushworth, and Henry Crawford join her. When Maria wants to pass through a locked iron gate into the park,
Mr. Rushworth goes off to fetch its key. Henry urges Maria to pass around the edge of the gate to circumvent
its “feeling of restraint and hardship” (p. 99) and, thus challenged, the two leave Fanny alone a second time, to
be joined by Julia, who likewise “scrambled across the fence” (p. 101). Rushworth arrives soon after,
“mortified and displeased” (p. 101) to find the others gone off without waiting for him. Rushworth, too,
leaves, using his key. Fanny goes off to seek Edmund and Mary, and finds them after their own visit to the
park through an unfastened side gate. Eventually, everyone reconvenes, many of them quite out of sorts or out
of breath: “By their own accounts they had all been walking after each other, and the junction which had taken
place at last seemed, to Fanny's observation, to have been … much too late for re-establishing harmony” (p.
104).

The maneuverings and conversations of all these characters at Sotherton mirror the operations of the novel as
a whole. Clusters of characters come together, part, and regroup in an elaborate choreography that reflects one
of Austen's concerns in Mansfield Park, to depict a world in which alliances shift and reform, and where very
high stakes attend the arrangements that remain when the music stops. The Sotherton episode opens in the
confined chapel with serious discussions about family prayers, the role and status of the clergy, and the moral
value of marriage, then moves outdoors to a more expansive round of imprisonment and escape through and
around locked gates and doors, where the game of partnering and triangulating has clear erotic overtones.

Tom Bertram returns from Antigua before his father, who is detained by business, and he introduces to
Mansfield an Oxford friend, John Yates, a younger son of a lord, who is as idle and irresponsible as Tom. The
two young men put forward a theatrical presentation, and they turn Sir Thomas's billiard room into a theater
for the purpose. Edmund at first objects on moral grounds.

I think it would be very wrong. In a general light, private theatricals are open to some
objections, but as we are circumstanced, I must think it would be highly injudicious, and more
than injudicious, to attempt any thing of the kind. It would show great want of feeling on my
father's account; absent as he is, and in some degree of constant danger; and it would be
imprudent, I think, with regard to Maria, whose situation is a very delicate one, considering
every thing, extremely delicate.

(Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, p. 125.)

Maria's flirtations with Henry Crawford have become evident to all, including Rushworth, and Julia Bertram
has set her marital sights on Henry, with the family's approbation, as well. Edmund calls upon the rigidity of

158
Sir Thomas's sense of decorum, especially for his daughters, but he is overruled and eventually, through the
seductions of Mary Crawford, he joins in the acting plans after saying unequivocally at first that he would not
do so. The group scraps over what sort of play to put on—comedy or tragedy—before settling on Lovers'
Vows, a play that turns on the abandonment of a pregnant woman, the recognition of an illegitimate child, and
a woman who avows her love to her tutor, and would have been considered quite risqué in Austen's time.

Edmund asks Maria to give up her idea of acting in the play, finding it unsuitable, but is laughed at for his
prim scruples. In the event, everyone participates, even luring Fanny into a small part. The play serves as a
microcosmic variant on the relationships between these characters, with jealousy flaring as Rushworth slowly
realizes how Henry Crawford and Maria are making a fool of him, and Fanny uneasily watches the growing
attraction between Mary Crawford and Edmund. Fanny herself becomes a more central figure in the
household through this episode. Once Edmund compromises with his conviction that acting is wrong and
decides to be in the play, the novel's moral compass turns.

The household begins to deteriorate as scene painters arrive, Fanny and Julia retreat, and “Every body began
to have their vexation” (p. 164). This episode contains both burlesque elements and aspects of near-tragic
chaos, and hence remains one of Austen's most unsettling extended narrative sequences. The climax occurs
when Edmund and Mary ask Fanny to help them to rehearse a scene that Fanny finds shocking and, to end the
first volume of the novel, Sir Thomas unexpectedly arrives home, announced by Julia throwing open the door
and uttering the news with “a face all aghast” (p. 172).

Sir Thomas finds his house in disarray, disapproves, and in short order burns every copy of Lovers' Vows he
finds. A cynicism pervades Mansfield Park. The novel focuses on two sets of threesomes: Edmund and Mary
and Fanny on the one hand, and Henry and Maria and Fanny on the other. They work in opposition to one
another. The decent and judicious Edmund is nearly seduced into a calculated and too worldly love by Mary,
who disapproves of his professional plans, until he finds redemption in Fanny's devotion and propriety. And
Henry is nearly redeemed by his love for Fanny until he runs off with the married Maria Bertram Rushworth
and condemns her to irrevocable ignominy.

Austen readers tend to hold extreme views about her third published novel. Readers either love it passionately
as their favorite of the six major novels, or they find it to be the weakest of the six. Few hold a middle position
about this complex work. The reason for this polarizing of positions about Mansfield Park rests in its heroine.
Fanny Price begins the novel as a diffident refugee brought to her uncle's mannered estate from her dubious
lower-class home in Portsmouth. The most docile, mousiest, and oddest of Austen's heroines, Fanny moves
more and more to the center of the novel, until at the end she represents the moral anchor of Mansfield itself.

A key source of recent critical debate about Mansfield Park has concerned the Bertram colonial possessions in
the West Indies, where they raise sugar cane and keep slaves. In some ways, this backdrop, alluded to
frequently but only clearly discussed a handful of times in the novel, relates to the theme of ordination, in that
the Evangelical movement in which Edmund would seem to fit opposed slavery and worked for the abolition
of the slave trade during Austen's lifetime, and Austen's own religious and moral sympathies lay in that
direction. Mansfield Park was written during the final years of the Napoleonic wars, a period in which
agriculture in England was relatively depressed, much of the economy depended upon sugar from the West
Indies, and the professional classes were beginning to forge new ideas about public service. The younger son
Edmund in this novel represents hard work and self-discipline in opposition to characters such as Tom
Bertram and John Yates, who represent the lazy self-importance of the dissolute gentry. Edward Said has
argued that the colonial background to Mansfield Park makes the novel a landmark in colonial literature, and
much has been written in response to his argument.16 Certainly, Fanny Price is the only character in the novel
who purports to be interested in her uncle's stories about Antigua.17

159
The colonial debates have focused on Austen's interpretation of the economic underpinnings of life on an
estate such as Mansfield Park. Another approach might be to examine the microcosm of colonialism
represented by the way Fanny is plucked from her impoverished and disadvantaged home in a naval port to be
rescued with education and civility at Mansfield in the safe interior of Northamptonshire. Treated virtually as
a servant and given accommodations unlike those of the rest of the family, Fanny eventually asserts herself,
revolts against expectations by refusing to marry Henry Crawford, and returns to redeem at least two of her
siblings, William and Susan, the latter of whom takes her place at Mansfield. Ironically, William's naval
promotion is a calculated part of Henry Crawford's courtship of Fanny; his situation also makes likely the
success of the younger seagoing Price brothers. Fanny wins her emancipation and eventually marries one of
her colonizers, the benevolent second son Edmund Bertram. The turnabout in Fanny's situation might, after
all, be a clearer way to understand Austen's global and economic politics than an attempt to elevate the brief
discussions of slavery in Antigua to the forefront of the novel. The younger Prices have more energy,
capacity, and ambition than any of the Bertrams; this, too, provides clues to Austen's class politics.

EMMA

John Murray offered Austen £450 for the copyright of Emma, but he wanted Mansfield Park and Sense and
Sensibility to be included in the package, and she turned down the offer. Austen wrote a letter in December
1815 in which she expressed anxiety that readers would find Emma less witty than Pride and Prejudice and
less sensible than Mansfield Park. To the Countess of Morley, an early reader of the novel who had sent a
note of praise, Austen wrote on December 31, 1815, that she was encouraged to find “that I have not yet—as
almost every Writer of Fancy does sooner or later—overwritten myself.”18

Emma returns Austen to her preoccupation with epistemology: What can we know and, more important, how
can we make sense of our knowledge? She asks other questions as well: What should we try to know about
others, and when should we mind our own business? All of Austen's major works are comedies of manners,
but Emma is Austen's purest comedy and her most reassuring portrait of manners. There are no tragic
backgrounds with stories like those of Colonel Brandon and the two Elizas, no charming but dangerous
seducers such as Willoughby and Wickham, not even a difficult and unforgiving character such as General
Tilney. Characters have their weaknesses, but none is so glaringly weak and misjudging as Emma Woodhouse
herself, a beautiful and wealthy young woman who dominates the village of Highbury.

Emma contains forays into the problems of class mobility and exegeses on social hypocrisy, as do all of
Austen's works. But in Emma, these passages are comically ironic without having a submerged dark side. The
secret engagement of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax exhibits qualities of deception that verge on the
sinister but never arrive there. The spirit of separation that creates an almost carnivalesque disorder at Box
Hill is ultimately put right, and everyone's happy place is restored.

Emma believes her understanding and psychological insight to be completely reliable. In the course of the
novel, she discovers the opposite to be true, and learns to exert less power over others and to pay more
attention to knowing and controlling herself. In her first disagreement with Mr. Knightley concerning Harriet
Smith and Robert Martin, Knightley expostulates, “Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason
you have. … Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do.”19 The novel abounds with variations on the
word “blunder,” a word that at one point is the answer to a word game in a story filled with riddles, charades,
puzzles, and enigmas. Emma improves in sense as her small humiliations mount, and she is finally rewarded
with knowing who she is and what she wants. Because the novel's village is so circumscribed, and Austen's
focus remains so thoroughly on Emma and stays almost entirely within Emma's perspective on events and
feelings, Emma has the tightest plot line of the major novels.

The opening sentence lays open the whole of the Emma problem, as Austen's opening sentences tend to do:
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to

160
unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twentyone years in the world with very
little to distress or vex her” (p. 5). Emma's problems derive, in fact, from her comfort and her temperament.

The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own
way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which
threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so
unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

(On Emma Woodhouse in Emma, pp. 5-6)

Emma centers on the education of Emma Woodhouse: learning to be humble and to examine her own motives
as she comes to an enlightening self-knowledge.

Pride and Prejudice features a mother who does a poor job of raising her daughters in Mrs. Bennet, and
Mansfield Park features bad mothers indeed, with Lady Bertram's indolent inattention to her children, Mrs.
Price's overlooking her daughters and poor household management that creates chaos around them, and the
childless Mrs. Norris's busybody meddling in the affairs of other people's children. In Emma, the adult
characters have virtually no mothers at all. The characters Emma, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, and Jane
Fairfax each must manage without mothers, and when Miss Taylor leaves, Emma experiences her first real
grief from the loss. Harriet Smith, “the natural daughter of somebody” (p. 22), lives as a boarder in a girls'
school. Jane Fairfax faces the real possibility of having to work as a governess, a position she likens to that of
a slave whose life is not her own to regulate. Churchill himself bears an oblique relation to the woman who
might have mothered him, his vain and tyrannical aunt Mrs. Churchill, and some of his weakness and vanity
might be said to derive from poor or absent mothering.

However, the focus stays fully on Emma Woodhouse throughout this novel. First, she takes up the
unpromising Harriet Smith as a project. She finds Harriet attractive and pleasant to be with and at the same
time unthreatening to Emma's own reign in Highbury. She separates Harriet from Robert Martin, a local
farmer, and decides on a plan of action: “she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad
acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners” (p. 24).
Emma persuades Harriet to aspire to Mr. Elton, the Highbury vicar and “a young man whom any woman not
fastidious might like” (p. 35). Then she encourages Harriet to fantasize about first, Frank Churchill (fantasies
that exist only in Emma's mind) and, by accident, Mr. Knightley himself, the highest-ranking man in the
village, as potential suitors before poor Harriet is finally able to get out of Emma's clutches and reconcile with
Mr. Martin, a man she loves and with whom she can be happy and appropriately settled.

Emma misses the fact that she is the woman Elton, in fact, aspires to, and that he is a conceited man who
thinks Harriet too common for him. Emma endures an embarrassing but wonderfully rendered carriage ride
while Elton makes his unwanted professions to her, and she has to take responsibility for humiliating her
friend. Emma's conversation with Mr. Knightley about class and rank, along with Elton's more self-serving
definitions of these positions, anchor the novel in its social analysis as a book with a very clear sense of who
belongs where. Those who maneuver around their class positions, such as Jane Fairfax, find themselves in a
social limbo that disconcerts everyone around them and makes them vulnerable to embarrassment and
hardship.

The story of the secret engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax provides one of the novel's
central intrigues. Even before she meets Frank, Emma decides that, were she to marry, he might be a suitable
match for her. And even before Jane Fairfax arrives in Highbury, she feels threatened by having a potential
rival for the role of most beautiful and accomplished young woman in Highbury. Unlike Emma, Jane is a
woman educated to be a governess; however, her relative impoverishment does not take away her
independence of experience or spirit. Emma indeed has reason to be jealous, because Jane is her equal except

161
in social and economic rank. Her presence reminds readers that Emma's position in society very much
depends upon her family and her wealth.

From early in the novel, the consummate matchmaker Emma declares that she herself will never marry. “I
cannot really change for the better,” Emma tells Harriet. “If I were to marry, I must expect to repent it.” “I
have none of the usual inducements of women to marry,” she goes on. “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; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so
always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's” (p. 84). Mr. Woodhouse, a
cantankerous invalid, indeed proves a small obstacle to Emma's marriage to Knightley, and will have to be
accommodated with unorthodox measures, requiring that her husband come live with her rather than the
reverse. When Harriet worries that Emma will have the dreadful fate of being an old maid if she persists in her
decision not to marry, Emma makes an odd speech about independence and economics in relation to marital
alliances:

“Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes
celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income,
must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! The proper sport of boys and girls; but a single
woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as
anybody else.”

(p. 85)

As it happens, these remarks describe one version of Miss Bates, and suggest the cloud that hangs over both
Jane Fairfax, who speaks of the governess trade as akin to the slave trade, and Harriet Smith. The trajectory of
the novel works away from Emma's rather thoughtless if sociologically astute musings, until she comes to find
herself alone and discontent and self-reproachful at the moment when she learns to understand herself at last.

The set piece and climax of Emma comes in the Box Hill episode, which takes place on midsummer's day and
bears some phantasmagoric relation to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. As critic Terry Castle
points out, Austen captures in this scene the quality of cranky, overheated discontent that a failed group outing
can have, and it causes Emma to be struck with a stab of malice delivered toward the comic-pathetic character
of Miss Bates, a poor spinster who is always good-natured despite her rather depressed situation.20 The outing
begins well, then rapidly deteriorates:

Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there. Seven miles were traveled in
expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving; but in
the general amount of the day there was deficiency. There was a languor, a want of spirits, a
want of union, which could not be got over. They separated too much into parties … during
the whole two hours that were spent on the hill, there seemed a principle of separation … too
strong for any fine prospects, or any cold collation, or any cheerful Mr. Weston to remove.

(p. 367)

The wandering disharmony at Box Hill reminds Austen readers of the gate-evading misconnections and
annoyances that plague the party at Sotherton in Mansfield Park. Some of the same principles of
misunderstanding and self-delusion operate at Box Hill, though without the adulterous undercurrent of sexual
immorality that buzzes around Sotherton. Frank works to amuse Emma, and she becomes “gay and
thoughtless” (p. 368), producing the most trivial yet also the most heinous of Emma's social misjudgments
when she openly insults Miss Bates by making fun of her tendency to talk incessantly about nothing. Even
Miss Bates, slow on the uptake and nearly incapable of anger, realizes that she has been insulted.

162
As he hands her into the carriage to leave Box Hill, Knightley, who is “one of the few people who could see
faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them” (p. 11), upbraids her for using
insolent wit “to a woman of her character, age, and situation” (p. 374). Emma blushes and tries to shrug off
the reprimand, which comes not because Miss Bates is not as ridiculous as Emma sees her to be, but because
her poverty and discomfort require compassion. Her mortification at the rightness of his reproach causes her
to act sullen, and the day ends with Emma “vexed beyond what could have been expressed—almost beyond
what she could conceal. Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life” (p.
376). Extraordinarily, Emma weeps “almost all the way home,” tears that Castle argues may be the first real
tears, and the most realistic, in all of English literature.21

Emma visits Miss Bates, makes amends, and is forgiven, but the episode remains odd. In a story in which
Emma's deluded errors cause real mischief to the material lives of others, it is a brief, thoughtless remark to an
older woman who is a relative nonentity in Highbury society that reveals the crux of Emma's self-destructive
lack of insight and self-knowledge. In minding the manners of everyone around her, she has failed to mind her
own.

Some critics have proposed that Emma bears a resemblance to the detective novel, as Emma tries to solve
various mysteries, notably concerning the shady character presentations of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax.
If so, Emma Woodhouse may be the literary world's most inept detective, missing every clue and hint until
she is thunderstruck with the realization that she loves Mr. Knightley: “It darted through her, with the speed of
an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” (p. 408). After Knightley's profession of love
and Emma's famous and maddening non-reply—“What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady
always does” (p. 431)—the narrator provides a commentary on their zigzagging non-courtship that could
stand for the novel as a whole: “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure;
seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken” (p. 431). In the comic world
of Highbury, relative truth rises to the surface and wins the day, but not before it is ringed about with the
enticing possibilities of self-deception.

PERSUASION

Jane Austen spent almost a year composing Persuasion, from August 1815 to August 1816. There are two
versions of the ending, and the two final chapters of Persuasion represent the only surviving manuscript
portions of any of Austen's major novels. In the last months of her life before illness forced her to stop
writing, Austen worked on Sanditon, a work that, even in its unfinished state, suggests a return to high satire
and the precise delineation of social and personal absurdities. But Persuasion was a bit of a departure from
her usual affectionate assault on sentimentality and romance.

Persuasion continues a narrative tactic that also characterized Emma: There is a rhythm that moves from ease
to tension, then to reversal and renewed ease. Both novels have theatrical qualities in their plot trajectories, as
circumstances build to a suspenseful turn, coalesce and explode, calm again, then crystallize into significance.
This rhythm derives from the central plot scenario. When she was nineteen, Anne Elliot fell in love with
Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer, and accepted his proposal of marriage. Anne's father, the proud and
snobbish Sir Walter Elliot for whose character “vanity was the beginning and the end,”22 opposed their
alliance, as did Lady Russell, a family neighbor and friend who became a mother-figure to Anne when Lady
Elliot died. Neither Sir Walter nor Lady Russell could brook an alliance with a man who had no fortune and
not much of a family name, and Lady Russell persuaded Anne to give up an imprudent engagement and
separate from Wentworth. At the same time, Anne is little valued by her family. Although she possesses “an
elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real
understanding, [Anne] was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was
always to give way;—she was only Anne” (p. 5).

163
The title of Persuasion returns Austen to the abstract conceptual titling of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and
Prejudice. Anne “had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of
character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure,” Wentworth believes, and
he remains resentful. “She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had
been weakness and timidity” (p. 61).

When the novel opens, nearly eight years have passed since the lovers' parting; the Elliot finances have
seriously dwindled; and Sir Walter is forced to let Kellynch Hall to Admiral and Mrs. Croft. This arrangement
brings Wentworth, now a Captain in the Navy who has distinguished himself in the service, advanced in rank,
and “made a handsome fortune” (p. 30), back into Anne's purview, as Mrs. Croft is his sister. Wentworth has
not married; and Anne, who “had been forced into prudence in her youth, … learned romance as she grew
older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning” (p. 30). Anne Elliot is twenty-seven years old when the
novel opens, by far the most mature of Austen's heroines. She is the only Austen heroine who has a past.

Persuasion is a more physical novel than Austen had previously written. Two accidents form climactic
moments: young Charles Musgrove's fall in which he breaks his collar bone and injures his back, and Louisa
Musgrove's near-fatal fall on the Cobb in Lyme Regis. Both accidents test Anne's resilience and coolness in a
crisis. Captain Harville's lameness dates from a war injury, and Richard Musgrove died of a fever in the West
Indies. Multiple deaths precede the novel's action as well, most notably those of Lady Elliot and of Mrs.
Elliot. Mr. Elliot wears a black band around his hat and the Elliot women wear black ribbons. Mrs. Smith's
illness defines her decline and makes her helpless and older than her years. Anne Elliot herself begins the
novel with the note that “her bloom had vanished early” and she has become “faded and thin” (p. 6);
Wentworth remarks to Anne's sister Mary Musgrove that Anne is “so altered he should not have known” her
again (p. 60). Critic John Wiltshire has argued that the human body is at its most vulnerable in Persuasion.23
From this perspective, Persuasion may have paved the way for Austen's focus on invalidism in her final
fictional effort, Sanditon, a fragment in which she otherwise seems to move in new directions.

Human emotions are more vulnerable in Persuasion as well. As Anne has to come to terms with having been
influenced in an intensely private decision and repented of that decision, so Wentworth has to overcome his
bitterness in order to find his way back to Anne and to forgive her. Austen carries out the details of these
emotional developments with some of her most powerful and effectively staged scenes. Most notable is her
use of eavesdropping, an activity often engaged in by Austen characters, but nowhere more intensely than in
Persuasion.

On a walk early in the story, Anne finds herself behind a hedgerow from which vantage point she overhears a
conversation between Louisa Musgrove and Wentworth. The conversation snippet begins in medias res and
its context makes no difference. Anne hears Louisa tell Wentworth, “What!—would I be turned back from
doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a
person?—or, of any person, I may say. No,—I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made
up my mind, I have made it” (p. 87). Wentworth responds, “It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a
character, that no influence over it can be depended on.—You are never sure of a good impression being
durable. Every body may sway it; let those who would be happy be firm” (p. 88). The second notable
eavesdropping scene decides the conclusion of the novel. Wentworth overhears a conversation about
constancy in men and women.

Emma moved Austen in the direction of a tighter plot structure; Persuasion is Austen's shortest and most
tightly plotted novel. There is the usual allotment of misunderstandings; however, all the plot elements serve
the tension—erotic and narrative—that builds when Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth meet so many
years after their failed engagement.

164
Persuasion has one of the clearest temporal structures of any of Austen's novels. Characters frequently allude
to the precise dates of events, and the years that have intervened between the broken engagement and the
current narrative loom large. For Sir Walter, the past represents the family tradition and status that he wishes
to uphold; for his daughter, who looks toward the future, the past represents the mistake of her life and its
turning point. Like Elinor Dashwood, Anne must struggle for self-control, and she must balance self-respect
with emotional repression as she confronts a renewal of acquaintance with Wentworth.

Most of Austen's novels offer little prehistory before the narrative begins. In Persuasion, foreshadowing and
decisive pasts abound: Sir Walter Elliot has lost his wife and become estranged from his male heir, Mr. Elliot.
Mr. Elliot has failed to marry Elizabeth, Anne's older sister, and then married a woman who has died. Charles
Musgrove proposed first to Anne before he married her younger sister, Mary. At school, Anne Elliot became
friends with Miss Hamilton, now Mrs. Smith, who has her own sad history. Frederick Wentworth has a long
and distinguished war history and set of naval friends in Harville and Benwick. And, of course, Anne and
Wentworth became engaged and then Anne succumbed to “persuasion” and broke the engagement.

This dwelling on the past establishes one of the novel's major themes, the changing of the guard from the old,
landed aristocracy typified by Sir Walter Elliot and his obsession with Debrett's Baronetage of England [that
“book of books” (p. 7) to the new professional classes]. The Napoleonic wars that pitted Britain against
France enriched a new group of military and commercial men whose class claims have nothing to do with
inherited estates or birth. The narrator holds up for ridicule Sir Walter and the other representatives of the
aristocracy in the novel, Lady Dalrymple and her daughter Miss Carteret. In contrast, the naval officers who
abound in Persuasion represent education and self-sufficiency. The aristocrats lack manners and hospitality
and fall back on empty formality, while the professional men exemplify inner substance, the value of
friendship, tolerance, an embrace of change, and inner strength.

An early conversation about naval men sets up the class conflict that anchors part of the plot of Persuasion.
“The navy, I think, who have done so much for us, have at least an equal claim with any other set of men, for
all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give,” Anne argues when Admiral Croft presents
himself as a possible tenant for Kellynch Hall. “Sailors work hard enough for their comforts, we must all
allow,” she continues. Sir Walter feels differently, finding the naval profession offensive, “as being the means
of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and
grandfathers never dreamt of” (p. 19). In Sir Walter's world, personal worth is based on birth and heritage. In
the new professional world, worth (part of Wentworth's name) depends upon merit.

Austen's previous heroes had been landowners or clergymen; Wentworth deviates from that background in
important ways. As a consequence, the ending of the novel contains some ambiguities. Whereas Austen's
earlier heroines move into a world they know when they marry, Anne Elliot looks forward to a life of
adventure, movement, and change. Admiral and Mrs. Croft represent not only the happiest married couple in
all of Austen's works, but also the most unconventional couple. Mrs. Crofts challenges gender roles when she
accompanies her husband on board ship, participates in financial negotiations, and intervenes to give the reins
of the family equipage “a better direction.” Self-sufficiency and new forms of status may be available for
women as well as men, the novel suggests.

The long series of wars between France and England that ended in 1814 made naval officers wealthy and
rendered them prominent social figures as well. Napoleon's unexpected escape from Elba renewed hostilities
in Europe and suggested that no peace would ever be reliably lasting. The “dread of a future War” (p. 273)
referred to in the novel's last sentences is quite real. So readers cannot be sure what the future holds for the
Wentworths, other than a happy acceptance of change and social progress.

MINOR AND INCOMPLETE WORKS

165
LADY SUSAN

Lady Susan did not appear in print during Austen's lifetime. James Edward Austen-Leigh published it for the
first time in the 1871 edition of his Memoir of Jane Austen, and he gave the work its title.

Two eighteenth-century novels may have influenced Lady Susan: Henry Fielding's 1741 parody of Samuel
Richardson's Pamela, a wicked send-up of its inspiration called Shamela, and French novelist Choderlos de
Laclos' 1782 Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). These earlier works use epistolary form with
multiple correspondents, and their competing and crossing letters, like those of Lady Susan, unmask rank
hypocrisy and display outrageous manipulation of the emotions of the characters whom the protagonists
exploit. Lady Susan Vernon, like her notorious predecessor Madame de Merteuil in Les Liaisons dangereuses,
captivates the reader's imagination even as she behaves with repellent amorality to get what she wants.24

The plot of Lady Susan is as outrageously complicated as its heroine. Lady Susan Vernon, thirty-five and a
widow billed as “the most accomplished Coquette in England,” comes to visit her brother-in-law and his wife
in “that insupportable spot, a Country Village”25 in order to escape a mess that she has created by having an
affair with a married man. On arrival, Lady Susan promptly sets about to seduce Mrs. Vernon's brother
Reginald de Courcy, the only son and heir of his venerable family. At the same time, she plots to marry her
daughter Frederica to the oblivious, dim-witted, but wealthy buffoon Sir James Martin. Lady Susan
uncharitably and unfairly describes her daughter as “the greatest simpleton on Earth … who was born to be
the torment of my life” (p. 245), and “a stupid girl, & has nothing to recommend her” (p. 252).

Letters fly chiefly between Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson, her confidante and co-conspirator in London, and
between Mrs. Vernon and her mother, Lady de Courcy, with occasional missives from others and a lot of
quoted and indirect dialogue. The pleasure in Lady Susan derives from its eponymous heroine's “captivating
Deceit” (pp. 248-49). While Lady Susan herself delights in what she calls the “exquisite pleasure in subduing
an insolent spirit, in making a person pre-determined to dislike, acknowledge one's superiority” (p. 254), the
other characters are alternately charmed by her considerable art and artifice and horrified at her duplicity and
their own susceptibility to it. The reader follows suit.

Lady Susan works her art through her linguistic fluency, and she prides herself on being able to persuade
anyone of anything and being able to talk her way out of any difficulty. “If I am vain of anything, it is of my
eloquence,” she writes. “Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration
waits on Beauty” (p. 268). Her technique involves the fine use of words to maneuver through any social
pitfall.

Lady Susan's analysis of her first pass at coercing her daughter into a marriage with Sir James illustrates her
simple philosophy: She aims to maximize her economic and social status and her emotional power over
others, because for her, all personal pleasure derives from status and power.

Upon this whole I commend my own conduct in this affair extremely, & regard it as a very
happy mixture of circumspection & tenderness. Some Mothers would have insisted on their
daughter's accepting so great an offer on the first overture, but I could not answer it to myself
to force Frederica into a marriage from which her heart revolted; & instead of adopting so
harsh a measure, merely propose to make it her own choice by rendering her thoroughly
uncomfortable till she does accept him. But enough of this tiresome girl.

(Lady Susan in Lady Susan, pp. 253-54)

For Lady Susan, social life is a game that involves high stakes and risks, and she is its consummate player. In
complaining about her daughter, she writes, “Artlessness will never do in Love matters, & that girl is born a

166
simpleton who has it either by nature or affectation” (p. 274).

Yet, of course, Lady Susan gets her comeuppance in the end. An expository “Conclusion” to the epistolary
narrative explains that because some of the characters are together and others permanently estranged, the
correspondence has ended (“to the great detriment of the Post office Revenue” [p. 311]). Readers learn that
Frederica is living under the care of her aunt and uncle, and that Lady Susan herself will marry Sir James
Martin. The narrator remarks at the end that it is not possible to know whether Lady Susan was happy with the
choice of Sir James, “for who would take her assurance of it, on either side of the question?” She remains an
anti-heroine and tantalizingly enigmatic.

Critic Terry Castle has pointed out that Lady Susan's double standard infects the reader and that Austen
herself does not entirely condemn her character's subversive talents. Castle writes of Lady Susan's
“incorrigible will to power, her gaiety, her erotic rebelliousness, her triumphant contempt for all the ‘romantic
nonsense’ that keeps other women subservient.”26 She may be evil, but the form that evil takes is quite
compelling.

In Lady Susan, Jane Austen initiated the fictional use of twin psychological concepts, employing the terms
consciousness (in the sense of “self-consciousness”) and embarrassment in what were early instances of these
rather modern concepts.27 So while Lady Susan carries on the parodic digs at hypocrisy that preoccupy
Austen's earlier juvenile writings, this extended and more accomplished short novel moves significantly
toward Austen's mature facility with ironic social satire and psychological judgment.

THE WATSONS

Jane Austen began writing The Watsons in Bath in 1804 (the manuscript bears an 1803 watermark), and she
abandoned it in 1805 following her father's death. Austen never returned to this story despite hints about how
the plot would have unfolded and real narrative promise. The Watsons is the darkest of Austen's fictions, and
when she put it aside, she remained silent, with the exception of some verses and an inquiry concerning the
copyright of Susan, until she began to revise Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility in 1809 or 1810.

If Jane Austen introduced modern psychological concepts into her work with Lady Susan, she constructed a
story around the psychology of anxiety and dread in the unfinished The Watsons. This brief work abounds
with multiple references to awkwardness and anxiety and mentions of consciousness and conscience,
embarrassment, shame, and alienation, all relatively new terms for the period. Emma Watson is a
sophisticated heroine who analyzes her social and emotional situation with acute insight.

The plot of The Watsons is complex. Emma Watson has been living with her aunt and uncle, and she returns
home at age nineteen after her uncle has died and her aunt has remarried an Irishman, thus cutting her out of
the inheritance she and her family had expected for her. After an absence of fourteen years, during which she
has had no contact with her family, Emma finds a sensible but invalid father, two petulant, irritable, and
self-interested sisters who see her as an unwelcome rival for the small number of available men in the
neighborhood, and a boorish brother who has moved to a neighboring town and married a wealthy but vain
wife. An older sister, Elizabeth, worries and meddles but is good-natured and warm-hearted. As with many
novels from the eighteenth century, the Watson mother has died before the novel begins.

The Watsons opens with a local ball, a segment that offers an intriguing historical account of the social
protocols of assemblies. Emma finds herself the center of attention as a new face in the circumscribed social
gathering. She marks herself as kind, amiable, and morally responsible when she rescues a boy of ten whose
haughty dance partner has reneged on her promise to him, thus making herself interesting to the boy's
aristocratic companions. By the end of the fragment we have of this story, Emma has attracted the attentions
of the arrogant and socially inept Lord Osborne, the smooth-talking but vapid social climber Tom Musgrave,

167
and the agreeable, gentlemanly clergyman Mr. Howard.

Meanwhile, Emma's straitened economic situation pains her, and she fights back tears when her cruelly
dismissive brother remarks, “What a blow it must have been upon you!—To find yourself, instead of heiress
of 8 or 9000£, sent back a weight upon your family, without a sixpence.” He goes on mercilessly: “After
keeping you at a distance from your family for such a length of time as must do away all natural affection
among us & breeding you up (I suppose) in a superior stile, you are returned upon their hands without a
sixpence.”28 Toward the end of the fragment, the narrator sums up Emma Watson's predicament quite grimly:

[S]he was become of importance to no one, a burden on those, whose affection she could not
expect, an addition in an House, already overstocked, surrounded by inferior minds with little
chance of domestic comfort, & as little hope of future support.

(pp. 361-62)

A dismal set of circumstances indeed, with people characterized by “Hard-hearted prosperity, low-minded
Conceit, & wrong ûheaded folly” (p. 361).

For all the gloomy prognostications, the existing text of The Watsons hints that Emma, more congenial and
better brought up than her sisters, may find a husband who is both in possession of a comfortable income and
social standing and worthy of her affections. Cassandra Austen reported that Emma would have received and
declined an offer of marriage from the wealthy if slightly creepy aristocrat Lord Osborne, who can speak of
nothing but horses and ladies' fashions in shoes, and she was to have ended up happily engaged to Mr.
Howard, whose love she was to have won despite the efforts of Miss Osborne to secure him for herself.

Yet despite the apparently intended happy ending, The Watsons diverges from the plot of Pride and Prejudice,
with which it shares some superficial plot resemblances: a group of sisters with little fortune to recommend
them as marriage partners; ineffectual parental guidance; obnoxious suitors; and a heroine whose sensibility
permits her to see with great acuity precisely where her social situation places her. In The Watsons, the sisters
without means who are in search of suitors are snappish, cross, jealous, and resentful of one another and the
world. More important, women must compete fiercely with one another for eligible men in the world of The
Watsons, a world of palpable social awkwardness, disappointments in love that cause shame as well as
heartache, and excruciating anxieties about the future.

In addition to the psychological complexity and anxiety exhibited in The Watsons, bursts of inspired prose
enliven this work. As the novel progresses, Austen reveals a developing narrative style and set of writerly
techniques that she was later able to deploy more fully. The fragment opens with an effective method of
speaking for and about a group consciousness with a writing method that might be called the communal
passive voice. Here is the opening sentence:

The first winter assembly in the Town of D. in Surry was to be held on Tuesday October 13th,
& it was generally expected to be a very good one; a long list of Country Families was
confidently run over as sure of attending, & sanguine hopes were entertained that the
Osbornes themselves would be there.

(p. 314)

Far from representing a lack of agency, the passive verbs here and throughout The Watsons present a social
ethos that controls the lives of everyone in this well-defined, hierarchical, rule-bound community, introducing
a theme of social politics that defines all of Austen's mature fiction.

168
Given the unpromising future the Watson sisters face, it would have been interesting to know how Austen
would have resolved their fates. Austen's grasp of economics is forthright in this fragment of a novel,
extending even to the stunning moment when Emma chastises Lord Osborne for not understanding that
“Female Economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one,” at which
“Lord Osborne was silenced” (p. 346).

Snatches of the famous Austenian irony appear in The Watsons. Using a combination of the communal
passive voice and indirect discourse, the narrator paints a satiric picture of the ball atmosphere:

The cold & empty appearance of the Room & the demure air of the small cluster of Females
at one end of it began soon to give way; the inspiriting sound of other Carriages was heard, &
continual accessions of portly Chaperons, & strings of smartly-dressed girls were received,
with now & then a fresh gentleman straggler, who if not enough in Love to station himself
near any fair Creature seemed glad to escape into the Card-room.

(p. 328)

Some turns of phrase reflect Austen at her wicked best. The tongue-tied, dense Lord Osborne can think, for
example, of little to say when he pays a post-ball visit, but “after hard labour of mind, he produced the remark
of it's being a very fine day” (p. 345). And Emma's self-absorbed, conceited sister-in-law “eyed her with much
familiar curiosity & Triumphant Compassion” (p. 349), lording it over her impoverished relative at the same
time that she reveals her own moral inferiority in this brief phrase.

Austen also sets out her trademark character and plot devices in The Watsons. The dilemmas Emma Watson
faces seem trivial—how to avoid being escorted home in Tom Musgrave's curricle, for example—but
represent the typical Austenian method for revealing depth of character in confrontation with social
proprieties. Emma wants to get home as quickly as possible and Tom's offer would facilitate this. Yet she
does not want to invite intimacy with this forward young man. She needs to remain proper and polite, yet
dislikes the pressure to act in a way that displeases her and invites misunderstanding. These are the moments
in Austen's fiction that prove decisive, and Emma's superior strength of will emerges as she negotiates this
social precipice with aplomb, creativity, and decorum, as befits an Austen heroine.

SANDITON

Nothing can be quite so simultaneously depressing and exhilarating for a lover of Jane Austen than to read the
wonderful fragment of a novel she left when she died. In the last months of her life, Austen composed the
beginnings of Sanditon, a work she was obliged to abandon during her final illness. She began to write
Sanditon in January 1817, and the last date on the manuscript is 18 March 1817. She died on 18 July, exactly
four months later, and her health quickly deteriorated during the period in which she composed this last work
of fiction. It seems fitting, then, that Sanditon concerns health and invalidism and paints an especially vivid
picture of hypochondriacs.

This novel fragment is magnificent, and thus underscores the enormous loss to the canon of English literature
represented by Austen's premature death. “There are some great writers who wrote too much,” novelist
Margaret Drabble wrote. “There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like
enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.”29

Sanditon departs from Austen's serious later novels and returns to the sort of burlesque she practiced in
Northanger Abbey, but on a different subject, that of invalidism and fashionable watering places. The idea that
a dying woman depicted hypochondriacal characters with so much energy and real fun and such a skewering
of the state of medical knowledge gives some hints about Austen's own character and courage in the face of

169
her last illness.

Highly satirical and at times hilarious, Sanditon presents some of Austen's most promising comic characters
and situations. Mr. Parker is “an Enthusiast;—on the subject of Sanditon, a complete Enthusiast” and a man
“of a sanguine turn of mind, with more Imagination than Judgement.”30 His wife is “the properest wife in the
World for a Man of strong Understanding, but not of capacity to supply the cooler reflection which her own
Husband sometimes needed, & so entirely waiting to be guided on every occasion, that whether he were
risking his Fortune or spraining an Ancle, she remained equally useless” (p. 372). As “Every Neighbourhood
should have a great Lady,” the imperious Lady Denham, seventy years old, “born to Wealth but not to
Education” (p. 375) fills that role exquisitely. When the heroine Charlotte Heywood becomes experienced
with Lady Denham's economic interactions and judgments and her notion that lawyers and clergymen and
military officers are worthless because they produce no heiresses for her nephew to marry, she thinks, “She is
thoroughly mean. I had not expected any thing so bad.” “Thus it is, when Rich people are Sordid,” she
concludes (p. 402).

The three hypochondriacs, Diana, Susan, and Arthur Parker, are drawn with exaggerated raillery and comic
glee. The Parker siblings combine extreme preoccupation with their bodies and bodily functions, with eating
and exercise and air, that they take to extravagances such as bleeding themselves with leeches for ten days
running or pulling three teeth at once. Their vocabulary tends to phrases such as “Spasmodic Bile” (p. 386).
Far from appearing to be as ill as they pretend, Diana officiously organizes the lives even of strangers; Arthur
sits next to a roaring fire to nurse his burly constitution with cocoa and buttered toast; and Susan “had no
Hysterics of consequence” on their journey until they arrived just in sight of Sanditon (p. 407).

The pompous sentimentalist Sir Edward Denham provides equal mirth to the reader and returns us to Austen's
narrative concerns about novel-reading in Northanger Abbey. Sir Edward fancies himself erudite and
sensitive, and he virtually pummels Charlotte with ridiculous quotations from Scott, Campbell, and Burns
until she “began to think him downright silly” (p. 398). Sir Edward's disquisition on novels and literary taste
beautifully sends up the intellectual snobbery of the day while offering a parody of fashionable language. Poor
Charlotte survives this onslaught of words to conclude that their tastes in reading do not coincide and to
discover that Sir Edward has primarily enlarged his vocabulary and denigrated his own style through his
reading, without in any way improving his mental acuity or capacity for critical judgment.

Sanditon begins more actively than other Austen fictions, with a dramatic carriage accident on a country lane.
In the twelve extant chapters, an intriguing scene is set for various plot developments, but not much actually
transpires. It is clear that more raillery at the expense of invalidism and hypochondria would have filled many
pages. In addition, Austen presents a strong grasp of economic conditions in the Parker-Denham effort to
merchandize and turn a profit from Sanditon. The presence of several unmarried and various situated young
men and women—one of them described as a West Indian mulatto—offered rich material for Austen to have
mined had she lived to do so. It is not surprising that several writers have made attempts to complete this
promising narrative material.

ADAPTATIONS

A spate of imitators and completers have finished Jane Austen's unfinished works, published fictional sequels
to the novels, and even published historical murder mysteries with a fantasy Jane Austen playing the plucky
detective.31 The latest entry into what we might call the Austen augmentation market—often these works
pretend to be found manuscripts—is a slim volume purporting to print the expurgated sex scenes from the
Austen oeuvre.32 These works are not part of the Austen canon, but they represent a phenomenon that is very
much tied to the world of Jane Austen and deserves some attention.

170
In addition to the literary additions to Jane Austen's output—with works by writers such as Joan Aiken, Julia
Barrett, and Emma Tennant, entries by Austen kin Anna Austen Lefroy and Joan Austen-Leigh, and a novel
inspired by Austen by Fay Weldon33—the movie industries in England and the United States have found
Austen's novels to be fertile ground for cinematic treatment. Austen movies first appeared in 1940, with a
production of Pride and Prejudice that starred Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. Interestingly, it was Harpo
Marx who presented this idea to Hollywood after seeing a 1935 Australian theatrical production based on
Pride and Prejudice. Marx sent a telegram to producer Irving Thalberg proposing that the role of Elizabeth
Bennet would be perfect for Thalberg's wife, actress Norma Shearer. Shearer postponed the project, and
Thalberg died before MGM made the film. The English writer Aldous Huxley helped with the screenplay, and
the studio advertised the movie with the tag line “Bachelors Beware! Five Gorgeous Beauties are on a
Madcap Manhunt!” The plot is significantly altered by having Lady Catherine de Bourgh, played by Edna
May Oliver, arrange the match between Darcy and Elizabeth.34

A particularly strong set of movie productions of Austen novels appeared in the mid-1990s. Seven movies or
television series came out between 1970 and 1986, and in 1995 and 1996, six additional adaptations of Austen
novels for the screen appeared. These movies of Austen fiction brought with them new mass market editions
of the novels on which they were based. Scholars and literary critics have begun to look at the Austen
filmography as a way to recover how readers have interpreted Austen's meanings for their own times.35

In 1995, British actress Emma Thompson worked with director Ang Lee to produce a relatively faithful
screenplay of Sense and Sensibility. Thompson played Elinor Dashwood, with Kate Winslet as Marianne,
Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars, Greg Wise as Willoughby, and Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon. The movie
enjoyed box office as well as critical success and brought renewed popular attention to Austen's work. Also in
1995, the BBC and writer Nick Dear produced a film of Persuasion, directed by Roger Michell, with Amanda
Root as Anne Elliot, Ciaran Hinds as Captain Wentworth, Corin Redgrave as Sir Walter Elliot, and Sophie
Thompson as Mary Musgrove. The same year, a BBC and Arts and Entertainment production of Pride and
Prejudice written by Andrew Davies and directed by Simon Langton scandalized some Austenites with a
version of Pride and Prejudice in which Colin Firth, playing Darcy, dived into a lake on the Pemberley
property and emerged dripping wet. This sexualized portrait made Firth a screen idol. That production also
starred Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and was shown on television in a mini-series format.

The following year, in 1996, another major movie star, Gwyneth Paltrow, brought attention to Austen with a
movie of Emma. Jeremy Northam played Mr. Knightley and Ewan McGregor played Frank Churchill in this
movie, written and directed by Douglas McGrath. The same year, a television production for the Arts and
Entertainment Network, written by Andrew Davies (who also wrote the televised version of Pride and
Prejudice) and directed by Diarmuid Lawrence, featured Kate Beckinsale as Emma. So suddenly in 1995 and
1996, Austen novels seemed to be everywhere in popular culture.

In 1999, a movie adaptation of Mansfield Park took more liberties with the story than had the earlier films.
Writer and director Patricia Rozema, known for experimental and feminist movie work, created a movie that
brought some of the recent critical work on colonialism to bear on Mansfield Park, the epicenter for global
analyses of Austen. Rozema gave Fanny Price more backbone than she appears to have at the beginning of the
novel. In addition and more controversially, she created a movie in which the slave trade and the presence of
slaves at the Bertram plantations in Antigua figure as a nightmarish backdrop to the action in England.

The renewed and popular appeal of Austen's work in Hollywood cannot be explained simply. The factors that
help us understand the sudden ubiquitous mass cultural presence of Austen in the 1990s might include the fact
that Austen's work, after all, arguably focuses on three best-selling topics: money, sex, and love. In addition,
in a period in which values are splintering and new forms of technological media are proliferating, Austen
provides a glimpse into a simpler world where moral issues were clearer, life options were more
circumscribed, and choices were, in general, fewer.

171
Two recent Austen-related works, updates rather than true adaptations, deserve some mention. In 1995,
alongside the Austen movie mania, Paramount produced a movie titled Clueless, written and directed by Amy
Heckerling, and starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd. The movie is set at a high school in Los Angeles
and offers a comic send-up of angst among wealthy American teenagers with cell phones. Clueless is a funny
coming of age story that works in its own right. At the same time, its plot closely follows that of Austen's
Emma. The protagonist meddles in the affairs of others while failing to understand the nature of her own
feelings. Other parallels abound. The protagonist falls for a man who turns out to be unavailable, as was Frank
Churchill, but here because he is gay, and everyone realizes it but the heroine. The man the protagonist loves
is under her nose all along—he is her stepbrother. And an incident in a mall replaces the attack by gypsies in
the novel. In Clueless, albeit in a late twentieth-century context, Heckerling captures on film Austen's ironic
voice, something most of the movie adaptations of Austen's novels fail to do.

Helen Fielding's novel Bridget Jones' Diary, is less successful than Clueless, both as a work of fiction and as a
movie, but it became wildly popular.36 The movie casts Colin Firth, to date the sexiest Darcy, as Mark Darcy.
Like Clueless, the story is set entirely in the modern day, in fashionable London rather than Los Angeles, and
features a plot closely based on the plot of Pride and Prejudice. Renée Zellweger is the heroine torn between
a handsome cad (Hugh Grant as the Wickham character) who is her boss and the distant and proper Darcy,
about whom the cad has told her what turn out to be lies to cover for his own misdeeds with respect to Darcy.
Both Clueless and Bridget Jones's Diary bring a sharp focus to the ongoing appeal of Austen's irony and
cutting wit. At the same time, these contemporary stories also update and renegotiate the marriage plot for a
post-feminist era.

Notes

1. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp.
78; 102. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
2. Jane Austen's “Sir Charles Grandison,” ed. Brian Southam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980).
References to the text of the play will be given parenthetically.
3. Southam, “Introduction,” ibid., p. 20.
4. Ann Radcliffe was the major practitioner of the female Gothic novel that Isabella Thorpe and
Catherine Morland so dote on. Her two best-known works are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and
The Italian (1797).
5. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 13. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
6. Many Austen characters are judged by what and how much they read and by how they respond to
their reading.
7. Ibid., p. 182.
8. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. I, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 34. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
9. Margaret Anne Doody, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xiii.
10. Ibid., p. xxxiii.
11. Zelda Boyd, “The Language of Supposing: Modal Auxiliaries in Sense and Sensibility,” in Janet
Todd, ed., Jane Austen: New Perspectives (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 142-52.
12. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
13. Isobel Armstrong, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xxiv. Note that this revision, however apt, destroys the comic irony
of the original.
14. Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 202.
Mansfield Park is set in Northamptonshire.

172
15. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. III, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 92-93. Moira
Ferguson offers a postcolonial analysis of Mansfield Park in “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism,
and Gender,” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. Laura Mooneyham White (New York: G. K. Hall
& Co., 1998), pp. 103-120. See also The Postcolonial Jane Austen, ed. You-me Park and Rajeswari
Sunder Rajan (London: Routledge: 2000) for readings of Mansfield Park from a global economic
perspective.
17. Austen does require, to be sure, a plot device for removing Sir Thomas from Mansfield. The lack of
his moral guidance fuels much of the story; the Rushworth engagement would no doubt not have
taken place had he remained at home.
18. Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 309.
19. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. IV, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 64. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
20. Terry Castle, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990).
21. Ibid., p. xx.
22. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 4. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
23. John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health” (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1992).
24. The situation in Lady Susan also forecasts Austen's portrait in Mansfield Park of the complicity
between Mary Crawford and her brother Henry in his amorous intrigues and, ultimately, his pursuit of
Fanny Price.
25. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp.
248; 245-46. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
26. Terry Castle, “Introduction,” to Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and
Sanditon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. xxvii-xxviii.
27. Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defines “consciousness” as the perception
of what passes in one's own mind, citing Locke, and the internal sense of guilt or innocence. Johnson
offers two definitions of “embarrassment”: perplexity and entanglement. Margaret Anne Doody has
written about Frances Burney's modern and new presentation of embarrassment in Evelina, a novel
published in 1778 that Jane Austen knew well, in Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes about these concepts in
women's fiction in Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), which includes a chapter on Mansfield Park.
28. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p.
352. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
29. Margaret Drabble, “Introduction,” Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1974), p. 7.
30. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp.
371; 372. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
31. Helen Barton has written The Jane Austen Quiz Book and Maggie Lane published The Jane Austen
Quiz & Puzzle Book. Stephanie Barron has written five detective novels that feature Jane Austen as
the main character. There are also whole industries of Austen memorabilia, from umbrellas to playing
cards to bumper stickers.
32. Arielle Eckstrut and Dennis Ashton, Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). For a list of pre-1975 adaptations, see Andrew Wright, “Jane
Austen Adapted,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (1975): 421-53.
33. This is only a very partial list of the most prolific of the Austen adapters. Joan Aiken's books include
Emma Watson: The Watsons Completed (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), Eliza's Daughter (New

173
 York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), Jane Fairfax: A Novel to Complement Emma by Jane Austen
(London: Gollancz, 1990), Mansfield Revisited: A Novel (London: Gollancz, 1984), and The Youngest
Miss Ward (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). Julia Barrett's books include Presumption (New
York: M. Evans, 1993), The Third Sister: A Continuation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (New
York: Donald I. Fine, 1996), and Jane Austen's Charlotte: Her Fragment of A Last Novel (New York:
M. Evans and Co., 2000). Emma Tennant has published Emma in Love: Jane Austen's Emma
Continued (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), Pemberley, or, Pride and Prejudice Continued (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1993), and An Unequal Marriage, or, Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

Austen's niece Anna Austen Lefroy (1793-1872) wrote Jane Austen's Sanditon: a Continuation, ed.
Mary Gaither Marshal. (Chicago: Chiron Press, 1983). A great-great-grandniece, Joan Austen-Leigh,
published A Visit to Highbury/Another View of Emma (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) and Later
Days at Highbury (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). Fay Weldon wrote Letters to Alice on First
Reading Jane Austen (New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1984). Weldon also wrote a novel called
Darcy's Utopia (London: Collins, 1990) and a screenplay of Pride and Prejudice that the BBC
produced in 1979.
34. See Rachel M. Brownstein, “Out of the Drawing Room, Onto the Lawn,” in Jane Austen in
Hollywood, second ed., ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 2001): 13-14.
35. For a collection of such essays, see Jane Austen in Hollywood, second ed., ed. Linda Troost and Sayre
Greenfield (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
36. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel (New York: Viking, 1998); the Miramax film
appeared in 2001 and was written by Richard Curtis and directed by Sharon Maguire.

Special Commissioned Essay on Jane Austen, Julia

Epstein: Jane Austen As Studied
Jane Austen's works made a small splash when they were published, fell into relative neglect for a time, were
revived in the later part of the nineteenth century, and have become increasingly popular. The novels enjoyed
fair success during Austen's lifetime, and received relatively positive critical reviews. But the books were
published anonymously, and nothing was known about the novels' author outside her immediate circle.

Following Jane Austen's death, her brother Henry Austen published a “Biographical Notice” in the 1818
posthumous printing of Northanger Abbey with Persuasion. Henry Austen's “Biographical Notice” painted a
portrait of a traditional, devout spinster who existed solely in the bosom of her family. The “Notice” included
some details about profits from the novels, presented Austen as having read extensively in history and
literature (with a special fondness for Samuel Johnson's prose, Samuel Richardson's novels, and William
Cowper's poetry), and extolled her quiet kindness to others, her wit, her “placidity of temper” and lack of
affectation, and her piety (saying that “her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church”).1
Henry Austen also cited the famous passage in which she describes her novelistic technique as “the little bit
(two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour”2;
he dubbed this “a playful defence of herself,”3 but critics then as now have often neglected to see that she was
being ironic and self-deprecating.

Austen's novels were reissued as a set in 1833 in the Bentley Standard Novels series, an inexpensive series of
reprints. The printings diminished in size over time as sales were smaller than the publisher had anticipated.
So Austen's readership remained steady if relatively small through the middle part of the nineteenth century.
Critics during this period treated her work as old-fashioned and out-of-date until another family member's
biography in 1870 changed Austen reception.

174
Austen's novels have attracted two overlapping but disparate types of readers: general readers who tend to be
overwhelmingly middle-class white women and are sometimes referred to as “Janeites,” and literary scholars,
who come in many different stripes, from formalist to Marxist, feminist to new historicist and postcolonial.
The only other major English author of whom this kind of doubled readership—both popular and
academic—can be said to exist side-by-side is William Shakespeare.4 In 1948, R. W. Chapman wrote, “I have
it on good authority that Jane Austen is now the only nineteenth-century prose writer with whom the rising
generation (including aspirants to honours in English Literature) can be assumed familiar.”5

Yet even more than Shakespeare, Austen's dramatic predecessor in the English canon of literary masters,
Austen has inspired a dual approach to reading her works. Austen readers in the general public identify with
her plots and people and think of characters such as Elizabeth Bennet and Captain Wentworth as friends, or at
least as people to identify with and gossip about. Scholars, in contrast, mine the relation of Austen's works to
a range of academic concerns, from their use of an omniscient narrator and an ironic voice to British politics
and the status of women during the regency, social conservatism, feminist literary strategies, and postcolonial
critical theory.

Renewed attention came to the novels with the publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870 by Austen's
nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh. The scholarship of R. W. Chapman and B. C. Southam and the 1932
publication of Austen's letters and the subsequent editions of the juvenile and minor writings caught the
attention of the scholarly community.6 Other writers have responded with varying degrees of admiration and
disdain for Austen's work, from Sir Walter Scott's contrasting of Austen's delicacy to his own “Big Bow-wow
strain” of writing to Charlotte Brontë's notion that “Miss Austen is only shrewd and brilliant” to Henry James'
commentary on readers who turned the author into “their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody's dear Jane.”7 Even
Mark Twain weighed in with this biting remark: “Whenever I take up Pride and Prejudice or Sense and
Sensibility, I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven.”8

Austen's influence as a quintessential representative of British culture is famously apparent in Rudyard

Kipling's 1924 short story, “The Janeites,” in which a company of artillerymen in World War I establishes a
secret Austen society as a way to cope with the atrocities of trench warfare.9 To the uninitiated, Austen is
described this way: “Why, she was a little old maid 'oo'd written 'alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago.
'Twasn't as if there was anythin' to 'em either.… They weren't adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you'd call
even interestin'—all about girls o' seventeen (they begun young then, I tell you), not certain 'oom they'd like to
marry; an' their dances an' card-parties an' picnics, and their young blokes goin' off to London on 'orseback for
'air-cuts an' shaves.” In the end, the main character and last surviving Janeite explains that he continues to
reread the six novels and proclaims “there's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place. Gawd bless 'er,
whoever she was.”10

There are two parts to Austen's continuing popularity. First and foremost, of course, she was a great artist: She
invented a new genre of fiction, and her ironic prose style is often compared to Shakespeare's use of language
for its power and mastery. She is much read in middle and high schools and in university literature courses,
some of which are devoted exclusively to her writings. Scholars have dissected every scrap of evidence from
her writings to produce multiple biographies and editions of her six major novels, her juvenile writings, and
her letters, and collections of critical essays on every imaginable topic and theme in Austen's work.
Conferences are held to discuss Austen's work, and Jane Austen societies and Web sites have appeared in
England and the United States and even in Japan. Contemporary writers have produced sequels, spin-offs, and
parodies of the novels as well as multiple television and movie adaptations, not to mention the puzzles, cards,
clothing, and bumper stickers (“I'd rather be reading Jane Austen”) that have made Jane Austen a virtual
industry. Jane Austen's consummate skill as a storyteller and prose stylist repays all this attention with
continuing new insights into her methods and her meanings.

175
At the same time, there is a second aspect to the popularity of Jane Austen as one of the greatest of all literary
artists in the English language. While scholars and university syllabi ply the Austen trade, there is a parallel
cultural phenomenon that makes Austen's novels books well-loved by people who have no aspirations to or
interest in the academic study of literature. Henry James referred to this phenomenon disparagingly when he
wrote impatiently of “everybody's dear Jane”; Katherine Mansfield, a twentieth-century English novelist,
wrote similarly: “The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he
alone—reading between the lines—has become the secret friend of the author.”11 Readers feel as though they
know Jane Austen, that she is their friend, and there is a rhapsodic quality to some of her fans, for “fans” does
seem to be the apt word. It is interesting to ask why this should be the case.

Austen has also been misread. As we have seen, Austen wrote her fiction against the backdrop of churning
social turmoil at home and political and military turmoil abroad. Yet she also managed not to transgress in any
obvious way the strictures on behavior or the social expectations that genteel women contended with at the
turn of the nineteenth century. With a nod to Kipling's conceit in “The Janeites,” some doctors even
recommended that shell-shocked soldiers in World War I hospitals read Austen for therapy. In this view of
Austen, her novels represent a world of limitation, of clear rules, of domestic life as a sanctuary; thus reading
these books is reassuring, unthreatening, and salutary.

OTHER AUTHORS FREQUENTLY STUDIED WITH JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen wrote in a pivotal moment in literary history. Her dates place her squarely in the Romantic
period, but her poetry receives little attention and her forays into Gothic fiction are satiric, so she fits
uncomfortably in literature classes studying Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. The novels
occasionally surface in discussions of the Romantic period; there are critical debates about her place in
Romanticism, and she is sometimes understood to represent sensible moral prudence as a counter-Romantic.

Austen's importance rests with the genre of the novel. She tends either to serve as the culminating point for
courses on the novel's first major century in England, the eighteenth century, or as the starting point for its
second flowering in the Victorian period. So sometimes she is the goal to which Daniel Defoe, Samuel
Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Frances Burney lead. At other times, she inaugurates a
tradition of epic prose narrative epitomized by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James. In
women's studies classes, she is read alongside lesser-known women novelists such as Jane West, Mary
Manley, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft,
with French women sometimes added to the mix: Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Genlis, and Madame de
Staël. She is also studied with more modern women writers such as Jean Rhys and Barbara Pym.

And, of course, Austen often appears on the reading lists of survey and “Great Books” courses that sample a
range of literary classics. Austen's novels also appear, often as the first assigned reading, in courses on the
English novel that go on to read the Brontës, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Eliot, and
James. No matter where Austen appears on a school or college syllabus, she represents the apex of novelistic
achievement: She invented the detached, all-knowing narrator whose intelligent perspective provides the
story's moral underpinnings.

NINETEENTHHCENTURY VIEWS OF JANE AUSTEN

Early critical writings on Jane Austen's novels make pretty unexciting reading. There were twelve
contemporary reviews published as the novels were issued, and not much of substance before 1870. The novel
itself remained somewhat suspect as a literary form, so novel criticism wasn't of much scholarly interest.

While Austen's novels were fashionable during her lifetime, she was well-regarded but not much read in the
fifty years or so after her death. As Virginia Woolf later put it, Jane Austen is “of all great writers … the most

176
difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”12 The first critic to read Austen with critical seriousness may have
been Richard Whately (1787-1863), Archbishop of Dublin, who wrote an unsigned review of the posthumous
publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in the Quarterly Review of January 1821. Whately was the
first to realize the important literary innovation represented by Austen's focus on ordinary middle-class life,
and to see that writing about ordinariness need not itself be ordinary. He understood that Austen conveyed a
moral world-view and set of values in her novels.

Austen's consummate skill at depicting people as they are is also a source of negative criticism for those who
downplay this talent as “mere” miniature portraiture. An unsigned 1830 essay makes this point well, asserting
that readers undervalue the skill required to present characters who behave “as any body might be expected to
behave under similar circumstances in real life.” This writer goes on to point out that Jane Austen is “too
natural” for some readers, as “the highest triumph of art consists in its concealment; and here the art was so
little perceptible, that they believed there was none. Her works, like well-proportioned rooms, are rendered
less apparently grand and imposing by the very excellence of their adjustment.” And Austen's plots and
characters are probable and commonplace, in this view: “No novelist perhaps ever employed more
unpromising materials, and by none have those materials been more admirably treated.”13

This strain of criticism characterized commentaries for the first hundred years or so after Austen's death. Her
works are seen as judicious, prudent, proper, sensible, and instructive. In short, Austen was a safe writer, one
whose works could be recommended for impressionable young people, quite the opposite of the sensational
kinds of fictions Catherine Morland so loves in Northanger Abbey. Here, for example, is the American poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on her novels: “She has great power of discrimination in delineating
common-place people; and her writings are a capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and
machinery laid bare like a patent clock.”14

In this view, Austen avoided romance at all costs, a point of view that would surprise the current crop of
Austen aficionados. Still, readers (and moviegoers) continue to agree that Austen surpassed all others in
representing human nature in all its foibles and insecurities and ridiculousness. As Thomas Babington
Macauley, historian and politician, wrote in 1843, Austen comes nearest in stature to Shakespeare of all
English writers because she “has given us a multitude of characters, all in a certain sense, common-place, all
such as we meet every day. Yet they are all perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most
eccentric of human beings.”15

George Henry Lewes, a journalist who was the companion of Victorian novelist George Eliot, concurred with
the Shakespeare comparison.

A novel may by the dashing brilliancy of its style create a momentary sensation; by some
well-kept mystery, some rapid incidents, or some subject of horror dragged from the reeking
shambles of civilization, it may hurry the reader onward through its three volumes; but to
produce a pleasant, satisfactory, and lasting impression, it must be true to nature. It will then
live. It will bear reading and re-reading.16

(George Henry Lewes on Jane Austen)

Not everyone was this positive. One of Austen's notable detractors was Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre,
for whom Austen's anti-Romanticism represents a failure of imagination. Brontë responded to G. H. Lewes's
assertion that he would rather have written Pride and Prejudice than any of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley
novels with a letter:

I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book.
And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully

177
 fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a
bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I
should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined
houses.”17

G. H. Lewes remained one of Austen's staunch early champions, despite Charlotte Brontë's protestations. His
1859 article in Blackwood's Magazine, entitled “The Novels of Jane Austen,” praises Austen as “the greatest
artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.”18

In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson recorded a view similar to that of Charlotte Brontë in a journal entry
written in 1861:

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which
seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched
conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was
life so pinched and narrow.19

Again, Lewes was her major defender against charges of prosaic smallness of reach and lack of passion. And
each of these positions had its counterpart. Where Emerson condemns Austen for the meanness of what he
sees as her exclusive focus on marriageability, Richard Simpson justified his praise by arguing that Austen's
irony derived from her acute understanding of the distance between the ideal of romantic love and the social
realities of alliances made under the pressures of economics and family expectations.20

RESPONSE TO THE MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN OF 1870

Prior to 1870, there was little formal commentary on Jane Austen's works other than the reviews that appeared
in periodicals as the novels were published. Even so, Austen was not in danger of complete obscurity, thanks
to the attention paid to her by Sir Walter Scott and other well-known literary personages. In 1870, Austen's
nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published a full-length memoir of his aunt that produced a spike of
critical attention, as the Memoir of Jane Austen was widely reviewed.21 Austen-Leigh, a clergyman, presented
a quite staid portrait of his aunt, presenting her, in the words of one reviewer, as “easily contented, a small
modicum of general approbation satisfied her, and what she coveted most was that of her own family. She was
willing, like the mole, to make her ingenious structures in the dark.”22 Austen-Leigh's genteel portrait of
tranquil, unruffled domesticity, similar to the 1818 portrait presented by her brother Henry Austen, provided
the basis for subsequent biographies. And for the first time, Jane Austen the woman was someone about
whom at least something was known.

Austen-Leigh was concerned about his family; when he first planned to write a biography of his aunt, several
family members had objected to the invasion of her privacy (and, presumably, theirs). In 1865, Austen's last
surviving brother, Frank, died, and the family objections seemed to wane. The Memoir's publication sparked
immediate public interest and renewed critical appreciation. Virginia Woolf cites one of the most striking
assertions that the Memoir makes, quoting Austen-Leigh: “I doubt whether it would be possible to mention
any other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete.”23 Through her nephew, we receive a
vision of Aunt Jane as a woman who seized on the spare moment to put down her sewing and take up her pen
as a private amusement, and who otherwise quietly watched the world go by, paying attention to
conversations and manners along the way, a spinster clergyman's daughter. In many ways, this version of
Austen did not begin to be challenged until after World War II, and recent biographies have made it clear that,
not surprisingly, Austen's life was not quite this uncomplicated.

In a review of Austen-Leigh's biography of his aunt, Richard Simpson presented for the first time the view
that Austen has a distinctive ironic voice and moral philosophy. “She is neat, epigrammatic, and incisive, but

178
always a lady; there is no brandy and cayenne in her farrago,” wrote Richard Simpson. Simpson's long article
dealt with philosophical issues, yet it also ended with this sentence: “Might we not for like reasons borrow
from Miss Austen's biographer the title which the affection of a nephew bestows upon her, and recognize her
officially as ‘dear aunt Jane’?”24

In one of the most important post-1870 appreciations of Austen, Henry James echoed Simpson's epithet. In a
1905 essay called “The Lesson of Balzac,” James commented on the resuscitation of Austen by a publishing
industry that had overlooked her for several decades following her death. Publishers and editors, James wrote,
“have found their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody's dear, Jane.” He went on to write that Austen's art was
“unconscious”; James's Austen has no premeditated artistry.

In 1883, George Routledge published the first inexpensive, popular edition of Austen's novels, with gaudy
covers to attract browsers at bookshops. Then Routledge began to issue illustrated versions of the novels in
the Sixpenny Novels series. In 1884, Lord Brabourne edited a two-volume edition of Austen's Letters and
dedicated the publication to Queen Victoria.25 Brabourne was Austen's great-nephew through his mother,
Fanny Knight, and he inherited letters from Knight and from Cassandra Austen. There were ninety-four letters
in his collection, and their publication followed soon after Fanny Knight's death.

By the late nineteenth century, publishers began to compete for popular editions with well-known illustrators
who could render period costumes, and at the same time more ornate editions aimed at bibliophiles began to
appear, sometimes in limited releases. These editions needed prefaces as well, so some of the important early
critical and scholarly commentaries came in this form, by writers such as Austen Dobson, E. V. Lucas, R.
Brimley Johnson, Joseph Jacobs, and George Saintsbury. Writers such as H. G. Wells, William Dean Howells,
G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, Thornton Wilder, and Willa Cather commented positively about Austen's
contribution to literature and influence on the history of fiction. Mark Twain was an exception to the general
accolades Austen's works received; he set himself as an enemy and admitted to feeling an “animal
repugnance” for her writing. In a letter from 1898, Twain wrote: “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I
want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”26 And Austen began to appear on
university syllabi as well. By 1907, when Henry James rated Austen with Cervantes, Shakespeare, and
Fielding, her literary stature was secure.

Reginald Ferrar wrote several influential essays in the second decade of the twentieth century. Notably, Ferrar
referred to “the Divine Jane” in an article he published on the occasion of the centenary of her death in 1917,
in which he seemed to be addressing Janeites. Ferrar wrote:

When we speak of her as our greatest artist in English fiction we do not mean that she has the
loudest mastery of any particular mood, the most clamant voice, the widest gamut of subjects;
we mean that she stands supreme and alone among English writers in possession of the secret
which so many French ones possess—that is, a most perfect mastery of her weapons, a most
faultless and precise adjustment of means to end. She is, in English fiction, as Milton in
English poetry, the one completely conscious and almost unerring artist.27

Ferrar here comes full circle from Henry James' castigation of Austen's “unconsciousness” in 1883.

MODERN AUSTEN CRITICISM

A landmark in Austen reception occurred when R. W. Chapman published a complete scholarly edition of the
novels in 1923 with Oxford University Press.28 In 1932, Chapman published an edition of Austen's collected
letters, and in 1954 his edition of her Minor Works, including juvenile writings and fragments, appeared.29
The Chapman editions continue to provide the basis for scholarship, as they serve as the definitive texts of the
novels, correcting textual errors and restoring Austen's original volume divisions. At the same time, a

179
complete edition with scholarly apparatus gave Austen's work canonical status in the pantheon of English
literature.

The first serious full-length study of Austen as a great writer is Mary Lascelles' 1939 Jane Austen and Her
Art.30 Lascelles pointed out the subtlety of the way Austen's social criticism emerged through the
consciousness of her characters and examined the art in the apparent simplicity of Austen's prose style and
narrative voice. At this point, Austen began to earn her current unshakeable reputation among scholars and
popular readers alike as one of the greatest writers in the English language. One important commentator was
the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who proposed that Jane Austen was interested in theoretical problems of human
nature and human conduct, and that the consideration of moral dilemmas in her novels amounts to a secular
ethics.31

D. W. Harding's 1940 article, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” represents another
turning point in Austen studies in the twentieth century.32 Harding's thesis remains controversial, and sparked
debate. He proposed that what many critics call Austen's satire is actually her way of resolving a dilemma. On
the one hand, there are distasteful and difficult people in the world, and on the other hand, one has need of
these people for maintaining social decency and respect. Harding views Austen as portraying the “eruption of
fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life.”33 For Harding, Austen was a writer who found a
measured method for expressing her values without risking censure.

Since World War II, the volume and range of Austen criticism has spanned every conceivable approach to
literature. As Lionel Trilling put it, writings about Austen are almost as provocative as her work.34 In fact, it
might be possible to claim that the major strain of Austen criticism from the mid-twentieth century onward
has been “political” in the broadest sense of that term. That is, critics have wanted to pin down Jane Austen's
ideological worldview as either conservative, subversive, or radical. At the same time, much modern criticism
continues to take an aesthetic or formalist approach, reading the novels as works of artistic imagination that
deploy literary language to enshrine universal truths about human nature, and an underlying appreciation of
Austen's artistry founds political readings of her work as well, of course. That the novels are masterpieces of
their form is now an assured and established fact, accepted by critics from every approach and every camp of
literary interpretation. As Austen criticism is second in quantity perhaps only to Shakespeare criticism, no
brief sketch can cover the entire, ever-expanding territory of Austeniana.

Marvin Mudrick, one of the most influential of twentieth-century Austen critics, noted the crucial role of irony
as a defining attitude in his 1952 study, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery.35 The particularities of
Mudrick's readings have been disputed, but not his assertion that irony is central to Austen's art. A decade
later, Frank W. Bradbrook took up the proposal made by the important British critic F. R. Leavis in 1948 that
Jane Austen was heavily indebted to the novelists who came before her, and therefore she provides a fruitful
test case for the nature of originality.36 Bradbrook examined in Austen what T. S. Eliot has called the
relationship of the “individual talent” to literary tradition.37 Following Leavis and R. W. Chapman, Bradbrook
studied Austen's readings in philosophy, journalism, and fiction to understand what had influenced her views
about life and her artistic production. Ian Watt also considered Austen's inheritance of eighteenth-century
novel conventions, and argued that her strength comes from a fusion of the external techniques of Fielding
with the internal psychological understanding of Richardson.38

In 1962, a year after Bradbrook's work appeared, Howard S. Babb published a close study of Austen's
language use.39 Babb analyzed Austen's use of dialogue and the way she balances syntax, and he argued that
her characters' use of language provides the key to their moral worth. Three years later, A. Walton Litz argued
that Austen worked rhetorically and thematically to accommodate the eighteenth-century antitheses she had
inherited, such as those between art and nature and reason and feeling (sense and sensibility).40

180
In The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels, Alistair M. Duckworth proposed that
“Jane Austen maintained an ideal conception of society, even as she represented, ironically and critically, her
experience of morally corrupt and economically debased behavior.” Duckworth reads Mansfield Park as the
centerpiece of Austen's oeuvre in that it presents “the estate as an ordered physical structure” that also
represents other ordered structures in society, such as inherited values, manners, social systems, and codes of
morality. According to Duckworth, whose approach has been placed with that of Marilyn Butler and
pigeonholed as politically conservative, the theme of the estate unifies Austen's major work and articulates
“an authentic commitment to a social morality and a continuous awareness and exposure of attitudes
destructive of social continuity.”41 For Austen, in this view, the individual's ultimate responsibility lies in
improving traditional society.

Marilyn Butler's 1975 book, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas and her 1981 study, Romantics, Rebels, and
Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1860-1830, which contains an important section on
Austen, also follow a conservative point of view in arguing that Austen championed the individual and was
“the gentry's greatest artist” even while engaging in “the controversies of her class and generation.”42 For
Butler, Austen was an anti-Jacobin who supported the established social order against the radical ideas of the
French Revolution and Mary Wollstonecraft's feminism. Butler was among the first scholars to recognize the
political ramifications of Austen's portraits of the domestic sphere of women, and she placed her novels in the
context of the Jacobin debates of the 1790s. Butler saw Austen as a counterrevolutionary who believed that
the individual should submit to the larger social and moral order and who distrusted Romantic notions of the
self.

Later in the 1970s, the conservative view of Austen was challenged by the landmark publication of a book by
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar called The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.43 Gilbert and Gubar inaugurated the notion that while Austen
appeared to hold conservative views, her ironic stance actually disguised a subversive attitude toward the
social world in which she lived and, especially, toward the place and treatment of women in that world. This
view was given substantive and subtle support by Mary Poovey in 1984; Poovey understood Austen to be
offering a critique of the ideologies of marriage and romantic love as regulators of social and sexual life for
women.44 In 1986, Jane Spencer took an intermediate position, placing Austen within a conservative didactic
tradition of reformed heroines, but at the same time recognizing that Austen “wants a better status for women
within [the established] hierarchy.”45

Other important feminist work followed. Critics such as Margaret Kirkham, Nancy Armstrong, Claudia
Johnson, Alison Sulloway, and Deborah Kaplan published important book-length studies of Austen from
varying feminist perspectives.46 Kirkham presented the view that Austen was a conscious feminist whose
“viewpoint on the moral nature and status of women, female education, marriage, authority and the family,
and the representation of women in literature is strikingly similar to that shown by Mary Wollstonecraft in A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”47 Armstrong reads Austen through the lens of historical materialism,
analyzing Austen's depiction of the bourgeois marriage market that prescribes heterosexual monogamy and
endorses a sexual contract that disempowers women. Johnson argued that Austen belongs to “a largely
feminine tradition of political novels” and that it is crucial to consider her sex in understanding her work. In
Johnson's view, Austen uses irony in a political way.

Sulloway reads Austen primarily as a satirist, but one who comes to her satirical voice as an outsider and who
uses it to channel her anger at women's circumscribed roles. Sulloway wrote that Austen was “a provincial
Christian gentlewoman whose contempt for the overt and hidden ethical disjunctions at the heart of all satire
politely but obsessively pierces destructive myths and assumptions about her own sex.”48 Kaplan saw Austen
as part of a women's culture that needs to be evaluated in its historical context and social circumstances.
Although she falls short of being someone we can claim for twenty-first century feminist goals, Austen still
represents for Kaplan a figure who may have spoken for the patriarchal values of her gentry class but who

181
also understood the stakes involved in the domestic ideology that she wrote about.

A recent strain of Austen criticism has controversially examined her emphasis on close relationships between
women.49 The suggestion that there might be something “queer” in this emphasis created an outcry of scandal,
explained by Claudia Johnson as deriving from “the enormity of Austen's status as a cultural institution” and
her “centrality to the canon of British literature.50 In fact, gender as a factor has simply become a given in
recent scholarly and critical work on Austen.51

Feminist scholars have been, with Marxists and other historical materialists and cultural critics, among the
first to read Austen ideologically, but certainly not the only critics or the last ones to do so. In a
comprehensive 1986 study of Austen's work, Tony Tanner examined what he called Austen's “habitual cool
irony” and her “wit, ironic reflectiveness and moral intelligence” to argue that she was better informed about
and more aware of the main historical events through which she lived than she has been given credit for, and
that this awareness comes through in her fiction. “That Jane Austen held many Tory sympathies need hardly
be questioned,” Tanner wrote, “but it does not follow that her work is uncritical of her society in many
profound ways.” Indeed, he concluded, “by the end of her work social systems themselves are called in
question and found increasingly inadequate to satisfy her heroines' needs.”52

New historicists and followers of Michel Foucault's approach to cultural studies have also taken up the banner
of ideology, but have subordinated gender to class and economics in their readings of Austen's novels. The
Marxist scholar Raymond Williams, who insisted that we not idealize rural poverty and country nostalgia, has
influenced some interpretations of this sort. Williams wrote this intriguing passage comparing Austen to the
social thinker William Cobbett, who lived during the same period and in the same part of England:

What [Cobbett] names, riding past on the road, are classes. Jane Austen, from inside the
house, can never see that, for all the intricacy of her social description. All her discrimination
is, understandably, internal and exclusive.53

Cultural historian James Thompson has written that Austen portrays the conflicts between landed property
interests and the new values of commodity exchange.54 Mary Evans published a book with the title Jane
Austen and the State in 1987 and argued that Austen deplored economic individualism and skewered the
world of monetary self-interest that her novels depict.55

A 1999 book about Austen's politics contends that Austen has achieved such a mythic stature because she
represents something fundamental about English patriotism. Jane Austen, Edward Neill writes, is “one of the
great formative and founding influences on how we think about ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’” and has become
“something of a Tribal Totem, a prime exhibit in a version of Our Heritage.”56 This argument quarrels with
Marilyn Butler about Austen's alleged Burkean Toryism. Julian North puts forth a similar perspective:

Austen has become something of a conservative icon in popular culture: a canonical author
whose life and work signify English national heritage and all that implies of the past as an
idyll of village life in a pre-industrial society, of traditional class and gender hierarchies,
sexual propriety, and Christian values.57

The contemporary British novelist Fay Weldon, author of a novel entitled Letters to Alice on First Reading
Jane Austen,58 has also weighed in on Austen as an icon of English patriotism and culture in a discussion of
recent movie adaptations.

When we say ‘Jane Austen’ everyone knows what we're talking about. Austen means class,
literature, virginity and family viewing.… The clip-clop of horses over cobbles suggests the
past, and the past was when jobs were safe, and bouquets flowed, not brickbats.… or one

182
 could say, with a little more charity, but not much: ‘Why we love Jane Austen because she's
Heritage’.59

Fay Weldon on Jane Austen

Janet Sorenson writes in a similar vein:

Interested in the experiences of a gentry located in the lush green Home Counties and offering
only fleeting impressions of spaces beyond fashionable watering holes and country
residences, let alone the country of England, Jane Austen's novels have come to signal to
generations of critics and readers the Englishness of England.60

The focus on the “Englishness” of Austen's world arguably comes from the writer herself. After all, in Emma,
she has the narrator refer to “English verdure, English culture, English comfort.”61

The controversy over the offstage events beyond England in Mansfield Park—the Bertram sugar plantation
holdings in Antigua that take Sir Thomas and Tom Bertram away from the central plot for so many
pages—focuses on the flip side of Austen's Englishness. The historical and Marxist strands of Austen
criticism have put economics on center stage. In particular, critics have raised the question of the effects of
British colonial imperialism on Austen's perspective. Palestinian activist and literary critic Edward Said
famously put forward this analysis in a reading of Mansfield Park, the novel around which the colonial
allegations swirl. (Mansfield Park has taken its place with Shakespeare's The Tempest and Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe as a core text of English colonialism.) According to Said, Austen's moral philosophy cannot
be separated from the economic substrate which shores it up materially: “[R]ight up to the last sentence,” Said
wrote, “Austen affirms and repeats the geographical process of expansion involving trade, production, and
consumption that predates, underlies, and guarantees the morality.”62

This global, postcolonial approach to Austen studies characterizes a major strain of recent Austen criticism
influenced by the work of Said and cultural theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
This criticism claims, as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan phrases it, that “[r]eading Austen postcolonially is not one
critical ‘approach’ among others, uniquely propagated by ‘postcolonial’ critics, but rather, an inescapable
historical imperative in our times.”63 This argument looks at the particular geographical world of European
expansion and commerce and sees Austen's country village worlds as representations of a certain type of
Western power in a world dominated by imperialism. Raymond Williams inaugurated this approach when he
situated Austen with the journalist William Cobbett and the naturalist Gilbert White as residents of Hampshire
and Surrey and proposed that Austen provides us with a “social history of the landed families.”64

It is also plausible to say that Austen portrays only a carefully selected subset of English people, those in the
“middling” classes. Servants and the poor do not find their portraits in Austen's fiction, even though this was
the period in which class distinctions began to blur. Austen's gentry class, from the struggling to the
aristocratic, seems to represent the heart of a broader national experience. “Austen's focus on the domestic
does not make her novels apolitical,” writes critic Barbara K. Seeber, “for it is precisely the private matters
that were the site of the ideological battles of the times.”65

It is difficult to find any consensus in political readings of Austen. If Marilyn Butler sees her as a crusty
antifeminist and staunch conservative who disliked romantic individualism, Alison Sulloway allows her to be
“as insurrectionary as Mary Wollstonecraft” and Mary Poovey and Claudia Johnson try to find a middle
ground between the two in which Austen can be viewed as a careful progressive. It may even be that this
plethora of approaches and views adds to Austen's immense popularity by letting readers choose for
themselves in what vein to read her work.66

183
So the question posed by critics who give pride of place to economics and politics is this: Did Austen
champion the old order of gentry tradition, or did she recognize the social instabilities of the new order and
the precarious place of women during this period of turbulent socioeconomic change? Was she a nationalistic
Church of England Tory, or a progressive egalitarian feminist? One argument that all sides might agree upon
is that for Austen, the personal is never isolated from the social. We become who we are in relationship and
connectedness to others and to a larger social fabric that defines our choices and our options.

Notes

1. R. W. Chapman reprints the “Biographical Notice” in Volume V of The Novels of Jane Austen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 6, 8.
2. Letter 146 to James Edward Austen, 16-17 December 1816. Jane Austen's Letters, New Edition, ed.
Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 323.
3. “Biographical Notice,” p. 8.
4. For general accounts of the history of Austen readership and criticism, see the introduction to Jane
Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) and
Southam's “Janeites and Anti-Janeites,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, A. Walton
Litz, and Brian Southam (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 237-43; Juliet McMaster, “Jane Austen
as a Cultural Phenomenon,” in her Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 3-17; Claudia Johnson, “The Divine Jane Austen: Jane Austen, Janeites,
and the Discipline of Novel Studies,” boundary 2.23 (1996) and reprinted in Janeites: Austen's
Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deirdre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 25-44;
Laura Mooneyham White, “Introduction,” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, (New York: G. K. Hall
& Co., 1998), pp. 1-12; Barbara K. Seeber, “Introduction: ‘Directly opposite notions’: Critical
Disputes,” in General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2000), pp. 3-17.
5. R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 161.
6. Jane Austen, Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, two vols., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1932). Volume the First, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1933), Volume the Second, ed. B. C. Southam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), and
Volume the Third, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).
7. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968),
p.106 (Scott) and p. 126 (C. Brontë); Henry James, “The Lessons of Balzac,” in The House of Fiction:
Essays on the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1957), pp. 61-63. James' essay first
appeared in 1905.
8. Cited in “Introduction,” Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 7. B. C. Southam discusses Twain's antipathy in the “Introduction” to
his Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1987), pp. 74-75. The 1898 letter sentiment is cited in ibid., p. 232.
9. Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites,” in Debits and Credits, ed. Sandra Kemp (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1987), pp. 99-128. Many scholars have noted that Austen novels were often prescribed to World War
I veterans who suffered from shell shock.
10. Ibid., pp. 132; 146.
11. Katherine Mansfield, Novels and Novelists, ed. J. Middleton Murray (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p.
302.
12. Cited by Southam in the “Introduction” to Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam,
Vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 3.
13. Unsigned review by Thomas Henry Lister in the Edinburgh Review (July 1830), in Jane Austen: The
Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 113-114.
14. Extract from Longfellow's journal entry of March 23, 1839. Ibid., p. 117.
15. From an article on Frances Burney in the Edinburgh Review (January 1843). Ibid., p. 122.

184
16. From an unsigned review in Fraser's Magazine (December 1847). Ibid., p. 124.
17. Ibid., p. 126.
18. Cited by John Lauber, Jane Austen (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), p. 123.
19. Cited by B. C. Southam in the “Introduction” to Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C.
Southam, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 28.
20. From an unsigned review of Austen-Leigh's Memoir in North British Review (April 1870). Ibid., pp.
241-265.
21. A Memoir of Jane Austen (1st ed., London, 1870; 2nd ed., enlarged, London, 1871); ed. R. W.
Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). A second expanded edition appeared in 1871,
accompanied by the most important of the unpublished manuscripts: Lady Susan, The Watsons, and
parts of Sanditon as well as the cancelled chapter from Persuasion and some letters.
22. From an unsigned article in St. Paul's Magazine (March 1870); R. W. Chapman supposed that
novelist Anthony Trollope might have been the reviewer, but B. C. Southam disagrees. The Critical
Heritage, op. cit., p. 237.
23. From a 1923 review of the five-volume Oxford edition of Jane Austen's Works, reprinted in The
Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 182.
24. Ibid., p. 265.
25. Edward Brabourne, 1st Lord, Letters of Jane Austen, 2 vols. (London, 1884).
26. B. C. Southam discusses Twain's antipathy in the “Introduction” to his Jane Austen: The Critical
Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987): 74-75. The 1898 letter
sentiment is cited in ibid., p. 232.
27. From “Jane Austen, ob. July 18, 1817,” Quarterly Review (July 1917). Rpt. in Jane Austen: The
Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987): 250.
28. The first edition of R. W. Chapman's The Novels of Jane Austen was published by Oxford University
Press in 1923 in five volumes. Volume I contains Sense and Sensibility, Volume II Pride and
Prejudice, Volume III Mansfield Park, Volume IV Emma, and Volume V Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion. A second edition appeared in 1926 and a third in 1933. The set was subsequently
reprinted in 1940, 1944, 1946, 1949, 1952, 1959, 1965 (with revisions), 1967, 1971, 1973, 1976, and
1982. In 1954, Chapman published Volume VI, Minor Works, which contains the Juvenilia, Lady
Susan, the unfinished novels The Watsons and Sanditon, the Plan of a Novel, Austen's gathering of
opinions of Mansfield Park and Emma, and Austen's extant poetry and prayers.
29. The Works of Jane Austen, Volume VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954).
30. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
31. Gilbert Ryle, “Jane Austen and the Moralists,” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. B. C. Southam
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968): 118.
32. Scrutiny 8 (March 1940): 346-362. Reprinted in Critics on Jane Austen, ed. Judith O'Neill (London:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1970): 42-49.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. Lionel Trilling, “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen,” written as the “Introduction” to the
Riverside edition of Emma (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) and reprinted in Trilling's Beyond
Culture (New York: Viking, 1968).
35. Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1952).
36. F. R. Leavis made his claim in The Great Tradition (London, 1948), 5.
37. Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1961). T. S. Eliot's influential essay is called “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and was published
in a collection of his essays, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen,
1920).
38. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977): 338. For a more recent discussion
of Austen's literary forbears and their influence on her work, see Jo Alyson Parker, The Author's
Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel (Dekalb: Northern

185
 Illinois University Press, 1998). Parker connects Austen's focus on the inheritance plot with her effort
to claim a literary inheritance, and thus literary authority, for herself.
39. Howard S. Babb, Jane Austen's Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1962).
40. A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965).
41. Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Duckworth's book was reissued in 1994 in paper with a
new introduction that illuminatingly reviews the criticism subsequent to its first publication.
Quotations come from the 1994 edition: xv, xxix.
42. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background,
1860-1830 (1981; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982): 99, 98. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen
and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
43. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
44. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
45. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (London: Basil
Blackwell, 1986): 169. Both Spencer and Dale Spender, in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women
Writers Before Jane Austen (London: Pandora Press, 1986), place Austen squarely within a tradition
of women's writing.
46. Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983); Nancy
Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987); Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of
Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen
Among Women (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
47. Kirkham, op.cit., xi.
48. Sulloway, op.cit., xvii.
49. See the chapter on Sense and Sensibility in George E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and
Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) and the
chapter on Emma in Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British
Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
50. The controversy over Austen and lesbianism erupted when a review by Terry Castle of Deirdre Le
Faye's edition of Austen's letters was headlined by editors with the title “Sister-Sister” in the London
Review of Books, 3 August 1995, 3-6. Castle mildly and judiciously raised the issue of a homosocial
and homoerotic dimension in Austen's depictions of female friendship, especially that between sisters
such as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. A great brouhaha ensued, and the
letters, with Castle's response, were published in the next issue, on 24 August 1995. Even Time
magazine reported on what they called this “kerfuffle” (4 September 1995). Claudia L. Johnson offers
a useful discussion of this incident, which really amounted to a scandal, in “The Divine Miss Jane:
Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies,” in Janeites: Austen's Disciples and
Devotees, ed. Deirdre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): 25-44; the quotation
appears on p. 27.
51. A useful collection of feminist essays on Austen's work reflects the legacy of these early feminist
readings: Jane Austen and Discourse of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1995).
52. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1986): 1, 9, 5, 11.
53. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973): 117.
54. James Thompson, Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981). See also Beth Fowkes Tobin, who understands Austen to
respond in her works to her contradictory circumstances by depicting property ownership as a virtue

186
 and commerce as a sign of corruption in “The Moral and Political Economy of Property in Jane
Austen's Emma,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (April 1990): 229-54; Terry Lovell, “Jane Austen and
Gentry Society,” in Literature, Society, and the Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker et al.
(Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1977); and Judith Weissman's chapter on Austen in Half
Savage and Hardy and Free: Women and Rural Radicalism in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
(Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).
55. Mary Evans, Jane Austen and the State (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987).
56. Edward Neill, The Politics of Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1999): ix, 1.
57. Julian North, “Conservative Austen, Radical Austen: Sense and Sensibility from Text to Screen,” in
Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelchan
(London: Routledge, 1999): 38.
58. Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (c. 1984; New York: Taplinger Publishing
Company, 1985). This book concerns the nature of fictional worlds, with Jane Austen serving as a
touchstone for the discussion.
59. Fay Weldon, “Star of Stage and Screen,” Guardian 2, 12 April 1995, 2.
60. Janet Sorenson, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000): 197.
61. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. IV, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933), p. 360.
62. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993): 92-93. Moira Ferguson
offers another postcolonial analysis of Mansfield Park in “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and
Gender,” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. Laura Mooneyham White (New York: G. K. Hall &
Co., 1998): 103-20. White's “Introduction” to this volume usefully reviews critical approaches to Jane
Austen's work (1-12). Many of the essays in The Postcolonial Jane Austen, ed. You-me Park and
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (London: Routledge, 2000) offer readings of Mansfield Park from a global
economic perspective.
63. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Austen in the World: Postcolonial Mappings,” in The Postcolonial Jane
Austen, ed. Rajan and Park, op. cit., 3.
64. Williams, The Country and the City, op. cit., 113.
65. Barbara K. Seeber, General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism (Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000): 5.
66. This appealing view is presented by Christopher Clausen in “Jane Austen Changes Her Mind,” The
American Scholar 68.2 (Spring 1999): 90. Clausen goes on to argue that Persuasion represents a
distinct shift away from the claustrophobic world of the landed gentry and offers a new and riskier
approach to the world.

Additional coverage of Austen's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale
Group: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 19; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography,
1789-1832; DISCovering Authors; Dictionary of Literary Biograhpy, Vol. 116; DISCovering Authors: British;
DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors: Modules, Most-studied Authors and Novelists;
DISCovering Authors 3.0; Novels for Students, Vol. 1; World Literature Criticism.

187
Analysis
Analysis
Jane Austen’s novels present English country gentry of the early nineteenth century in such tartly intelligent
and witty terms that her subjects are both particular to their time and place and universally human. She has
never lacked for readers since Sense and Sensibilityfirst appeared in 1811. Born in 1775, Austen died in 1817,
having completed six novels, of which four had been published at the time of her death.

The events of her life, as measured against the turbulent backdrop of history, were slight. The American
Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars all raged as she lived, as one of eight children in
a country parsonage, and as she circulated in her familiar social circle. Never married, she became “dear Aunt
Jane” to a lively brood of nieces and nephews. After her death, her family cherished her memory as that of a
veritable saint, a devoted daughter and sister who was witty and wise, unfailingly kind, and almost too good to
be true.

David Nokes, in Jane Austen: A Life, attempts to prove that “too good to be true” is not good enough for Jane
Austen. Instead of a bland, angelic maiden aunt, she was a woman of wit and temper, often sharp-tongued,
and at times profoundly discontented with her lot in life. Nokes uses a broad perspective to explore the family
in which Austen lived and the wider world to which they belonged. The book begins with a vignette centered
on a distant relative by marriage, one Tysoe Saul Hancock, a surgeon general in English colonial India. His
wife, the beautiful Philadelphia Austen, was the sister of George Austen, Jane’s father.

The story of the Hancocks carries the tang of scandal. Philadelphia’s only daughter was rumored to be the
child of Warren Hastings, later governor of India, rather than Hancock’s own. The luxuries that Hancock
provided for his wife in England, from his post in the East, were an integral element in her place in the Austen
family. Letters exchanged by the Hancocks are among Nokes’s primary sources for the early years of George
Austen’s marriage to Cassandra Leigh. Hancock even wrote from India to deplore the reckless rate at which
the Austen family grew.

As deeply rooted as the Austens were in English country life, they also were connected with the exotic and
corrupt world of the English colonial system. Two of Jane’s brothers served as naval officers in the
Napoleonic Wars, thus heightening the family involvement in the greater world. A third brother would marry
Philadelphia’s daughter Eliza, after the execution of her first husband, a French count, during the French
Revolution.

Jane Austen’s clergyman father, George, was never rich and was imprudent enough to sire a large family. His
wife, Cassandra Leigh, was a clever woman, given to expressing herself in verse. She bore six sons and two
daughters. Of her sons, one would be adopted by wealthy relatives and live out his days in financial ease.
Another would follow his father as a clergyman. Two became naval heroes. The fifth, Eliza Hancock’s
husband, was a banker. The sixth son was an idiot, one of the family secrets that Nokes explores. Cassandra
Leigh’s family had already faced the sad circumstance of a mentally handicapped son, her brother, who had
been permanently boarded with a farmer near the family home. When her own son proved to be similarly
impaired, he was placed along with his uncle. Nokes maintains that this hidden brother provided Jane Austen
with at least one character, the dead Dick Musgrove ofPersuasion (1818), an object of pity and interest only to
his overly sentimental, often ridiculous mother. The perceivable impact on Austen’s life and family
relationships of her own brother’s condition seems minimal.

The other, ambitious Austen sons were able to pursue various careers, but more limited avenues were open to

188
the Austen daughters, Cassandra (the older) and Jane. Women of their day and class could plan on
dependency of one kind or another, as a wife and mother, as a governess in a wealthy family, as a teacher in a
school, or as a poor relation in the home of relatives. Cassandra was devoutly religious and serious in
character. After the death of her fiancé, a young chaplain in the Royal Navy, she seemed content in her role of
family caregiver.

Jane Austen, devotedly fond of her older sister, was less humble in her aspirations. She hated being poor; she
valued money and the independence it could buy, as well as the frivolous luxuries and pleasures Cassandra
scorned. It was a perpetual frustration to Jane to never have much disposable income, and she made many
bitter jokes about her penniless condition. She envied the estate to which her brother Edward, adopted by
wealthy relatives, fell heir. She rejected the possibility of teaching, as a governess or in a school, but also
could not accept loveless marriage and its “conjugal duties” as the price of financial security. As pretty, lively,
and agreeable as she was when young, she could look forward with optimism to a suitable match with a
suitable man.

Nokes tells several stories of Jane’s abortive romances: a charming young man sent away by his wealthy aunt
before a serious misalliance with the poor parson’s daughter could occur, an unacceptable proposal from the
awkward brother of close friends, and a mysterious seaside encounter with a possible suitor so enchanting that
Cassandra was still speaking of him to her nieces years after Jane’s death. Although Cassandra Austen
destroyed the letters from her sister that might have told these stories in definitive form, they hardly need to be
fleshed out. After all, they could easily be the outlines of subplots in Austen’s own novels and, indeed, may
have become just that.

A large part of Nokes’s narration is devoted to the gradual process of self-discovery through which Jane
Austen came to realize that her particular qualities of intelligence and independence, her impatience with
stupidity and her acute sense of the ridiculous in social life, would find no match among the men of her
acquaintance. With no fortune, she could not compete in the marriage market. Simultaneously, she was
finding her way into her life as that odd and unusual being, a novelist.

From early childhood, Jane Austen indulged the family love and talent for words by writing stories based on
the popular novels of the day. Her writing, as Nokes shows, was not a thing apart from her family life, but an
integral part of it. She shared her work with her family and friends, who often returned the favor. Her
mother’s verses accompanied all family occasions. Her brothers also were versifiers, and for a short time, two
of them published a literary magazine. As time passed, her juvenile literary pastiches and awkward imitations
of Gothic thrillers gave way to stories of young women in situations similar to those to be seen in the Austens’
own milieu. Her family encouraged her to think of publishing her work, and in 1803, she sent the manuscript
of a novel, Susan, to a London publisher, who accepted it but never took the trouble of actually bringing it
out. This text, retitled Northanger Abbey, was not published until after Austen’s death.

Although the suspension of Susan in literary limbo discouraged further attempts at publication for some years,
Austen continued to work on her novels and to share them with her family, reading aloud to her sister
Cassandra and their mother and discussing different aspects of plot and character. The success of Sense and
Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) was a delightful surprise to her. The small income that her
novels provided seems to have brought her great satisfaction. If her first novels were written as amusement,
her later ones were meant for publication, and with critics in mind. Readers of Mansfield Park (1814) will be
particularly interested in the story of its genesis as a deliberately sober and moral tale, meant to abandon the
light and witty tone of Pride and Prejudice so as to please the sober Cassandra. What a disappointment to find
that critics and public alike preferred headstrong but witty Elizabeth Bennet to shy, devout Fanny
Price! Emma appeared in 1815, once again with a lively, witty central character, lovable in spite of her
faults. Persuasion, which pays pointed compliments to the Royal Navy, in which two Austen brothers made
their career, was completed before Austen’s death in mid-1817, although it was not published until later in the

189
year, along with the resurrected Northanger Abbey.

One of the charms of Jane Austen: A Life is the tone of Nokes’s narrative. The even tenor of long periods of
Austen’s life precludes surprising plot developments and exotic settings. Instead, the reader will find an
orderly, chronological development of the central characters of that life: parents, brothers and sister, closest
friends. The houses and villages are described and the everyday conditions evoked. The development of each
of the novels within these contexts is suggested, but nowhere does Nokes lean too weightily on these
connections.

The biography is accompanied by some of the armature of critical apparatus: There are basic notes for each
citation and a somewhat sketchy index. There is no bibliography, and references to secondary works are
relatively few. Nokes does not advance particular hard-and-fast theses, being much more prone to suggest
than to argue. The portrait he produces of Jane Austen and her family is built gradually, by many small
touches of color. Much of the text of Jane Austen: A Life is actually citation from Austen’s letters and novels,
as well as the reminiscences of family members and friends. Nokes has consulted unpublished letter archives,
such as the Hancock correspondence, which add immeasurably to his work.

The Austens are an articulate circle, and many of the personalities and stories evoked here are fascinating in
their own right. Near prim Cassandra and Jane Austen we find the exotic Hancock family and their dubious
connection, Warren Hastings, who was accused of official corruption as governor of India. One wealthy aunt,
Mrs. Leigh Perrot, was twice accused of shoplifting—perhaps as a blackmail scam, perhaps rightly—and
ended her life in seclusion. Austen’s willful and charming niece Anna followed her Aunt Jane’s example of
novel writing, but she married, bore several children in close succession, and eventually burned her
manuscripts. The Austen family members are full of interest, and the reader will follow their developing
characters and careers, their marriages and children, as if they too were walking through the pages of one of
Jane Austen’s novels. A few family portraits are included among the illustrations.

The family scandals that Nokes unearths simply add more depth to his portrait. They are not intended to
discredit Austen but to demonstrate that she was a complex person who could question her destiny of poverty
and dependence. By the exercise of her intelligence and wit, and a pen dipped in the wry knowledge of human
failings, Jane Austen earned her central place in her family and made herself a towering figure in English
literature. The reader will come away from this long book wishing it longer, and will return to it as a
constructive companion to Austen’s novels.

Sources for Further Study

Boston Globe. November 23, 1997, p. E1.

The Christian Science Monitor. August 28, 1997, p. B1.

Commonweal. CXXIV, November 7, 1997, p. 23.

The Economist. CCCXLV, October 18, 1997, p. 7.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. November 23, 1997, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, September 14, 1997, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIV, July 7, 1997, p. 55.

The Times Literary Supplement. September 12, 1997, p. 3.

190
The Wall Street Journal. November 17, 1997, p. A24.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVII, October 26, 1997, p. 1.

Analysis: Other Literary Forms

Jane Austen is best known for her six novels about middle-class life in the nineteenth century. Four were
published during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park
(1814), and Emma (1815). Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818) were published posthumously.

Analysis: Achievements
Although she was not widely recognized in her own day, Jane Austen did enjoy the appreciation of
discriminating readers whose contemporary esteem has since become the critical consensus. The scrupulous
accuracy, complex irony, and serious moral speculation of Austen’s novels of middle-class life provided the
groundwork for the “great tradition” of the nineteenth century novel. Austen’s short fiction, written before she
turned seventeen, is experimental work in which the beginning writer mocks the absurdities and limitation of
the sentimental novel popular at the end of the eighteenth century and tentatively explores the possibilities of
themes and literary techniques that she will later develop in her mature work. By slightly exaggerating the
sensibility of a heroine, the refinement of a hero, the effusiveness of their conversations, and the unlikelihood
of their adventures, Austen makes plain the absurdity of the worldview purveyed by sentimental novels.

Analysis: Other literary forms

In addition to writing novels, Jane Austen (AWS-tuhn) was the author of various short juvenile pieces, most
of them literary burlesques mocking theconventions of the eighteenth century novel. Her other works are Lady
Susan, a story told in letters (written c. 1805); The Watsons, a fragment of a novel written about the same
time; and Sanditon, another fragmentary novel begun in 1817. All these pieces appear in Minor Works
(volume 6 of the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, 1954), edited by R. W. Chapman. Jane Austen’s surviving
letters have also been edited and published by Chapman.

Analysis: Achievements
Jane Austen, who published her novels anonymously, was not a writer famous in her time, nor did she wish to
be. From the first, however, her novels, written in and largely for her own family circle, gained the notice and
esteem of a wider audience. Among her early admirers were the Prince Regent and the foremost novelist of
the day, Sir Walter Scott, who deprecated his own aptitude for the “big Bow-Wow” and praised Austen as
possessing a “talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to
me the most wonderful I ever met with.” Since the days of Scott’s somewhat prescient praise, her reputation
has steadily grown. The critical consensus now places Jane Austen in what F. R. Leavis has termed the “Great
Tradition” of the English novel. Her talent was the first to forge, from the eighteenth century novel of external
incident and internal sensibility, an art form that fully and faithfully presented a vision of real life in a specific
segment of the real world. Austen’s particular excellences—the elegant economy of her prose, the strength
and delicacy of her judgment and moral discrimination, the subtlety of her wit, the imaginative vividness of
her character drawing—have been emulated but not surpassed by subsequent writers.

191
Analysis: Discussion Topics
Explain how Jane Austen, working in a narrow social range and with limited experience of the world, could
succeed so brilliantly as a novelist.

Distinguish the main characteristics of her novels that differentiate them from the eighteenth century novels
that made up a great deal of her literary background.

How does Austen help her readers to become better readers?

In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor develops sympathy for the incorrigible Willoughby. Determine whether or not
that is a flaw in Elinor’s personality.

Pride and Prejudice begins with Mr. Bennet’s problem of finding suitors for his five daughters. Explain
Austen’s avoidance of making his problem the theme of the novel.

How does one explain the popularity of Austen’s novels with filmmakers?

192