Jane Austen

by Carol Shields

  A home-made article, Jane Austen’s nephew had called his aunt’s work. Her novels were conceived and composed in isolation. She invented their characters, their scenes and scenery, and their moral framework. The novelistic architecture may have been borrowed from the eighteenth-century novelists, but she made it new, clean, and rational, just as though she’d taken a broom to the old fussiness of plot and action. She did all this alone.

  “Even during the last two or three years of her life, when her works were rising in the estimation of the public, they did not enlarge the circle of her acquaintance”—so wrote her nephew, who must have guessed what a deprivation this was to his aunt. She would have relished the company of other novelists. And she might have been comforted and encouraged to know something about the universal difficulty of transmuting the real to the fictional. Such shared insights would have softened her gaze and might have widened her level of tolerance. Instead she was forced to go it alone, working out her compromises in the light of her own confined knowledge.

  Once settled at Chawton, she went back to her old manuscripts—by then she must have considered them old friends. She even pulled out the notebooks she’d written in her youth and emended a few passages. Contentedly, or so it seems, she unpacked the heaped pages she had written some ten years earlier and began a series of revisions. First Impressions, the family favorite, later known as Pride and Prejudice, was lightly edited during the months following the move to Chawton; Sense and Sensibility may have received more in the way of revision—it was, in any case, the first of the manuscripts she sent to a publisher.

  Brother Henry, from London, was advising her to send a copy of Sense and Sensibility to a publisher (Egerton’s of Whitehall) whom he had contacted. She had another look at the novel, and brought one or two minor references up to date: the institution of the twopenny post and the mention of Walter Scott as a reigning literary light. After that the manuscript was dispatched.

  Late in the year 1810 she received word that the novel had been accepted for publication. Her jubilation was surely tempered by the fact that the publisher had accepted this first manuscript by an unknown writer “on commission.” This meant that it would be printed at the author’s own expense, and she would be expected to take up the loss if the sale of copies failed to repay the expense of publication.

  She was cautious in matters of economy. Her circumstances demanded that she weigh every penny. But, with money borrowed from Henry and Eliza, she seems not to have hesitated for a moment about jumping into the venture. She knew, perhaps, the worth of the manuscript, that it would draw readers as it had delighted her family. And besides, she might not have another chance. This was it.

  18

  THE DIFFERENCE between a published and unpublished author is enormous, and every novelist in the world would agree: It is a truth universally acknowledged that published authors, even those whose books have not yet appeared before the public, are filled with a new and reckless confidence in their own powers.

  Jane Austen, thirty-six years old, traveled to London in March of 1811 so that she could work at correcting the proofs of Sense and Sensibility. The very phrase “correcting proofs” must have excited her imagination. She stayed in the Sloane Street house of Henry and Eliza, who drew her into a whirl of theatergoing and parties, galleries and museums, and modest shopping for printed muslin, which she characterized as “extravagant.” Her letters to Cassandra during the next two months are close to being feverish. She bubbles with happiness, with stray thoughts, with gossip. “I have so many little matters to tell you of, that I cannot wait any longer before I begin to put them down.” Everything she sees delights her. Everyone she meets is sympathetically drawn. At a large and elegant party given by Henry and Eliza, she says, “We were all delight & cordiality of course.”

  Cassandra must have written to ask whether, amid all the social comings and goings, she was giving much thought to the publication of Sense and Sensibility. Her tone may well have been scolding, or at least chiding. Jane replied, “No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking [sic] child.” And then she adds, as though to placate Cassandra, “I am much obliged to you for your enquiries.” She had by then just two more sheets to correct and was hoping for a June publication.

  In fact, it would be late October before the Morning Chronicle announced “a New Novel by a Lady—.” Something like one thousand copies were printed, selling for 15 shillings. An article in the Critical Review (1812) deemed, in a rather low-key voice, that “the incidents are probable, and highly pleasing, and interesting; the conclusion such as the reader must wish it should be, and the whole is just long enough to interest without fatiguing.”

  The book sold well. Jane Austen’s anonymity was preserved, even for a time from family members. It is Cassandra, rather than Jane, who seems to have encouraged this secrecy, but the subterfuge was one that both of them enjoyed and that they made into something of a game. James and Mary at Steventon were at last let into the conspiracy, and James, Jane’s least favorite brother, sent her a poem of praise, signed simply “A Friend.” It was written in a disguised hand and ended with the encouraging lines:

  O then, gentle lady! Continue to write,

  And the sense of your reader t’amuse & delight.

  James was often considered the writer of the family, at least by Cassandra, though his verses remained unpublished. But success can breed good will, even in families, and besides, the tables had been turned; now his younger sister Jane was being recognized and, in a strictly anonymous way, celebrated.

  The publisher Egerton wrote to say that all the first edition copies had been sold. Tucked into the postscript of a letter to her brother Francis, Jane Austen exclaims, as though she can hardly help herself, “There is to be a 2/d Edition to S&S. Egerton advises it.” A sense of jubilation accompanies this piece of information, and there is the sense, too, that she is trying with all her might to keep a cap on her satisfaction by sprinkling her letters with other more mundane references: deaths, babies, the weather, the scarcity of apples, her mother’s headaches. Her efforts don’t quite succeed. Her joy in publication keeps breaking through. This, it would seem, is what she had always wanted; she may have missed out on marriage and motherhood, and certainly she had been denied the financial means to a life of independence. But she was a writer of genius, as she must have known, and that genius was now, in a very small way, being recognized and applauded. A second sweet source of happiness must have been that her own family—where she was the younger sister, a little eccentric and strange—was made aware of her gifts.

  After a period of scant correspondence, there is an out-pouring of letters. It is well known that Cassandra destroyed those letters that she felt reflected poorly on Jane, and perhaps poorly on herself and other family members. What was it in particular that caught Cassandra’s censor’s eye? Immediately before the publication of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s letters were particularly astringent. She niggled at neighbors; her gossip had a poisonous pitch; her last attempt at writing, The Watsons, was a book with a bleak horizon and a host of embittered women. There are only a handful of these surviving letters, and it can be imagined that Cassandra was anxious to extirpate this unattractive side of her sister’s expression. Overnight, with the appearance of Jane Austen’s first published novel and her buoyant new spirit, there are streams of letters sparkling with happiness, animated, determinedly distracted, breathless.

  Nevertheless, publication meant having a public self after a life that had been austerely private. Her scale of values, her opinions were now being read by a wide public, and not just received by the family circle. The two selves, public and private, were in danger of flying apart, but her correspondence shows her efforts to hang on to all that was familiar while enjoying the titillation of celebrity.

  She had earned, to her great astonishment, well over £100. This was the only money she had ever earned by her pen
other than the £10 put forward years earlier for Northanger Abbey, which still lay unpublished. Now she had money for small gifts, mostly for Cassandra, and money to pay for her own travels to London and back.

  At once she set about correcting the manuscript for Pride and Prejudice. “I have lopt & cropt so successfully . . . that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S&S.” Pride and Prejudice had always been the family favorite, and she herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.” This ebullient faith in her next published novel was unrestrained, and already she was planning a new novel, which, she said, would be about a wholly different subject, ordination. This projected novel was to be Mansfield Park.

  Full of new confidence, she was also becoming more critical of her own work. She could afford to be, now that she had readers who admired her and bought her books. Of Pride and Prejudice she said, “The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;—it wants shade;—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter . . . about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte [sic]—or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile.” She doubted, she said, whether Cassandra, with her “starched Notions,” would agree, and it may be she was seeking confirmation. Whether we have Cassandra to thank or Jane Austen’s own sound critical judgment, there was no added material to pad out the novel and provide “shade” and no sideways essays on the matter of composition. Her publisher Egerton offered £110 for the copyright, which meant that this time around Henry was not obliged to advance money for printing costs. The book sold for 18 shillings and was once again published anonymously, advertised as being by the author of Sense and Sensibility. “I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London,” she wrote Cassandra when a finished copy of Pride and Prejudice arrived at Chawton in late January of 1813. Like all newly published writers, she may have magnified its potential effect. She was pleased Cassandra was away at the time, she said, because “it might be unpleasant to you to be in the Neighbourhood at the first burst of the business.” What business? It is not clear why publication might have embarrassed or discomfited Cassandra; Jane Austen was being disingenuous, or else she was acting out of her lifetime habit of deferring to her older sister. In fact, she was disappointed that Cassandra was away at a moment of celebration, and worried that her sister, in fact, might have deliberately absented herself. The only celebration of the new “child” consisted of a reading out loud of the novel with her mother and a neighbor at Chawton. Her mother read badly, and this soured what pleasure Jane Austen felt in the occasion. She longed for her family’s proud cries of approval. Her second novel was in print, a novel sought after by her publisher and purchased with a reasonable advance. There should have been a celebration party of friends and family, and the bright atmosphere of adulatory toasts. Instead, on a winter’s night, she was confined at Chawton Cottage, seated by the fire, hearing her words mumbled with inappropriate rhythms and emphasis.

  The book met with immediate success. Readers loved it, laughed at it, were moved by it, and they adored especially the vibrancy and spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. “Pride and Prejudice rises very superior to any novel we have lately met with in the delineation of domestic scenes,” said the Critical Review. “Nor is there one character which appears flat, or obtrudes itself upon the notice of the reader with troublesome impertinence.”

  Her delight in the novel’s immediate success coincided with an uneasy time with Cassandra. Jane found herself always in the position of propitiating her sister, and trying to keep control of her own exultation. Instead of taking pleasure in the book’s reception, she committed herself to a fussy displeasure about the typographical errors that had cropped up. It would be selfish, she must have reasoned, to rejoice in the satisfaction she felt. Others would condemn her self-cherishing thoughts and remarks. The situation was untenable. She must not seem to be too happy. But she was.

  19

  SHE TOOK REFUGE in knowing she had a new novel on the boil. And Mansfield Park was, for her, a leap into new fictional space, and perhaps even an act of redress for the lack of “shade” in her previous two novels; now she must be serious; now she must mute her natural irony and deal with the subject of goodness and virtue.

  The characters in this novel, the self-satisfied, entitled inhabitants of Mansfield Park, move through the daily patterns they have come to enjoy and never suspect, even as the narrative skies darken, that the house is about to come tumbling down. It collapses catastrophically, spreading circles of damage everywhere, leaving at the center Fanny Price and the reader’s wish that Fanny might, just once, recognize her priggishness.

  The novel does not exhilarate as Pride and Prejudice does, nor does it dramatize in the same way that Sense and Sensibility does. It is solid—perhaps too solid—morally bewildering, and certainly perplexing to a contemporary audience. Its heroine, Fanny Price, is largely responsible for the difficulty of the novel.

  What is the matter with Fanny Price, shadow heroine of Mansfield Park? Why is she so dutiful, passive, lacking in spirit, so relentlessly correct, so given—when she is invited—to little puffs of sanctimoniousness, and why, despite these qualities, does she end up the respected mistress of the Bertram family and their worthy country seat, Mansfield Park? No one, to use one of Jane Austen’s favorite words, is more “particular” than Fanny. Where Fanny’s finely attuned moral sense comes from is something of a mystery, a triumph over both genetics and environment.

  The question of Fanny has teased the readers of Jane Austen’s novels for close to two centuries. Austen’s other heroines possess spirit and wit. In their youth and exuberance they are sometimes impolite, rash, imprudent, mistaken in their judgment. Emma Woodhouse lacks maturity and tact. Elizabeth Bennet hurls herself blindly at life. Catherine of Northanger Abbey is helplessly curious. Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, Fanny Price’s closest sister in the oeuvre, is easily led but at the same time innately wise and always supported by an inner assurance.

  Not one of these heroines, though, has begun life as radically disentitled as Fanny Price of Portsmouth, and in the reading and understanding of her character, some of our contemporary psychological insights can be brought into view. A sensitive child, Fanny spends the first decade of her life with a rough drinker for a father and a slatternly mother who prefers her sons to her daughters. Abruptly, and without her consultation, she is plucked from this disorderly home and placed in elegant Mansfield Park, where she meets with one indolent aunt, a second aunt who is cruelly manipulative, an absentee uncle, and a set of cousins who have every advantage over her. Here she is reminded daily that she is inferior to the members of the Bertram family and that she must be grateful for the crumbs that fall her way. She is called upon to perform dull and unrewarding services, and when she reaches womanhood, she is subjected to the pressing attentions of one Henry Crawford, a man she loathes.

  Her rejection of this match brings upon her the wrath of the Bertram family and a punishing banishment back to her own family in Portsmouth, where she is powerless, virtually without funds, and kept ignorant of her future. That this pattern of abuse has created a being as repressed as Fanny is not in the least surprising. The modern reader understands precisely why Fanny is Fanny. Hers is a case of the Cinderella syndrome, of the prisoner’s self-protective strategy. Her weakness is close to being a debility, an illness, but one that confers on her the crown of moral superiority. She is enfeebled in somewhat the same way Christian saints are sometimes portrayed, possessing bodies that are too ephemeral for this world, separated from the main, ruddy, healthy stream. Mary Crawford asks at one point whether Fanny is “out”? Meaning, has she been presented to society? Well, no. Her reticence, her withdrawal, is fueled
by a curious stubbornness of the soul. Her spirit urges her to be “in,” not “out.” The problem is, Can the reader love her?

  Austen clearly does love her. “My Fanny,” she calls her in the novel’s remarkable final chapter, in which all the narrative lines are brought to conclusion and the whole cast of characters summed up. Fanny triumphs in the end partly because Austen has artfully cleared the field for her: The two Bertram sisters are in disgrace; Aunt Norris has been sent packing; Mary Crawford, Fanny’s rival in love, has been exposed in her moral shallowness. Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas, humiliated and lost, requires the consolation of a daughter he can trust, and Fanny stands ready to fulfill that role. She is, as always, available. Furthermore, Austen has put the reader in a near impossible situation, for if we underrate Fanny’s essential value, we put ourselves in the same camp as the Bertrams.

  But Fanny does have real claims on our attention, despite her joylessness. She shows growing signs of independent thought—her little discourse, for instance, on memory in chapter 22. “There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.” She is, in fact, quite silent for the first half of the novel, then bursts into a promising articulation in the second half. And she becomes capable of anger—about time!—in chapter 33 when the obdurate Henry Crawford refuses to believe she cannot love him. (“Now she was angry,” Austen says plainly.)