Jane Austen

by Carol Shields

  Anne becomes aware that Captain Wentworth, sitting nearby and writing a letter, has heard every word. He picks up his pen again and writes to Anne, pleading his love and assuring her that his affection has not diminished even after eight and a half years. The scene becomes a ballet of glances given and received, of understandings reached not directly but through a look, a gesture, and the unspoken subtext of all that has been said aloud. These two lovers are not shown in an unreal isolation as in the original ending, but are clearly part of the moving, bustling world, two people sending their connecting glances across a crowded drawing room. They have moved, in a few heightened moments, from separate and secret yearnings to proud public acknowledgment of their future together.

  Persuasion required further work, which Jane Austen surely knew. But she was unwilling or unable to commit herself to it any longer. Something at its center worried her: the character of Anne Elliot. This unfixable problem made her reluctant to apply her usual fine finishing strokes and to fill out the portraits of the lesser characters. Anne Elliot is “almost too good for me,” she wrote to her niece Fanny. “Pictures of perfection” exasperated her, she claimed, and Anne with her patient fortitude and cool clarity of mind presents just such an image.

  It is possible that Jane Austen’s health had already begun to fail at the time of writing Persuasion. Just as she was finding her greatest strength as a writer, she may have experienced intimations of an early death. The darkness of Persuasion, its vivid sensuality, its use of accident and near misses, relates, perhaps, to the kind of fatalism that stared down at her, suggesting that she might be desperately rewriting the trajectory of her own life and giving it the gift of a happy ending. Elizabeth Bennet shared part of Austen’s own rebelliousness; Emma Woodhouse embodied some of her sense of mischief; Fanny of Mansfield Park might be thought of as Jane Austen attempting the role of dutiful goodness, performing an act of expiation for the levity and brightness she had brought to Pride and Prejudice. But Anne Elliot, more than any of these heroines, combines Austen’s sense of loss and loneliness, her regrets, her intelligence, and in the end, her willingness to lead a disappointed life.

  A number of other tasks occupied her at the time. She had bought back the manuscript for Northanger Abbey for the original £10 she had been paid and was busy making a series of emendations, readying it for the press. The pressures on her were enormous. Family occupied a good deal of her time: her nieces and nephews, her brother Henry’s bankruptcy and his decision to enter the Church. There were endless visitors at Chawton Cottage, family and friends who had to be accommodated. On top of this, she was not feeling well.

  She was fatigued. Her back hurt, and her knee. Her nights were feverish. She took to lying down after dinner. She grew increasingly irritable, especially with the presence of young children. To family and friends she offered various forms of self-diagnosis. Her condition was caused by “bile.” Or else rheumatism. Always she felt herself to be improving, and she shared each small increment of renewed strength with family members. Illness had always been a bore to her, something to push aside, and she had an abhorrence of hypochondria, a condition frequently mocked in her novels. During the winter of 1817 she gathered what energy she had and wrote twelve chapters of a new novel, a fragment not published until 1925.

  Sanditon, though unfinished, shows the direction in which Jane Austen might have moved had she lived longer. In it she exploits her greatest gifts, her management of dialogue and her skill with monologue. The book feels open and modern, admitting a new and changing social landscape. Old values were giving way to a new, restless bustle of prosperity, and there is a sense that Jane Austen welcomed this new social vitality and that she may have been on the cusp of widening her novelistic scope. As vigorous and inventive as her earlier work, the fragment does not read like the work of a dying woman. The overall theme of reality and artifice is not new to Austen, but the setting is. She is writing here about the resort development of a seaside town, the invasion of the new into an old and authentic community. The comedy is broad and blunt, but the characterization, especially that of Sir Edward Denham, is more subtle and psychologically shaded than anything she had attempted.

  In March, however, she was forced to give up writing, and at the end of April, an invalid by now, she quietly wrote her will. Cassandra was appointed her executrix, and it was to Cassandra that all her worldly goods would go—except for a £50 legacy to Henry and another £50 to a Madam Bigeon, a housekeeper who had looked after her sister-in-law Eliza. She had exerted herself to do those things that invalids did at the time; she visited Cheltenham to take the waters and she even attempted donkey riding as a form of exercise.

  It was decided that she, and Cassandra as her nurse, should take lodgings in Winchester so she would be nearer her surgeon, Mr. Lyford. It was a rainy May day when brother James sent his carriage to take her and Cassandra on the sixteen-mile journey. Henry, always the loyal brother, accompanied them on horseback.

  As ever she took an interest in her surroundings, describing with appreciation the neat little College Street drawing room with its bow window and view overlooking a garden. Weak as she was, she managed to write to her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh a few days later, making light of her condition. Her irony is in perfect form, and so is her wish to maintain a semblance of improving health. “I will not boast of my handwriting; neither that, nor my face have yet recovered their proper beauty; but in other respects I am gaining strength very fast.” This letter was dated May twenty-seventh.

  By mid-June the family realized that Aunt Jane was not going to recover. She took Holy Communion along with her two clerical brothers, James and Henry, and was strong enough, it was reported, to attend to the service. Suffering from what was most likely cancer, she rallied for a few days and even dictated a number of comic verses, which have been preserved.

  It is impossible to say for certain what the nature of her illness was. Claire Tomalin, the biographer, suggests a lymphoma. For quite some time Austen was believed to have suffered from Addison’s disease, a tuberculosis of the adrenal glands, a condition not identified until 1860, more than forty years after Austen’s death. The Addison symptoms, however, don’t match well with those bodily failings Jane Austen knew. She had suffered for some months with fever and weakness and was said by one of her nieces to have grown very pale. Addison’s, on the other hand, is characterized by a browning of the skin, which presents rather like the sun tan of a healthy person. It is, as well, a disease that brings on a steady decline, whereas Jane Austen’s health fluctuated from day to day in the spring of 1817, and she and her family were frequently persuaded that she was recovering, then declining, then improving once again.

  Breast cancer seems a very likely cause, especially since Jane Austen’s Aunt Philadelphia, and Philadelphia’s daughter, Eliza, probably died from that disease. Breast cancer does appear in exactly such family clusters. The fevers Jane Austen suffered would have been consistent with the visitations of hot flushes in which the body is continually adjusting to an imbalance of estrogen.

  On the seventeenth of July she suffered a seizure and died early the next morning. Cassandra closed her sister’s eyes, honored, she said, to be able to perform this small service. She also cut a few locks of her hair to keep and to give to such friends as Anne Sharp.

  The funeral took place early in the morning of July twenty-fourth. It was a small affair; women did not generally attend funerals at this time, since it was felt that their grief might be uncontrollable. The mourning party consisted of three of the Austen brothers and a few other male members of the family.

  Jane Austen, who loved the out-of-doors, was laid to rest inside the stones of Winchester Cathedral. The inscription on her tomb reads: “The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmest love of her intimate connections.” There was no mention of her six great novels, her literary offspri
ng, her own “darling” children.

  23

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER Jane Austen’s death she was entombed in veneration. Henry espoused her piety, her nieces recorded her skill with a needle, and Cassandra censored her correspondence so that the world would understand the angel of goodness her sister had been, that very “picture of perfection” that enraged Jane herself.

  What is known of Jane Austen’s life will never be enough to account for the greatness of her novels, but the point of literary biography is to throw light on a writer’s works, rather than combing the works to re-create the author. The two “accounts”—the life and the work—will always lack congruency and will sometimes appear to be in complete contradiction.

  Jane Austen, the stern moralist, was capable of petty cruelty; her control of her material stood at odds with her own lack of self-control. “If I am a wild Beast I cannot help it,” she wrote to Cassandra. “It is not my own fault.” Neat, clever Jane Austen in her lace cap a wild woman? If she is refusing blame for her own disordered self, then where might we place it? Her biological temperament may have contributed to what she perceived as wildness, or else the difficult circumstances of her life. She was poor. She was isolated. Several times she was banished from the home she loved. Her heroines claimed their lives through ideal marriages, while she found her own sense of arrival through her novels. She knew her worth as a writer, but lived, it seems, in a society that was late in recognizing what was plainly evident. And she was a physical being who had few opportunities to express that part of herself.

  Did she ever know a sexual relationship beyond a stolen kiss or two at a ball? Probably not. She was conventional about marriage and fidelity, so that even a random opportunity would have tested her moral sense, causing her to hesitate. And she was extraordinarily well chaperoned all her life, so that the privacy required for a sexual liaison would be unlikely to offer itself. There seems a contemporary reluctance to believe that anyone who writes so completely about the intricacies of love should have been inexperienced about love’s physical expressiveness, but Jane Austen was knowing about sexual matters, as even her juvenilia informs us, and she was for a time an enthusiastic husband hunter, if we can believe Mary Russell Mitford’s rather cruel remark. Her rejection of Harris Bigg-Wither may gesture toward either a general bodily fastidiousness or a revulsion for one particular man. It is not so difficult, then, given the rather rigid behavior of her class, to believe that she remained sexually innocent, especially when it is remembered that she lived with an admired older sister who had set the pattern early in her life, and whose spinster presence could only have normalized the situation.

  Austen’s narrative intricacies and turns were propelled for the most part by incident or by reason, and not by the needs or responses of the body. The brain—for Jane Austen does frequently refer to that particular fleshly organ—presides over the rest of the corporeal body that is treated with what? Indifference? Incuriosity? Disregard? Or perhaps a metaphorical shrug that all but erases itself. Or else her strategy, conscious or unconscious, points to the values that she believed supported a decent community of individuals.

  At the same time we are never given to believe that Jane Austen found the body repellent. The juvenilia took a rather mischievous delight in seductions and rapes, and then there was Cousin Eliza, who undoubtedly contributed a sense of the earthy to the young Jane. Later, Austen’s letters reveal a pervasive and sensuous delight in fabrics, muslins, ribbons, lace. As a young woman she loved to dance, and must have felt that the movement of dance brought her alive physically, just as George Knightley is finally given his body when he dances at the local ball—for until that moment we have had nothing but his hard, reasonable head.

  Everything we know of Emma and Elizabeth and Catherine—their spiritedness, their admiration for good sense and directness—tells us that they are not, by nature, a trio of prudes. Yet, except for the brain, the human body is infrequently mentioned in Jane Austen’s work. The reluctance to speak of the body’s parts, the body’s yearnings and satisfactions, reflects particular attitudes of Austen’s era, but it is also consistent with the kind of writer she was.

  There is, for instance, no mention of toes in any of her work, though there are a few fingers. Nor are there any hips, thighs, shins, buttocks, kidneys, intestines, wombs, or navels, and scarcely a single mention of toothache, said to have been the most commonly feared malady among all classes of people in the eighteenth century. There are, in Jane Austen’s collective work, few chins or ankles, and just an occasional nose, ear, leg, wrist, eyebrow, and eyelash. The word breast is mentioned several times, but most of these singular breasts belong to men and represent not flesh and nipple, but the center of feeling. People are rarely described in terms of their bodily posture; instead it is their air that is noted, a favorite Austen word, uniting substance and impression in one verbal bundle.

  True, there are hundreds of eyes, hearts, and hands, but Jane Austen’s eyes, hearts, and hands belong more to the eighteenth-century rational system than they do to human anatomy. Hearts record sensation, eyes are read for meaning, and hands are used metaphorically, much as we use that word, to symbolize a human transaction of one kind or another. Faces—of which there are well over a hundred mentioned—exist mainly to express reaction or convey meaning, and, in fact, the more abstract “countenance” receives even more mention and more nearly expresses Austen’s meaning. In the same way, “skin” often yields to the more metaphorical “bloom,” meaning the skin at a time of greatest beauty, health, and vigor.

  It would be foolish to place too much weight on word frequency or infrequency, especially observing that Jane Austen never once mentions the word “ink,” that practical agent of all her expressiveness, though there is one, only one, “inkstand”—in Mansfield Park.

  Jane Austen is a dramatic rather than descriptive writer, concerned with morality and using speech as her medium. Readers know how rarely she stops to describe a gown or a meal or a piece of furniture, and how those of her characters who are given to such descriptions are exposed, gently or severely, as being inferior. Think, for instance, of Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey who rattles on about ribbons and muslins; think even of the unfailingly substandard Frank Churchill, who carries on, fatally in Emma’s estimation, about Jane Fairfax’s complexion, Jane Fairfax’s eyebrows—and it is Frank who utters the questionable word “skin.”

  This is how Jane Austen describes Harriet Smith: “She was short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features.” There is little more information here than one would find on a modern driver’s license. Mrs. Elton possesses “a face not unpretty.” Jane Fairfax is tall, but not very tall. And here is Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility: “Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features and a remarkably pretty figure.” Her sister Marianne’s features “were all good.” This is minimalist description, a checklist fulfilled, close to being meaningless. Clearly Jane Austen’s preference is for the sharp, economic psychological gesture, such as Harriet’s praising of Emma for her ability to “see into everybody’s heart,” a tribute we know we are to take ironically, since Emma, in her matchmaking, understands the heart of no one, least of all her own.

  Occasionally physical references go hand in hand with psychological insight and thereby earn their weight. Harriet, naïve and unshaped, describes for Emma how she has recently recorded her height at the Martin farm and found she was still growing. And there is a most curious scene in which the announcement of Mr. Elton’s engagement coincides with a discussion of a gift of pork flesh. Here is Jane Austen at her most subversive, with one irony buried inside another.

  Austen’s disinclination to use images of the body reflects the time and place in which she lived, and this question unfolds to reveal the larger problem of the relation of fiction to the period in which it was written—does a novel help explain the times or do the times illuminate the novel? The world she shows us is close to bein
g an idyll, allowing space for the rupture and reconciliation of romantic love, but hardly any room for the particularity of human bodies.

  It might be thought that the infrequency of bodily images or bodily reaction would undermine the solidity of Jane Austen’s created universe and transform her various characters into talking heads. In fact, the rarity of such allusions sometimes gives them power; it is as though minor physical allusions are code words for larger sensations. When Mr. Knightley draws Emma’s arm within his and presses it against his heart, we are fully persuaded of his yearning, since he has never done anything like this in the hundreds of preceding pages. When he presses the arm yet again in the following paragraph, we understand we are in the presence of a grand passion. In turn, Emma’s “glowing cheeks” inform us of her emotional temperature, her confusion, and the happiness that is about to overtake her. She allows herself a “flutter of pleasure,” one of the rare instances in the novel of the body as receiver of emotional stimulation, though Emma does occasionally blush or flush with shame and once even sheds tears.

  The extraordinary contemporary interest in Jane Austen’s novels and in films based on the novels is thought by some to reflect our society’s exhaustion with the human body and, conversely, a new awareness of the sensual power of delayed gratification. But to say that Jane Austen’s writing is indifferent to the human body is not precisely to say that her world-view excludes it. She is a profound realist who understands the follies of human nature and its ability to mend itself. Decency in Austen’s time meant, for men and women alike, sincerity, unselfishness, and a concern for the happiness of others. The body, like Jane Austen’s inkstand, was always on view, a stubborn continuum too commonplace perhaps to require description or exposition. If she were alive today she might question our own attitudes toward using the body as a kind of software of literature. For all the body’s powers and vulnerability, her novels demonstrate that, for her, the real dance of life lies in language and in understanding.