What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  With everyone so susceptible to the weather, talking about the weather is not evidently banal. Marianne Dashwood is scornful of those who talk only of ‘the weather and the roads’ (Sense and Sensibility, I. x), but we need not share her scorn. The weather is the first topic of conversation between Elizabeth Bennet and Wickham, by no means unresourceful conversationalists (I. xvi). The weather can indeed be the refuge of the conversationally limited; so Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility can only talk about her children and the weather. Yet the first of these topics is made to seem the less truly communicative. The most intelligent of Austen’s characters talk about the weather. When Edward Ferrars arrives unannounced near the end of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, unable to express any of her true feelings or apprehensions, ‘sat down again and talked of the weather’ (III. xii). ‘When Elinor had ceased to rejoice in the dryness of the season, a very awful pause took place.’ In Persuasion, when Anne nervously engages in conversation with Captain Wentworth at the concert in Bath, wholly uncertain about his feelings towards her, they start with the weather (II. viii). In Emma, when Mrs Weston finds herself in a conversation with Mr Knightley about the likelihood of Emma marrying, she is relieved (because of her own hopes for her stepson as a possible husband) when he makes the ‘quiet transition’ to ‘What does Weston think of the weather; shall we have rain?’ (I. v).

  Mr Weston himself talks about the weather in a rather peculiar way. When his son cancels his expected visit to Highbury, he consoles himself that a later visit will be better: ‘better time of year; better weather’ (I. xviii). All manner of things will be well. When his son later writes to announce his imminent arrival, Mr Weston duly invokes the weather to show that all is indeed for the best. ‘I was always glad he did not come at Christmas; now we are going to have just the right weather for him, fine, dry, settled weather’ (II. v). Listening to this, you should realise that there is invariably something a little misjudging about whatever Mr Weston says. You can recall his comment during the Randalls’ dinner party, where he responds to Mr Woodhouse’s panic at news of snow with the acknowledgement that ‘he had known it to be snowing some time, but had not said a word, lest it should make Mr Woodhouse uncomfortable’ (I. xv). In fact he gives an extra twist to Mr Woodhouse’s anxiety by professing the hope that all the roads will be blocked so that his guests are compelled to stay. Mr Weston is sanguine, contented, optimistic, but though these are likeable characteristics, he is therefore often wrong-headed. He is at it again when news comes that Mrs Churchill is moving to Richmond. The time of year couldn’t be better for Frank’s constant visits, ‘weather genial and pleasant, always inviting one out, and never too hot for exercise’ (II. xviii). He is forever making the weather the mirror of his hopes, and always making out that everything is for the best. Anybody who makes the weather serve their hopes is to be suspected.

  The weather is reality, and the novelist expects us to notice those who try to fit it to their purposes.

  ‘The weather is mended, which I attribute to my writing about it,’ wrote Austen in a letter to her sister in 1808 (Letters, 55). When you talk rubbish about the weather you are indeed not to be trusted. On the outing to Box Hill, Frank Churchill says that he was ‘cross’ on the day of the Donwell strawberry picking because ‘The heat overcame me’ (III. vii). ‘It is hotter today,’ points out Emma, to which Frank nonsensically replies, ‘Not to my feelings.’ He resorts to nonsense about the weather because he is covering the tracks of his lovers’ quarrel with Jane Fairfax. Some people talk credibly about the weather, and some incredibly. The weather is reality, and the novelist expects us to notice those who try to fit it to their purposes. In Mansfield Park Mrs Norris indulges the meteorological ill will that has ever tempted the envious or the malign. Nettled by Fanny’s invitation to dine with the Grants, she wishes bad weather upon her niece. ‘And if it should rain, which I think exceedingly likely, for I never saw it more threatening for a wet evening in my life—you must manage as well as you can’ (II. v). She tells her niece that she must not expect the Bertram carriage to be sent for, ‘so you must make up your mind to what may happen’. She wishes on Fanny not just a soaking, but an evening of worrying about the weather – until Sir Thomas dispels all anxiety by telling her that his coach will take and return her.

  Deluded and self-deluding, Marianne Dashwood is a great one for requiring the weather to conform to her desires. Her self-deceptive hopes of the weather, which led to that initial meeting with Willoughby, persist. In London she cannot understand why Willoughby has not written or called, until Mrs Jennings remarks that Sir John will not like to leave Devon if ‘this open weather holds’ (II.v). Marianne seizes on the thought gratefully: all keen huntsmen will be staying in the country. And then she naturally begins projecting her wishes on to the weather: ‘it cannot be expected to last long . . . Frosts will soon set in, and in all probability with severity. In another day or two, perhaps; this extreme mildness can hardly last longer—nay, perhaps it may freeze to-night!’ Marianne’s talk of the weather comically epitomises her folly, for she speaks as if there were some reason for her wishes to come to pass – as if what is merely her desire were some fact in the external world. She is ‘happy in the mildness of the weather, and still happier in her expectation of a frost’. Suddenly she is transformed into a keen, though hopelessly biased, meteorologist, ‘busy in observing the direction of the wind, watching the variations of the sky and imagining an alteration in the air’. We know that there is some more human and disturbing explanation of his silence, but Marianne will have only the elements to blame. One delusion (the weather is the reason) becomes another (the weather is changing to bring him to her). We, like Elinor, are ‘alternately diverted and pained’.

  Her folly continues. At Cleveland she likes to wander in the grounds ‘in free and luxurious solitude’, and on her first day the morning is ‘fine and dry’ and she can indulge herself. However, ‘Marianne, in her plan of employment abroad, had not calculated for any change of weather during their stay at Cleveland’ (even though it is April).

  With great surprise therefore, did she find herself prevented by a settled rain from going out again after dinner. She had depended on a twilight walk to the Grecian temple, and perhaps all over the grounds, and an evening merely cold or damp would not have deterred her from it; but an heavy and settled rain even she could not fancy dry or pleasant weather for walking (III. vi).

  It is striking that only when she is penitent and recuperating, near the end of the novel, does she begin talking of the weather rationally (III. x). She will take walks with Elinor, she says, ‘When the weather is settled, and I have recovered my strength’.

  Yet the weather will not influence all alike. When hot weather comes to Mansfield Park, everyone (except Fanny) is out riding and determined to be pleased, ‘the heat only supplying inconvenience enough to be talked of with pleasure’ (I. vii). Fanny, meanwhile, roasted by Mrs Norris, is reduced to headaches and tearfulness. In Emma the hot June weather of the Donwell strawberry party is perceived differently by different characters. Mr Woodhouse is indoors with a fire; Mrs Elton is bringing on heatstroke with all her talking and strawberry picking; Emma finds the day delicious. Frank Churchill arrives late with a catalogue of complaints about the weather.

  The heat was excessive; he had never suffered any thing like it—almost wished he had staid at home—nothing killed him like heat—he could bear any degree of cold, etc., but heat was intolerable—and he sat down, at the greatest possible distance from the slight remains of Mr. Woodhouse’s fire, looking very deplorable. (III. vi)

  As ever with him, this is a blind. He is agitated because he has fallen out with Jane Fairfax, whom he has met in the road walking home to Highbury. ‘I am glad I have done being in love with him. I should not like a man who is so soon discomposed by a hot morning,’ thinks Emma, foolishly – for she has not been in love with him and it is not the hot morning that has rumpled him. He is merely fixing his disconte
nt on the weather. ‘You will all be going soon I suppose; the whole party breaking up. I met one as I came—Madness in such weather!—absolute madness!’ The weather has nothing really to do with his feelings.

  The poets of Austen’s lifetime were happy to use the pathetic fallacy. ‘O there is blessing in this gentle breeze . . .’ begins the greatest poem of the Romantic era, Wordsworth’s The Prelude. The elements conspire to assure the poet that Nature restores and strengthens and delights him. We come near such discovery of human feelings reflected in the elements in Persuasion, where Anne is prone to find the fading autumn light of the first half of the novel an index of her own melancholy. As she waits on her own at Uppercross for Lady Russell’s carriage to fetch her from her sister’s house she muses on the likely (as she thinks it) betrothal of Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove. She has an hour for such reflections, ‘on a dark November day, a small thick rain almost blotting out the very few objects ever to be discerned from the windows’ (II. i). This autumnal novel uses touches of weather which we hardly notice at first but which suggest the heroine’s melancholy. When Anne arrives with Lady Russell in Bath, a place she dislikes, we get a ‘dim view of the extensive buildings, smoking in rain’ (II. ii). Anne’s companion is alive to the prospect of her ‘winter pleasures’; our heroine sees things differently.

  The nearest to a pathetic fallacy that Austen truly hazards comes in Emma : ‘The weather added what it could of gloom’ (III. xii). Emma has found out about Frank Churchill’s engagement to Jane Fairfax and is contemplating the possible pairing of Mr Knightley and Harriet Smith. The world is narrowing. ‘A cold stormy rain set in’ – unseasonal for July. ‘The weather affected Mr. Woodhouse’, requiring Emma ceaselessly to be attentive to him in order to keep him ‘tolerably comfortable’. The evening of rain lengthens out like the long prospect of her future days with only her father for company. We should not merely think that Mr Woodhouse is foolish for letting the grim weather get to him. Commenting on recent ‘terrible’ weather in a letter to Martha Lloyd, Austen described its effect on Mrs Austen. ‘My Mother slept through a good deal of Sunday, but still it was impossible not to be disordered by such a sky, & even yesterday she was but poorly’ (Letters, 82). That ‘impossible’ does not sound sarcastic: grim weather was naturally grim for the spirits, and where a person was easily indisposed (Mr Woodhouse or Mrs Austen) it could easily make them ‘poorly’. ‘The weather continued much the same all the following morning; and the same loneliness, and the same melancholy, seemed to reign at Hartfield’ (III. xiii). But then it shifts: ‘the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared; it was summer again’ (III. xiii). Emma can escape into the shrubbery at Hartfield. The weather has liberated her from her gloom and self-absorption – and from her father. She has her ‘spirits freshened’ by the welcome fine weather and soon finds herself joined by Mr Knightley. ‘He meant to walk with her, she found.’ At the critical moment in their conversation, where he offers a revelation and she declines to know it, they reach the house and she decides to ‘take another turn’ around the garden. A new, benign climate blesses their exchange, and he gets the chance to tell her not that he wishes to marry Harriet – which was her fear – but that he loves her. It is the walk in the sudden fine weather that allows for Mr Knightley’s proposal, apparently unpremeditated before he discovers the occasion. The shrewd reader will regard the final betrothal of Emma and Mr Knightley as inevitable, from the moment we know that he is the only person ever to find fault with her. But the best comedy recruits chance, and the lucky change of weather in Emma is there to let us imagine how it might have been otherwise.

  EIGHT

  Do We Ever See the Lower Classes?

  ‘The man who fetches our letters every morning (one of our men, I forget his name) shall inquire for yours too and bring them to you.’

  Emma, II. xvi

  It is usual to observe that Jane Austen’s novels have no room for the labouring classes. Defenders will say that she is simply limiting herself to the world and the genteel classes that she knew; critics will suggest that the exclusion from her fiction of all except gentlemen and ladies shows a certain narrowness of the imagination, for she was certainly surrounded by members of the labouring classes. In Chawton when she arrived, the majority of the 400 or so inhabitants were forestry or agricultural workers.1 The charge of the critics is worth a careful answer, since Austen herself invites the reader to be unsettled by one of her own characters’ absolute negligence of the lower orders. Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park has inherited a rich Norfolk estate. When he is trying to woo Fanny Price in Portsmouth, he talks of how he has been doing good on behalf of industrious families there. ‘He had introduced himself to some tenants whom he had never seen before; he had begun making acquaintance with cottages whose very existence, though on his own estate, had been hitherto unknown to him’ (III. x). His account is ‘well aimed’. ‘To be the friend of the poor and oppressed!’ The exclamation mark gives us the force of Fanny’s unspoken response. Yet his account also implies the carelessness of his landlordism before now and the invisibility to him of those beneath his social horizon (even if they are paying him rent).

  Some of her characters acknowledge poverty. It is the arch-snob Emma Woodhouse who pays ‘a charitable visit’ to ‘a poor sick family’ in Emma (I. x). The account of the visit seems suspended between endorsement and satire: Emma is ‘very compassionate’ and has ‘no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue’ – even if she does afterwards embark on some sermonising to Harriet. Yet there is no doubt of the ‘wretchedness’ of what she has seen. She has given money as well as counsel, and soon a child comes from the cottage with a pitcher to get broth from Hartfield. Later, when walking with Harriet and trying to divert her protégée’s mind from thoughts of Mr Elton, she talks of ‘what the poor must suffer in winter’ (II. i). The rich are expected to relieve the poor. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot is ashamed to know that, with the Crofts installed in Kellynch Hall instead of her father and sister, ‘the poor’ are sure of ‘the best attention and relief’ (II. i). Having returned to Kellynch from Uppercross to stay with Lady Russell, Anne herself engages in more than one ‘visit of charity in the village’ (I. ii).

  What is poverty? There is Mrs Smith in Persuasion: ‘She was a widow, and poor’ (II. v). She rents two rooms in a cheap part of Bath. Unable to walk, she relies on a servant (Mary) whom she shares with all the other occupants of her lodgings. She has to be rung for. Mrs Smith’s very poverty seems to put her on a conversational level with those to whom Austen’s characters do not usually talk. When Anne visits her after the concert, she already knows much about the gathering ‘through the short cut of a laundress and a waiter’ (II. ix). Suddenly you catch a world of chat and information passing beneath the hearing of genteel characters. ‘Did you observe the woman who opened the door to you, when you called yesterday?’ she asks Anne (II. ix). Anne of course noticed ‘no one in particular’ – when in fact it was Nurse Rooke, who observed her closely, knowing much that was said about Mr Elliot’s relationship with her. Yet Mrs Smith’s status, which has made her the conversational companion of members of the lower classes, is temporary. Her circumstances have been reduced by her husband’s improvidence and Mr Elliot’s nefariousness, and like some character from Victorian fiction, she is restored to deserving affluence at the end of the novel.

  Another character reduced from gentility is Miss Bates in Emma. Mr Knightley explicitly says ‘She is poor’ (III. vii), but she and her ageing mother, living in a couple of upstairs rooms, themselves employ one maid-of-all-work, Patty, who cooks and cleans. Emma is a novel which lets you feel the embarrassment – or Hobbesian carelessness – of those who are luckily rich and are living close to those who are unluckily poor. Austen inserts some entirely unnecessary evidence of poverty in Highbury into one of Miss Bates’s rambling monologues. She is trying to remember when she first heard that her niece had accepted Mrs Elton’s
arrangement of a governess’s post, and recollects Mr Elton being called out of the room by ‘old John Abdy’s son’ (III. viii). We find out from Miss Bates, ever particular, that the old man is a bedridden former clerk to the vicar (her father), and that she visits him. His son, an ostler at the Crown, is after parish relief for him, and must persuade Mr Elton into dispensing it.

  The crucial distinction is between those who employ servants, and those who do not. Almost all the named characters who belong to the latter category in Austen’s novels are themselves servants; to her first readers, as habituated to the presence of servants as the novelist, they would not have been invisible at all. Indeed, her novels rely on the readers ‘seeing’ these servants in a way that we have forgotten to do. Her characters are wise not to forget that they are often observed by servants. Colonel Brandon recalls how his planned elopement with Eliza, the woman he loved who was promised in marriage to his brother, was scotched by a servant. ‘The treachery, or the folly, of my cousin’s maid betrayed us’ (II. ix). It is a foolish person who does not shape conversation to take account of the presence of servants. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and the Gardiners are relieved when Mrs Bennet withdraws to her room in the wake of Lydia’s elopement, ‘for they knew that she had not prudence enough to hold her tongue before the servants, while they waited at table’ (III. v). Hearing the account of her mother’s reactions when the news about Lydia was first broken, Elizabeth cries out that every servant must have known ‘the whole story before the end of the day’. And when the servants know, so does the world. They are self-interested monitors, who will not necessarily protect those whom they watch. Lady Catherine de Bourgh boasts of having sent two servants with her niece to Ramsgate (‘I am excessively attentive to all these things’), but they do not manage to prevent the planned elopment (I. xiv). In fact, the scheme is facilitated by a diabolical servant, Mrs Younge, the former governess to Miss Darcy