What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  Persuasion is arguably the Austen novel that most shares its heroine’s experiences and feelings, yet in its opening chapters she only slowly becomes present to us. We come to her via her family’s vanities and follies – ‘she was only Anne’. She speaks for the first time in the third chapter, to express her admiration of the navy for reasons that are wholly unclear. A few pages later she speaks for only the second time, showing herself unaccountably well-informed about Admiral Croft’s position in the navy and his war service. Only Mr Shepherd’s forgetfulness at the end of the chapter about the name of Mrs Croft’s brother – ‘the gentleman who lived a few years back, at Monkford. Bless me! What was his name?’ – forces an answer from Anne – ‘“You mean Mr. Wentworth, I suppose,” said Anne’ – an exchange that unleashes her feelings and forces her story on our attentions. Thus far the novel has been mimicking her family’s neglect of her. After this opening there are only three moments in the novel when Anne is absent. The first comes just after Mary tells her that Captain Wentworth has found her ‘so altered he should not have known you again’ (I. vii). The narrative then switches to Captain Wentworth, to tell us that he had indeed ‘used such words’ and to show him discussing his interest in marriage with his sister.

  He had been most warmly attached to her, and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal; but, except from some natural sensation of curiosity, he had no desire of meeting her again. Her power with him was gone for ever.

  It was now his object to marry. (I. vii)

  It is an audacious turning aside from the heroine. We briefly penetrate directly into Captain Wentworth’s thoughts for the only time in the novel, in order to be told something about him that is entirely untrue: ‘Her power with him was gone for ever.’ It is self-delusion masquerading as narrative fact. He tells himself that Anne’s power over him is ‘gone for ever’ because he would like to believe it to be true.

  Anne is absent only twice more. In the first instance, we briefly see the Musgrove sisters at the window, looking out for Captain Wentworth, as Charles Hayter drones on about the Uppercross curacy (I. ix). It is a glimpse of the half-comic turmoil that Captain Wentworth is causing in the lives of the sisters, and of Charles Hayter, Henrietta’s now displaced admirer. And finally there is the strange little scene much later in a shop (Molland’s) in Bath. Anne has taken shelter from the rain with Elizabeth and Mrs Clay. Captain Wentworth enters with a party of others. They have some awkward conversation. Then Mr Elliot arrives to take Anne off. But we do not leave with her; we stay in the shop. The ladies of Captain Wentworth’s party chat about Anne.

  ‘. . . One can guess what will happen there. He is always with them; half lives in the family, I believe. What a very good-looking man!’

  ‘Yes, and Miss Atkinson, who dined with him once at the Wallises’, says he is the most agreeable man she ever was in company with.’

  ‘She is pretty, I think; Anne Elliot; very pretty when one comes to look at her. It is not the fashion to say so, but I confess I admire her more than her sister.’

  ‘Oh! so do I.’

  ‘And so do I. No comparison. But the men are all wild after Miss Elliot. Anne is too delicate for them.’ (II. vii)

  It is an unobtrusively brilliant use of dialogue. Nothing is said of Captain Wentworth’s thoughts, but we listen to this exchange only because he is listening. In Anne’s absence, we hear about her likely engagement to Mr Elliot with all Captain Wentworth’s silent attention. We hear the verdict on her looks with all his silent interest. We feel his jealousy aroused and Anne’s allure, her ‘power over him’, confirmed. It is appropriate that this happens once she has left the scene. For Austen often lets you understand her heroines by allowing you to glimpse things in their absence. Anne is removed so that we can feel her influence. It is fictional proof that we know someone best when we can see them in their absence, when we believe in them when they are not there.

  THIRTEEN

  How Much Money Is Enough?

  ‘My father would be well pleased if the gentlemen were richer, but he has no other fault to find.’

  Persuasion, II. x

  The question of money is posed bluntly enough in Sense and Sensibility, when Elinor and Marianne Dashwood debate the importance or unimportance of wealth in the company of Edward Ferrars. Marianne reacts indignantly to Elinor’s declaration that happiness has much to do with ‘wealth’: ‘“Elinor, for shame!” said Marianne, “money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned”’ (I. xvii). A ‘competence’ is the contemporary term for enough money, and Elinor takes up the word, smilingly suggesting that Marianne’s ‘competence’ would be equivalent to her ‘wealth’. The exchange that follows proves her right. Marianne’s idea of a ‘competence’ is ‘About eighteen hundred or two thousand a-year; not more than that.’ The modern reader will know from trustworthy Elinor’s response – ‘Two thousand a-year! One is my wealth!’ – that Marianne has named a large sum; the first readers of the novel would have felt how very large it was – and therefore how very absurd Marianne was being. Defending herself against the implication that her demands are ‘extravagant’, Marianne herself mentions some of these. She hopes for ‘a proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters’.

  Austen is always careful with her sums of money and particularly so in Sense and Sensibility, which has more talk of money than any other of her novels. Discussing the business of correcting proofs of this novel, she told Cassandra about her desire to correct some of the figures quoted. ‘The Incomes remain as they were, but I will get them altered if I can’ (Letters, 71). Presumably the sums of money remained the same as in an earlier version of the novel and no longer carried exactly the right implications. The opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility are painstakingly precise about money. Elinor and Marianne’s father had ‘only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal’ (I. i). Their great-uncle leaves the three sisters ‘a thousand pounds a-piece’. The total capital sum of £10,000 would give a total income of about £500 a year, which allows them their modest, harassed gentility. (Austen’s first readers would have known what kind of income was represented by the capital sums specified in the novels, characters relying on returns of 5 per cent, the usual interest on investments in government funds.) In the second chapter, Mrs John Dashwood accurately calculates the Dashwoods’ income. Yet the modern reader cannot know exactly what to think when she exclaims, ‘Only conceive how comfortable they will be! Five hundred a-year! I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it’ (I. ii). We do know by this stage of the dialogue that Mrs John Dashwood is meanness personified, and we catch the ring of absurdity when she completes her peroration by assuring her husband that ‘as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be much more able to give you something.’ We already know that John Dashwood has inherited an estate that gives him some £4,000 a year, in addition to his wife’s money and an inheritance from his mother, so we can easily understand how her persuasion of her spouse has triumphed over truth and logic. But how adequate or inadequate is that £500?

  In the very process of allowing himself to be persuaded out of allowing his sisters a regular income, John Dashwood concedes that they might easily find themselves under financial pressure. ‘A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money,’ he assures himself (I. ii). Historians caution against applying some blind multiplier to produce a modern equivalent of sums of money from the past, but it is not difficult to put numbers to some of the early nineteenth-century outlays that characterised degrees of affluence. We have helpful information from Austen’s own family. After his retirement George Austen enjoyed an income of up to £600 per annum from his clerical livings and an annuity (Letters, 29); all this disappeared with his death. It paid for a rented house in Bath (the rent alone taking a quarter of his income) and t
hree servants. Yet there is evidence that this income was only just sufficient: after three years the Austens moved from their house in Sydney Place to another in Green Park Buildings, an address that they had previously rejected. This might well have been an economy measure.1 After Rev George Austen’s death the Austen ladies had to live on £450 a year between them, much of it contributed by Jane Austen’s brothers.2 In a now notorious (because Mrs John Dashwood-like) letter to his brother Frank, Henry Austen explained unconvincingly how ‘comfortable’ this would make them.3 In fact it reduced them to employing just one servant. In the summer months they had to become peripatetic, living with various relatives and friends in turn. The turn for the worse is instructive. We will find in Jane Austen’s fiction, as in her life, £500–£600 per annum is the usual range of a ‘competence’ for a couple or a family unit. We might remember that John Dashwood, after his promise to his father on his deathbed, contemplates giving his half-sisters each a thousand pounds more. This would raise their joint annual income by £150 and move them into affluence. Naturally he decides against this.

  An adequate income for a single person can be much less. Mr and Mrs Norris have ‘very little less than a thousand a year’ while Mr Norris is alive (I. i). After his death, Mrs Norris might be even more affluent. ‘I hope, sister, things are not so very bad with you neither—considering. Sir Thomas says you will have six hundred a year,’ says Lady Bertram (I. iii). ‘Lady Bertram, I do not complain. I know I cannot live as I have done, but I must retrench where I can, and learn to be a better manager. I have been a liberal housekeeper enough, but I shall not be ashamed to practise economy now. My situation is as much altered as my income.’ Mrs Norris savours the prospect of financial stringencies. ‘It is unknown how much was consumed in our kitchen by odd comers and goers. At the White house, matters must be better looked after. I must live within my income, or I shall be miserable; and I own it would give me great satisfaction to be able to do rather more—to lay by a little at the end of the year.’ The modern reader easily suspects the gist of this: that Mrs Norris’s economies are her pleasure rather than her necessity. Austen’s first readers would have known that this widow’s income went well beyond her needs. Mrs Norris’s affluence is all the greater when one considers that she is almost certainly living rent-free in ‘a small house of Sir Thomas’s in the village’.

  Famously, Jane Austen names sums.

  It makes me most uncomfortable to see

  An English spinster of middle class

  Describe the amorous effect of ‘brass’,

  Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

  The economic basis of society.4

  Austen’s interest in money does not in itself single her out from other women novelists of her age. As Edward Copeland has shown in his brilliantly detailed study Women Writing about Money, ‘The yearly income is an obsessive motif in women’s fiction at the turn of the eighteenth century.’5 What is extraordinary about Austen is not her candour but the precision with which she shows the influence of particular sums on particular people. Most of her major characters come with income tickets attached, not so much because the novelist wants us to notice how important money and the lack of money might be, as because she wants us to see her characters noticing these things. It is their understanding of money – and how they are bound to or separated from each other by money – that is at stake. There is a painfully revealing example in Emma where Miss Bates is telling Emma about Jane Fairfax’s prospects as a governess to the Sucklings’ friends the Smallridges. Having long fended off Mrs Elton’s officious suggestions, she has relented and is going. ‘To a Mrs. Smallridge—charming woman—most superior—to have the charge of her three little girls—delightful children’ (III. viii). We should wince to hear Miss Bates parroting Mrs Elton’s assurances (in truth, she has no idea whether Mrs Smallridge is ‘charming’ or not). We know that any friend of Selina Suckling is a poor prospect as an employer, and Emma knows this just as well as us. But we and Emma know too that Miss Bates must make herself believe in the desirability of this apparently inescapable option. Emma’s feelings are troubled further when Miss Bates mentions her niece’s proposed salary. ‘It will be nothing but pleasure, a life of pleasure.—And her salary!—I really cannot venture to name her salary to you, Miss Woodhouse. Even you, used as you are to great sums, would hardly believe that so much could be given to a young person like Jane.’ No sum is actually specified, but we can feel that Emma Woodhouse, ‘handsome, clever, and rich’, knows how modest it must be. Most governesses at this time earned between £20 and £30 a year, some as little as £12.6 Jane Fairfax’s proposed salary would certainly be an amount to embarrass a woman whose income from her capital is about £1,500 a year. If Miss Bates were not an assured innocent in her declarations, you might suspect satire: ‘you, used as you are to great sums’. Nothing more needs to be said to exhibit the chasm about to open up between two young women who share much in the way of gentility, elegance and accomplishments. The exhibition is entirely dramatic: we are not told anything of how Emma feels about this cruel and merely lucky difference in their fortunes. We just see and feel her listening to Miss Bates with the knowledge of her own wealth heavy on her. We do not know exactly how much Miss Bates and her mother have to live on, but their ability to afford one all-purpose servant, Patty, suggests that it might be £100 per annum.7 Austen would have expected a contemporary reader to have noticed her recoiling from the ‘bad news’ that their chimney needed sweeping and the real difference to their diet that the gift of Woodhouse pork and Knightley apples can make.

  Perhaps Miss Bates does not know just how rich Miss Woodhouse is. If not, she is unusual. For the extraordinary thing is that everyone in Austen’s fiction seems to know about everyone else’s money. It is not so surprising that Mr Collins is able to tell Elizabeth Bennet, loftily, that he will make no demands on her father for a marriage portion, since he knows that ‘one thousand pounds in the four per cents, which will not be yours until after your mother’s decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to’ (I. xix). He is just repeating common knowledge. In Sense and Sensibility, when John Dashwood asks Elinor what Colonel Brandon’s fortune is, she does answer him and she does know: ‘I believe about two thousand a-year’ (II. xi). Elinor asks Mrs Jennings whether Miss Grey is ‘very rich’ and gets a definitive-sounding answer: ‘Fifty thousand pounds, my dear’ (II. viii). Elinor soon repeats the information to Colonel Brandon. Mrs Jennings also knows that Miss Grey is orphaned and has complete control over her fortune (and that she is disliked by her own guardians). Mansfield Park begins by informing us that ‘about thirty years ago’, Miss Maria Ward, ‘with only seven thousand pounds’, captivated Sir Thomas Bertram. ‘All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match’, as if the financial details were common knowledge. (Miss Ward takes only a little more than Mrs Bennet into marriage.) Edmund Bertram, having his well-founded doubts about Mr Rushworth’s capacities, says often to himself, ‘If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow’ (I. iv).

  This is a world in which everyone knows – or thinks they know – about everyone else’s money.

  If a novelist now were to tell us about somebody’s income, it would be an authorial confidence. When Austen does so, she is giving us information that is available to her characters. When Wickham switches his attentions from Elizabeth to Miss King, it is because of her ‘sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds’, a gain that seems entirely well-advertised (Pride and Prejudice, II. iii). Emma Woodhouse knows that Mr Elton has proposed to her only because she is ‘the heiress of thirty thousand pounds’ (I. xvi) – and she can be sure that he knows her worth. Emma in her turn knows that Miss Campbell is due to inherit twelve thousand pounds, and absurdly assumes that this was Mr Dixon’s only reason for marrying her, when he truly loved Jane Fairfax (II. ii). Incomes and inheritances are not confidential matters. Thus the extraordinary thing that Lady Catherine de Bourgh says to Elizabeth at
their first meeting about girls learning to play the piano. ‘The Miss Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income as yours’s’ (II. vi). This is amazingly rude, but still sayable. Not only is the income of another family a discussable matter – just – but it is also a knowable matter. Lady Catherine has done her research. ‘The topic itself was not hedged with the secrecy it possesses today. Letters and diaries sent along the news of other people’s incomes almost as a duty.’8 One of the most important original sources of information was the marriage settlement. Marriages among the landed and propertied involved legally binding settlements drawn up by lawyers (with no obligation to confidentiality).9 Such agreements required explicit calculations of the worth of each party. When Dr and Mrs Grant move to Mansfield, Mrs Norris is appalled at their indulgence of culinary luxury. ‘Inquire where she would, she could not find out that Mrs. Grant had ever had more than five thousand pounds’ (I. iii). The amount of money she took into marriage is more or less public information. Mrs Norris, we are to infer, had the same seven thousand pounds on marriage as her younger sister Maria, now Lady Bertram.

  In Sense and Sensibility Elinor bumps into her half-brother John Dashwood in a Piccadilly jeweller’s shop and he gives her the outlines of a proposed marriage settlement between Edward Ferrars and the Hon. Miss Morton, ‘only daughter of the late Lord Morton’ (II. xi). The young lady has thirty thousand pounds; Edward’s ‘most excellent mother, Mrs. Ferrars, with the utmost liberality, will come forward, and settle on him a thousand a-year’. Social historians should hesitate before taking this as evidence of the openness with which settlements were discussed: John Dashwood is money-obsessed, and we can hear his love of lucre behind the empty doublings of ‘most excellent’ and ‘utmost liberality’. (What he calls Mrs Ferrars’s ‘noble spirit’ will later be aptly demonstrated when she disinherits her younger son for the sin of become engaged to a portionless young woman.) He surely should not be bandying such financial arrangements in a West End shop. Especially he should not be doing so when he knows that his sister was attached to the man whose proposed marriage he describes. His obtuseness and vulgarity are made worse by his announcement that Mrs Ferrars, his mother-in-law, has just given his wife ‘bank-notes . . . to the amount of two hundred pounds’ (almost half the annual income of Elinor, her mother, and her sisters). ‘And extremely acceptable it is, for we must live at a great expense while we are here.’ The stupidity of his avarice is all in that phrase ‘extremely acceptable’, used in talking to a sister who is so pushed for money that she has come to the shop to negotiate the sale of ‘a few old-fashioned jewels of her mother’.