What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  The most powerful example of such brief misunderstanding, happily corrected, occurs in Emma, when Mr Knightley struggles to declare himself to the heroine. ‘I must tell what you will not ask’ (III. xiii). Emma thinks that he is about to tell her of his love for Harriet and stops him: ‘don’t speak it, don’t speak it’. He complies, in ‘deep mortification’, and for just a moment Austen lets you see how a misunderstanding might end hopes of a happy ending. Only some better instinct – ‘Emma could not bear to give him pain’ – makes her change her mind, allowing the revelation that ‘Harriet’s hopes had been entirely groundless, a mistake, a delusion, as complete a delusion as any of her own’. Mr Knightley is allowed to declare himself, but not before we have known that hesitation, that possibility of failure. Austen loves blunders because they show the difference between what we can understand of her characters, and what they can understand of each other. This final near-blunder allows Emma, for once, to understand everything, while Mr Knightley never grasps and will never grasp that Emma imagined him as Harriet’s future husband. ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.’ It might be the motto of Austen’s fiction.

  FIFTEEN

  What Do Characters Read?

  ‘He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.’

  Emma, I. iv

  In Ang Lee’s 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility, scripted by Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, in the character of poetry-loving Marianne Dashwood, reads Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds . . .’) aloud with Willoughby, played by Greg Wise. Shakespeare’s paean to lovers’ constancy (in fact addressed to a young man) is a popular choice for contemporary wedding services and must have seemed a natural choice for the screen Marianne. Lee and Thompson clearly thought it even more significant given Willoughby’s later inconstancy. To push the point home, they had Winslet recite it again later in the film, her love now disappointed, as she looks at Combe Magna (the marital home that never was) through the rain.

  The film-makers were on to something. Austen’s novel is much concerned with the influence of reading, and Marianne puts a premium on literary discernment. Willoughby is qualified to be her partner by his ability to talk in the right way about the right books. In her first conversation with him, she excitedly discovers their shared tastes: ‘her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before’ (I. iii). Willoughby happily agrees with her every literary opinion. He has quite enough ‘sensibility’ to respond in the right way to books, or to know that this beautiful girl rates such responsiveness very highly. Perhaps he senses what Austen’s first readers were expected to infer: that Marianne’s ‘sensibility’ – apparently all instinct and spontaneity – was itself learned from her reading. Books instruct her strongest feelings. As far as Marianne is concerned, Willoughby has himself walked out of a book. ‘His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story’ (I. ix).

  It is difficult to think of a novelist who makes reading a more animating part of her characters’ lives than Jane Austen. Her completed fiction begins, in Northanger Abbey, with a heroine whose errors are entirely the product of books: the Gothic novels that she devours and then confuses with reality. The novel on which she was working when she died, Sanditon, has at its centre a character, Sir Edward Denham, who ‘had read more sentimental Novels than agreed with him’ (Ch. 8) and has begun to fancy himself the seductive rake from a Samuel Richardson novel. Reading takes possession of Austen’s characters; how and what they read reveals them. Yet the film’s use of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets is poetic licence. The Sonnets were little regarded in Austen’s day, and unlikely reading matter for either Marianne or her dashing lover, alert as they both are to literary fashion. In the novel, what does Willoughby read with the Dashwoods? Something surprising. When he is unaccountably called away to London, promising no return and sending Marianne into a histrionic ‘violent oppression of spirits’, his departure brings to an end the book that they have been enjoying en famille:

  one evening, Mrs. Dashwood, accidentally taking up a volume of Shakespeare, exclaimed,

  ‘We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away before we could get through it. We will put it by, that when he comes again . . . But it may be months, perhaps, before that happens.’ (I. xvi)

  It is jolting to think of Willoughby and the Dashwoods sharing the parts of a play whose protagonist dwells so often on the sexual urges of his mother and stepfather, and where ‘the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed’ is so vividly imagined. (It is just possible that they were reading a safer version: a Family Shakespeare, expurgated by Thomas Bowdler’s sister Harriet, had been published in 1807.) The choice of play testifies to the literary seriousness of the Dashwoods, and to the willingness of Marianne’s suitor to take on the most demanding literary parts, for we are surely invited to imagine that Willoughby will have been rendering Hamlet himself.

  Willoughby reads his way into the Dashwoods’ hearts – ‘he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward unfortunately wanted’ (I. x). Reading is important to the Dashwoods, and Elinor has to assure her sister that Edward’s ‘enjoyment of books is exceedingly great’ (I. iv). The hyperbole is a measure of her anxiety. Reading matters. Reading sets the Dashwood girls apart from the empty-headed ladies and gentlemen on whose company they are forced.

  Though nothing could be more polite than Lady Middleton’s behaviour to Elinor and Marianne, she did not really like them at all. Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given. (II. xiv)

  Why ‘satirical’? Because she is made to feel uneasy: Elinor and Marianne are too clever by half and take themselves off elsewhere, to a world of books. Those who spend much time reading are evidently not satisfied with Lady Middleton’s world. Austen cannot resist the clever speculation, ‘perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical’. Lady Middleton senses that she might be laughed at, and yet cannot quite imagine why.

  The Dashwoods are readers in a non-reading world. As Elinor weeps over her discovery of Edward’s secret engagement to Lucy Steele, she knows that he will not be happy ‘with a wife like her—illiterate, artful, and selfish’ (II. i). It is an extraordinary combination of adjectives, never used before or since. Lucy can read and write (though the grammar of her letters is highly faulty). ‘Illiterate’ means that she has not read books. The word reflects Elinor’s judgement. ‘Lucy was naturally clever . . . but her powers had received no aid from education, she was ignorant and illiterate’ (I. xxii). To Austen’s heroine the deficiency seems severe. Lucy’s ignorance of books will be as much a torment to poor Edward, her future husband, as her cunning and self-interestedness. Such a devastating character sketch presumes that reading is good for you, especially if you are a woman. Austen herself had less than two years’ formal schooling and relied on her father’s instruction and access to his library of some 500 books, a large collection for a country clergyman (Letters, 31). You can sense something personal to the author when she distinguishes in Mansfield Park between the rich Bertram girls, who have a governess and suppose Fanny ‘stupid at learning’, and the heroine herself, with her native ‘fondness for reading which, properly directed, must be an education in itself’ (I. ii).

  Those who do not read are the worse for it. When we hear in the opening sentence of Persuasion that Sir Walter Elliot ‘never took up any book but the Baronetage’, we catch not just h
is aristocratic self-regard but also his stupidity. Sir Walter being so preoccupied with the signs of his status, Kellynch Hall must have its stock of books, probably a library. And this is all he reads! Some at least know well enough to pretend to ‘literacy’. ‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!’ exclaims Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, failing in her attempts to draw Mr Darcy away from his book (I. xi). Three chapters and a day earlier, this paragon of disingenuousness was aiming a barb at Elizabeth for not playing cards because she was ‘a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else’. Now, seeing what Mr Darcy is doing, Miss Bingley has a book in her hand, but chosen, idiotically, only ‘because it was the second volume of his’. She knows that books do furnish an impressive home, and disloyally dissociates herself from her own father who, though rich from ‘trade’, failed to stock enough shelves with these genteel objects. ‘“I am astonished,” said Miss Bingley, “that my father should have left so small a collection of books”’ (I. viii). She knows enough, too, to compliment Mr Darcy on his books. ‘What a delightful library you have at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!’ Proudly and stiffly he observes that building it has been ‘the work of many generations’. Her response is intended flattery. ‘And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books.’ With the emphasis on expenditure, this is just tactless enough to let us sense her evaluation of books by cost and yardage.

  Lack of reading in a man is a sure sign of worthlessness. In Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram sees ‘some part of the truth’ about Mr Rushworth, his daughter’s proposed spouse: he is ‘an inferior young man, as ignorant in business as in books’ (II. iii). In Northanger Abbey, Catherine may be foolish to believe too thoroughly in Mrs Radcliffe’s novel, but the boorish John Thorpe is worse when he reveals his ‘illiteracy’ by mistaking Samuel Richardson’s study in drawing-room manners, Sir Charles Grandison, for a Gothic novel. The best men read, though their reading does not seem quite so health-giving when they tell women of its benefits. Mr Darcy is deliciously absurd, to us and Elizabeth, in his pompous pro forma of a woman’s necessary accomplishments. He rounds off his list – ‘a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages’ – with, ‘To all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of the mind by extensive reading’ (I. viii). Elizabeth has done this reading, but naturally now wants to deny it. More resigned is Mr Knightley, with his ironical approval of the reading lists that Emma has drawn up for herself over the years. ‘I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule’ (I. v). When Emma takes up Harriet Smith, conducting her through the right books is part of her plan.

  Her views of improving her little friend’s mind, by a great deal of useful reading and conversation, had never yet led to more than a few first chapters, and the intention of going on to-morrow. It was much easier to chat than to study; much pleasanter to let her imagination range and work at Harriet’s fortune, than to be labouring to enlarge her comprehension. (I. ix)

  Emma understands what ‘improvement’ entails, but hardly embarks on it. The wit of these sentences is their sympathy with her avoidance of labour. Trying to make Harriet more ‘literate’ is probably a fool’s errand, when ‘prettiness’ is much more likely to assure her a contented future.

  Being well-read is not beyond suspicion. There is one quotation in all Austen’s fiction from Paradise Lost, and who supplies it? Henry Crawford, naturally – his literacy another aspect of his dangerous charm. In private conversation at the Parsonage with his sister Mary and half-sister Mrs Grant, he fends off the latter’s wish that he marry one of the Bertram girls with a fragment of Milton: ‘I consider the blessing of a wife as most justly described in those discreet lines of the poet, “Heaven’s last best gift”’ (I. iv). His emphasis nicely misinterprets Adam’s enraptured description of Eve (‘My fairest, my espous’d, my latest found’) in Book V of Paradise Lost. The turning on its head of the poem’s intended sentiment is his witty literary blasphemy. Wonderfully, the only other Austen character who quotes Milton is the appalling Mrs Elton in Emma. Recalling her courtship by Mr Elton, she tells the utterly uninterested Mr Weston, ‘he was apt to be in despair, and exclaim that he was sure at this rate it would be May before Hymen’s saffron robe would be put on for us’ (II. xviii). Her adaptation of lines from Milton’s ‘l’Allegro’ (‘There let Hymen oft appear/In Saffron robe, with Taper clear’) invoking the Greek God of marriage is a gloriously pretentious euphemism, all the more satisfying because she should not be broadcasting details of her courtship at all.

  Those who truly love reading attract the misjudgements or suspicions of others. In Persuasion Anne overhears, from behind a hedge, Louisa Musgrove telling Captain Wentworth of her rejection, some six years earlier, of Charles Musgrove’s proposal of marriage. Louisa says that her parents ‘think Charles might not be learned and bookish enough to please Lady Russell, and that therefore, she persuaded Anne to refuse him’ (I. x). This is all wrong: Anne rejected Charles’s proposal because she was still in love with Wentworth. The brilliance of the passage is that we overhear the dialogue with Anne, sensing the pressure of her feelings. Louisa’s misconception reflects the easy belief that book-lovers are a species apart. Anne herself confirms this. When she hears the news of Louisa’s engagement to Captain Benwick, the narrative follows the surprised sequence of her thoughts. ‘Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove! The high-spirited, joyous-talking Louisa Musgrove, and the dejected, thinking, feeling, reading, Captain Benwick, seemed each of them everything that would not suit the other. Their minds most dissimilar! Where could have been the attraction?’ (II. vi) This use of ‘reading’ as an adjective has passed out of our vocabularies. The OED cites an example from the Monthly Magazine of 1797, which tells you how unusual a ‘reading man’ was by talking of ‘my residence at the university, and a constant intercourse with both reading and non-reading men’. Captain Wentworth reverts to the same adjective when expressing to Anne his own astonishment at the engagement of Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove.

  ‘I confess that I do think there is a disparity, too great a disparity, and in a point no less essential than mind.—I regard Louisa Musgrove as a very amiable, sweet-tempered girl, and not deficient in understanding, but Benwick is something more. He is a clever man, a reading man—and I confess, that I do consider his attaching himself to her with some surprise.’ (II. viii)

  Benwick is an odd sort of person. ‘I am sure Lady Russell would like him,’ says Charles Musgrove, ‘He is just Lady Russell’s sort. Give him a book, and he will read all day long’ (II. ii). It is clearly a form of eccentricity.

  Anne is appointed as his companion at Lyme because of her own relish of reading, revealed earlier during an autumnal walk.

  Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling (I. x).

  Anne carries in her head a selection of poetical ‘beauties’, as anthologies of the ‘best’ extracts were called in Austen’s day. However, she is rueful about the self-indulgent pleasures of autumnal verse: ‘after another half mile of gradual ascent through large enclosures, where the ploughs at work, and fresh-made path spoke the farmer, counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence and meaning to have spring again, they gained the summit . . .’ Life pushes poetic melancholy aside. When she walks with Benwick, it is contemporary poetry that he wants to discuss – and declaim:

  having talked of poetry, the richness of the present
age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether Marmion or The Lady of the Lake were to be preferred, and how ranked the Giaour and The Bride of Abydos; and moreover, how the Giaour was to be pronounced, he showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope that he did not always read only poetry . . . (I. xi)

  It is 1814, the mid-point of what we now call the Romantic period, but he does not have Wordsworth or Coleridge or Blake in mind. He names Walter Scott and Lord Byron, the two best-selling poets of the day.

  For the discerning reader there would be an edge of comedy in the English naval man’s taste for Byron’s ‘impassioned’ tales. The Bride of Abydos is a ‘Turkish Tale’ about the illicit passion of the Pasha’s daughter Zuleika for her cousin Selim. In The Giaour, Leila, a haremite of the Turk, Hassan, has a clandestine love affair with ‘the Giaour’ (the word means ‘infidel’). Her master sews her into a sack and casts her into the sea. The Giaour kills Hassan and many years later, having become a monk, he makes his dying confession to a fellow monk, denying religious consolation and clinging only to a vision of his lover.

  I would not, if I might, be blest;

  I want no paradise, but rest.

  ‘Twas then, I tell thee, father! Then

  I saw her; yes, she lived again;