Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  This isn’t the only apparent autobiographical echo in Sense and Sensibility. The annual income of the Dashwood women, after Mr Dashwood has died, is £500. The Austen women had around £450 per annum to keep themselves on, plus Martha Lloyd’s contribution. Readers who leap to disliking Lucy Steele should perhaps bear in mind that there exists a degree of similarity between Lucy, who becomes engaged to a young man who’s been educated by her uncle, and Jane’s own sister, Cassandra, whose fiancé had been a pupil at the school the Reverend Austen ran at Steventon. The Steele sisters, who are very often away from home, and who pay for their board and lodging in the houses of various relations and acquaintances by entertaining any children, are not so very different to Jane and Cassandra. It’s clear from Jane’s letters that the two went on frequent visits, and were expected to take on quite a substantial amount of childcare when they did.

  Whether it was intended or not, the most painful echo surely lies in the opening pages of Sense and Sensibility, where the security of the Dashwood girls, and their mother, is sacrificed to the future of a toddling little boy; where a home, and almost everything in it, is lost, taken over by a sister-in-law who is seen as a usurper. This – as we know from Jane’s letters of January 1801 – is very much what happened, what she felt had happened, in her own family. The family home given up; financial possibilities sacrificed, and all for a small boy who was unlikely to want for much, all for a dream of carrying on the family name, of shoring up the family legacy. Was James Austen’s wife Mary, who brought friends to look around the Steventon vicarage while her in-laws were still living there, a real-life version of Sense and Sensibility’s acquisitive Fanny Dashwood, with her eye for ‘china’ and ‘any handsome article of furniture’? Well, perhaps. It’s tempting to believe so. At any rate, Jane specifically states that the Dashwood women take both the ‘books’ and Marianne’s ‘handsome pianoforte’ away with them, which is more than she had been allowed to do herself.

  The novel begins with the words, ‘The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex’. But ‘family’, it soon becomes clear, can expand or shrink at will. There’s little that is truly settled about the Dashwoods.

  The ‘old gentleman’ who we meet so briefly in the first paragraph, and whose last will and testament precipitates the plot, is the only survivor of his generation – an oldest son, who had ‘a sister’ (either unmarried or widowed, since she lived with him until her death) and, clearly, a younger brother. We know the last fact because the old gentleman has a nephew who shares his surname and is ‘the legal inheritor’ of the estate, that is, the person who would inherit it under intestacy laws. This is the first instance of a sibling pattern that we see repeated over and over again in the novel – a pattern of two brothers and a sister. It’s so neat a way of examining the question of inheritance that it looks very much as if it must be design.

  Other examples of the pattern are the Ferrars – Edward, the oldest, Robert, the second son, and Fanny, who marries into the Dashwood family – and the Brandons – Colonel Brandon had an older brother who is now dead, and he has, we know, a sister. It also appears in the family of Sir John Middleton, where, though we’re once told that there are four children, only three are particularised – John, ‘the second boy’ William, and ‘sweet little Annamaria’, small cousins of the Dashwood sisters.

  An early and generally very favourable review of the novel in the conservative, Church of England-affiliated British Critic announced that ‘there is a little perplexity in the genealogy of the first chapter, and the reader is somewhat bewildered among half-sisters, cousins, and so forth’.2 The bewilderment is deliberate, or so it seems to me. What Jane describes in the opening is the setting up of an entail – the same legal device for controlling inheritance which menaces the future well-being of the Bennet sisters in Jane’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice, and the Crawley family in the recent long-running television series Downton Abbey.

  Entails were only ever able to exist because English law assumes that something can be owned in two different ways by different people simultaneously.i Say I own a pen – it’s my pen, I bought it with money I earned myself. Legally and morally that pen is mine, there’s no question. I can do whatever I like with it: throw it away, give it away, sell it, leave it to a cats’ home in my will. But say I was left a watch by my grandfather and that his will also stated I should leave the watch to my eldest daughter. From the moment I inherit it with that instruction attached, she part-owns it too, the two of us own it together. I can wear it or keep it in a drawer, just as I like, but I can’t sell it, I can’t leave it to my nephew, and I can’t give it away. It has to go to her after my death, because she has a kind of ownership of it already – equitable ownership – and that ownership is enforceable through the courts.

  What the old gentleman does in his will – and what some ancestor of the Bennet family must have done too – is a more complicated version of this. In simple terms, he leaves Norland Park, the Dashwood family estate, to three individuals at the same time: his nephew, his great-nephew, and his great-great-nephew. His nephew owns it, but not outright; John Dashwood, and his son, little Harry, have ownership too, though they don’t have the right to use Norland until it’s their ‘turn’, so to speak. This doesn’t just control inheritance, it means that Elinor and Marianne’s father is hugely restricted as to what he can do with the property: ‘it was secured, in such a way, as to leave […] no power of providing for those who were most dear to him, and who most needed a provision by any charge on the estate, or by any sale of its valuable woods.’ He can’t raise a mortgage, because the land isn’t his to mortgage. He can’t sell the timber, because that counts as ‘waste’ – defrauding the other owners. But when John Dashwood takes over Norland, he can’t do those things either. And depending on the exact legal phrasing, this is a state of affairs that could continue indefinitely, with no one owner ever actually being able to deal freely with the property.j

  An entail basically forces adherence to primogeniture on a family – it makes explicit the superiority and greater importance of oldest sons.k No one else matters – not siblings, not widows, not younger sons, and certainly not daughters. Given that the term ‘family tree’ already existed before Jane was born, it isn’t such a stretch to wonder whether the name Dashwood was chosen deliberately. What she’s sketching out for her readers in the opening of the novel is, after all, a family tree in which all the extraneous branches and twigs are broken off, and cast aside.

  The opening chapter is bewildering because the concept it describes is. Jane is making explicit a deeply held (and deeply inconsistent) cultural belief – that women, the very people who are supposed to spend their life at home, in the bosom of their families, don’t really belong there. Whatever the domestic contribution of the Dashwood women – the ‘solid comfort’ and ‘cheerfulness’ they have provided, the ‘attention’ they have given – it’s worth nothing at all, its ‘value’ can easily be outweighed, ignored, dismissed. Behind Elinor and Marianne and Margaret and their mother are a whole imaginary army of others, generations of them, a disinherited multitude of Dashwoods both male and female.

  Jane wasn’t alone in questioning the fundamental fairness of primogeniture. The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft did it too, in her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, asserting that ‘children of the same parents’ have ‘an equal right’. The passage in which she makes this claim is worth looking at more closely.

  Wollstonecraft begins by talking about the common opposition between male ‘reason’ and female ‘sensibility’, before moving on to discuss how women are persuaded – or coerced – into devoting themselves to ‘the duties of a mother and the mistress of a family’. Next Wollstonecraft touches on inherited wealth, on its tendency to promote selfishness and vice, a state of affairs which she suggests will persist ‘till hereditary possessions are spread abroad [i.e. more widely]’. Then she goes back to talking about sensibility, about how women�
�s ‘power’ is ‘sensibility’ and how ‘men not aware of the consequence, do all they can to make this power swallow up every other’. For Wollstonecraft, ‘female sensibility’ becomes akin to sexual responsiveness; society being what it is, women are prepared and educated for only one thing – attracting a marriage partner. If they fail to do so, their sensibility is no use to them at all, because it’s no use to anyone else.

  Girls, who have been thus weakly educated [she continues], are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers. These brothers are, to view the fairest side of the question, good sort of men, and give as a favour, what children of the same parents had an equal right to. In this equivocal humiliating situation, a docile female may remain some time, with a tolerable degree of comfort. But, when the brother marries, a probable circumstance, from being considered as the mistress of the family, she is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of the master of the house, and his new partner.

  Who can recount the misery, which many unfortunate beings, whose minds and bodies are equally weak, suffer in such situations—unable to work and ashamed to beg? The wife, a cold-hearted, narrow-minded woman, and this is not an unfair supposition; for the present mode of education does not tend to enlarge the heart any more than the understanding, is jealous of the little kindness which her husband shows to his relations; and her sensibility not rising to humanity, she is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister.

  This is a longer chunk of text than I usually quote, but the reason, I imagine, becomes clear very quickly – here, in a nutshell, are the first few chapters of Sense and Sensibility, the relationships and resentments that develop between the various Dashwoods, and all of it tied up with a discussion of sensibility, inheritance, and the damaging effects of both.

  For Wollstonecraft, it’s clear that the current system of inheritance erodes instincts of fairness and generosity, that it warps the very idea of family and natural affection. In a society like this, even sensibility, fine feeling, a sense of connection to others, can only ever operate bluntly, selfishly, and with an eye to the main chance. And the sexual responsiveness that (most) men are looking for in women? Well that becomes something to be exchanged, too.

  The idea that Jane is drawing from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Sense and Sensibility isn’t a new one. If you put this passage in front of a roomful of students nearly all of them will pick out the parallels. It’s really quite obvious. But is it obvious enough for us to conclude that Jane meant her novel to be read as a Wollstonecraftian critique of women’s position in society? That rather depends, of course, on when she first came up with the story. As I pointed out in the first chapter, Wollstonecraft was subjected to a vicious character assassination after her death in 1797. Even before her death, her illicit relationship with the anarchist philosopher William Godwin had put her firmly in the sights of conservative thinkers. If Sense and Sensibility is a work of the 1790s or early 1800s then it looks like it was written as a deliberately and self-consciously feminist one. By 1811, of course, that effect would have been muted for a fair portion of readers who were less familiar with Wollstonecraft.

  What we can say is that Sense and Sensibility, even in 1811, would have been read as a novel about property, and inheritance – about greed and need, and the terrible, selfish things that families do to each other for the sake of money.

  In his poem Letter to Lord Byron, first published in the late 1930s, W.H. Auden talks about how profoundly unsettling he finds Jane’s novels:

  You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

  Besides her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

  It makes me most uncomfortable to see

  An English spinster of the middle class

  Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,

  Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

  The economic basis of society.

  Of all Jane’s novels it’s this one, the first to be published, that pays the most sustained attention to ‘the economic basis of society’ and to ‘brass’.

  ‘Brass’ has been slang for money since the middle ages; so too have ‘gold’ and ‘silver’. In the early nineteenth century ‘tin’ and ‘pewter’ came into use as well. In a letter to her niece Fanny, Jane complains that people aren’t buying Mansfield Park, borrowing the phrasing of one of her nephews: ‘tho’ I like praise as well as anybody’, she admits, ‘I like what Edward calls Pewter too.’3

  Sense and Sensibility is preoccupied with metal, particularly with metal as a means of exchange, as payment, or as a way of transferring wealth. John Dashwood and his wife obsess over the ‘plate’ which is taken away to Barton Cottage. ‘Plate’ is the massive silver dinner services, generally worth hundreds if not thousands of pounds – a secure way of storing money, with the added advantage of being readily sellable and reasonably portable. When Willoughby dismisses Colonel Brandon’s experiences in the East Indies, he mockingly mentions such stereotypically eighteenth-century Indian things as ‘nabobs, gold mohrs, and palanquins’. A mohr (often spelt ‘moher’ or ‘mohur’) was a unit of Indian currency, made of gold and worth, according to the 1801 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘about 33 shillings’, so a touch less than twice the value of an English pound.

  There’s much more reference to jewellery in Sense and Sensibility than is common in Jane’s novels, and to jewellery being bought or sold. While in London Elinor has business at a jeweller, a real-life one, Gray’s – ‘a negotiation for the exchange of a few old-fashioned jewels of her mother’, we’re told. She’s selling or pawning them: either way, converting them into cash. At the same shop, she encounters Robert Ferrars, Edward’s brother, who is ‘giving orders for a toothpick-case’, to be ornamented with ‘ivory’, ‘gold’, and ‘pearls’. She also bumps into her brother John, who’s ordering ‘a seal’ for his wife – to impress on the wax used to secure letters. In their next conversation together, John Dashwood complains about the many calls on his purse; his aim, Jane explains, is ‘to do away the necessity of buying a pair of ear-rings for each of his sisters’ when he returns to the jeweller to pick up his order. Characters make baskets of filigree, delicate work done in gold and silver thread or wire, or metallic paper. Lucy Steele gives her betrothed, Edward, a ring set with her hair.l

  Then, too, an astonishing proportion of the surnames in Sense and Sensibility are metallic ones. We have the Steele sisters. We have the Ferrars family (that is, ferrous, containing iron). Willoughby’s rich cousin is called Mrs Smith – a common name, true, and one which Jane uses in three separate novels, but nevertheless, a smith is a worker of metal.m Willoughby marries an heiress called Miss Grey, recalling the jeweller Grays – the sharing of names is something we’ll return to. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) a ‘gray’ or ‘grey’ is also a spot of discoloration which marks the flaw in a metal, particularly in a gun, and when we first encounter Willoughby, he’s carrying a gun.n

  Guns, and knives, and scissors, and needles, and pins crop up fairly frequently in Jane’s novels. But it’s only here, in Sense and Sensibility, that they’re all mentioned, and it’s only here that they do damage.o Little Annamaria Middleton, the Dashwoods’ cousin, is injured (though trivially) by ‘a pin in her ladyship’s head dress slightly scratching the child’s neck’. Willoughby cuts off a lock of Marianne’s hair as a love token. When Edward Ferrars, released from his engagement to Lucy Steele, comes to Barton Cottage to explain his behaviour to the Dashwoods, he expresses his pent-up feelings by taking up ‘a pair of scissors that lay there, and […] spoiling both them and their sheath by cutting the latter to pieces as he spoke’. Lucy Steele – later Ferrars and so doubly metallic – is thrice described as ‘sharp’. Characters ‘cut’ their acquaintance, refuse to acknowledge that they are acquainted, a word which doesn’t appear in this context in Jane’s other novels. />
  The world of Sense and Sensibility is a sharp and glittering one, one in which an embrace can draw blood, in which metal is both bribe and weapon, reward and threat. The novel features the richest of Jane’s heiresses, Miss Sophia Grey, who according to Mrs Jennings is worth £50,000. This figure is likely to be an accurate one. Mrs Jennings may be vulgar, she may love to leap to conclusions, but she is shrewd and she knows Miss Grey’s family (‘I remember her aunt very well, Biddy Henshawe; she married a very wealthy man. But the family are all rich together’). Besides, this was the kind of information which tended to be common knowledge; it was perfectly normal, during Jane’s lifetime, for the fortune a woman brought to a marriage to be included at the end of the wedding announcement printed in the newspapers.

  Is Miss Grey’s £50,000 safe from Willoughby? She is, apparently, ‘of age and may choose for herself’; that is, she is over 21 and needs no one’s permission to marry. Presumably then, her money is also entirely at her own disposal. One hopes, though, that her one-time guardians, the Ellisons, will help her with drawing up a watertight marriage settlement, especially with so expensive a husband as Willoughby on the cards. Marriage settlements generally made a point of balancing the financial interests of the husband and the wife; they put money or property in trust for the woman and, often, for her children if she should die before her husband. Married women, remember, didn’t exist legally, and couldn’t own money or property themselves. But single women, including widows, could and did.

  Under a marriage settlement, a woman owned her property in the same way that little Harry Dashwood owns Norland; the ownership came into effect – and was legally enforceable – only in certain circumstances, namely, when she was widowed. The balance struck by each marriage settlement was different; it was dependent on who wanted the marriage more, on what each party was gaining, and on who occupied the stronger position. Usually parents or other relatives were involved. John Dashwood’s mother clearly had a decent settlement drawn up when she married, since we’re told that half her fortune passes to her son ‘on his coming of age’, while the other half is ‘secured’ to him when his father dies. Settlements are the reason men tried to elope with heiresses; they’re the reason it was, in some circumstances, a specific crime to do so – at the moment of marriage a woman became what was known as a feme covert, a ‘covered’ or ‘protected’ woman. She was legally merged with her husband and everything she possessed or came to possess during the marriage was his, to do with as he pleased.p Running away with an heiress was, effectively, stealing her inheritance. From what we see of her, Miss Grey seems, thankfully, to be made of stern stuff. Willoughby is marrying her for her money, but quite how much of it he will succeed in getting isn’t clear.