Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Sense and Sensibility features a large number of financially independent single women. Mrs Jennings has a jointure – she owns her house and her income but only for life, and after she dies it will go to her daughters, or, depending on the precise terms of their marriage settlements, to their husbands. But there is Mrs Dashwood, who may not be particularly financially competent, but who controls her £7,000 fortune. Willoughby’s cousin Mrs Smith, it appears, owns Allenham outright, since Willoughby takes her threats to disinherit him seriously. Fanny Dashwood – a Ferrars by birth – mentions that the money left by her father ‘would have been entirely at my mother’s disposal, without any restriction whatever’ were it not for the matter of three annuities to servants.

  It’s worth pointing out how unusual this situation was for women, both in Jane’s novels and in the real-life society in which she lived. Despite what many readers believe, Rosings Park, in Pride and Prejudice, belongs not to the fearsome Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but to her daughter, Anne (‘the heiress of Rosings, and of very extensive property’).q For a man to leave his property totally at the disposal of his widow was hugely risky at a time when remarriage could see everything immediately pass away from any children of the marriage to a second husband. It required a high degree of trust in a wife’s intelligence and financial acumen.

  One reason for doing it, of course, would be to leave a wife the means of controlling the behaviour and life-choices of any children. As William Blackstone, the great eighteenth-century legal commentator explains, though fathers had legal rights over their children as minors – to physically chastise them, to benefit from their labour, and to refuse them permission to marry – ‘a mother, as such, is entitled to no power, but only to reverence and respect’.4 A mother who holds the purse strings, though, is in a position to discourage her sons from pursuing ill-thought-out careers or pastimes (such as gambling or horse-racing), and to steer all of her offspring towards prudent marriages, and she remains in that position even when her children are adult. It’s mercenary to wish one’s children to marry well, it’s perhaps power-hungry to be ambitious for one’s eldest son, but this is really as far as Mrs Ferrars’ sins stretch.

  Nevertheless, our instinct as readers is to dislike her, to scoff disbelievingly when her son-in-law John Dashwood insists that she is ‘a most excellent mother’. It’s true that she is rather rude to Elinor, but it’s equally true that from early on in the novel, long before she’s given any real justification, Elinor is determined to dislike her.r ‘What his mother really is we cannot know’, she admits to her sister, ‘but […] we have never been disposed to think her amiable.’ For Elinor and, to a lesser degree, for her mother and Marianne, Mrs Ferrars is a very convenient scapegoat. Everything inexplicable or confusing in Edward’s behaviour towards them is blamed on his mother. ‘Elinor placed all that was astonishing in this way of acting to his mother’s account’, we’re told, consoling herself with the idea that it is only Edward’s ‘dependent situation’ which prevents ‘the indulgence of his affection’ for her. As Jane drily notes: ‘it was happy for her that he had a mother whose character was so imperfectly known to her, as to be the general excuse for every thing strange on the part of her son.’ The truth is far less palatable.

  Mrs Ferrars is undoubtedly a generous mother – very generous, provided that her children do as she wishes. Fanny’s marriage to John Dashwood clearly met with maternal approval; Fanny brought money to her marriage and while in London receives ‘bank-notes’ from her mother ‘to the amount of two hundred pounds’ to help defray the expenses of making a good appearance in society. Remember, this is nearly half the annual income of the Devonshire Dashwoods, a vast sum to be giving away.

  And both Edward and his brother Robert must be receiving large allowances from their mother. Edward has only ‘a trifling sum’ himself, but he can afford to travel about the country more or less as he pleases. Robert dresses ‘in the first style of fashion’ and buys such fripperies as jewelled toothpick-cases; he can’t be kept short of money.

  Nevertheless, Mrs Ferrars subscribes to the popular notion that the most important of her children is her eldest son. From what we can gather she spends a good deal of time fretting about Edward’s career prospects: ‘His mother wished to interest him in political concerns, to get him into parliament, or to see him connected with some of the great men of the day.’ She wants to obtain power and influence for her family, in other words – it’s simply unfortunate that it is Edward who is the eldest son. As Mrs Dashwood remarks, indulgently dismissive, Edward has ‘no inclination for expense, no affection for strangers, no profession, and no assurance’. He will never make ‘a great orator’.

  ‘I have no wish to be distinguished’, explains Edward at one point in the novel. No wish to be, and no chance of being. Nor is Robert, with his ‘natural, sterling insignificance’, well suited to public life. The only member of the Ferrars family with the gift of persuasive speech is Fanny, who we see talk her husband round in the first chapter of the novel. But women have no way of taking part in public life directly; they have to sublimate their ambition, and focus their energies on their menfolk.

  Disappointed of her political ambitions for Edward, Mrs Ferrars goes to the trouble of attempting to arrange a prosperous marriage for him instead, ‘a most eligible connection’, with Miss Morton, ‘the daughter of Lord Morton’ and heiress to £30,000. Her rage when she discovers that he has for years been secretly engaged to marry Lucy Steele – penniless, badly connected, and wholly ineligible – is understandable.

  Less understandable is her decision to not merely reject Edward, but to settle on his younger brother Robert the family estate in Norfolk, which produces an income of £1,000 a year. When one son has shown himself to be ungrateful and disobedient, it seems reckless to make the other son financially independent of her. Mrs Jennings is made to remark on it; ‘Everybody has a way of their own. But I don’t think mine would be, to make one son independent, because another had plagued me.’

  Jane is less interested in psychological plausibility here, I think, than in resolving the plot – Robert’s sudden acquisition of wealth and independence wins him the affections of practical-minded Lucy Steele, freeing Edward to marry Elinor. But it also shows how arbitrary and absurd it is to concentrate resources on any one child to the disadvantage of the others, how unnatural. Nearly every character in the novel is taken aback at Mrs Ferrars’ decision to make Robert ‘to all intents and purposes […] the eldest’, at ‘so unfair a division of his mother’s love and liberality’; there’s much talk of how unfortunate Edward is, of how unkind his family are being to him. This, though, is exactly what primogeniture always did – it’s a zero-sum game.

  As Jane shows us repeatedly in Sense and Sensibility, one person’s gain is always another’s loss.

  This is a novel in which Willoughby admits that he has run up debts for years, built himself a financial prison from which he fully expects other people to rescue him, no matter what it costs them. ‘The death of my old cousin, Mrs Smith, was to set me free’, he says, blithely, but ‘that event being uncertain, and possibly far distant’, he intended ‘to re-establish my circumstances by marrying a woman of fortune’. He’s been living on his expectations, borrowing money, getting credit on the basis that he’s going to inherit. He treats Mrs Smith’s house as if it’s already his own when he shows Marianne around it; he treats Mrs Smith’s money as if it’s already his own. His long-standing intention is to marry a ‘woman of fortune’, his aim to get his hands on as much of that fortune as is practicable.

  Given Willoughby’s highly acquisitive nature, it makes sense for Mrs Smith to attempt to control him through money. And her controlling impulses have the saving grace of moral uprightness behind them. When it comes to her attention that Willoughby has seduced and abandoned Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza, leaving her pregnant and alone, Mrs Smith takes him to task. The result, we’re told, is ‘a total breach’. She insists that he atone
for his sin by marrying the girl; when Willoughby refuses (‘That could not be’), he is ‘formally dismissed’ from Mrs Smith’s ‘favour and her house’.

  Willoughby calls his cousin a ‘good woman’, but it’s clear he has little time for goodness when it interferes with his own advancement: ‘The purity of her life, the formality of her notions, her ignorance of the world—every thing was against me’, he complains. Moreover, he insinuates that Mrs Smith was ‘discontented with the very little attention, the very little portion of my time that I had bestowed on her’. For Willoughby, even morality has to be secretly motivated by selfishness. As for Eliza, the teenage girl he seduced and left, she is, in Willoughby’s mind, as much to blame as he is. He talks of ‘the violence of her passions, the weakness of her understanding’; suggests that ‘common sense’ could have told her how to find him. His wife, the rich wife he schemed to get? ‘Do not talk to me of my wife’, he sighs to Elinor, ‘She does not deserve your compassion. — She knew I had no regard for her when we married.’ He’s even able to fantasise about his wife’s death – a ‘blessed chance’ which would set him ‘at liberty again’, at liberty and with a large chunk of someone else’s money in his pocket.

  Willoughby is happy to take things from women – money, a lock of hair, virginity and respectability. We, as readers, shouldn’t make the mistake of giving him our sympathy too. His explanation may excite ‘a degree of commiseration’ in Elinor, ‘a tenderness, a regret, rather in proportion, as she soon acknowledged within herself—to his wishes than to his merits’, but once the charm of his presence is removed, she comes to a more reasoned conclusion, that ‘The whole of his behaviour […] has been grounded on selfishness’.

  Jane doesn’t come up with any excuse for what Willoughby’s done. His repentance is, in the end, ‘sincere’ – Jane says it ‘need not be doubted’ – but only because it turns out that Mrs Smith would have forgiven him and he could have married Marianne and had enough money after all. Where we hear his repentance in his own words, he is mawkish, self-indulgent; remember that he turns up at what he thinks is Marianne’s death-bed intoxicated (‘yes, I am very drunk’) and demands Elinor’s attention, as of right. There’s nothing redemptive about the scene. The reviewer in the British Critic was forthright in his condemnation of Willoughby, calling him a ‘male coquet’, ‘fickle, false, and treacherous’. This ought to be our conclusion, too. From the very beginning, Jane indicates that we should be suspicious of Willoughby, that he cannot be relied on.

  I suggested in the last chapter that Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho was so popular, and so widely-read during the late 1790s, that Jane would have expected her audience to recognise even quite detailed references to it. When Willoughby first appears, he does so almost exactly like Valancourt, the love-interest of Emily, the heroine of Udolpho.s And Valancourt proves himself to be a gambler, one who very much enjoys the company of ‘captivating’ marchionesses and countesses. Though he loves Emily when he’s with her, her image fades. He does nothing towards rescuing her from the dangers she’s embroiled in. No reader who was familiar with Udolpho would have been surprised to discover that Willoughby is a weak-willed, sexually inconstant gambler who gets himself into debt; the difference between him and Valancourt is that Jane doesn’t subscribe to the comforting notion that a sinner can be reformed by love – or that they ought to be. She avoids dishing out punishment to Willoughby – ‘that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on’, we’re told – but she isn’t willing to countenance giving him an ending in which everything is resolved and forgiven.

  Happy endings, truly happy ones, are in short supply in this novel.

  Quite early on, when both Elinor and Marianne are fairly confident of their respective men, they discuss what sort of income would make for happiness. Marianne rebukes her sister for suggesting that ‘wealth’ is necessary; she wishes only for a ‘competence’.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Elinor, smiling, ‘we may come to the same point. Your competence and my wealth are very much alike, I dare say; and without them, as the world goes now, we shall both agree that every kind of external comfort must be wanting […] Come, what is your competence?’

  ‘About eighteen hundred or two thousand a year; not more than that.’

  Elinor laughed. ‘Two thousand a year! One is my wealth! I guessed how it would end.’

  Colonel Brandon’s income is £2,000 a year, as we know from shrewd Mrs Jennings, who once considered him as a potential son-in-law. When Marianne marries him, she gets her ‘competence’. But Elinor doesn’t quite get her ‘wealth’. Jane tells us that Edward’s new job as a vicar will bring in ‘about two hundred a year’.t She reminds us that Elinor has £1,000 of her own, Edward £2,000. Assuming that this money is placed in government bonds, the ‘five-percents’ which is what nearly all of Jane’s characters invest in, that will add £150 a year, making an annual income of £350.

  This isn’t enough to marry on. Mrs Dashwood is in no position to advance them any money; the only way for them to marry is for Edward to appeal to his mother. She, grudgingly, gives him £10,000, the same sum ‘which had been given with Fanny’. Edward isn’t just made into a younger son; he’s made into a daughter. Still, thanks to Edward’s mother, he and Elinor will have an extra £500 a year, making £850 altogether. It’s a perfectly adequate income. But it falls short of the ‘wealth’ without which ‘every kind of external comfort must be wanting’. They’ll be able to afford servants, perhaps a carriage, but they will struggle to send their sons to school or university, to set them up in a career. They’re unlikely to be able to provide dowries for any daughters, certainly not extensive ones. And as a vicar, Edward will have no home to leave to his wife and children – just like Jane’s own father.

  Finances aside, there are other reasons for us to be doubtful about how happy Elinor will be with Edward.

  He and Willoughby seem, initially, to be entirely different. Edward is ‘not handsome’; nor is he charming, but instead ‘diffident’ and ‘shy’. His ‘manners’, Jane informs us, ‘required intimacy to make them pleasing’. Again, in opposition to Willoughby, he has no taste for poetry, for art, for nature, and is unable to pretend that he does. But then, he isn’t particularly intelligent. The most Jane can say of him is that: ‘His understanding was good, and his education had given it solid improvement.’ ‘Solid’ isn’t high praise. Jane doesn’t ever really explain why Edward was educated by a provincial tutor rather than being sent to Westminster like his younger brother. Westminster is the large London boarding-school that has existed since the middle ages. Robert boasts about the connections he made there, and we should imagine him rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful. Old boys included prime ministers and poets laureate, playwrights, philosophers, historians, judges, aristocrats – names like John Dryden, Christopher Wren, John Locke, the Duke of Portland, the Earl of Elgin, the Marquis of Rockingham. Lord Mansfield, who we’ll encounter in Chapter 5, went there. So too did a man called Warren Hastings – Governor General of India and the godfather of Jane’s cousin Eliza.

  There must be a reason why this school wasn’t deemed suitable for Edward, particularly considering his mother’s political ambitions for him. Apparently an uncle (‘Sir Robert’) persuaded Mrs Ferrars that her eldest son should have ‘private tuition’. Was he sickly? Was he bullied? Was his behaviour in some way undesirable, peculiar even? And why send him to Exeter? It’s a provincial town in Devon, several days’ journey from London, a fact you can hardly escape in this novel, where characters are continually travelling to and from the county. It’s further still from Norfolk, which is where the family estate is. Edward would have received a better education from some of the excellent specialist tutors who worked in the capital. And he wouldn’t have got engaged to Lucy Steele – his tutor’s niece, introduced into the house, one suspects, quite deliberately. />
  Edward, interestingly, blames his mother rather than his former tutor. He calls his engagement to Lucy ‘a foolish, idle inclination’, but is quick to point out that any foolishness or idleness was ‘the consequence of ignorance of the world—and want of employment’. ‘Had my mother given me some active profession’, says he, ‘I think—nay, I am sure, it would never have happened.’ His mother should have chosen a ‘profession’ for him, or ‘allowed’ him to ‘chuse’; she should have sent him to university sooner. She ‘did not make my home in every respect comfortable’, complains Edward; his brother was ‘no friend, no companion’. It’s a tendency Edward shares with Willoughby, this ability to always find someone to blame.

  It’s not the only similarity between the two characters, in spite of their apparent positioning as opposites. Both have financially independent female relations who attempt to use money to control their behaviour. Both encourage one of the Dashwood sisters to believe that they are interested in marrying them, and Jane makes a point of showing us that it isn’t just Marianne and Elinor who are misled, but almost everyone who observes the two couples together. It’s arguable as to which man behaves worse in this regard. Whatever Willoughby intended at the beginning, there was a period when, he says, ‘I felt my intentions were strictly honourable’. Edward knows, right up until nearly the end of the novel, that he’s engaged to another woman. He’s not in a position to have proper intentions towards Elinor. Both men indulge their own vanity, and their own feelings, without much regard for the women they claim to love.