Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  So is she his daughter?

  She goes by the name Eliza Williams. Now it’s possible that Williams was her mother’s maiden name, or that it’s a name picked for her at random. But it’s also possible that it spells out the identity of her father even though she has no right to use his surname, that she is ‘Eliza, William’s child’. It’s easy then; we just have to look at Colonel Brandon’s Christian name. It’ll be a pretty hefty clue, one way or another.

  Jane never tells us what it is.w

  Now she never gives us the first name of Darcy’s cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, either, in Pride and Prejudice, so the silence isn’t exceptional. But Colonel Brandon is the only central character in the novels whose Christian name isn’t mentioned. And names are problematic in Sense and Sensibility anyway. For that reason they assume undue prominence. We’ve already looked at the significance of some of the surnames.x On top of that, quite a number of characters have the same Christian names, and not always because they’re related, but sometimes, seemingly, at random.

  We have the two Elizas, mother and daughter. We have Marianne and her little cousin, Annamaria – both, presumably, named for the same female relations. There are two Henrys and a Harry. The disagreeable Thomas Palmer shares his name with the Dashwoods’ manservant. We learn in a throwaway piece of dialogue that Fanny Dashwood shares hers with a cousin of Colonel Brandon’s. We have three grown-up Johns – John Dashwood, Sir John Middleton, and John Willoughby – and a little one, the oldest of the Middleton children.

  There was a limited pool of names in common use in England in the eighteenth century, and this kind of coincidence must have happened all the time. In a novel, though, it’s almost too true-to-life, too naturalistic. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that some of this, at least, is Jane’s inexperience as a writer showing. As I’ve mentioned before, we don’t know when the novel was written, or when or even whether it was ever substantially revised. But Jane must have read through it before it was sent to the publishers, and we know she checked through the proofs.

  Is there some point to the repetition of names, then?

  Let’s look at the Dashwoods’ cousins, the three named Middleton children. The daughter is Annamaria, the sons John and William. Annamaria, I’ve suggested, is named for the same people as Marianne. John, though he shares his name with John Dashwood and with John Willoughby, is surely named for his father. Who is William named for? Well, plausibly, for a godfather. And a likely candidate for a godfather is his father’s near neighbour and ‘particular friend’, Colonel Brandon. So perhaps the Colonel is a William, after all?

  It’s the only indication we’re ever given, as readers. We can’t be certain, but there’s room for doubt – doubt about Colonel Brandon’s morals, his motivations. Doubt, ultimately, about whether Marianne can ever really be happy with a man who, if he doesn’t quite steal the bread out of the mouths of his daughter and granddaughter, is happy to enrich himself from the fortune which, morally, ought to belong to his female relations.

  Jane herself never seems to really want to convince us about the good sense of Colonel Brandon and Marianne marrying. Why make the age difference so vast? Why have characters think about the age difference as being insurmountable (‘thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together’, ‘he had little to do but to calculate the disproportion between thirty-six and seventeen’)? Why manipulate matters so that, as far as the reader is concerned, the two never once converse with each other?y Why not show us Marianne’s feelings gradually altering, rather than telling us that Marianne’s mother and sister and brother-in-law wish to promote the match out of gratitude to the Colonel? ‘They each felt his sorrows, and their own obligations, and Marianne, by general consent, was to be the reward of all’, Jane writes. Marianne marries, with ‘no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship’; she finds herself ‘submitting to new attachments’. In all this, Marianne plays an alarmingly passive, even sacrificial role. On a more cheerful note, we’re assured that ‘Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby’.

  How long that time might be, we’re not told, nor how long this love might last.

  For Wollstonecraft, it was self-evident that sensibility, in exciting women’s feelings, particularly their sexual feelings, would be a lifelong burden. As she says, ‘A husband cannot long pay those attentions with the passion necessary to excite lively emotions, and the heart, accustomed to lively emotions, turns to a new lover, or pines in secret, the prey of virtue or prudence.’

  It’s an ending which, in its own way, is fully as chilling as Edward’s little trick with the scissors.

  In the world of Sense and Sensibility love and family, honour and duty have hardly any meaning. Promises are made to be broken. Women are exiled from their homes. Guardians don’t guard. Brothers ignore their sisters, mothers disinherit their sons, fathers fail to safeguard their daughters. Elinor Dashwood marries a man who we know is an unfaithful liar with (perhaps) troubling sexual inclinations. Marianne Dashwood, having lost her heart to a vicious, selfish scoundrel, marries a man whose morality is suspect, and who she can never be certain of. Edward comes to regret his engagement to the venal – or the practical – Lucy Steele. Colonel Brandon falls in love with a girl he doesn’t know.

  In a society where unmarried men and women were kept largely separate, and permitted to socialise only when properly chaperoned, how could a woman arrive at any sort of knowledge of a man’s character – and how could a man hope to understand the nature of the woman he married?

  In Mansfield Park and Emma the heroines seek safety in quasi-incestuous marriages with men who are closely connected to their families, and who they have known for years. In Pride and Prejudice, though, Jane suggests an altogether more revolutionary approach to the problem.

  Footnotes

  a Based on Jane Austen’s letters to Cassandra Austen (3rd–5th January 1801 and 8th–9th January 1801).

  b Jane Fairfax, in Emma, has a living grandmother, but Mrs Bates is very much an exception to the general rule.

  c It is possible in certain circumstances for children to make a claim on this first amount.

  d The family were apparently very proud of their connection to the Dukes of Chandos – Jane’s nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh devotes several pages of his memoir to explaining the connection, though it wasn’t particularly close.

  e Jane certainly knew a little Latin. One of the notebooks in which her youthful writing is preserved is inscribed, in Latin, ‘ex doni mei patris’ (‘Given to me by my father’), and she includes Latin phrases in her letters on more than one occasion.

  f The sentence structure here looks like a fairly explicit reference to the parable of the talents in Matthew 24:14–30 which, on a literal reading at least, praises investment and financial savviness over laziness, or even caution. The parable concludes with the warning that the rich do inherit the earth: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’

  g ‘I do not wonder at your wanting to read first impressions [sic] again’, writes Jane in a letter to her sister (8th–9th January 1799).

  h After the death of Jane’s sister, Cassandra, Chawton Cottage was divided and used as homes for estate workers. The current floorplan is an approximation of what it would have been when Jane lived there.

  i The Law of Property Act 1925 banned the setting up of new entails, but a number are still running, though the courts have become slightly more sympathetic to the idea of forcibly breaking them.

  j It was possible to break an entail if the individual (or individuals) lower down the ‘chain’ of inheritance were agreeable. Some form of financial arrangement would be agreed or, if all the individuals were within the nuclear family, emotional pressure could be brought to bear. Three-generation entails, though,
usually couldn’t be broken unless everyone with rights was over the age of 21 so this couldn’t happen with the Dashwoods anyway.

  k It was equally feasible, in theory, to leave property to a line of, say, second-born daughters, but, for the reasons I outlined above, oldest sons was the norm. It may well be, though, that the original Bennet entail in Pride and Prejudice stipulated inheritance by eldest son, eldest grandson, great-grandson, etc., with a provision that if that male line failed, inheritance should flip to the male line descended from a daughter. This would explain why Mr Collins and Mr Bennet have different surnames, though it’s also possible that either side of the family may have changed surnames in order to marry an heiress, or to inherit from another relative, both of which happened sufficiently often during the eighteenth century that the circumstance wasn’t thought of as remarkable. There are two examples of it in Jane’s own close family, in addition to her brother Edward’s adoption.

  l Hair jewellery, though it seems peculiar to us, was commonplace during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both for mourning and as a love token.

  m There are two Mrs Smiths, one in Sense and Sensibility and one in Persuasion, and Harriet Smith, in Emma.

  n Willoughby shares his surname with the deeply unpleasant Sir Clement Willoughby, in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), and with the hero of Charlotte Smith’s Celestina (1791), whose cruel behaviour to the heroine turns out to have been caused by an unfortunate misunderstanding.

  o Mr Elton apparently cuts his finger in Emma – Harriet Smith cherishes a part of the plaster he’s given – but it’s not a scene we’re shown. The injuries in Persuasion are connected to falls.

  p Under a statute dating from the reign of Henry VII, a man who ran off with a woman who had any substantial property of her own (or was likely to in the future) committed a crime if at any point in the process she was not completely willing.

  q Anne de Bourgh is, presumably, still under-age.

  r We shouldn’t be surprised that Mrs Ferrars and Elinor haven’t met, even though Mrs Ferrars’ daughter is married to Elinor’s brother. Weddings were very much smaller, lower-key affairs during Jane’s lifetime than they are now, and it was perfectly usual for even quite close family members not to attend. None of Edward Ferrars’ family attend his wedding to Elinor, though they do pay formal visits to the newly-married couple afterwards.

  s Willoughby enters the novel as ‘A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him’ – a hunter. Valancourt is first described as ‘a young man … followed by a couple of dogs’, ‘in a hunter’s dress’, with a ‘gun … slung across his shoulders’.

  t For more detail on how careers in the Church operated at this point, see Chapter 5.

  u Sexual fetishes connected to hair were certainly recognised in the eighteenth century. In the period’s most famous work of erotica, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–9), one of Fanny’s customers is ‘a grave, staid, solemn, elderly gentleman whose peculiar humour was a delight in combing fine tresses of hair […] drawing the comb through it, winding the curls round his fingers, even kissing it as he smooth’d it’.

  v We can extrapolate larger age differences in the marriages of some of the parents in Jane’s novels – between Mr and Mrs Bennet, for example, or between Mr Woodhouse and his wife.

  w Emma Thompson’s screenplay for the Ang Lee-directed film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995) made him a ‘Christopher’, on absolutely no basis whatever.

  x Colonel Brandon’s surname carries some fairly negative connotations. As the Australian critic Olivia Murphy points out, Brandon Hall is the estate where the virtuous heroine is imprisoned and subjected to attempted rape in Pamela, the first novel by Samuel Richardson, who dominated the genre in the middle of the eighteenth century.

  y We’re never shown the two in conversation together. The one time we see Marianne actually address a comment to the Colonel, he doesn’t reply. Even towards the end of the novel, there are no more than a couple of indirect references to them exchanging very basic courtesies.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘All Our Old Prejudices’

  Pride and Prejudice

  Steventon, Christmas 1798.a

  She was to have dined at Deane this evening, with Martha Lloyd, but it is coming on to snow, and she doubts whether a journey – even if it is only to the next village – is altogether to be advised. Martha will not mind it. She is a dear friend, dearer still since the birth last month of little James-Edward, their shared nephew. If only James had married Martha instead of Martha’s sister Mary, though. Jane could have loved Martha, who is quite the most appreciative reader that First Impressions has had. Since she cannot while away the evening chatting with Martha, however, she has taken out her half-finished letter to Cassandra, at present in Kent. But having passed on the pleasantest news, that their brother Frank is to be made captain, and that their own particular little brother Charles will not have so long to wait before he is promoted, every other topic seems flat and insipid.

  They have had cold weather this last little while. Their mother has suffered with it – she who feels the cold far more than other mortals. Jane has already exhausted the ball. That it was thin of company, less than a dozen couples; that she wore her black cap; that she danced twenty dances without the least fatigue; the list of her partners – these facts are already recorded in her letter. Cassandra, it appears from her most recent letter, has been at a ball herself and supped with a prince, no less. Jane can say nothing of their acquaintance in Hampshire that can compete with princes. Still, there are clothes, and there is ill-health – a perennially fruitful topic with such a mother, and such a brother as Edward.

  And charity. She has laid out half a guinea in four pairs of worsted stockings, a shift and a shawl, and distributed them among the poor women in Steventon. Cassandra will be glad to hear of her doings. She is glad herself.

  She drums her fingers on the table top. What else is there that can she write of?

  Perhaps Cassandra will be amused to hear that, at the very time their father was approaching Admiral Gambier to enquire about the prospects of promotion for Frank and Charles, Charles was attacking another of the Sea-Lords directly. ‘The Lords of the Admiralty will have enough of our applications at present’, she writes, and, straining for a humorous tone, ‘I am afraid his serene Highness will be in a passion, & order some of our heads to be cut off. —’

  It does not do, to joke about such matters.

  What must it be like to lose one’s head? The Irish rebellion is all but defeated now, so she gathers from the newspapers. But all this year, it seems, she has been reading of how the rebel leaders had their hearts taken out, their heads stuck up on spikes in Cork and Wexford. To be sure, it was no more than they deserved, for inviting the French into Ireland. But still, imagine seeing one’s father, one’s brother or husband, beheaded …

  It’s too close.

  She’s sent letters to Cork – to her little brother Charles, when he was on board the Unicorn, not two years since.

  Her cousin Eliza – clever, fascinating cousin Eliza, heiress to an Indian fortune from her godfather, now married to brother Henry – lost her first husband, the French Comte, to the guillotine during the Terror. Jane dreamed about heads in baskets for months.

  And yet, in the beginning, it had all seemed so different. At fourteen, at fifteen, she had believed firmly in the need for liberty and equality – for fairness.

  Jane thinks of the women shivering in the cottages around Steventon, of how little her charities will do to warm them. She thinks of her mother, upstairs in bed, with the covers heaped over her and a fire roaring in the grate.

  She doesn’t know what she believes now.

  Everyone – almost everyone – loves Pride and Prejudice.b It regularly tops lists of the hundred most important or best-loved novels. The hero and heroine, Darcy and Elizabeth, have developed lives of their own, rather like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holm
es. They’ve become cultural icons in their own right, their relationship the ultimate in literary romance.

  I have a mug that I was given a couple of Christmases ago. It’s one of a series that you can buy, ‘Classic novels abridged’. This one encapsulates the plot of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Mr Darcy is a proud man’, it reads. ‘Elizabeth Bennet doesn’t like him. They change their minds and get married. The end.’

  There is, of course, rather more to it than that.

  More than anything else, it’s the 1995 BBC television series of Pride and Prejudice which precipitated the current, two-decade-long period of intense, near-global, obsession with Jane Austen. It’s this version that entered the cultural consciousness, creating such a strong hold for itself that when a member of the general public hears the title, the first image that appears in their mind is one which has no counterpart in the book: a sweaty Colin Firth stripping half naked and diving into the lake at Pemberley. And there have been other very popular Pride and Prejudices since, lots of them – the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley, the Bollywoodised Bride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Lost in Austen, Death Comes to Pemberley, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible. Even the ‘biopic’ Becoming Jane riffed on Pride and Prejudice. All these retellings and variations work on the assumption that readers or viewers know the characters and the story very well, an assumption that doesn’t get made with Jane’s other books. The assumption isn’t wrong.

  But it’s that same knowledge, that same sense of familiarity, which blinds us to much of what Pride and Prejudice is actually doing as a text. It makes it, perhaps, the most difficult out of all of Jane’s novels for us to read as she intended.

  We all know that Pride and Prejudice is a happy, cheerful book, even if we haven’t read it. There’s a degree of truth there, but only a degree.