Jane Austen

by Fiona Stafford

  The boldness of her new novel was not confined to its artistic innovations, however. In addition to the delightfully irreverent heroine, whose general attitudes provide such a refreshing contrast to the kinds of models promoted in the contemporary educational manuals for girls, Jane Austen presented her readers with a story that involves abductions and extramarital sex. The worst fears of eighteenth-century moralists are realised in the behaviour of George Wickham, but, far from following the literary convention of condemning either the rake or his victims, Jane Austen rescued both Georgiana and Lydia from social disgrace and punished Wickham with nothing harsher than a silly wife.

  Unlike Richardson’s novels, the focus of Pride and Prejudice is not on the seduction of the younger girls, but rather on the embarrassment of their elder sisters. As with the comic containment of Mr Bennet’s threatened demise, there is never any real sense that Lydia’s elopement will lead to her destruction, but the distressing effects of her rash actions on the rest of the family are still examined with great sensitivity. Despite its effervescent humour, Pride and Prejudice is just as concerned with the feelings of its heroines, whose contrasting responses to their changing circumstances lie at the heart of the novel. Readers may laugh at the novel’s dazzling line-up of comic turns or marvel at the brilliant observations of human interactions; they may admire the skilful construction of the plot or the beautifully turned sentences from which it is made; they may be provoked into deeper consideration of the flaws in English society or the evasive wartime setting – but everyone who enjoys Pride and Prejudice will be compelled by the central narrative. Though Mrs Bennet’s now-famous assumption that ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ is relentlessly mocked throughout, there can be few readers who remain immune to the intense satisfaction of the final union. Pride and Prejudice has many facets, but, like Sense and Sensibility, it is essentially a love story. Unlike its immediate predecessor, however, Pride and Prejudice is prepared to offer the possibility of unreserved happiness.

  MANSFIELD PARK AND EMMA

  1813–15

  The intensity of Jane Austen’s preoccupation with her writing cannot be overstated. Although her nephew’s recollections conjure up a picture of the modest aunt quickly putting aside her writing at the sound of approaching visitors as if producing tea and conversation were every bit as important to her as creating such a scene on paper, her own letters tell a different story. A sisterly enquiry about the progress of Sense and Sensibility provoked an unusual metaphor: ‘No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it than a mother forget her sucking child.’47 It recurs two years later to express Jane’s excitement over the arrival of Pride and Prejudice: ‘I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London.’48 The comments jump out from the correspondence as rare revelations of genuine feeling, unmasked by irony, self-deprecation or comic absurdity. Jane Austen was referring to her novels as her children. By now, she was a single woman approaching forty, so the likelihood of having a baby of her own was remote. Instead of children, Jane Austen was producing books; and the affection with which she talks about the characters of Pride and Prejudice in letters to Cassandra demonstrates that the emotional satisfaction she derived from writing was profound.

  Although Jane Austen never experienced motherhood, she maintained a deep interest in education and the ways in which children might be affected by their upbringing. Edward’s large family provided an endless topic for Jane’s own mother, while James and Frank’s children, who lived much nearer Chawton Cottage, were frequent visitors. Jane’s eldest nieces, Anna Austen and Fanny Knight (whose name had changed in 1812 when Edward inherited his estate), were now the same age as the Dashwood sisters and the Bennets, so she had plenty of opportunity to witness the trials of adolescence and early adulthood at first hand. As Jane Austen watched her nephews and nieces growing up, she was also reminded of her own childhood, alerted to the contrasts and the continuities between younger and older selves. Had she changed? Had Cassandra? Or James? Or any of her siblings? What made people grow into the adults they became? How important were their physical surroundings or material possessions? Were personalities fixed from birth or did the combined influence of education, family, place and income determine a child’s character? Or was it the result of an individual’s unique experiences?

  These were questions that had already occupied many of the greatest minds of the past century and continued to attract vigorous debate. Jane Austen’s approach was always primarily imaginative rather than purely philosophical, her mind moved by the human dimensions of a question. When she read essays, she responded passionately to their authors, even if the subject was as unpromising as Captain Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (‘I am as much in love with the Author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan,’ she wrote on 24 January 1813). When she considered political or theoretical ideas, they rapidly changed into the conversations and behaviour of her imaginary creations. As a girl, her history lessons had provoked intense involvement with injured queens and indignation over detestable monsters. Now, her imagination was under tighter control, but the capacity to translate dry fact and argument into compelling human drama remained. The primary concern of her novels was the creation of believable human beings in a beautifully structured fictional world. By the time she wrote Mansfield Park, however, she knew that her acute observations of human behaviour might be conveyed in such a way that larger questions could also be addressed in her fiction.

  In 1812, with the contract for Pride and Prejudice agreed, Jane Austen was bursting with ideas for her next novel. Rather than reach into her treasure trove of older writings to retrieve Lady Susan or ‘The Watsons’, she embarked on an entirely new story that would allow her to explore questions of education, family relationships and the different kinds of lives forced on individuals by their birth and background. She had not abandoned the imaginative stocks of her earlier years, but rather than revise stories written twenty years before, she now drew creatively on memories of Steventon or Southampton, revisiting in her mental landscape the English country houses of old friends and family. She was still interested in sisters, but now her attention turned from the necessity of marriage to its consequences, as she imagined the contrasting households of the three Miss Wards. Charlotte Lucas’s wry observation that ‘happiness in marriage was entirely a matter of chance’ is tested in Mansfield Park through the cameo portraits of the three sisters and their relative successes: Maria’s captivation of Sir Thomas Bertram; her elder sister’s subsequent marriage to Reverend Norris; and the impulsive secret wedding of Frances and Lieutenant Price, a low-ranking officer in an unelevated branch of the navy. Two married for love, but while one lives a life of easy luxury, the other is worn down by frequent pregnancies and the struggle of maintaining a large family on a low income. The economic and social divisions of contemporary society, which had furnished Pride and Prejudice with a rich seam of jokes about snobbery, upward mobility and the erotic charge of a good estate, were now providing the framework for a novel whose tone was far less ‘light & bright & sparkling’. Frances Ward pays a heavy price for her unlucky infatuation: her married name is a constant reminder of her mistake.

  Jane Austen was far too thoughtful a writer to be content with presenting any straightforward equation between material comfort and happiness. As the fast-paced, schematic opening chapter leads into the more slow-moving and capacious surroundings of Mansfield Park, initial judgements are qualified by the complexity of the narrative and its focus on the next generation. The transplantation of a child into an unfamiliar environment had always been a sensitive issue for the Austen family. Jane’s decision to remove Fanny Price at ‘just ten years old’ from her home in Portsmouth drew on a cluster of painful, personal memories: Edward’s adoption by the Knights; George’s permanent exile; her departure for school and the experiences that followed. As she recreated the intense un
happiness of the displaced child, lost in the vast grandeur of her uncle’s great house, however, Jane Austen was also breaking new narrative ground, shifting rapidly between profound sympathy for the vulnerable heroine and satirical comment on the unattractive figures who surround her. Fanny Price may not be able to defend herself, but the narrator is well equipped to demolish her oppressors with a caustic aside.

  Despite the unsentimental attitude to Frances Ward’s misguided romance, it quickly becomes apparent that the comfortable upbringing enjoyed by her elder sister’s children has done nothing to ensure their personal well-being. One of the central ironies of the novel is that Mrs Price’s apparently disastrous choice has nevertheless resulted in the birth of Fanny, William and Susan, who are all presented as far more admirable characters than their spoilt cousins. If Austen avoided equating wealth and goodness, however, neither was she endorsing Sir Thomas’s final realisation of ‘the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure’. Sir Thomas’s second son, Edmund, turned out well even without the advantages his father suddenly identifies as key to the integrity of the young Prices. It is evident from the closing chapters that the older generation have been just as much in need of a sound education as their children and that much of the unhappiness depicted in the novel has resulted from irresponsible parenting. Henry Crawford has been ‘ruined by early independence and bad domestic example’, while Julia Bertram’s marginal superiority to her sister has resulted from her being ‘less the darling’ of Mrs Norris, ‘less flattered and less spoilt’.

  Although Mansfield Park is clear about the unfortunate consequences of spoiling children, it also demonstrates that there are no easy answers to the question of what constitutes a good education or a good person. Despite the obvious sympathy for Fanny as a victim of bullying relations, she has not proven as universally appealing as Elizabeth Bennet, whom Jane Austen herself pronounced to be ‘as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print’.49 Many readers have balked at the seriousness of Fanny and Edmund, their embarrassment over naughty jokes or amateur dramatics, and the understated nature of their final declaration. Fanny’s mounting horror at the noise levels in her own parents’ home, her relief at returning to the tranquillity of Mansfield Park, despite its many flaws, and her disapproval of so many of the residents and their guests have not helped to endear her to readers already disappointed by her lack of wit and energy. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen was marking out new territory as a novelist. She was no longer limited to her close family audience, who expected to be delighted, and could therefore experiment with a different kind of fiction. In her next novel, she would deliberately create a heroine whom ‘no one but myself’ would much like, but the idea of discomforting her readers was already well developed in Mansfield Park.50

  As a mature novelist, Jane Austen felt no need to use her work as a vehicle for submerged autobiography, even though she drew from the rich store of memories she had garnered over the years. The Bertram–Crawford theatricals gain conviction from her early experience of the rehearsals at Steventon, but these chapters fulfil many different roles in Mansfield Park. They develop the plot by introducing new characters and revealing different aspects of those already in place, while also offering a sophisticated exploration of the nature of art and the ways in which a play can become part of a novel. The major themes of class, education and personal choice are also highlighted as soon as Edmund expresses his reservations about fashionable private productions by ‘a set of gentlemen and ladies who have all the disadvantages of education and decorum to struggle through’. Whatever Jane Austen’s own memories, the theatricals constitute a beautifully crafted episode, intricately connected to numerous threads in the novel. In her skilled hands, the raw material of personal experience is transformed into fine art.

  Similarly, references to William Price’s promotion and the various ships in Portsmouth owe much to Frank and Charles Austen’s naval careers, but this does not mean that the navy is included for the sake of family interest alone. William’s wide experience of the world provides another comment on the disadvantages of gentlemen, most explicit when an eager account of his hazardous profession prompts Henry Crawford to a rare moment of self-knowledge: ‘The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price.’ Jane Austen was paying a private tribute to her own brothers in her portrait of William, but she was also making more ambitious points about contemporary class structure, systems of inheritance and personal responsibilities to society. The careful contrasts between those in the navy and those born into wealth gradually make plain that Mansfield Park’s concern with economics is national as well as domestic. Jane Austen was too accomplished a novelist to allow family loyalties to cloud her acute observation of the ironies of contemporary society, however: the positive portrayal of Midshipman William Price is set against those of his rather less upstanding father and of the Crawfords’ pleasure-loving uncle, the admiral.

  Questions about the proper use of riches had attracted writers throughout the eighteenth century, but now took on a new urgency in relation to the French Revolution and the immediate Regency crisis. By 1813, when Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park, the extravagance of the Prince Regent was legendary. Tales of his lavish parties and building projects startled his subjects, especially since many were struggling for survival by working very long hours in appalling conditions. There was even concern during the long war with France that, while the Prince Regent indulged in six-course banquets, the nation’s food supply was actually running out, leaving the poor starving. At the same time, the recent campaign to abolish the slave trade had raised public awareness that part of Britain’s prosperity had depended on the cruellest exploitation of human beings. Though patriotic loyalty was accentuated by Napoleon’s alarming conquests abroad, doubts about the nation’s domestic well-being were widespread.

  Although Jane Austen’s novels, with their carefully realised domestic settings, seem largely untroubled by the great issues of her day, it is evident from comments in her letters that she was extremely concerned about the human aspects of contemporary political questions. Her dislike of the Prince Regent, for example, was expressed most clearly in her sympathy for the Princess of Wales (‘Poor Woman! I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband’), while her keen interest in the abolition of the slave trade is evident in her ‘love’ of the campaigner Thomas Clarkson.51 Mansfield Park avoids conversations about contemporary politics, but, in its imaginative exploration of the rights and wrongs of private economies, it addresses questions of intense public concern. When Fanny Price asks her uncle about the slave trade upon his return from Antigua, her question is answered with silence, even though her relations are happy to discuss the fashionable topics of landscape gardening, home improvements or the delivery of sermons. Jane Austen allowed nothing improbable, nothing contrived, into her new novel, but nevertheless developed ways of suggesting that the realistic details in her text were also signs of much broader concerns. Sir Thomas’s ‘recent losses on his West India Estate, in addition to his elder son’s extravagance’ were, after all, anxieties of which George III might have complained in his more lucid moments, and the discussions over whether alterations to an ancient inheritance should involve massive destruction or mere modification applied as much to the British constitution as to Mr Rushworth’s house at Sotherton.

  Mansfield Park is not a political novel in the sense that its purpose is polemical or its action allegorical, but, in the careful detail and thoughtful construction of contrasting characters, it demonstrates the ways in which a novel can offer numerous satisfactions. Like Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, it has a strong plot, brilliant comic observation and sympathetic involvement with characters in realistic settings, but it also provided a new forum for testing contemporary ideas in
action. The high ideals of the modern novel first set out in Northanger Abbey were rapidly being realised.

  Jane Austen’s interest in the economic basis of society was undoubtedly sharpened by her own circumstances. Unlike the Bertram daughters, she had not been born into a wealthy, landed family, even though many of her friends and relations had inherited estates. After her father’s death, Jane Austen had spent years in rented houses and she remained dependent for a home on the charity of her brothers. The success of her novels gave her an income for the first time in her life and, with it, a renewed self-confidence and a different angle on the very idea of independence. In Mansfield Park, she had focused on the figure of the poor relation, but in her next novel she would explore similar questions of wealth, power, responsibility, education and the accidents of birth from the perspective of the wealthy instead. The very first line introduces Emma Woodhouse, ‘handsome, clever and rich’. It is almost as though Fanny Price has been displaced by Maria Bertram.