A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

Book by None

Susanna Clarke
WHY WE READ JANE AUSTEN:

YOUNG PERSONS IN INTERESTING SITUATIONS

"Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of."

So said Jane Austen in Emma in the early 1800s, and for the rest of the nineteenth century novelists got a lot of mileage out of young persons who either died or married. Dickens excelled at the young persons who died, Austen did the ones who married.

Stories about love and marriage are full of the good stuff: romance, sexual attraction, jealousy, suspense, misunderstanding. But in the early nineteenth century they had another dimension. All of a woman's

Future—her happily-ever-after or lack of the same—was implicit in her choice of husband. Such, at least, was the conventional wisdom of the age, and whether or not it was entirely true, clearly many things did depend on whom a woman married-her income, her status, her home, perhaps even her occupations.

If the female characters in Austen's novels sometimes give the impression of considering potential husbands rather dispassionately, there is good reason for it. In many ways they are not only choosing a husband, they are also choosing a career. By their marriage Austen's heroines may become a parson's wife (Elinor, Fanny, and Catherine), a landowner's wife (Elizabeth and Emma), or a ship's captain's wife (Anne). With the exception of Emma, marriage holds out to them not simply a more financially secure life, but the opportunity for a more active, socially responsible one.

Today the idea of marriage is a loaded one; at best it's a closing down of options. Austen's women saw things differently. For them life opened up at the point of marriage. The married state, not the single state, meant liberation. Marriage offered freedom from the confined life of a girl at home. In Mansfield Park Maria Bertram marries to gain "Sotherton and London, independence and splendour"-two houses, worldly status, and independence from her parents.

Of course this bid for freedom only worked if you married the right person. Maria did not and found in marriage a prison at least as confining as her father's house. For both sexes, marriage to the wrong person could have disastrous consequences-not simply unhappiness and financial precariousness, but worse still, moral degradation. If you were led to marry someone small-minded, mean, or coarse (whether by your own faulty judgment or the faulty judgment of your friends and relations), you risked those qualities rubbing off on you. It was a danger Austen seems to have felt men were particularly prone to. Of Mr. John Dashwood she says: "Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was:-he might even have been made amiable himself." Similar things are said of Frank Churchill's uncle, who is married to the perennially disagreeable, ill- tempered Mrs. Churchill: " . . . he would be the best man in the world if he were left to himself . . ."

Even if you somehow proved immune to your partner's vices and you didn't actually acquire them yourself, your personality might be warped by trying to accommodate them, as with Elizabeth's father, Mr. Bennet. Twenty-something years of his wife's nonsensical conversation seem to have given him a faintly masochistic turn: he takes a strange pleasure in never giving her a straight answer, thereby making some of her imaginary frustrations real and provoking her to exclaim even more. These two do not act pleasantly on each other.

With stakes as high as these it's hardly surprising that the action of Jane Austen's six novels so often turns on character. The author, her readers, and her heroines all set themselves to decipher the personality of this attractive young man, that newly arrived young woman, not as an abstract exercise in aesthetics or moral judgment, but because these young people form a significant part of the available marriage pool and the

future happiness of someone-usually someone dear to the heroine- depends on it. Marriage is rarely far from the thoughts of an Austen heroine, but much of the time it is not her own marriage that occupies her.

Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot, and Fanny Price are all, in their different ways, inveterate people-watchers. When Darcy asks Elizabeth Bennet, "May I ask to what these questions tend?" she replies, "Merely to the illustration of your character? . . . I am trying to make it out." Nor is it simply the pressure of finding a suitable partner that makes them so curious about other people.

In our largely urban culture we choose those to whom we belong: our friends are likely to have interests and opinions similar to our own. Other family members may live some distance away, and we have a degree of control over how often we see them. Austen's women-and most of her men-don't have this freedom. They live in small, clearly defined societies-a village or country town. Even Emma Woodhouse, who is wealthy, hasn't much choice of companions; she cannot avoid Miss Bates who irritates her, Mr. and Mrs. Cole who bore her, or Jane Fairfax whom she dislikes. In fixed societies it becomes a matter of some necessity to understand one's neighbors, to seek out those most likely to contribute to one's comfort and to learn how best to get on with the rest.

Often there is a newcomer whose character becomes a sort of mystery that requires unraveling. In Sense and Sensibility it is Willoughby, in Emma Frank Churchill, in Persuasion Mr. Elliot, while Pride and Prejudice has three: Bingley, Darcy, and Wickham. Darcy has somehow been redefined in recent years as a dark, brooding, romantic hero. I've seen him mentioned with Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester as if they were all points on the same spectrum. But that's not how Elizabeth or Jane Austen sees him. When Elizabeth thinks Darcy is arrogant, she isn't attracted to him. She turns him down. It's only when she sees him as a kind friend, a caring brother, and a good master that she begins to fall in love with him. If he makes other people happy, then he is capable of making her happy too. I doubt that Elizabeth is secretly or subconsciously attracted to a "dark" Darcy. Twenty-first- century women (and men) can afford to romanticize dark heroes because their fates and futures are in their own hands-Elizabeth didn't have that option.

As in a detective story where a tiny detail may hold the key to a murder, some small action may turn out to be a clue to a man's personality. Halfway through Emma Frank Churchill goes to London to get his hair cut, and it promptly becomes one of the most overanalyzed haircuts in English literature:

There was certainly no harm in his travelling sixteen miles twice over on such an errand; but there was an air of foppery and nonsense in it which she could not approve. It did not accord with the rationality of plan, the moderation in expense, or even the unselfish warmth of heart which she had believed herself to discern in him yesterday. Vanity, extravagance, love of change, restlessness of temper, which must be doing something, good or bad; heedlessness as to the pleasure of his father and Mrs. Weston, indifferent as to how his conduct might appear in general; he became liable to all these charges . . .

And these, it ought to be said, are just Emma's first thoughts on the haircut. Of course she is right and the haircut is a clue-but not in the way she thinks.

Austen's liveliest and most articulate heroines (Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), who congratulate themselves on their superior knowledge of people, are the ones who get it spectacularly wrong. Elizabeth misjudges Darcy, Wickham, and Bingley; Emma goes one better and misjudges everybody including herself. ("With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of every body's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange every body's destiny.") But the quiet heroines, the women whom circumstances have conspired to humble (Fanny Price and Anne Elliot) see and understand perfectly. I suspect that "humble" is the key word here. There is a logical connection for Austen between clarity of vision and true humility (a virtue so unfashionable nowadays that we scarcely believe it exists and use it as a synonym for "hypocrisy"). If you no longer believe that you can control a situation or have anything to gain from it, then your chances of perceiving it clearly are much improved. Not that this is a particularly pleasant gift: Fanny and Anne are both cruelly hurt by what they see. Each endures the heartbreak of watching the man she loves court someone else.

Film and television adaptations have misled us into thinking Austen wrote about something called "the Jane Austen world"—a world of picturesque houses, romantic landscapes, carriages, placid servants, candlelit ballrooms, bonnets, and costumes. But these things belong to costume drama; they are what give it visual impact. Austen wasn't a visual writer. Her landscapes are emotional and moral-what we would call psychological; they are not physical.

There is always more negative space around Austen than we think. We know that she did not address social problems, criticize political or social institutions, delve into the lives of the working class, or rise to describe the aristocracy. In fact the list of things Austen didn't write about is much longer than that. She has little to say about dress; even less about landscape. The servants, who must play an enormous part in the daily lives of her characters, are rarely named. How many of the most important houses in her fiction are described? Not Longbourn. Not Hartfield. Even Mansfield Park is barely sketched in ("an handsome house") until Mary Crawford contemplates marrying Tom Bertram in Chapter 5. Then we learn it has: "a park, a real park five miles round, a spacious modern-built hou...