Austen Criticism (II) « Making Sense

In his 1870 review of the Memoir of Jane Austen, Richard Simpson identified the ‘critical spirit’[1] of Austen and John Bailey has suggested that it may account for her capacity to ‘bother’ her critics from time to time,[2] as Rebecca West catches wittily in her 1932 preface to Northanger Abbey, speculating as to why Crosby ‘should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think worth while to publish’:[3]

But later, perhaps when he was about to send the manuscript down to the printing-press, he gave it another look, and was sharply pulled up by a suspicion that it was not what he had supposed it. He was not at all sure that the tale was as like any other as he had supposed, or so pleasant. It certainly was not the kind of tale generally accepted as pleasant at the circulating libraries, which draws tears and smiles from the reader by incidents generally accepted as having that effect. For though the people in it were pleasant enough, the author’s attitude to them was not so pleasant. It was disconcerting. One did not know where one was. She seemed to be laughing at them for actions not usually considered laughable. It might even be feared that she was laughing at the reader; in which case she would certainly be laughing much harder at the business man whom she had persuaded to act as intermediary in this sarcastic assault on the public. But it might even be that the joke the manuscript was playing on him was even more impudent. It might be that there was nothing in it at all, innocuous twaddle which would strike even the circulating libraries as insipid trifling with their subscribers’ intelligence; for it dealt with most ordinary people and events, and that not robustly, as Fielding and Smollett had done it, nor with sentimental excitements as Richardson and Fanny Burney had done it, but with the calm of ladies talking round a tea table. It is not to be wondered if the book-seller threw back into his drawer this manuscript that meant either far too much or far too little, told the printer’s devil not to wait, and announced to himself that he might as well consider that ten pounds as good as lost.

Rebecca West, 1932 Preface to Northanger Abbey, pp. 293-4

John Bailey’s thesis in The Irresponsibility of Jane Austen, which is really the antithesis of F. R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition, that Jane Austen’s most natural home isn’t in the series of great nineteenth century ‘intellectual’ novelists taking in Eliot, Lawrence and James, but belongs to the greater transcendent tradition that includes Tolstoy and Shakespeare. As Trilling observed, each rereading of Emma can produce a different reading making it somewhat difficult to pin down her meaning, which hasn’t stopped critics from having a go.

In these comments on Mr. Woodhouse by another critic we seem even further away from Jane Austen.

Mr Woodhouse—after long years of invalidism, of being coddled by his daughter, of scarcely stirring from his house or seeing a new person—is an idiot. He is quite incapable of thought or judgement… When Emma, in a rare mood of almost irritable playfulness, tries to point out the contradiction between his respect for brides and his dislike of marriage, she only makes him nervous without making him at all understand… His tenacious clinging to Emma, to his acquaintances, to the seen boundaries of his world, come to resemble the clinging of a parasitic plant, which must be now or sometime shaken off. Mr. Woodhouse is the living—barely living—excuse for Emma’s refusal to commit herself to the human world.[4]

I confess to total puzzlement, which I feel Jane Austen might have shared, about the word ‘human’ in this context.

John Bayley, The Irresponsibility of Jane Austen

Without being careful more is learnt about the critic than the work being criticised, but this is more liable to happen with Austen’s novels than Eliot’s, James’s or Lawrence’s, as these authors are standing outside the characters and action and shaping the whole to meet a coherent, ‘responsible’ narrative. For Bayley though, Shakespeare, Austen and Tolstoy work from within the action and are characterised by their ‘irresponsible’ development of character and plot.

It is surely a wholly different fictional outlook which finds some human beings more human than others? And though the critic is entitled to his own assessment of Mr. Woodhouse, is it fair to assume that his creator felt the same way? Doesn’t he ignore Jane Austen’s characteristic and ‘irresponsible’ sharing of Mr. Woodhouse with us? Jane Austen, and we with her, enter into Mr. Woodhouse as Shakespeare enters into Shylock, or Tolstoy into Stiva Oblonsky; and it is moving, liberating and illuminating to be enabled to feel in this way how other people feel; to relax inside their limitation; to acquiesce briefly in the bonds of their temperament; to surrender for the moment our own modes of judging, perceiving and desiring. This is a primal experience in literature, and one essentially different in kind from our being invited to contemplate the character as a portrait, and to assist in the analysis of a composition. Of course with Jane Austen we can do that too, but a kind of identification comes first, and profoundly modifies our ensuing appraisal. It is from his critical vantage-point that Professor Mudrick calls Mr. Woodhouse an ‘idiot’. Jane Austen in life might herself have called him that in a moment of exasperation, and so can her reader; but it would be an exclamation from inside a community, not a verdict from outside it.

John Bayley, The Irresponsibility of Jane Austen, p. 5

For Bayley, Austen belongs properly, not in the tradition identified by F. R. Leavis, but that identified by Johnson:

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few can how nearly they are copied. The irregular combination of fanciful invention may delight a while, by the novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror[5] of manners and of life.

Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, pp. 420-1

But Johnson goes on to make some criticisms of Shakespeare.

His defect is that to which can be imputed most of the evil in books or men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is he careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked;[6] he carries his persons without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer’s duty to make the world a better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.

Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, p. 427

However Johnson later seems to qualify this in his preface to on Addison.

Whatever crimes there may be in seeing crimes punished and virtue rewarded, yet since wickedness often prospers in real life, the poet is certainly at liberty to give it prosperity on the stage. For, if poetry has an imitation of reality,[7] how are its laws to be broken by exhibiting the world in true form? The stage may sometimes gratify our wishes; but if it is truly the mirror of life,[8] it ought to show us sometimes what we are to expect.

Samuel Johnson, Prefaces to the Works of the English Poets, p. 671

However, Shakespeare lived in a different time from the nineteenth century novelists, when the claims of the Church and state to pronounce upon private and public ethics remained intact, and this historical context is significant in considering the ethical dimension of their works. Austen did see herself as a moralist and a careful examination of her six published novels will show that they meet Johnson’s criteria for poetic justice—Austen never sacrificed virtue to convenience—and remained within the parameters of the manifesto for the new realistic Novel set out in the Rambler, No. 4:

The purpose of these writings is surely not only to show mankind, but to provide that they may be seen hereafter with less hazard; to teach the means of avoiding the snares which are laid by Treachery for Innocence without infusing any wish for that superiority with which the betrayer flatters his vanity; to give the power of counteracting fraud without the temptation to practice it; to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defence, and to increase imprudence without impairing virtue. […]

It is therefore to be steadily inculcated that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the natural consequence of narrow thoughts, and it begins in mistake and ends in ignominy.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No 4, p. 177-9

Drama has never had the same capacity as the realistic novel to break down the barrier between reader and the imaginary world of the novel; the debate about ethics, and ethics in art, starts properly with the Enlightenment and the rise of the realistic novel and mass communications.

Whatever about Shakespeare we do know Tolstoy’s mature attitude towards art in general and his novels in particular.

The diversity of feelings produced by religious consciousness is infinite, and they are all new, because religious consciousness is infinite, and they are all new, because religious consciousness is nothing other than the indication of the new, creative attitude towards the world, while the feelings arising from the desire for pleasure are not only limited, but have long since been experienced and expressed. And therefore the unbelief of the European upper classes led them to an art most poor in content. […]

… it is the weariness with life, the scorn of the present age, the longing for another time perceived through the illusion of art, the taste for paradox, the need to make oneself noticed, the aspiration of the refined towards simplicity, the infantile worship of the marvellous, the morbid seductiveness of the reverie, the unsettling of the nerves, and above all the exasperated appeal of sensuality.

[The Young: Studies and Portraits by traditionalist scholar and critic René Doumic (1800-1937)]

And indeed, of these three feelings, sensuality, being the lowest, accessible not only to all people but also to all animals, constitutes the chief subject of all works of art in modern times.

From Boccaccio to Marcel Prévost,[9] all novels, narrative poems and lyrics invariably convey feelings of sexual love in its various forms. Adultery is not just the favourite but the only theme of all novels.

Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, pp. 60-2

The point isn’t that the mature Tolstoy was the best critic of his own novels but it is difficult to believe, given these later sentiments, that he would have disowned Anna Karenina if he had a positive vision of how one should live in the society of (his own assessment) the dissolute Russian metropolitan milieu that he caught so brilliantly. Jane Austen probably regarded the metropolis with fairly similarly sentiments (Fanny could well have been reflecting in some measure the suspicions of her author in her ‘disposition to think the influence of London very much at war with all respectable attachments’[10]), but Austen never allowed it to distract her from her purpose, which wasn’t merely to passively ‘represent’ people or society, from the inside or outside, but to also capture the ongoing struggle to live the (take your pick) just or true or happy or meaningful or virtuous life. Her art is a critical exploration of that vision, and her means of doing it was to keep the action focused on the central drama of her heroine’s (tragic?) battle to cope with life, comically offset with the social context.

It goes without saying that Jane Austen could not in the nature of things have performed Tolstoy’s massive feat of sustaining a deep inner acceptance of society—with all it adds to the vitality and certainty of his characters—together with an external vision of it, and of them when they have put themselves outside society. His ruthless comprehensiveness, his masculine freedom, could conjecture and continue to the bitter end where she could not. Her power to suggest and explore stops short at the boundaries within which she lived and wrote, but in her greatest novels the very act of stopping short is a peculiar tender of significance and illumination.

John Bayley, The Irresponsibility of Jane Austen, p. 17

It is a uniquely modern motif that there exists a ‘view from nowhere’ which has to be caught, but one which didn’t seem to interest Austen who was content to present society from the viewpoint of the central drama. It isn’t that society isn’t important, quite the contrary, it is just that, in Austen’s universe, as in life, one has be content to explore it from a single viewpoint.

In Mansfield Park, for all its virtues, no resolution is achieved. The situation of Fanny, the perception of her divided feelings about Mansfield Park and Portsmouth, and of her half-admiring and half-hostile relationship to Mary Crawford—a relation which carries a hint of Jane Fairfax’s with Emma—these instance the real pressures conceived and conveyed in Mansfield Park. There are many more of the same quality, but none of them harmonize with the arbitrary winding up of the plot. Fanny’s triumphant marriage is not earned nor even indulged by anything crucial in the presentation of her; and the Crawfords, with the younger Bertrams, simply collapse into limbo. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery…’ This is not the irresponsibility that we can prize and participate in with her, but mere abdication, more elegant and light-hearted than it would be with professionals of a later date, but no more satisfying.

John Bayley, The Irresponsibility of Jane Austen, p. 18

I think that ‘Fanny’s triumphant marriage is not earned nor even indulged by anything crucial in the presentation of her’ would be at least as surprising to Jane Austen as Marvin Mudrick’s judgement of the Woodhouses. As Tony Tanner points out in the same volume, Mansfield Park, is about ‘rest and restlessness, stability and change’ in a world that is getting ready to enter a period of ‘convulsive, uncontrollable change—the moving and the immovable’[11]—and it is reminding us of the virtues of stability and stasis, as well as contrasting pleasing surfaces with superficially less attractive but more enduring qualities. As the novel progresses Fanny—easily Austen’s most timid heroine—is put through the most intense and subtle pressures of all kinds from everyone who is close and important to her (even the otherwise-inert favourite aunt of hers) to sacrifice her principles and her heart to expediency and marry Henry Crawford.[12] She has correctly determined that below the Crawfords’ pleasant and pleasing manners lurks something much less attractive, and it is her passion for Edmund that has cleared her head, giving her strong motivation for keep both Mary and Henry at a distance and therefore seeing them more clearly.

Henry Crawford had quite made up his mind by the next morning to give another fortnight to Mansfield, and having sent for his hunters, and written a few lines of explanation to the Admiral, he looked round at his sister as he sealed and threw the letter from him, and seeing the coast clear of the rest of the family, said, with a smile, “And how do you think I mean to amuse myself, Mary, on the days that I do not hunt? I am grown too old to go out more than three times a week; but I have a plan for the intermediate days, and what do you think it is?”

“To walk and ride with me, to be sure.”

“Not exactly, though I shall be happy to do both, but that would be exercise only to my body, and I must take care of my mind. Besides, that would be all recreation and indulgence, without the wholesome alloy of labour, and I do not like to eat the bread of idleness. No, my plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me.”

“Fanny Price! Nonsense! No, no. You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins.”

“But I cannot be satisfied without Fanny Price, without making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart. You do not seem properly aware of her claims to notice. When we talked of her last night, you none of you seemed sensible of the wonderful improvement that has taken place in her looks within the last six weeks. You see her every day, and therefore do not notice it; but I assure you she is quite a different creature from what she was in the autumn. She was then merely a quiet, modest, not plain-looking girl, but she is now absolutely pretty. I used to think she had neither complexion nor countenance; but in that soft skin of hers, so frequently tinged with a blush as it was yesterday, there is decided beauty; and from what I observed of her eyes and mouth, I do not despair of their being capable of expression enough when she has anything to express. And then, her air, her manner, her tout ensemble, is so indescribably improved! She must be grown two inches, at least, since October.”

“Phoo! phoo! This is only because there were no tall women to compare her with, and because she has got a new gown, and you never saw her so well dressed before. She is just what she was in October, believe me. The truth is, that she was the only girl in company for you to notice, and you must have a somebody. I have always thought her pretty—not strikingly pretty—but ‘pretty enough,’ as people say; a sort of beauty that grows on one. Her eyes should be darker, but she has a sweet smile; but as for this wonderful degree of improvement, I am sure it may all be resolved into a better style of dress, and your having nobody else to look at; and therefore, if you do set about a flirtation with her, you never will persuade me that it is in compliment to her beauty, or that it proceeds from anything but your own idleness and folly.”

Her brother gave only a smile to this accusation, and soon afterwards said, “I do not quite know what to make of Miss Fanny. I do not understand her. I could not tell what she would be at yesterday. What is her character? Is she solemn? Is she queer? Is she prudish? Why did she draw back and look so grave at me? I could hardly get her to speak. I never was so long in company with a girl in my life, trying to entertain her, and succeed so ill! Never met with a girl who looked so grave on me! I must try to get the better of this. Her looks say, ‘I will not like you, I am determined not to like you’; and I say she shall.”

“Foolish fellow! And so this is her attraction after all! This it is, her not caring about you, which gives her such a soft skin, and makes her so much taller, and produces all these charms and graces! I do desire that you will not be making her really unhappy; a little love, perhaps, may animate and do her good, but I will not have you plunge her deep, for she is as good a little creature as ever lived, and has a great deal of feeling.”

“It can be but for a fortnight,” said Henry; “and if a fortnight can kill her, she must have a constitution which nothing could save. No, I will not do her any harm, dear little soul! only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall be never happy again. I want nothing more.”

“Moderation itself!” said Mary. “I can have no scruples now. Well, you will have opportunities enough of endeavouring to recommend yourself, for we are a great deal together.”

And without attempting any farther remonstrance, she left Fanny to her fate, a fate which, had not Fanny’s heart been guarded in a way unsuspected by Miss Crawford, might have been a little harder than she deserved; for although there doubtless are such unconquerable young ladies of eighteen (or one should not read about them) as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment by all that talent, manner, attention, and flattery can do, I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them, or to think that with so much tenderness of disposition, and so much taste as belonged to her, she could have escaped heart-whole from the courtship (though the courtship only of a fortnight) of such a man as Crawford, in spite of there being some previous ill opinion of him to be overcome, had not her affection been engaged elsewhere.

Mansfield Park, Vol. II, Ch. VI (24.1-11)

‘I will not have you plunge her deep’ indeed. This is a highly unusual scene that breaks the novels unity of presentation from the heroine’s point of view, it being a private scene between Henry and Mary which remains private, having no consequences for the development of the plot. We are being dramatically shown the soundness of Fanny’s judgement.

The pressure the timid Fanny Price is put under by the most powerful figures in Austen’s novels is awesome.

Sir Thomas came towards the table where she sat in trembling wretchedness, and with a good deal of cold sternness, said, “It is of no use, I perceive, to talk to you. We had better put an end to this most mortifying conference. Mr. Crawford must not be kept longer waiting. I will, therefore, only add, as thinking it my duty to mark my opinion of your conduct, that you have disappointed every expectation I had formed, and proved yourself of a character the very reverse of what I had supposed. For I had, Fanny, as I think my behaviour must have shewn, formed a very favourable opinion of you from the period of my return to England. I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. But you have now shewn me that you can be wilful and perverse; that you can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you, without even asking their advice. You have shewn yourself very, very different from anything that I had imagined. The advantage or disadvantage of your family, of your parents, your brothers and sisters, never seems to have had a moment's share in your thoughts on this occasion. How they might be benefited, how they must rejoice in such an establishment for you, is nothing to you. You think only of yourself, and because you do not feel for Mr. Crawford exactly what a young heated fancy imagines to be necessary for happiness, you resolve to refuse him at once, without wishing even for a little time to consider of it, a little more time for cool consideration, and for really examining your own inclinations; and are, in a wild fit of folly, throwing away from you such an opportunity of being settled in life, eligibly, honourably, nobly settled, as will, probably, never occur to you again. Here is a young man of sense, of character, of temper, of manners, and of fortune, exceedingly attached to you, and seeking your hand in the most handsome and disinterested way; and let me tell you, Fanny, that you may live eighteen years longer in the world without being addressed by a man of half Mr. Crawford's estate, or a tenth part of his merits. Gladly would I have bestowed either of my own daughters on him. Maria is nobly married; but had Mr. Crawford sought Julia's hand, I should have given it to him with superior and more heartfelt satisfaction than I gave Maria's to Mr. Rushworth.” After half a moment's pause: “And I should have been very much surprised had either of my daughters, on receiving a proposal of marriage at any time which might carry with it only half the eligibility of this, immediately and peremptorily, and without paying my opinion or my regard the compliment of any consultation, put a decided negative on it. I should have been much surprised and much hurt by such a proceeding. I should have thought it a gross violation of duty and respect. You are not to be judged by the same rule. You do not owe me the duty of a child. But, Fanny, if your heart can acquit you of ingratitude—”

He ceased. Fanny was by this time crying so bitterly that, angry as he was, he would not press that article farther. Her heart was almost broke by such a picture of what she appeared to him; by such accusations, so heavy, so multiplied, so rising in dreadful gradation! Self-willed, obstinate, selfish, and ungrateful. He thought her all this. She had deceived his expectations; she had lost his good opinion. What was to become of her?

Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. I (32.39-40)

Tony Tanner has summed it up well.

To a world abandoning itself to thoughtless restlessness, Jane Austen is holding up an image of the values of thoughtful rest. Aware that the trend was for more and more people to explore the excitements of personality, she wanted to show how much there was to be said for the ‘heroism of principle’. It is a stoic book in that it speaks for stillness rather than movement, firmness rather than fluidity, arrest rather than change, endurance rather than adventure. In the figure of Fanny, it elevates the mind that struggles against itself, as opposed to the ego which indulges in promiscuous potentialities. Fanny is a true heroine because in a turbulent world it is harder to refrain from action than to let energy and impulse run riot. This is a point of Sir Thomas’s final insight when he comes to ‘acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.’

Tony Tanner, Jane Austen and the Quiet Thing, p. 159

John Bayley is by no means the only critic to fail to recognise a heroine in Fanny Price as Lionel Trilling explains.

As for Mansfield Park, the first work of the mature period, it quite matches Emma in point of substantiality but it makes a special and disturbing case. Greatly admired in its own day – far more than Emma – Mansfield Park is disliked by many readers who like everything else Jane Austen wrote. They are repelled by its heroine and by all that she seems to imply of the author’s moral and religious preferences at this moment of her life, for Fanny Price consciously devotes herself to virtue and piety, which she achieves by a willing submissiveness that goes against the modern grain. What is more, the author seems to be speaking out against wit and spiritedness (while not abating her ability to represent these qualities), and virtually in praise of dullness and acquiescence, and thus to be condemning her own peculiar talents. Mansfield Park is an extraordinary novel, and only Jane Austen could have achieved its profound and curious interest, but its moral tone is antipathetic to modern taste, and no essay I have ever written has met with so much resistance as the one in which I tried to say that it was not really a perverse and wicked book.

Lionel Trilling, Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen, p. 151

Lionel trilling wasn’t exaggerating. Mansfield Park’s ability to offend twentieth century sensibilities id difficult to match as can be seen from the closing words of Kingsley Amis’s essay.

Instead it is a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel . What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? From being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgement and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.

Kingsley Amis’s What Became of Jane Austen?, p. 144

A film adaptation of Mansfield Park effectively abseiled Elizabeth Bennet into the heroine’s role as this was presumably the only way they could get the film made or be sure of its financial success.[13] This is highly ironic as when Jane Austen considered Pride and Prejudice ‘rather too light and bright & sparkling’[14]—could she have been concerned that some may miss the point believing that it was merely Elizabeth Bennet’s wit and vivaciousness that had triumphed and would inject some ‘shade’ into her next production, transposing Elizabeth’s surface qualities onto the anti-heroine Mary Crawford and creating in Fanny a heroine the almost exact reverse of her favourite heroine.

The symmetries between novels are so marked that the structure of the cycle must be taken into account in drawing conclusions about any one of the novels and it is notable that Lionel Trilling—surely one of Austen’s very finest critics—should give such weight to the ‘moral and religious preferences at this moment of her life’ in apologising for the tone of Mansfield Park when the author has flagged her intentions so clearly. Austen started work on Mansfield Park in February 1811, rewrote and then published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, finished and published Mansfield Park in 1814, started Emma in January 1814 for publication in 1816[15]—this is a short, awesome period of creativity and one can’t fail to be struck by contrast between Mansfield Park and the playfulness of Pride and Prejudice and Emma; the suggestion that Austen transmogrified into a high-Victorian evangelical moralist before writing Mansfield Park only to then undergo another violent change in outlook before starting on Emma suggests an unstable Jane Austen not to be found in the biographies. What is more pertinent is the instability of the reputations of Mansfield Park and Emma, with their relative popularity being thoroughly reversed by professional critic and punter alike between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Matthew Arnold and others reread Mansfield Park annually as a kind of tonic for their style[16]). To better comprehend the contrast in tones between Mansfield Park and its adjacent siblings it is important to take account of the way Austen structured her comedies.

Austen’s Cycle of Comedies

Two structures are used and alternated. In both series it is the passion of the heroine that holds the novel together which, of course, gets consummated in a marriage at the end. In discovery novels—Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Emma—the theme is discovery and knowledge, where the heroine has to discover the passion but also make a discovery about the world with the subjective misunderstanding of her heart being mirrored in an objective misunderstanding of the world, and only by correcting one can she correct the other and achieve the emotional and financial security in the resolution at the end. In the case of Northanger Abbey—which breaks this pattern somewhat—she has to discover that her passion is for Henry Tilney, not John Thorpe, and to not take surface realities so literally. The theme of Northanger Abbey is innocence and it breaks the pattern because Catherine Morland actually manages to get the important things more-or-less right by intuition, her innocence carrying her. However, the going is tough because Catherine takes what people are saying literally rather than picking up their real intentions, until Henry Tilney starts to school her in penetrating surfaces to get to the underlying meaning. There is a nice little twist where we are left wondering to what extent Catherine is right in marking General Tilney out as a villain given his ultimate monstrous behaviour and Henry shows himself to be naïve in claiming that domestic murders can’t happen in England, with or without the spies. This is the other important motif, the hero and heroine helping each other to see themselves and the world more clearly[17]—head and heart never being allowed to become too separated in an Austen novel. As well as a study of innocence, and showing how polite society and the marriage market works, there is a neat allegory inviting the reader outside the novel to read the fictional narrative carefully and critically, just as the heroine inside the novel is being schooled in penetrating surfaces in the real world that is being represented around her.[18] In Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the pattern of discovery fits more closely, Elizabeth and Emma more actively misreading the world.

For the remaining novels there is an action motif. The heroine (Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price or Anne Elliot) starts out seeing the world without the kind of distorting characteristic of the discovery novels and likewise knowing her heart, but she has to undergo trials that test this knowledge, and only when she passes the trials does she get the emotional satisfaction and financial security that comes with marriage. (Butler (1987) observes that in this series, the heroine generally has to bring about a correction of understanding in the lover or parent figure [p. 164].) The point about these two series is that where the motif is knowledge, the source of the pressure on the heroine comes internally from her misunderstanding, so the heroine and the scene in which she is placed can be lighter and more dynamic, comic and amiable—Austen’s nineteenth century readers tended to criticise these novels for lacking seriousness. In the action novels the heroine is being tested from without so is put under much pressure from her environment, which is represented as darker and more threatening than the in the discovery novels, and the heroine has a corresponding stamp of seriousness and is more passive—Austen’s twentieth series readers have tended to dismiss novels as being too moralistic and featuring a heroine that is overly-rational and emotionally frigid, and Austen suspected that again Anne Eliot might prove to be ‘almost too good’[19] for her, opted for a more subjective, sentimental format emphasising the pathos of Anne’s situation and so Anne and Persuasion escapes the opprobrium that Elinor and Sense and Sensibility and especially Fanny Price and Mansfield Park tend to attract from twentieth century readers.

Note that the action novels feature relatively passive heroines; it seems paradoxical that a virtuous heroine should be inactive, and critics have wondered about this feature of professedly ethical novels.

The insistence on “moral and instructive sentiments” can seem simply untrue to the novels themselves and sounds like little more than an official justification of the pleasures of fiction. After all, the whole force of Clarissa comes from its authors determination to place his heroine in situations where there seems no right choice – or no choice at all.

John Mullan, Sentimental Novels, p. 246

Ian Watt has observed that women probably reached the nadir of their powerlessness in the eighteenth century leisured classes.

To begin with, the legal position of women in the eighteenth century was very largely governed by the patriarchal concepts of Raman law. The only person in the household who was sui juris, who was a legal entity, was its head, usually a father. A woman’s property was, for instance, became her husband’s absolutely on marriage, although it was customary to arrange a jointure for her when marriage articles were drawn up; the children were in law the husband’s; only the husband could sue for divorce; and he had the right to punish his wife by beating or imprisoning her.

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 141

Women of the extended eighteenth century didn’t have to be powerless as we saw with, for example, Mrs Ferrars and Lady Catherine De Burgh, but Austen heroines and sympathetic protagonists are usually in situations like herself, a portionless, gentleman’s daughter with marriage being the only way of avoiding dependence and a slow humiliating social descent like that of Miss Bates in Emma. It is this association of virtue with passivity which has caused the most problems for twentieth century readers of Austen.

Cynical or Critical

Catharine had the misfortune, as many heroines have had before her, of losing her parents when she was very young, and of being bought up under the care of her Maiden Aunt, who while she tenderly loved her, watched over her conduct with so scrutinizing severity, as to make it doubtful to many people, and to Catharine amongst the rest, whether she loved her or not.

Jane Austen, Catharine and the Bower, p. 418

Here in this opening sentence of Catharine and the Bower we can see some of the Austen trademarks—the probing and playing off of fictional and real-world values and conventions, the questioning and destabilising of sentimental conventions, the illumination under a shower of comic fireworks of those ‘aspects of things that are most important for us’ being ‘hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’[20]—not bad for an author that is not yet seventeen, already showing some of the disconcerting qualities that would prompt Auden’s verse.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside 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.

Hugh Wystan Auden, Letters front Iceland, p. 299

This is illustrated by the predicament of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, a poignant episode showing how marginal genteel women could hardly afford to ignore the effects of ‘brass’. When we meet her Charlotte has much in common with Elizabeth, being a sensitive and intelligent portionless daughter of a gentleman who, as her brothers fear, risks ‘dieing an old maid’[21], but is more akin to Austen herself in not having Elizabeth’s superabundance of youth and beauty. As Charlotte explains to Elizabeth, ‘I am not romantic, you know’,[22] and in her situation perhaps she can’t afford to be. Mr Collins, on the other hand has an establishment and is ‘in need of a wife’, so Charlotte closes with him, gets herself off her family’s hands, and we see how she manages him and the situation when Elizabeth follows them to the Huntsford parsonage.

Mr Collins, however, is one of the most distinct and original portraits in the gallery of fiction, and we accept him gladly as a real contribution to our knowledge of humankind; not a contribution certainly which will make us more in love with our fellow-creatures, but yet so lifelike, so perfect and complete, touched with so fine a wit and so keen a perception of the ridiculous, that the picture once seen remains a permanent possession. And when we are told that the Bennet family, with all its humours—the father who is so good and sensible, and yet such an unmitigated bear; the mother whom he despises and ridicules without hesitation, even to his heroine-daughters who accept his sarcastic comments as the most natural thing in the world; the stupid pompous Mary, the loud and noisy, heartless and shameless Lydia—are all drawn with an equally fine and delicate touch, we have not a word to say against it. We acknowledge its truth, and yet we rebel against this pitiless perfection of art. It shocks us as much as it could possibly have shocked Mr Darcy, to allow that these should be the immediate surroundings of the young woman whom we are called upon to take to our hearts. We blush for the daughter who blushes for her mother. We hate the lover who points out to her, even in self-defence, the vulgarities and follies of her family. A heroine must be superior, it is true, but not so superior as this; and it detracts ever so much from the high qualities of Elizabeth when we see how very ready she is to be moved by a sense of the inferiority of her mother and sisters, how ashamed she is of their ways, and how thankful to think that her home will be at a distance from theirs.

Curiously enough, it would seem that Miss Austen herself felt for this same Elizabeth, and for her alone, the enthusiasm of a parent for a child. ‘I have got my own darling child from London,’ she writes to her sister, in a little flutter of pleasure and excitement. ‘Miss B——dined with us on the very day of the book’s coming, and in the evening we fairly set at it and read fully half the first volume to her, prefacing that having intelligence from Henry that such a book would soon appear, we had desired him to send it as soon as it came out; and I believe it passed with her unsuspected. She was amused, poor soul! That she could not help, you know, with two such people to lead the way, but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know.’ In a letter she adds—‘Fanny’s praise is very gratifying. My hopes were tolerably strong of her, but nothing like a certainty. Her liking Darcy and Elizabeth is enough; she might hate all the others if she would.’ This is as curious a piece of revelation as we know, and proves that the young woman who had just given so original a work to the world was in reality quite unaware of its real power, and had set her heart upon her hero and heroine like any schoolgirl. Our beloved Mr Collins, upon whom the spectator would be tempted to think a great deal of pains and some proportionate anxiety must have been expended, evidently goes for very little with his maker. It is her lovers she is thinking of, a commonplace pair enough, while we are full of her inimitable fools, who are not at all commonplace. This curious fact disorders our head a little, and makes us ponder and wonder whether our author is in reality the gentle cynic we have concluded her to be, or if she has produced all these marvels of selfish folly unawares, without knowing what she was doing, or meaning anything by it. Genius, however, goes a great deal deeper than conscious meaning, and has its own way, whatever may be the intentions of its owner; and we but smile at the novelist’s strange delusion as we set aside Elizabeth and Darcy, the one a young woman very much addicted to making speeches, very pert often, fond of having the last word, and prone to hasty judgments, with really nothing but her prettiness and a certain sharp smartness of talk to recommend her; and the other a very ordinary young man, quite like hosts of other young men, with that appearance of outward pride and hauteur which is so captivating to the youthful feminine imagination, though it must be admitted that he possesses an extraordinary amount of candour and real humility of mind under this exterior. It is curious to realise what a shock it must have given to the feelings of the young novelist when she found how little her favourite pair had to do with the success of their own story, and how entirely her secondary characters, in their various and vivid originality, carried the day over her first.

Margaret Oliphant, Mrs. Oliphant on Jane Austen, p. 220

Though the term had yet to be coined, we see an early accusation of Janeitism to an Austen enthusiast, and one of the first members of the club, appropriately enough, is Jane Austen herself. Indeed the point of Austen’s fiction is the ordinariness of her fools, heroes and heroines and the heroine’s battle to see herself clearly (in Elizabeth’s case, her tendency for hasty judgement and sharp, pert speeches). We can see with Margaret Oliphant’s progression of thought the kind of debate that cycles through Austen criticism, the assumption that because Austen sees things clearly, that she must therefore be cynical, but when the charge of cynicism can’t be made to stick, the Janeite charge of ‘strange delusion’ is levelled. At about the same time that Mrs Oliphant was writing this review Richard Simpson was opining that ‘her view of the life she described was that of a humourist, but of a very kindly one’,[23] however in the twentieth Century the psychologist D. W. Harding inaugurated a new period of Austen criticism:

Chiefly, so I gathered, she was a delicate satirist, revealing with inimitable lightness of touch the comic foibles and amiable weakness of the people whom she lived among and liked.

All this was enough to make me certain that I didn’t want to read her. And it is, I believe, a seriously misleading impression. Fragments of the truth have been incorporated in it but they are fitted into a pattern whose total effect is false. And yet the wide currency of this false impression is an indication Jane Austen’s success in an essential part of her complex intention as a writer: her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine. [p. 263, …]

The implications of her caricatures as criticism of real people in real society is brought out in the way they dovetail into our social setting. The decent, stodgy Charlotte puts up cheerfully with Mr Collins as a husband; and Elizabeth can never quite become reconciled to the idea that her friend is the wife of her comic monster. And that, of course, is precisely the sort of idea Jane Austen could never grow reconciled to. The people she hated were tolerated, accepted, comfortably ensconced in the only human society she knew; they were, for her, society’s embarrassing unconscious comment on itself. A recent writer on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jenkins, puts forward the polite and more comfortable interpretation in supposing Charlotte’s marriage to be explained solely by the impossibility of young women’s earning their own living at that period. But Charlotte’s complaisance goes deeper than that: it is shown as a considered indifference to personal relationships when they conflict with cruder advantages in the wider social world:

She had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was not exactly like her own, but she could not have supposed that it was possible that, when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage.

We know too, at the biographical level, that Jane Austen herself, in a precisely similar situation to Charlotte’s, spent a night of psychological crisis in deciding to revoke her acceptance of an ‘advantageous proposal’ made the previous evening. And her letters to Fanny Knight show how deep her convictions went on this point.

It is important to notice that Elizabeth makes no break with her friend on account of the marriage. This was the sort of friend—‘a friend disgracing herself and sunk in her esteem’—that went to make up the available social world which one could neither escape materially nor be independent of psychologically. [p. 268, …]

This will illustrate Jane Austen’s typical dilemma : of being intensely critical of people to whom she also has strong emotional attachments. [p. 269]

D. W. Harding, Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen

Mudrick (1952) subsequently expanded the psychological misanthropic ‘irony as defence’ thesis into a book, but again Virginia Woolf had seen this all quite differently.

[S]he is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature. […] Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delights of slicing their heads off. She is satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head, or move one brick or blade of grass in a world which provides her with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, of the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature women proves it. At this very moment some Lady Bertram is trying to keep Pug from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny too late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just, that, consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of pettiness, no hint of spite rouses us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illuminates these fools.

That elusive quality is, indeed, often made up of very different parts, which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature.

Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, pp. 19-21

This is a real puzzle: different critics are coming up with very different assessments of what Jane Austen is saying in her novels, and what it says about the author, and this isn’t in a few tricky passages, but across all the novels; not just pro-Austen critics saying one thing and her critic-critics saying another but enthusiasts and detractors appearing on each side of the disputes; we aren’t talking about a wobble with a change in critical methods, but disagreements that have been running for as long as her work has been subject to varied and serious criticism (since publication of the Austen-Leigh (1870) Memoir) and they aren’t technical disagreements of interpretation but substantial matters like whether, as A. C. Bradley found, “her novels make exceptionally peaceful reading”,[24] or as D. H. Lawrence found “this old maid typifies ‘personality’ instead of character, the sharp knowing in apartness instead of knowing in togetherness”[25]; was Austen a bitter and twisted, misanthropic, narrow-minded, censorious, Christian moralist or a kindly, generous, enlightened, non-judgemental, atheistic,[26] irresponsible poet of nature? and so forth.

Perhaps this puzzle can be unravelled in two stages. First Austen’s ‘metaphysics and epistemology’—how was she representing reality—and then the ethical question: what vision of life and the way it should be lived was she advocating, if any. The Italian critic Cecchi’s disapproving comments may provide a clue—“the sentimental nakedness of her characters shows the narrow-minded precision of a watchmaker”, “a fleshless psychological play, with the flash of clockwork”, “Miss Austen presents the events of life more or less like the turning of an empty spit on the cold fireplace of a desert kitchen”[27]—expressing clearly one grievance: Austen’s reality is causal and therefore anti-sentimental, as is to be expected from a thoroughgoing rationalist, but it is also why Austen’s novels were considered an important landmark in the development of the realistic novel, prominently identified by Scott and Whately (the first instances of serious Austen criticism). They pay close attention to the careful structuring of the narrative—the interdependent development of plot and character—and, as Hume pointed out, our comprehension of reality is essentially causal, and if causal relations are themselves examined we can only find probabilities.[28]

In short, the author of novels was, in former times, expected to tread pretty much in the limits between the concentric circles of probability and possibility; and as he was not permitted to transgress the latter, his narrative, to make amends, almost always went beyond the bounds of the former. [p. 61, …]

In adventuring upon this task, the author makes obvious sacrifices, and encounters peculiar difficulty. He who paints from le beau idéal, if his scenes and sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling them with the ordinary probabilities of life: but he who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader.

Walter Scott, Walter Scott, an unsigned review of Emma, Quarterly Review, p. 63

It is a remark of the great father of criticism, that poetry (i.e. narrative, and dramatic poetry) is of a more philosophical character than history; inasmuch as the latter details what has actually happened, of which many parts may chance to be exceptions to the general rules of probability, and consequently illustrate no general principles; whereas the former shews us what must naturally, or would probably, happen under given circumstances; and thus displays to us a comprehensive view of human nature, and furnishes general rules of practical wisdom. It is evident, that this will apply only to such fictions as are quite perfect in respect of the probability of their story; and that he, therefore, who resorts to the fabulist rather than the historian, for instruction in human character and conduct, must throw himself entirely on the judgment and skill of his teacher, and give him credit for talents much more rare than the accuracy and veracity which are the chief requisites in history. We fear, therefore, that the exultation which we can conceive some of our gentle readers to feel, at having Aristotle’s warrant for (what probably they had never dreamed of) the philosophical character of their studies, must, in practice, be somewhat qualified, by those sundry little violations of probability which are to be met with in most novels; and which so far lower their value, as models of real life, that a person who had no other preparation for the world than is afforded by them, would form, probably, a less accurate idea of things as they are, than he would of a lion from studying merely the representations on China tea-pots.

Richard Whately, Whately on Jane Austen, p. 88

For her ethical project she had to (in Gilbert Ryle’s phrase) ‘isolate the phenomenon’, which meant sticking to ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’[29] and the ‘use of understatement, of shallow relief’,[30] the very domestic ordinariness of Austen’s settings, and, like all good scientific theories she had to idealise and standardise somewhat, but still remaining representative of the real world in the critical features.[31] It is tempting to believe that Jane Austen was anticipating criticism when she gets Elizabeth to explain to Darcy the merits of minutely observing characters over time a relatively limited and stable system.

“Whatever I do is done in a hurry,” replied he [Bingley]; “and therefore if I should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in five minutes. At present, however, I consider myself as quite fixed here.”

“That is exactly what I should have supposed of you,” said Elizabeth.

“You begin to comprehend me, do you?” cried he, turning towards her.

“Oh! yes—I understand you perfectly.”

“I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen through I am afraid is pitiful.”

“That is as it happens. It does not follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours.”

“Lizzy,” cried her mother, “remember where you are, and do not run on in the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home.”

“I did not know before,” continued Bingley immediately, “that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.”

“Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.”

“The country,” said Darcy, “can in general supply but a few subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society.”

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood. “I assure you there is quite as much of that going on in the country as in town.”

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Volume I, Chapter IX

(Note that ‘straightforward’ characters such as Bingley and Jane shouldn’t be undervalued.) All of this her best critics have drawn out, and indeed it has become part of the modern novelist’s stock tools-in-trade, but as her brother regretted, ‘[h]er death has made a chasm in our light literature,—the domestic novel, with its home-born incidents, its “familiar matter of today”, its slight array of names, and great cognisance of people and things, its confinement to country life, and total oblivion of costume, manners and the great world’[32]; and that chasm has still not been filled. It is regularly suggested that Austen stuck to what she did because it was what she new how to do, and slightly less frequently expanded into a reflection on her abilities, but if the novelist is trying to work out a vision for life, is primarily interested in, then sticking to the familiar domestic middle-range of life is good art and good science.

But none of this quite explains the remarkable heat and diversity in Austen criticism; it is Virginia Woolf’s observation that ‘she is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature’ hits the mark; it is the comprehensiveness of her critical project—nothing is allowed to stand, there are no sacred cows, and, for those with sentimental or romantic sensibilities, this shows remarkably poor taste indeed. The holiest of the holy shrines for the modern romantic, the self, gets thoroughly desecrated in this tasteless analytical exercise, for persons are seen to be subjected to their own causes and conditions as plot and character thoroughly interpenetrate.

This conviction of the integrity of a good novel—this impression that it must be profitable to study ‘plot’ and ‘characters’ separately—is strongly borne out by a study of Jane Austen’s narrative art, and by particular observation of the course of its development. Whether we approach it in the fist place by way of her presentation of character, or of her construction of plot, we shall discover the need—more urgent as we draw towards the later of her novels—of reaching some central vantage point, from which the old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident’ (as Henry James calls it) is seen to be insignificant. For, ‘What’ (he demands) ‘is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’[33]

Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art, p. 147

That there is such diversity in Austen criticism suggests that she may have had some success in drawing life realistically, for as the great metaphysician himself has reminded us, our views of reality are filtered through our perception of that reality.

Candour

It has become the received wisdom of our contemporary culture that a discerning mind will endeavour to eliminate distorting, sentimental, generous, optimism from its outlook, and adopt more realistic attitudes that properly discern the selfishness that motivates actions (psychological egoism) and some have seen Austen’s programme as one of casting aside such sentimental blinkers. So it is worth considering whether Austen stands charged, as Elinor was in Mrs Dashwood’s eyes in Sense and Sensibility, of preferring to ‘take evil upon credit than good’ (Vol. 1, Ch. XV [15.28]).

The evolution in the meaning of the word candour is relevant. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is derived from the Latin candor—dazzling whiteness, brilliancy, innocency, purity, sincerity (candle being derived from the same root: see the full OED entry for Candour), and this is how the word is used from the 15^th century until the 17^th century when it gets split into three related meanings: a character of purity, integrity and innocence, and a disposition that is free from mental bias (impartiality, openness and justice) and a disposition that is kindly and not malicious. In the late eighteenth century we see the modern meaning of openness, frankness, ingenuousness and outspokenness (according to the OED the meaning of fairness and impartiality remains, but according to the Paperback Oxford English Dictionary, candour means only ‘the quality of being open and honest’).

It is striking that the original meaning of virtuous should be split into a judgemental part, the ability see things clearly, and a kindly, benevolent sense but that the modern understanding of candour stops at aiming for transparency, ignoring as it does the problems that can arise from misinterpreting evidence—to the modern sensibility with its view from nowhere it is enough to communicate the objective facts into the public sphere.

This is an important theme in Austen’s novels, being debated between Elinor and her mother in assessing Willoughby’s erratic behaviour on his abrupt departure[34] and it plays a crucial role in the plot of Pride and Prejudice with Jane and Elizabeth Bennet’s contrasting attitude towards the Bingleys and Darcy. Here, for example, is Elizabeth is wondering at Jane’s candour.

“Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in your life.”

“I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak what I think.”

“I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone. […]”

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. I, Ch. IV (4.7-9)

Note that Jane’s policy is to think well of people but to speak her mind. Of course Jane ends up the dupe of Caroline Bingley, being too careless of the signs that Caroline wasn’t a true friend, while Elizabeth is careless with Wickham and, of course, seriously misunderstands Darcy’s character after her pride is injured at their first meeting (4), or rather her vanity, as Mary had reminds us in the next chapter: ‘Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.’ (5.20)

“How despicably I have acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. II, Ch. XII (36.8)

We are given every reason to think that Jane’s character, though less intricate than Elizabeth’s, is no less inestimable, (9.13) as Elizabeth says herself of Jane:

“If you were to give me forty such men, I never could be so happy as you. Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness. […]”

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. III, Ch. XIII (55.52)

While there may be aspects of Jane Bennet’s disposition that contribute to her suffering, her candour, her determination to continue giving Caroline Bingley the benefit of the doubt, contributes little to it. Had Jane been more suspicious there is little she could have done to prevent Caroline working on her brother, but she would have had the superadded problem of trying to ward off bitterness towards her hypocritical friend. Jane, lacking Elizabeth’s brilliant, mercurial temperament is more inclined to brood and therefore more vulnerable to depression.

However there is a temptation for a modern reader to dismiss Elizabeth’s later, better appreciation of her sister’s qualities in psychological terms and see Jane as a ridiculous Panglossian optimist, as when Elizabeth teases Jane early of for trying to reconcile the very different accounts she is hearing of Wickham’s history with the Binghams’ testament of Darcy’s good character.

Elizabeth related to Jane the next day, what had passed between Mr. Wickham and herself. Jane listened with astonishment and concern; – she knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be so unworthy of Mr. Bingley's regard; and yet, it was not in her nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham. – The possibility of his having really endured such unkindness, was enough to interest all her tender feelings; and nothing therefore remained to be done, but to think well of them both, to defend the conduct of each, and throw into the account of accident or mistake, whatever could not be otherwise explained.

“They have both,” said she, “been deceived, I dare say, in some way or other, of which we can form no idea. Interested people have perhaps misrepresented each to the other. It is, in short, impossible for us to conjecture the causes or circumstances which may have alienated them, without actual blame on either side.”

“Very true, indeed; – and now, my dear Jane, what have you got to say in behalf of the interested people who have probably been concerned in the business? – Do clear them too, or we shall be obliged to think ill of somebody.”

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. I, Ch. XVII (17.1-3)

Indeed, there are two issues here: peace of mind and seeing clearly. Seeing clearly means being able to make successful predictions.[35] In a sense Jane Bennet failed to predict that Caroline Bingley would dump her as soon as she had no further use for Jane’s friendship, just as Elizabeth failed to predict Wickham’s unsavoury history in destroying women’s characters and his continuation of this career, and as she failed to predict Darcy’s merits. While Elizabeth may have read Caroline correctly, Jane correctly reads both Darcy and Wickham (‘I am sorry to say […] Mr. Wickham is by no means a respectable young man’ [18.46]); while the misreading of Caroline Bingley’s character is of fairly minor consequence, Elizabeth’s mixing up of Darcy and Wickham’s characters very nearly ruins her and her family’s prospects.

Jane’s efforts to think well of everyone until objective evidence suggests otherwise is wiser than it appears as it helps prevent Elizabeth’s snap, prejudiced judgement, and it promotes peace of mind—a vital quality for Austen and her favourite poet.

He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.

William Cowper, The Task, Book III: The Garden

Both Jane and Elizabeth’s favourite Aunt warn Elizabeth that she runs the risk of not only taking after her mother in making hasty judgements but also her father in turning her sharp faculties into a cynical and impotent philosophy of life.

“Nay,” said Elizabeth, “this is not fair. You [Jane] wish to think all the world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of any body. I only want to think you perfect, and you set yourself against it. Do not be afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching on your privilege of universal good will. You need not. There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense. I have met with two instances lately; one I will not mention; the other is Charlotte's marriage. It is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable!”

“My dear Lizzy, do not give way to such feelings as these. They will ruin your happiness. You do not make allowance enough for difference of situation and temper. Consider Mr. Collins's respectability, and Charlotte's prudent, steady character. Remember that she is one of a large family; that as to fortune, it is a most eligible match; and be ready to believe, for every body's sake, that she may feel something like regard and esteem for our cousin.”

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. II, Ch. I (24.11-2)

“Oh! if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all.”

[Mrs. Gardiner] “Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment.”

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. II, Ch. IV (27.19-20)

Darcy also finally regrets writing his letter to Elizabeth ‘in a dreadful bitterness of spirit’ (58.22), irrespective of the justice of its content.

In Austen’s ethical world, bitterness, or hatred—regulated or not—has little place, but should be minimised at all costs. As we will see Elinor Dashwood insists that the endeavour to treat people properly has nothing to do with the merit of their opinions and philosophies;[36] there is no reason why a kindly, respectful attitude can’t be (subjectively) cultivated while at the same time (objectively) seeking to better understand the context and minimise surprises. As we shall see,[37] the issue becomes sharp where responsibilities are present, such as the care of a vulnerable teenage daughter, where one must consider that an unsavoury history could be being concealed. While it may be just to give someone the benefit of the doubt, to be open to the possibility that their intentions are pure, this doesn’t mean that the assumption should be made in an act of blind faith; it is possible to be clear-headed without being hateful. On the contrary a hateful mind is difficult to regulate, doesn’t sleep easily, inhabits a body awash with toxic stimulants, is often bitter, paranoid and depressed, not to say aggressive—the hateful mind rarely thinks clearly.[38]

Too Judgemental?

Some have accused Austen of a harsh and judgemental ethics.

For a liberal like Lionel Trilling, the morality of any novel is indissolubly linked with its sympathetic treatment of individual human beings. The historical Jane Austen is serious-minded and didactic, but we should not, perhaps, be over hasty to call her moral—or not, at least, without careful and accurate consideration of her real moral position. That viewpoint is a strong-minded and intellectually consistent one, a strenuous, critical code which preaches self-understanding, self-mastery, and, ultimately, subordination. What therefore, it does not do is to give special value to the individual. It is Jane Austen’s way of presenting the individual, or, more specifically, her scepticism about the subjective consciousness, that distinguishes her from the nineteenth-century novelists. She is a moral writer, but of a type that may be antipathetic to the modern layman.

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. 296

It is true that the modern layman isn’t receptive to crude moralising, but neither is the modern layman antipathetic to Austen’s novels. To be sure Austen does make the case (‘preach’ is inappropriate here) for a self-understanding, self-mastery, which must in some instances require submission (an ethic that never restrains is no ethic at all), but this ethic respects the claims of all individuals. Austen would surely reply that true self-worth is only to be found in self-knowledge and mastery over self. As we will show[39] Austen presented some powerful arguments that designer ethics, a romantic laissez-faire neo-Kantian ethics in which we each create our own ethical systems may not be very coherent, and, to be sure, Austen would not have seen it as the duty of the novelist to reassure the reader that no effort need be invested in testing and refining ‘life skills’ and that surface sentiments are always reliable and in no need of scrutiny.

However, Butler goes on to cite the fate of Marianne Dashwood and Maria Bertram as instances of Austen’s ‘inhumanity’, the suffering having no value, Maria and Marianne’s suffering being a product of their own ‘moral error’ in the scheme of the novel, representative of the genre of ‘ant-jacobin’ conservative novels (p. 297).

Butler is surely right in that the pattern is there to see in the genre of late-eighteenth century conservative novelists, though Austen may also embody a move away from the moralising of ‘hard words and involved sentences’.[40] Obviously, Marianne Dashwood’s and Maria Bertram’s suffering has a meaning otherwise Austen wouldn’t have taken such pains to depict them so vividly, and Butler knows this, so what is going on?

Firstly, it shouldn’t need to be pointed out that Marianne Dashwood and Maria Bertram aren’t sentient and human but characters in a novel; the point of their fictional suffering is to try and stop real, sentient people from embarking on courses of action which do cause suffering, hence the emphasis on the causes and conditions that lead to their predicaments. Critically, the heroines, from whose perspective we witness the trials, are realistically compassionate: ‘[f]or him she felt much compassion;—for Lucy very little—and it cost her some pains to procure that little’,[41] and Elinor is making an effort for someone whose jealousy is producing spiteful behaviour towards herself and considerable mental suffering, and as for Fanny Price, ‘Fanny's disposition was such that she could never even think of her aunt Norris in the meagreness and cheerlessness of her own small house, without reproaching herself for some little want of attention to her when they had been last together’;[42] compassion for Marianne we see in buckets of course from Elinor from whose perspective Sense and Sensibility is being related. Compassion is a quality valued in Austen heroines, but it is the heroines that most embody it that come in for the stick from the sensitive modern spirit with its advocacy of universal compassion.

With Maria Bertram things aren’t so straightforward, but, in one sense, Marilyn Butler couldn’t be more wrong in calling her a ‘scapegoat’,[43] if by which is meant that the purpose of Maria’s suffering is to atone for the actions of others. The author goes to some pains to show how Maria’s own actions lead to her catastrophe, and that these in turn spring from the disastrous combination of her natural disposition and the combined influences of her aunt, her father and indolent mother. In Mansfield Park we are kept at a greater distance from Maria than Marianne because Fanny has from the start been excluded from any intimate relationship with Maria and Julia by this same baleful influence.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. XVII (48.1)

The author is apologizing for what she has to do, for the ‘shade’ she feels compelled to inject, and let the consequences of Maria’s actions take their course, and the author does find it distasteful, clearly signalled in the urge to ‘quit such odious subjects as soon as possible’. Austen doesn’t subscribe to the crude, sadistic school of moral fables where the sufferings of the doomed anti-heroine are rammed home with lurid details, but there had to be at least one protagonist who took a fall, otherwise the realistic project would be fatally compromised, marooned in an acausal cloud-cuckoo land where actions don’t ultimately have any consequences. In this sense Maria is indeed the scapegoat, but at this level, outside the story, Maria is a character of fiction. Inside the novel, we are left to ponder whether her father was right to embrace William Collins’s ‘notion of Christian forgiveness’,[44] or whether he should have shown a more compassionate attitude towards his daughter, especially given his clearly indicated role in her disgrace.

‘Wisdom is better than Wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side’, so Austen counselled her niece[45] and the unforgivable sin of Fanny Price and Mansfield Park in the eyes of some critics seems to be to make the case for ‘wisdom’ through Fanny’s consideration and compassion for others, and her resolution in not allowing her principles to be corrupted (if Tom was sure he was right in projecting his theatre he was quite spineless on his father’s return) and, especially, being true to one’s heart (Maria’s cynical marriage was a significant contribution to her fate), all of which are deliberately contrasted with more glitzy ‘light, bright and sparking’ surface values of ‘wit’, which, without something more substantial behind them, are shown to be hollow. The unyielding ‘stiffness’ of Sir Thomas doesn’t escape, being implicated in the troubles and is unfavourably contrasted with the ‘popular manners and more diffused intimacies’ of the Grants and Crawfords.[46] It is certainly no programme for ‘self-abasement’[47] and, even if the message is ‘antipathetic’ to at least some modern laymen, the case is intelligently presented.

At some point it is necessary to come to terms with what cannot be explained away. Jane Austen is conservative in a sense no longer current. Her morality is preconceived and inflexible. She is firm in identifying error, and less interested than other great novelists in the type of perception for which the novel is so peculiarly well adapted—the perception that that thoroughly to understand a character is to forgive him. But if this is true, are we right to call her a great novelist?

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. 298

As Elinor explained to Marianne,[48] a distinction needs to be drawn between attitudes towards people—fictional or real—and a critical discernment as to whether the philosophies they embody, their opinions and actions, will lead to happiness. To be sure everyone is deserving of our compassion—indeed why not—but that doesn’t mean that their actions are necessarily wise, and this is the question that needs answers if we are to live happy, intelligent and fulfilling lives, and the values that do withstand analysis in Austen’s novels are understanding and forgiveness, clearly embodied in all Austen heroines, but from the start in her ‘innocent’ heroine (Catharine) and her ‘action’ heroines (Elinor, Fanny and Anne). There is a critical tradition of seeing Austen as judgemental but closer examination reveals that absolute value judgements tend to originate in the critics that are trying to show Austen being judgemental; Austen has values but she generally lets the action do the talking leaving the reader to draw the critical conclusions[49], all of which was neatly summed up by Whately in 1821, for whom Austen conveyed the impression of ‘being evidently a Christian writer’:

… a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive. She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels, (as Cœlebs was designated, we will not say altogether without reason,) a ‘dramatic sermon.’ The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon. In fact she is more sparing of it than would be thought desirable by some persons; perhaps even by herself, had she consulted merely her own sentiments; but she probably introduced it as far as she thought would be generally acceptable and profitable: for when the purpose of inculcating a religious principle is made too palpably prominent, many readers, if they do not throw aside the book with disgust, are apt to fortify themselves with that respectful kind of apathy with which they undergo a regular sermon, and prepare themselves as they do to swallow a dose of medicine, endeavouring to get it down in large gulps, without tasting it more than is necessary.

The moral lessons also of this lady’s novels, though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: her’s is that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions. Her fables appear to us to be, in their own way, nearly faultless; they do not consist (like those of some of the writers who have attempted this kind of common-life novel writing) of a string of unconnected events which have little or no bearing on one main plot, and are introduced evidently for the sole purpose of bringing in characters and conversations; but have all that compactness of plan and unity of action which is generally produced by a sacrifice of probability: yet they have little or nothing that is not probable; the story proceeds without the aid of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or natural consequences of what has preceded; and yet (which is a very rare merit indeed) the final catastrophe is scarcely ever clearly foreseen from the beginning, and very often comes, upon the generality of readers at least, quite unexpected. We know not whether Miss Austin ever had access to the precepts of Aristotle; but there are few, if any, writers of fiction who have illustrated them more successfully.

Archbishop Richard Whately, Whately on Jane Austen, p. 94

For Whately she is not only an evidently Christian writer but, like Ryle (1990), sees Aristotelian influence in her writing, while Richard Simpson[50] noticed that ‘Miss Austen seems to be saturated with the Platonic idea that the giving and receiving of knowledge […] is the truest and strongest foundation of love’, with Trilling (1968) nodding in agreement.

Psychologically Unreal?

For Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen isn’t a psychologically-realistic novelist, Austen’s heroines reacting to events from a script written according to Austen’s ‘preconceived’, ‘inflexible’, ‘conservative’ philosophy—quite a different conclusion from, for example, Leavis (1948) and Watt (1957), that Austen was a worthy successor of both Richardson and Fielding.

Nor will it do to call Jane Austen ‘natural’ in her portrayal of psychology. Upon the individual inner life she imposes what amounts to censorship. Elizabeth and, especially, Emma, the best of her heroines, have been thought of as psychologically truthful studies. Her outward scene might be limited; here at least she is free to dig deep. In fact, we have seen that, natural though her portraits might seem in the manner of presentation, they are also systematically exclusive. The rational mind and the conscience are given an ascendance over the irrational kinds of experience that no more seemed true to life in Jane Austen’s day than it does now. Here, especially, she is a polemicist offering an ideal programme, and not a realist. One of the best of her twentieth century critics, Mary Lascelles, defends her against the charge that she leaves a great deal out by saying that she simply prefers to write about something else[51]. But since this implies that the grounds for her selection are aesthetic, and personal to her, it will not do. She chooses to omit the sensuous, the irrational, the involuntary types of mental experience because, although she cannot deny their existence, she disapproves of them.

As a critic of the indulged feelings, and of authors who uncritically take characters at their own sanguine valuation, she is the Fielding of her period, reacting against the Richardsonian individualism of the sentimental genre. It is strange therefore that she is hailed as the natural heir to Richardson’s psychological novel. It is the ethical side of the mind she defends, as opposed to the intuitive; she is sceptical of claims to virtue, and her Christians are likely to have to prove themselves, like Fielding’s, by good deeds. Pride and Prejudice and Emma , two novels which are critical of the consciousness, and test their heroes by their actions, are her best achievements. It is true that of her last three novels, two, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, try a more difficult technique, in which the heroine’s inner experience is more fully and less critically presented. But the provisos with which she hedges Fanny’s interior monologue about, and the mixed, uncertain handling of Anne, show very clearly that she is ill at ease when she cannot view her heroine’s consciousness with sceptical detachment. Both are deeply interesting novels, with fine things in them, but they no more represent Jane Austen’s mastery of he