The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen

The WIT and WISDOM of

JANE AUSTEN

edited by Michael Kerrigan

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Fourth Estate.

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Introduction and this selection copyright © 1996 by Michael Kerrigan

The right of Michael Kerrigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9781857026016

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007476848

Version: 2016-01-12

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Works of Jane Austen

Love and Friendship

Marriage

Men and Women

Youth and Age

Home and Family

Society

A Lady’s Accomplishments

Some Characters Observed

Human Nature

The Written Word

About the Publisher

Introduction

Few great writers can have cut so unglamorous a figure in the world as Jane Austen did. Though her novels from the first proved popular with the reading public, among the Hampshire gentry with whom she lived and visited her abilities went unguessed at. As for her family, while treasuring her merry, irreverent conversation, they found other accomplishments more immediately praiseworthy. According to her nephew, J. Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote a Memoir of his aunt in 1870, in his own old age, ‘Her needlework both plain and ornamental was excellent, and might almost have put a sewing machine to shame. She was considered especially great in satin stitch.’ Her younger relations, not surprisingly, were more alive to her sense of fun – ‘Her performance with cup and ball was marvellous’, records her nephew fondly – but they were no more able than their parents to imagine the miraculous talent that was coming to fruition in their midst as, working steadily away in the crowded parlour in the little family house at Chawton, between convivial family mealtimes, noisy games of ‘Spilikens’ and quiet sessions of reading and sewing, their aunt created the novels which would in time admit her to the company of England’s most revered writers – and as the most enduringly readable, lovable genius of them all. Even many decades after her death, when the fame of Jane Austen extended across the world, her Hampshire neighbours were the last to know. ‘A few years ago,’ recalls Austen-Leigh, ‘a gentleman visiting Winchester Cathedral desired to be shown Miss Austen’s grave. The verger, as he pointed it out, asked, “Pray, sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady; so many people want to know where she was buried?” ’

As the sixth of seven children, Jane Austen was introduced early to the idea of her own insignificance. The Reverend George Austen had been given the neighbouring Hampshire parishes of Deane and Steventon to administer in 1764, the same year that he married Cassandra Leigh. The couple lived in Deane for the first few years, however, and it was not until 1771 that they moved, with their growing family, to the rectory at Steventon in which, in 1775, Jane would be born. By that time, her eldest brother, James, was over ten years old: he must have seemed like another adult to the young girl, kind but a little imposing; a cultivated young man of wide literary and intellectual interests, he did much to foster her early interest in books. Affable and lively as he was by temperament, her next-eldest brother, Edward, was a remote figure in a different way. By an arrangement of a sort not uncommon at the time, he had been adopted by a relation, Mr Knight, in order to relieve some of the Austen family’s financial pressures. Living with his adoptive father in comparative splendour, he would eventually inherit both his name and estate; he became close to Jane in adulthood, his daughter, Fanny, becoming perhaps her favourite niece. The nearest to an underachiever the family was to produce, Henry was nonetheless a witty and likeable young man: it was his lack of steadiness, rather than any shortage of ability, which prevented his making more of a mark in a career as clergyman to which he was characteristically slow in settling. Though three years older than Jane, Cassandra, the novelist’s only sister, was also to prove her lifelong friend and confidante – and the recipient of many of her most acerbic and entertaining letters. The two brothers closest to Jane in age would both rise successfully in the Navy: both Francis and Charles would attain the rank of admiral, the former finally being appointed Senior Admiral of the Fleet.

Yet if the presence of so many strong personalities taught Jane to know her place, it also guaranteed an unending flow of jokes and games. Overflowing as it was with bright, boisterous children, the rectory at Steventon was a house of hilarity: there was always an eager cast of actors for any dressing-up game or dramatic presentation, an affectionate, appreciative audience for any doggerel rhyme or skit. It was in just such a spirit of family fun that Jane Austen produced her first work of fiction: by the age of twelve she was already writing little stories and plays, by fourteen she had written the short novel, Love and Freindship [sic], and the stream of outrageously nonsensical (but impeccably crafted) squibs, spoofs and satires continued unabated throughout her teenage years. Slight as these performances may be, they express opinions and interests which would reappear in Jane Austen’s ‘grown-up’ writing: there’s the same derisive disrespect for pretension, for example, the same unfoolable eye for hypocrisy. Most of all, however, there’s the same irrepressible humour, for even in the darkest works of her adulthood – works like Mansfield Park and Persuasion – the same wit and mischief can be seen. In its own preposterous way, the Juvenilia establishes Jane Austen as, essentially, a comic writer with a serious side, rather than a serious writer who tells jokes. The voice of Love and Freindship is unmistakably the voice of Pride and Prejudice and Emma: the joyous games of girlhood were built upon by the maturing author, and refined beyond recognition, but they would never be entirely left behind.

Not that her life can have been uniformly cheerful. Quite what tragedies it comprised cannot be known for sure, since in a spirit of protectiveness for which posterity has not thanked her, Cassandra destroyed much of her sister’s correspondence after her death in 1817. What griefs, what disappointments, what scandals she may have been concealing in the process will never now be known, though the speculation has afforded hundreds of scholars many thousands of hours of more or less harmless amusement. What we do know for certain is that the Reverend George Austen died in 1805, not long after retiring with his family to Bath. His widow and children moved first to Southampton and then, in 1809, to Chawton, to the little cottage on what was now Edward’s Hampshire estate, in which Jane would live for most of her adult life, and complete the great works of her maturity. Of these, Sense and Sensibility was the first to appear, in 1811, followed in 1813 by Pride and Prejudice. Early versions of both of these novels had been written as much as fifteen years previously, but the author’s own meticulous revision and re-revision over a number of years had been followed by a long spell gathering dust on a publisher’s shelf. (Much the same thing happened to Northanger Abbey which, though bought by Crosby & Co. as early as 1803, would not finally appear until after Jane’s death.) Once published, however, these early novels were well received: the 1814 publication of Mansfield Park was eagerly awaited, not least, it seems, by the Prince Regent, whose secretary wrote to Jane Austen with the idea that she might want to write a ‘historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Cobourg’. Delicately sidestepping this suggestion, she dedicated her next novel, Emma (1816), to His Royal Highness. It is hard to imagine that he can have felt himself in any way the loser. Persuasion was completed in 1815, but not published until after its author’s death, in 1817, of Addison’s disease, when Jane Austen’s last-completed novel appeared alongside what was probably her first, Northanger Abbey. Another novel, Sanditon, had been left uncompleted at her death.

Yet much of Jane Austen’s time will have been spent not as writer, but as daughter, sister and aunt, living the very ordinary, unassuming life of the Austens of Chawton. Theirs was a genteel, rather than a luxurious, lifestyle, for though George Austen had been a respectable clergyman and his sons would prosper in their chosen professions, the family was by no means rich. Their existence would not have been so very different from that described in the novels. They walked in the nearby woods and fields, visited and received neighbours, took tea and chatted, and generally endured and enjoyed the routine chores and treats of the genteel country society of the day. It was a quiet existence, perhaps, but anyone who has read Jane Austen’s novels – or, for that matter, anyone who has browsed at any length in the present anthology – will hesitate before dismissing it as a ‘narrow’ or ‘sheltered’ one. There’s some superficial truth in the charge, of course. Jane Austen’s reader can undoubtedly feel a sense of being removed from the concerns of the wider world. It can be hard for the reader of Sense and Sensibility to remember that its author grew up and wrote in an age wracked by revolution and war. Yet as her reader comes quickly to realise, Jane Austen’s world contains the wider one. Polite and contrived as it may at first seem, the social round of the rural gentry conceals beneath its civilised surface all the bloodiest instincts of human nature, all the raw aggression and competition of social existence. If life for Austen’s heroines can at times seem like one long husband-hunt, the business (and it was indeed a business) of courtship and marriage was by no means a trivial one in an age when other professions than wifehood were not open to women. To the young girl who knew she had but one chance of happiness, the drawing room was a jungle, the ball a battlefield: if marriage might involve a life sentence with a pompous bore or, worse, a drunken brute, spinsterhood could at best mean humiliating dependence and at worst destitution. Yet if Jane Austen saw through the mythology of romantic love and marriage to the squalid struggle for economic advantage which it all too often concealed, she saw too that marriage could, on occasion, represent real love, and bring men and women alike a degree of personal fulfilment that made every day a joy. A sceptic, then, but still at heart a believer, Jane Austen brought together romance and realism in her writing. No other writer, before or since, has managed to combine as thrillingly as she does the competing qualities of yearning eroticism, ardent idealism … and shrewd common sense.

Jane Austen did not need to go out into the world to find the world. A writer with an eye like hers for the weakness, the folly, the malice of humanity, found the world daily beating a path to her door, presenting itself in every item of gossip, in every name-dropping anecdote, in every overbearing neighbour, in every brash, boastful dinner guest and in every calculating caller. Yet, far too intelligent a writer to despair, she saw other things too. In the cheerful endurance of the sick, the patient optimism of the poor, in the everyday courage of the bereaved and abandoned – and, of course, in the occasional happy marriage! – she saw just how noble, how worthwhile human existence might be for those who were prepared to live honestly and well. These qualities are timeless – as instantly recognisable to us as they were to the family and friends who were Jane Austen’s first readers nearly two centuries ago. Not only did Jane Austen’s fiction encompass her world – it encompasses our world too.

Works of Jane Austen

‘Jack and Alice’, ‘The Adventures of Mr Harley’ and ‘The Three Sisters’, from VOLUME THE FIRST, written 1787–90.

‘Love and Friendship’, written 1790.

‘A History of England’, written 1791.

‘Lesley Castle’, written 1792.

‘Catharine, or the Bower’, written 1792–3.

LADY SUSAN, written around 1795, never submitted for publication.

SENSE and SENSIBILITY, written 1795 as ‘Elinor and Marianne’, renamed and revised 1797 and published 1811.

PRIDE and PREJUDICE, written 1796–7 as ‘First Impressions’, rejected by publisher; revised and renamed version published 1813.

THE WATSONS, begun 1804; abandoned incomplete on father’s death in 1805.

MANSFIELD PARK, begun 1811, published 1814.

EMMA, written 1814–15, published 1815.

‘Plan of a Novel’, written 1816.

PERSUASION, written 1815–16, published posthumously 1818.

NORTHANGER ABBEY, written as ‘Susan’, 1797–8; revised, renamed version published posthumously 1818, together with Persuasion.

SANDITON, begun 1817, left uncompleted on Jane Austen’s death.

Love and Friendship

What a strange thing love is! (EMMA)

Love conquers all; young love, at least:

When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.

PERSUASION

On the inevitability of young love, and the need for emotional occupation:

He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling. Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love; but the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail. They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love.

PERSUASION

The violence of young love:

… the tyrannic influence of youth on youth …

EMMA

Love at first sight?:

‘Will you tell me how long you have loved him?’

‘It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

On the duties of romantic love:

Marianne would have felt herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby …

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On the love-prone personality:

Harriet was one of those, who, having once begun, would be always in love.

EMMA

On getting ahead of oneself:

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

The ideal mate … a mythical beast?:

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both … the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On the kinship of loving spirits:

Any thing interests between those who love; and any thing will serve as introduction to what is near the heart.

EMMA

Talk as the food of love:

Though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On love’s sickness:

This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing’s being dull and insipid about the house! – I must be in love …

EMMA

At what moment can love be said to start?:

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew I had begun.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Love, like charity, should begin at home:

As to any real knowledge of a person’s disposition that Bath, or any public place, can give – it is all nothing; there can be no knowledge. It is only by seeing women in their own homes, among their own set, just as they always are, that you can form any just judgement. Short of that, it is all guess and luck – and will generally be ill-luck.

EMMA

On the joys of feeling just a little in love:

She was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she might know how he was, how were his spirits … But, on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual; she was still busy and cheerful; and, pleasing as he was, she could yet imagine him to have faults; and farther, though thinking of him so much, and as she sat drawing or working, forming a thousand amusing schemes for the progress and close of their attachment, fancying interesting dialogues, and inventing elegant letters, the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side was that she refused him.

EMMA

Men may have to be prompted into love:

There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely – a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

A Lakeland holiday for one crossed in love:

Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

On compatibility

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; – it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Economy of affability:

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

(Letter to her sister Cassandra, 24 December 1798)

What friends are for:

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

NORTHANGER ABBEY

Qualified euphoria, as the heroine of ‘Jack and Alice’, written when Jane Austen was twelve, makes a new friend:

The perfect form, the beautifull face, and elegant manners of Lucy so won on the affections of Alice that when they parted, which was not till after Supper, she assured her that except her Father, Brother, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins and other relations, Lady Williams, Charles Adams and a few dozen more of particular freinds, she loved her better than almost any other person in the world.

Faint friendship:

I respect Mrs Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment.

(Letter to her sister Cassandra, 12 May 1801)

Nothing pleases us like the success of our friends … unless of course it’s their failure:

Mrs Allen was now quite happy – quite satisfied with Bath. She had found some acquaintance, had been so lucky too as to find in them the family of a most worthy old friend; and, as the completion of good fortune, had found these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself.

NORTHANGER ABBEY

On the dangers of an unequal friendship:

I think her the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have. She knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all her ways; and so much the worse, because undesigned. Her ignorance is hourly flattery.

EMMA

Sheer inertia shores up some friendships, suggests the fifteen-year-old author in ‘Lesley Castle’:

To tell you the truth, our freindship arose rather from Caprice on her side than Esteem on mine. We spent two or three days together with a Lady in Berkshire with whom we both happened to be connected. During our visit, the Weather being remarkably bad, and our party particularly stupid, she was so good as to conceive a violent partiality for me, which very soon settled into a downright Freindship, and ended in an established correspondence. She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.

Marriage

I am no match-maker – being much too well aware of the uncertainty of all human events and calculations. (PERSUASION)

On the correct response to a proposal of marriage:

What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. – She said enough to show there need not be despair – and to invite him to say more himself.

EMMA

On a woman’s right to choose, and refuse:

A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.

EMMA

And man’s inability to understand this …

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.

EMMA

The economic motive:

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony.