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Some novelists mentioned Lord Mansfield in passing as a distinguished jurist, such as in The History and Adventures of Godfrey Ranger (1813) and Simple Tales (1815), as well as in a few novels published in the 1830s. Modern Literature (1804), Self-deception (1816), and The History of George Godfrey (1828) reference his rulings on libel. Strategems Defeated (1811) mentions his preference for investing in mortgages rather than government funds. I found no mention of his ruling in the Somerset case.

As Junejo noted, Mansfield’s obituary did not mention Somerset. Nor, in fact, did the first full-length biography which came out five years after his death.The Life of William late Earl of Mansfield runs to more than 500 pages, and it does not mention “slave,” “slavery,” or “Somerset” in the text or the index, although many other rulings are discussed.

Lord Mansfield’s contribution to the emancipation of enslaved persons appears to have come to the forefront of the public mind—that is, outside of legal texts—no earlier than the mid-19th century after slavery was ended in the British Empire. An 1865 speech describes Somerset as “perhaps [Mansfield’s] most celebrated decision” (Goodeve, 11). According to the historical record, that simply wasn’t the case 50 years earlier.

Of course, this isn’t definitive either way, but it’s interesting context. My thanks to Lona for pointing this out to me.

Perhaps the most vexed question in the discussion of Jane Austen’s work is whether Mansfield Park is about chattel slavery.

Though the evidence is quiet, it is significant. Mansfield Park reminds us of Lord Mansfield, the judge who freed a black slave in England. The name Norris has been linked to an abolition activist. Fanny reads Cowper and Johnson, prominent abolitionists. Sir Thomas owns a plantation and has a superiority over his English home as he does over his plantation. Fanny directly questions her uncle about his plantations.

It becomes difficult to deny that slavery has something to do with this novel.

In 1993, Edward Said accused Austen of ignoring slavery, which led to a body of scholarly work providing all the context Said lacked. Austen wrote at a time of great changes in the slave trade. Her brothers were at sea in the Navy. She read and admired abolitionist works. How can we not find slavery in this novel—Sir Thomas, after all, makes his money as a plantation owner in Antigua. Far from ignoring the world, Austen seems to have been fully engaged with it, but subtly.

To many readers, though, there is something intrusive and grasping about this question. It can feel as if modern values are appropriating beloved classics. Outside of the academy, the discussion descends into the attempt to take Jane Austen away from the long tradition of affection that has sustained her work in English culture globally and to wrest it into something more politically acceptable.

Such are many readers’ suspicions.1

So: how is Mansfield Park about slavery?

The most recent instance of this debate came in the New York Times recently, where the novelist Lauren Groff wrote:

I read “Mansfield Park” with its constant attention to enslavement and abolition to be speaking loudly and clearly about the subjugation of all of the vulnerable in the world to the will of the powerful.

This immediately throws up a hard question. If there is “constant attention to enslavement and abolition” in Mansfield Park, why doesn’t Austen just come out and say so?

Austen’s brothers were public abolitionists, as were many other people. In Austen’s lifetime, or shortly before it, Smith had opposed slavery, as had Johnson. Slavery was the explicit theme of many contemporary books. Reading Mansfield Park as an esoteric book in which we must find coded references to abolition ignores the fact that these debates were live and real. Mansfield Park could have been more openly against slavery had Austen wished it.

So what, exactly, does Mansfield Park have to do with slavery?

To read Austen properly, we require the sort of nuanced context that scholarship provides.

Amelioration or abolition?

The scene during which Fanny asks her uncle Sir Thomas about slavery is crucial to the question of slavery in the novel. Supposedly, Fanny challenged him about his slave-ownership. Said said that the “dead silence” which followed Fanny’s question is representative of Austen ignoring the problem. Here is how Fanny and Bertram discuss the conversation:

“Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”

“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”

“And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”

Mansfield Park was published in 1814, seven years after the Slave Trade Act of 1807. (Sir Thomas’s business problems are perhaps caused by that act.) If we see Fanny’s question in the light of the 1807 act, and contemporary debates about slave owners, another view of the silence is possible. (Slavery itself wasn’t abolished until 1833.)

George Boulukos argues that the scene depicts a pleasant conversation, not a challenging one, which, as Edmund says, appeals to Sir Thomas. The “dead silence” that follows belongs to the Bertram children—they are the ones at fault for their indifference. “Fanny, in this reading, does not confront her uncle about owning slaves; instead, she congratulates him for caring for his slaves properly.”

If the silence is awkward because Fanny has morally challenged her uncle about his slave-holding, why, as Edmund says, would Sir Thomas be pleased “to be inquired of farther”? Can this really be an account of an abolitionist clashing with a slave owner? (Had Fanny wanted to make a direct complaint about slavery, she would have done, as Jane Fairfax does in Emma, to the chagrin of the odious Mrs. Elton.)

More likely, as Boulukos says, it is a conversation between two ameliorationists—two people who believe in improving slaves’ conditions. The spoiled Bertram children are simply bored to silence by such involved ethical discussion.

On this reading, it is not possible to tell whether Fanny is advocating for amelioration (improvement of slave’s conditions, a topical debate in the wake of the 1807 act) or outright abolition (making slavery illegal, not just the trade of slaves). There was a distinction made between owning slaves and trading them at this time, but to some great extent, says Boulukos, the distinction between amelioration and abolition was not significant.

Confusing slavery and marriage…

This is neither Said’s view in which Austen ignores the world, nor Groff’s sweeping ideological claim. Boulukos is far more nuanced than Groff, who was following Helena Kelly’s reading of Mansfield Park from her book Jane Austen The Secret Radical. Kelly makes some sensible claims about Mansfield Park and slavery (it is her best chapter), but she makes no reference to Boulukos or amelioration. This is because her reading of the novel, like many modern feminist readings, requires the ending to be unhappy.

Once a critic feels obliged to deny that Fanny could possibly want to marry Edmund, she will be ideologically obliged to read Fanny’s character as submissive in the context of slavery as well. Groff’s was not merely a claim about slavery in the novel, but a generalized ideological view about subjugation.

Kelly argues that Fanny drops her moral resistance to slavery in the same way that she overlooks the fact that Edmund doesn’t love her. Austen (or Jane as Kelly insists on calling her) is trying to make her readers face up to what they already know (slavery is a great evil that is being ignored) and what makes Mansfield Park “deeply troubling” is that Fanny fails to face up to this truth.

The tragedy of Mansfield Park is that Fanny willfully—willingly—blinds herself.

The argument is thin. Fanny is supposed to have forgotten that the parsonage where she will now live was previously home to two women “who disliked her and tried to do her harm.” So what? The whole point is that Fanny patiently prevailed over those two women. She is vindicated, not subsumed. Edmund is supposed not to love Fanny, despite Austen writing the exact opposite. Indeed, Kelly has nothing to say about the actual words of the crucial final pages, in which Austen makes Edmund’s love explicit.

If we do accept, however, that Edmund and Fanny are happy at the end, we see it all quite differently. The morally indifferent characters like Mary Crawford and Mrs. Norris are exiled, and the morally concerned characters, Edmund and Fanny, prevail. Kelly says that Fanny “forgets” that she is Edmund’s second choice. But we can prefer, with Austen, to say that Edmund is diverted by temptation and Fanny has to practice Griselda-like patience, which is much more fitting with Austen’s themes of ordination, true religion, and the persistent moral sympathy that exists between them throughout the novel.

Austen knew that people like Kelly would come along and presume to know the feelings of her characters. She left a direct warning about such interpretations. Of Fanny’s happiness, Austen writes:

…there was happiness elsewhere which no description can reach. Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope.

Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman … readings like Groff’s and Kelly’s rely not only on a willful blindness to these explicit words, but Austen writes that “the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.”

To believe what Groff and Kelly claim about Fanny’s subjugation, we must ignore what Austen wrote. This is a novel about the vindication of simple goodness in a compromised, often degraded, but improving world.

A novel of subjugation?

What of the idea that Mansfield Park presents many other forms of oppression or subjugation? Fanny is taken from her home and then made to live in her uncle’s house on deeply unequal terms. She is given an attic room, not allowed a horse like the others, made to do tasks for her aunt as if she were a servant, and frequently treated (and spoken of) as directly inferior. It is Edmund, one of the few genuine Christians in the novel, who stands up for Fanny and insists that she is treated as a full and equal member of the household. If she wants to, Austen is fully able to present the hierarchical dominance of her society as a form or mode of slavery, and thus to reinforce the “hints” about slavery on Sir Thomas’s plantation.

Sarah Marsh argues that “Austen insists that Sir Thomas’s absolute power as a slaveholder corrodes his aristocratic liberality as inevitably as the West Indian climate ruins his hearty English constitution.” Marsh says that historians believe Lord Mansfield’s decision “abetted the slave trade by excluding the wider Atlantic world from England’s cultural and legal abhorrence of slavery.”

Marsh claims Mansfield Park is saying that slave owning, which continued after Lord Mansfield’s ruling, corrupted the landowners of England. The result of the Somerset case was not, strictly, that slaves were freed, but that they could not be sold in England. Slavery continued, and so James Somerset was not a freeman but someone of indeterminate status, just like Fanny Price.

As such, concerns about the changing landscape in Mansfield Park reflect Austen’s concern that “long-established English commitments to freeborn labor have been fundamentally jeopardized by Lord Mansfield’s silence about British slavery abroad.” Austen sees Sir Thomas’s absolute power over Mansfield Park as an importation of his absolute power over the slaves, something Lord Mansfield’s decision failed to prevent.

But if we accept the traditional chronology of the novel’s action, which has Sir Thomas leaving for Antigua in 1805 and coming back after the Slave Trade Act of 1807, the reasons for his business problems are to do with the Revolutionary Wars between England and France. A blockade begun in 1803 dropped the price of sugar. In Jane Austen and the French Revolution, Warren Roberts writes that the price of sugar dropped from 55 to 32 shillings a quintel while Sir Thomas was in Antigua. The Antiguan government went bankrupt and many plantations failed. (97) Wartime injuries to Fanny’s father are also the prompt that have her sent to live in Mansfield Park. These themes are strong in the novel, as the scenes with William show. Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris are indifferent to him as they are to slavery. Henry Crawford takes it as a prompt to daydream vainly. It is Edmund, again, who responds with moral aptitude.

To some significant extent, then, the question of slavery is confounded with the effects of the war.

Who is subjugated and who is spoiled?

If Mansfield Park is a novel about slavery and subjugation, we must ask: why did Austen choose to make Sir Thomas one of the few people in the novel with moral integrity? Like Edmund, he (mostly, and eventually) treats Fanny properly. Like Fanny, he sees the theatricals for what they are: an excuse for immorality.

Thus, Groff’s view about “the subjugation of all of the vulnerable in the world to the will of the powerful” isn’t quite possible. The book doesn’t present the Bertram children and the Crawfords as subjugated: instead they are selfish, spoiled, and indulged. Mansfield Park is less a place of liberty than licence.

The theatre scenes show the Bertram children up as uninterested in what they ought to do, believing, presumably accurately, that they can get away with it so long as Sir Thomas doesn’t return early. They have no overseer, quite the opposite as Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris take great pleasure in talking down Edmund’s moral oversight.

In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler explains that private theatricals among the upper-class were a prominent point of attack for the increasingly successful Evangelical movement in 1814. Upper-class immorality was, to the Evangelicals, clearly linked to private-theatre. Austen approved of Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, which argued that all private acting (even in irreprehensible plays) was morally damaging to young women.

“Unquestionably,” says Butler, “Austen expects us to see the play as a step in Maria Bertram’s road to ruin.” Maria is not too much subject to Sir Thomas’s supreme authority, but too little. He chose her husband, but ignored her moral development. By participating in the theatricals, Maria was allowing herself to act on feelings over which she ought to have exercised self-command.

The wayward Bertram children cannot be saved by the staging or not staging of an illicit romance, nor by Edmund’s reasonable objections; instead, they ought fundamentally to be more like Fanny: they require moral education, the one great theme of all Austen’s work. Mansfield Park may be a place of some subjugation (it is, still, ultimately hierarchical), but it is also a place of individual moral failure. (As ever, Austen points to the parents as the problem. Lady Bertram is so indolent she is no sort of mother.)

It is this that links the slavery parts of the novel to the whole.

Samuel Johnson and passive obedience

The question of improvement is really what animates Mansfield Park. Fanny’s vindication is based in the idea of her moral steadfastness.

One argument Kelly makes is that we see Fanny reading Samuel Johnson, a great opponent of slavery. But Johnson would read this novel quite unlike Kelly or Groff. His works are clearly present in the novel as part of its larger moral vision.

It is the Idler on Fanny’s table. Isn’t the title alone a great hint as to what Johnson would object to about the Bertram household? Tom’s debts, Lady Bertram’s indolence, Maria’s moral lassitude, Mrs. Norris’s constant sponging, Mary Crawford’s vanity—so much moral laxity! so much idleness! Though Johnson may correspond with Fanny’s implicit abolitionism, he corresponds also to the besetting moral qualities of her character: self-command and obedience.

Fanny’s objections to the theatre would also be Johnson’s. Here is the opening of ‘Idler 52’ (14th April 1759):

The practice of self-denial, or the forbearance of lawful pleasure, has been considered by almost every nation, from the remotest ages, as the highest exaltation of human virtue…

Nothing could be more apt to the theatricals and Fanny’s attitude about them. Nor could one hope to write a better summary of the moral dynamics of those scene than by quoting this, from further down the same essay:

But the doctrine of self-denial is not weakened in itself by the errours of those who misinterpret or misapply it; the encroachment of the appetites upon the understanding is hourly perceived; and the state of those, whom sensuality has enslaved, is known to be in the highest degree despicable and wretched.

Johnson’s attitudes are present in this novel, but he is fully present, telling us that the “shameful captivity” of the “sensuality” of the theatricals “may justly raise alarms, and wisdom will endeavor to keep danger at a distance”. His strictness is a constant strain of Edmund and Fanny’s character.

Yes, the Idler has passing mentions of abolitionist sentiments (“of black men the numbers are too great who are now repining under English cruelty”; “slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty”) but as we saw in the quotation above, Johnson is just as likely to talk about the enslavement of sensuality, or, as in another essay, enslavement by “fear of evils to which only folly or vanity can expose him”. At the end of Mansfield Park, Edmund and Fanny are free, the rest enslaved to their folly, vanity, and sensuality. They are not enslaved by anyone else; they are enslaved by their own lack of self-command.

The question of slavery in Mansfield Park cannot be neatly abstracted into a political reading that takes no interest in the question of moral development.

Poet of abolition or of tree-lined groves?

Kelly also points to Fanny reading Cowper, the “poet of abolition”. Cowper must be read more broadly too. He accords with the novel’s interest in landscapes, not just abolition: Fanny quotes him thus: “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.”

It is Cowper’s ‘Yardley Oak’ that seems to echo in this novel. On the visit to the Rushworth estate, the old avenue is all oak trees, symbolic of the established order of England: “Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak,” as Cowper has it in The Task. Fanny, we have to accept, though strong-minded and in virtuous opposition to those around her, is not a radical like Marianne. She regrets the passing of old landscapes. Her abolitionism is part of her establishment ideas.

In an Austen novel, one can be an abolitionist and strongly in favour of the social and moral order. In Johnsonian manner, Fanny sets a good moral example as a member of her society, a Christian, and a woman.

On the hating of Fanny Price.

Fanny’s goodness is why there is a long history of readers disliking Fanny. And that dislike, perhaps, accounts for some of the confusion about slavery and subjugation.

Virginia Woolf said, “There are characters such as … Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price which bore us frankly.” In 1917, Reginald Farrer talked of “Fanny’s cold self-righteous attitude of criticism”. Austen’s mother thought Fanny was “insipid”. Even some early admirers of Fanny wanted her to be more. “Mary Cooke…Admired Fanny in general; but thought she ought to have been more determined on overcoming her own feelings, when she saw Edmund’s attachment to Miss Crawford.” A.C. Bradley, ever reliable, sums up the problem:2

…for some readers, the suppression of feeling and fancy in these characters… much diminishes their charm, and even suggests the idea which Jane Austen certainly did not hold, that good sense and dutifulness are apt to be spiritless or even depressed.

Spiritless is exactly the complaint most people have about Fanny. Kingsley Amis, (the first paragraph of whose essay ‘What Became of Jane Austen’ is one of the strongest and more accurate pieces of appreciation of this novel), found Fanny “deficient”. Like many of the people who dislike Fanny, what he objects to most is that she is not fun.

But then he takes his bit too far and calls Fanny and Edmund “morally detestable”. How easily the opposition to an imagined Puritan bogeyman leads clever people into intellectual bar-stool habits!

The fact is: Fanny is simply good, like Helen Burns, Agnes Wickfield, Dinah Morris, and Esther Summerson, and for many critics that simplicity is precisely the sticking point.

It is not enough for Fanny merely to be good: she must be good in the right way; So critics make her acceptable. For Amis that means interesting, for Groff it means she her goodness has to become radical. Amis found her morally detestable; to save Fanny, Groff has to find her surroundings morally detestable.

A simple yet detailed reading shows us that in Mansfield Park, as in many other of the nineteenth-century novels, good deeds shine out in a naughty world, and Fanny’s simple goodness is eventually matched to Edmund’s, once he has been on a quest of moral development. To ask more of Fanny is to expect her to be a Marianne, to ignore the fact that Austen plainly offers Edward for approval. Fanny is the one who says she cannot act, cannot pretend, and who really means it. To mistake this for inanity (Amis) or an invitation to make esoteric readings (Groff, Kelly) is to prefer our own moods, norms, and ideologies to the words of the novel.

All critics have their own agenda!

No wonder many readers are suspicious of the attempt to read modern values into Austen’s work. Critics do often confound careful, scholarly readings with bold, ideological priorities.

And scholars sometimes admit that readers are right to be suspicious! In Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, the great Austen scholar Professor Kathryn Sutherland justified the “post-1970s” movement away from Bradleyan, character-based criticism—(the sort of literary criticism that fully incorporates personal feelings, including those critics, like George Saintsbury, who gushingly admitted that they could happily marry Elizabeth Bennett)—on the ground that that sort of work is more sexist and racist than modern academics are “comfortable” with. Sutherland talks about the “partial and even offensive” consensus under which those earlier critics were working.

Although Sutherland wished to leave behind the (as she sees it) sexism and racism of the old school, she sees no need to replace Austen with “a more intellectually restless or formally varied” woman writer of the period, nor with a non-white, non-middle class woman writer (assuming, she Sutherland says, one can be recovered).

Instead, Austen can “accommodate” the readings the post-1970s critics wish to make,—readings to do with gender, critiques of the family, and, of course, slavery.

Put aside your feelings about which ever side of this debate you may or may not be on and notice the critical assumptions on which scholars like Sutherland rely. To justify her assertion that Austen “accommodates” many modern readings, Sutherland writes: “that’s what classics do: they license endless re-readings.”

Well who is working under a “partial consensus” now?

Sutherland presumably does not mean to the idea that literary texts are subject literally to “endless re-readings” so that we can super-impose upon them whatever ideas we find most comfortable or appealing, or begin to deny that they have any sort of fixed meaning... Austen was surely able to impose binding intellectual constraints on her novel, rather than writing a green-screen for later readers and their priorities.3

There is, of course, more in Austen than has sometimes been seen—including by the affectionate Janeites—but from Sutherland’s “endless re-readings” to justify a “post-1970s” attitude it is a swift flight to the modern criticism that finds in Jane Austen not the values that would have pleased our grandmothers, but those which would not offend the young today.

Although Kelly and Groff lack Sutherland’s scholarly aptitude, they share her critical attitudes.

Bringing ourselves into the picture…

So: when we assess a question like the role of slavery in Mansfield Park, we would do well to pay attention to the “partial consensus” of the critics who are so often working to avoid the consensus of the generations who came before them.

In their refusal to allow sentimental feeling to inform a serious criticism, (and in their ideological inability to believe in the power of Mansfield Park’s happy ending), many modern scholars are just as blinkered as they believe Bradley and the old school were.

At one point, Sutherland calls Jane Fairfax, in Emma, a “missed opportunity”, saying that Charlotte Brontë would have never passed over such a chance at psychological complexity. It is amusing, no, that accusing Jane Austen of not being Brontëan enough when it comes to character development is the very essence of Bradleyan criticism?4

This provides the background explanation for why there has been so much vexation about Mansfield Park. When we read literature, all of us confusingly mingle our personal reactions to the characters with our intellectual analysis of the book. That Sutherland and other scholars have an intellectual framework to express this problem doesn’t make it go away.

Vindicating Fanny

Fanny is allowed to be a good character (in both senses) so long as we aren’t disturbed by the thought that she might not be sympathetic to our own frame of mind. Amis rejects her because she wouldn’t approve of him; Groff embraces her on the basis that Austen can be co-opted as a progressive.5

But Fanny Price is not disappointing: she is Austen’s most morally persistent heroine. At the end of the novel, she is vindicated, free, and happy. She is not a warning, nor is she problematized: she sets the example Austen wishes her other characters to follow. Mary Crawford jokes bitterly that Edmund will reform everyone, but it is Fanny whose character shines out like a good deed in a naughty world. It is she who reforms Mansfield Park. The more we believe in the “endless re-readings” the classics are capable of, the less clearly we will see this fundamental truth about Austen’s great novel.

If Mansfield Park is about slavery (and I believe it is) that is because Austen was a powerful writer of conservative values and Enlightenment ideas. This maps poorly onto our own preoccupations. It neither fits neatly with the post-1970s expectations that scholars and critics have of themselves, nor is it intuitive to many of them that the anti-racist characters will be the most conservative ones. But this novel is from another time, another place. It is not part of our world.

Fanny Price is Jane Austen’s least admired heroine. In recent times, some people have come to admire Fanny—but often as part of their partial, post-1970s framework. She ought to be recognised instead as Austen’s greatest heroine without us contorting the words Austen wrote to fit our own ideals.

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In May 1818 an unsigned notice appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine stating that they were “happy to receive two other novels from the pen of this amiable and agreeable authoress”. What a way to refer to Jane Austen! What a way to talk about Persuasion and Northanger Abbey! However, their praise was high—, Austen was under-rated, deserved to be better regarded, and would one day be one of the most popular novelists. Alas, the writer thought that she dealt in no “deep interests, uncommon characters, or vehement passions.” They are surely right that her genius was to write about “the history of people whom we have seen a thousand times”, but! what we admire is surely how unfamiliar she makes them; it is like watching an egg being cracked open for the very first time. Who would have predicted the insides from the shell? The rest of the piece praises her good Christian character. Quite right.

Such was Northanger Abbey’s introduction to the world.

Published alongside Persuasion after Austen died, it was reviewed early in the British Critic, a journal which had been set up to oppose the rising radicalism of the Jacobins in the 1790s. The British Critic reviewed a lot of books. It took, they wrote in this review, “a vast quantity of useful spirits and patience” in order to find books worth reviewing. One knows what they mean. Presumably the spirits were sometimes taken with water as they made their way through “an endless series of gloomy caverns, long and winding passages, secret trap doors…”. They are, of course, mocking the gothic novel (they refer also to the east wing of an old castle, banditti, and so on).

However, good novels are among the most fascinating productions of modern literature—and the British Critic thought Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were very good indeed: Austen, they said, displays “a degree of excellence that has not often been surpassed.” She lacks imagination, everything being quite familiar from normal life, but, “every individual represents a class… one of those classes to which we ourselves, and every acquaintance we have, in all probability belong.” (You will recall that this is what Johnson said of Shakespeare: “In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”)

Her merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation; no ridiculous phrase, no affected sentiment, no foolish pretension seems to escape her notice. It is scarcely possible to read her novels, without meeting some of one’s own absurdities reflected back upon one’s conscience.

So far, so ordinary. Then they say this: “our authoress never dips her pen in satire.” The British Critic thinks Austen treats follies instead “with good-humoured pleasantry”. Today we are just as likely to think of Austen as a satirical hater than as merely good humoured. That aside, we must stare in wonder at the idea that Northanger Abbey is not a satire. Instead the British Critic called it “simply, the history of a young girl.” After a summary of the plot, they call Northanger Abbey “one of the very best of Miss Austen’s productions”. (The reviewer had very little to say about Persuasion, thinking it “a much less fortunate performance.” The past is another country indeed.)

In 1821 Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, echoed Samuel Johnson in warning that when fiction becomes realistic (“copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life”) it is a more morally dangerous class of work, because it “guides the judgement, and supplies a kind of artificial experience.” Realistic novels are apt to make us think that we, too, shall come to a happy ending, irrespective of our conduct, Whately warned. (And indeed, it is thought that people who watch too many Rom Coms are unhappier in love.)

Whately was writing about Austen posthumously. She was a great source of both innocent amusement and “instructive example”, he lamented, even if her plots were too much dependent on “providential coincidences” which he thought a fault. What he did admire was Austen’s evident merits as a Christian writer. This was enhanced because she did not make it “at all obtrusive.” The moral lessons “spring incidentally from the story”: they are not preached.

Maria Edgeworth (and the British Critic) found fault with the General, whose expulsion of Catherine Morland at the end was deemed “out of drawing and out of nature” and “not a very probable character.” In 1842, Henry Crabb Robinson said Northanger “sadly reduced” his estimation of Austen, being a “gallery of disagreeables” with heroes and heroines “scarcely out of the class of insignificants.”

What all this shows is that it is often very hard to know quite why a book is impressive at the time. Nothing these critics said was quite wrong, but they are all too tied up, one way or another, in the ideological discourse of their times to see the whole novel clearly. You may be thinking to yourself that we, too, are too ideologically preoccupied to read Jane Austen clearly, as I argued in the Financial Times recently (and as Lauren Groff abundantly demonstrated in her lamentable assessment of Mansfield Park in the New York Times), but in fact there is a century of good scholarship from Mary Lascelles to John Mullan that has illuminated Austen quite clearly. One recent thesis even made advances in understanding her narrative techniques.

In 1885, Matthew Arnold’s niece, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, while reviewing Austen’s letters, said that Northanger Abbey was “gay, sparkling, and rapid… from beginning to end” and that it was “the book in which the bright energy of Austen’s youth finds it gayest and freshest expression.” Ward said Catherine Morland was the “inimitable literary expression” of the “exuberant girlish wit, which expressed itself in letters and talk and harmless flirtations before it took to itself literary shape”.

In 1894, George Saintsbury said in passing (in his Pride and Prejudice Preface, which is well worth reading) that many find the “delightful freshness and humour” of Northanger Abbey to obscure the fact that it is small in scale, and that parody is one of the genres “in which the first rank is reached with difficulty.” In 1917 Reginald Farrer (a botanist and writer who worked in the Foreign Office) said Austen took “a big stride forward” in Northanger Abbey by tackling a technical problem: weaving together parody and serious drama.

Rebecca West wrote an introduction to Northanger in 1932, where she pointed to the fact that Austen was putting English institutions to the test as a feminist—many had written about Isabella Thorpe-types before, but from the masculine perspective. “Husband hunting was shameful and horrible,” West said, “but there was every reason why one should join in the hunt.” As is now so commonplace as to have been grossly overstated (Austen hardly faced destitution), Austen knew about financial uncertainty. West rated the book highly, putting aside the imperfect satire of Udolpho in favour of its other delights.

It is sharp with Jane Austen’s hate of unpleasant things, it is sweet with her love of all that is pleasant, it nourishes with her special wit that is the extremity of good sense; and her genius for character drawing is at its happiest here.

Henry and Catherine are “not in the least insipid” but “rich with the special charm that attends the conjunction of good souls and good breeding”. She also points to the “wealth of phrases” which “evoke a whole phase of existence”, such as: “I did not quite like, at breakfast, to hear you talk so much about the French bread at Northanger.” To West, the book made Austen’s early death as ominous as Mozart’s—it seems to hint “that too urgent a thirst for perfection can only be quenched in the grave.”

In 1939 Mary Lascelles, a pioneering Austen scholar, took up the idea of the burlesque and praised Austen’s skill at handling the varieties of burlesque, though she thought this was not well integrated with the overall narrative. She thought the use of Henry Tilney as the “interpreter” rather than the narrator was “ingenious”. He points out the difference between life and fiction, as the narrator has been playfully doing, but once Catherine is enchanted by Isabella, he steps back. We do not need them both. Catherine goes off to discover the world as it is, and at the end, Henry “leads her over the threshold.”

In 1940, D.W. Harding based his idea that Austen was a hater on Henry Tilney’s comment about a “neighbourhood of voluntary spies”. In 1952 Marvin Mudrick noted the anti-types Austen establishes against the tropes of gothic fiction. (Henry Tilney, for example, is a gothic hero reversed: he doesn’t fall in love at first sight; he doesn’t even rescue her from the clutches of a villain.) Austen follows the gothic in making the heroine’s consciousness the centre of the action, but the heroine’s function is doubled. She is writing both a gothic and a realistic novel and Catherine may be too “lightweight a mind” to carry this doubling. Ultimately he sees the rejection of romance as a rejection of personality. Catherine is neither “the borrowed heroine of pure burlesque” nor so “interesting and complex” as would be required “to sustain the necessary tensions at the center of a realistic novel.”

To Elizabeth Hardwick in 1965, it was a relief on re-reading Northanger to find the gothic parody “the merest side issue… the weakest part of a strong novel.” Hardwick thought Austen felt the threat of Mrs. Radcliffe’s popularity strongly. (It is worth, by the way, comparing the parodic element of Northanger to Cold Comfort Farm.) Hardwick didn’t see Northanger as a work of literary criticism but “an engaging story of human beings in pursuit of love”, an odd thing for such a reliable critic to say, as the whole novel is explicitly about reading books and people. She does concede that the characters in Northanger are “more sketchily drawn” than in the later novels.

Marilyn Butler, a decade later, explicated Northanger as a response to a moral idea, not a literary mode. The early work was not “burlesque” but anti-Jacobin. (Hence the praise from the British Critic above.) Northanger, she argues, “uses the literary conversation not for the sake of the subject, but in order to give an appropriately morally objective ground against which character can be judged.” The five explicit conversations about the gothic novel challenge us to “consider the habits of mind which the different speakers reveal.” There is nothing partisan in the novel, but John Thorpe is a “revolutionary character who represents “a system of selfishness” and seeks to undermine institutions like marriage. Isabella Thorpe, too, is one of a series of dangerous women in Austen’s novels, who follow “the modern creed of self.” All of this could have come from the British Critic.

As I have written, or will write about, elsewhere, modern readings have focussed on the influence of Smith’s ideas of the virtues, Austen’s understanding of strategic thinking, and her position as an enlightenment thinker. We can see a clear development in the twentieth century. Critics deal with the same themes, and hold Northanger in respect, but are more detailed, closer readers, and put more context round the novel; there is, on the whole, a fuller understanding of what Austen was doing.

The case against Orwell is simple: he has been over-rated for political reasons. His work is not terrible, but it is by no means the calibre that the admirers believe. Orwell is a grumpy entertainer who some people mistake for an important thinker. All good fun, as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

And this.

The essence of Orwell is, as he once said, the problem of being stuck in one’s class. English people find it very hard to get beyond their class. Down and Out in London and Paris and Wigan Pier are all about Orwell’s own difficulty with getting beyond his class. He wanted to believe in left-wing ideas without being wrenched too far from his natural state. Socialism without marmalade was a socialism too far. And he knew that asking people to change their class habits is dangerous to the revolution. So he trod the line. Technology is inherently disruptive to this idea, so he disliked technology. It’s all downstream of his morning tea.

This leads to Orwell’s fundamental conservatism.

Since discussion of Orwell (rather like Christopher Hitchens) is a blatantly ideological argument rather than a literary one, I made some ideological points, too.

Orwell is beloved by people who don’t want to look at graphs and accept the simple fact that life has become immeasurably better over the last three hundred years.

And.

A real literary genius would either have written superior books or been able to see things more pluralistically. Usually, those two things go together, as with Mill, Naipaul, and all the other writers with whom Orwell ought not to keep company. They could see what he could not: the world is a Faustian pact, not a battle of wits about political allegiances.

How silly to idolise a man who refused to understand all of this because he was self-conscious about having gone to Eton.

You can read the whole thing here.

Why, when Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey, was she making fun of the Gothic? Another way to phrase this question is to ask why a young woman in the 1790s—the age of classical learning, Enlightenment ideas, post-Reformation non-superstition; the age of the French Revolution, of modern ideas—was writing about such medieval things?

The Gothic period in art and architecture was the High Middle Ages, starting in the twelfth century. In England, this begins in the time of the Norman kings, running through the start of the modern, at around the time of the Tudors. When the Renaissance began, this style became seen as barbarous, compared to the new classical style.

Walk through England and you will find many fine examples of the Gothic, from Canterbury to Northumberland. Turn right at the entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum and you step into a work of capitals carved with leaves and the elegant tracery of church windows.

There are several phases of the Gothic: Early, Decorated, Perpendicular. It all depends on the pointed arch. In this picture from Ely Cathedral you can see twelfth-century Romanesque arches in the nave and then, suddenly, pointed Gothic arches at the end. The pointed arch bears more weight, and so it can rise much higher. This is how cathedrals come to look like forests, with their elegant pillars rising like young trees.

Of course, this was not merely a style, but part of a whole ideology. The Gothic is northern, Catholic, devoted. With the Renaissance and the rediscovery of classical knowledge, Gothic was seen as barbarous. Although it had evolved out of the rounded Romanesque style, it was now believed to be inferior to the actually Roman and Greek styles being revived as classical learning moved through Europe with humanism and the Reformation.

In London, you can see this in Covent Garden and on Whitehall, where Inigo Jones, England’s first classical architect, built St. Paul’s Church and Banqueting House. The first has a simple, rugged portico, but exemplifies classical principles of balance, proportion, parallels. It was built in the 1630s, bringing the new Renaissance style to England.

This style was enhanced by Christopher Wren, who rebuilt many of the City churches, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the classical mode. Like Jones, he worked from Italian models. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral is incomprehensible to the Gothic style. This was a clean, bright, open form of architecture, suitable to the newly Protestant country, where churches needed no mystery, no dark corners at the holy end, but plainness and visibility. In the century following, classical architecture became the basis of the Georgian style—those long rows of clean, simple, elegant houses.

This, too, had an ideology. In the age of science, reason, Enlightenment, and humanism, classical ideas and ideals were more highly valued. The medieval world-view had given way to the modern world view, and the aesthetics had followed.

But, starting with Horace Walpole, the Gothic underwent a significant revival.

Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s house west of London, is a bizarre place. It was built in the 1760s, but it is full of Gothic patterns and pictures—wallpaper with Gothic patterns, and so forth—but it feels very mock, very imitation. It has all the shapes and curves of the medieval, but doesn’t feel at all medieval. As Kenneth Clark says in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, that is because Walpole didn’t use the right materials. That took several more decades.

When the Gothic revival in architecture was in full flush, in the nineteenth century, this had changed. The Victorians carved neo-Gothic stone and wood all over the country. Parliament looks medieval because it was built at the height of the medieval revival. It is no coincidence that A.W.N Pugin (who assisted Charles Barry) was Catholic, and that England by then (the 1830s) was undergoing a revival of Catholic tendencies in the Anglican church. The new medievalism wasn’t just about style.

Austen comes in the middle of all of this, between Walpole and Barry, between the pseduo-Gothic wallpaper and the Catholic revival. Her contemporary, Walter Scott, did more than anyone for the medieval revival with his historical novels. Ivanhoe is a thrilling re-creation, re-imagining, of the world of Robin Hood and King John, of the days when windows rose in high elegance as the Mass was sung under the drifting incense smoke. In his long poems he used Arthurian themes, which Tennyson later developed in his poems, eventually writing a whole marvellous account of Arthurian myth in The Idylls of the King. By the end of the century, William Morris was making sumptuous Gothic wallpaper, books, fabric, tiles.

So, Northanger Abbey comes in the middle of this fertile period of revival. Austen lived in a world of commerce, common sense, a Protestant dislike of superstition, and a canonical plain style in buildings, sentences, and dresses. But Romanticism was bringing a burgeoning sense of the Gothic back into art. Look at these splendid lines of Keats.

A casement high and triple-arch’d there was,
All garlanded with carven imag’ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

A perfect description of Gothic architecture. Later on, the appeal of Kate Greenaway’s illustrations was her ability to capture late eighteenth century simplicity at a time of High Victorian Complexity, when “carven imag’ries” were all over even the suburban houses.

In Austen, simplicity clashes with the new medievalism—that is, we see the classic style (plain, balanced, parallel) clash with the Gothic style (intricate, mysterious, romantic). This is the result of Austen teasing and testing her ideas about how novels should work, about the competing morality of the conservative mainstream and the new Romanticism (a huge part of the Gothic revival). It is part of the deeper contrasts in her world, between these two visions of life, religion, and art, which we still see all about us now.

Marrying the wrong man…

In Jane Austen’s novels we know that the heroine will get her husband. The question is whether she gets the right husband. Can she pick the good man?

As Timothy Peltason said in “Jane Austen and the Wrong Man” (2022) her plots are all about whether the right man “can be discerned.” To show the real complications of courtship “Austen deploys the reappearing figure of the wrong man”. The wrong man is a “plausible but mistaken romantic choice that the heroine is at least tempted to make.”

But why don’t those wrong men get harsher punishment? Why is it so often the case that the Wickhams and Willoughby get away with their bad behaviour?

Could it be that Jane Austen actually finds the Willoughby types not just immoral but rather attractive? Does Jane Austen love a rake?

To answer that question, I’ll first show you how easily Austen lets her rakes off, and then look at how evidence from genetic research can give us an interesting new perspective on this question of why Austen lets her rakes off so lightly.

Going easy on the rake

So often, what makes a potential partner desirable in Austen is also what makes them turn out to be the wrong man. Characters like Willoughby are so attractive and quick-witted that they get their pick of the women. Alas, they are not willing to surrender their romantic power for a monogamous relationship, even with an intelligent and attractive Jane Austen protagonist.

Wickham will never reform himself for Lizzy. Indeed, when Wickham elopes with Lydia in Pride and Prejudice we realise that if Elizabeth Bennet had decided to marry him (as she was considering) he may well have dallied with the other sister regardless.

By the end of the novel, the union of party-girl Lydia and the incorrigible Wickham reads like the Regency equivalent of an “open marriage” as opposed to anything that could be desired by our conservative heroine or author. Once married, Wickham repeatedly goes off “to enjoy himself in London or Bath”, while Lydia invites her sister Kitty to go to balls. (Not that Mr. Bennet will allow that…)

What befalls Wickham is hardly the undesirable fate portrayed in William Hogarth’s sequence A Rake’s Progress (1732-1734), showing the syphilitic mental breakdown of the spendthrift character “Tom Rakewell”. And yet it is not the happy marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy either.

The rake is not done away with, but contained.

Attracted to the wrong men

Perhaps if Maria Edgeworth had written Pride and Prejudice, Wickham would have been killed in the duel he almost fights with Mr. Bennet. Yet Austen allows him to live: she even offers him Lydia in the place of Lizzy.

In Sense and Sensibility (1811), John Willoughby is so attractive that he causes Marianne’s sister Elinor and indeed her mother Mrs. Dashwood to fall speechless before him:

Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at [Marianne and Willoughby’s] entrance; and while the eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration which equally sprang from his appearance, he apologised for his intrusion, by relating its cause, in a manner so frank and so graceful, that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression.

In the other novels, the Willoughby-type figure risks displacing the monogamous, dependable hero. In Mansfield Park, it is Henry Crawford versus Edmund Bertram; in Pride and Prejudice, it is Mr. Wickham versus Mr. Darcy; in Emma, it is Mr. Knightley versus Frank Churchill; and in Persuasion Austen produces her most compelling rake, Mr. William Elliot. Lady Russell, the confidante of our heroine Anne Elliot, observes on properly meeting him for the first time:

His manners were an immediate recommendation; and on conversing with him she found the solid so fully supporting the superficial, that she was at first, as she told Anne, almost ready to exclaim, “Can this be Mr Elliot?” and could not seriously picture to herself a more agreeable or estimable man. Everything united in him; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, and a warm heart. He had strong feelings of family attachment and family honour, without pride or weakness; he lived with the liberality of a man of fortune, without display; he judged for himself in everything essential, without defying public opinion in any point of worldly decorum.

Who wouldn’t be attracted to Mr. William Elliot? Austen is not afraid of showing us just how attractive these “wrong men” can be. This is a pattern in her work.

The Rake’s Accommodation

These intelligent, highly effective, and beautiful men prioritise reproducing a lot, not investing in a single family; they thus prefer smartly managed appearance over commitment.1 Naturally, they leave a trail of pregnant (often very clever women) before meeting Austen’s heroines. And yet in almost every novel, Austen tries to re-accommodate these men after their true nature is discovered.

Mr. Wickham marries Lydia; Willoughby marries Miss Grey and becomes friends with the Dashwood family again; Mr. Elliot tactically makes Mrs. Clay his wife to prevent her from marrying Sir Walter Elliot (and thus displacing him as heir to Kellynch Hall). It is only Henry Crawford whose reputation is jeopardised for his committing adultery with Maria Rushworth, and still he does not receive the deferred punishment of “instant annihilation” from Austen’s judge of Hell as does his female partner. To be direct, something funny is going on here.

We expect marriage to be the natural end of the female protagonist. Instead, it is insisted on by Austen at the expense of a more exciting but ultimately less desirable relationship with the male rake.

It’s not an ideal but a compromise.

No ideal heroes…

In Sense and Sensibility Marianne, heartbroken over Willoughby and exerting her ongoing lovesickness to the point of “self-annihilation”, marries Colonel Brandon, who is “On the Wrong Side of Five-and-Thirty”, whereas she is only seventeen. By this point, we know that Willoughby has impregnated Colonel Brandon’s ward. He is also engaged to a Miss Grey who has a fortune of £50,000. Still, when Willoughby expects Marianne will die, he confronts Elinor, professing that he did fall in love with Marianne, even though he did not intend to. Elinor is left in distress, but Marianne eventually persists in her marriage to Brandon. Notably, Mrs. Dashwood says:

I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy with him, as she will be with Colonel Brandon.

To this, Elinor’s reaction is as follows: “She paused.—Her daughter could not quite agree with her, but her dissent was not heard, and therefore gave no offence.”

To me, this is a deep and important silence. What Elinor stumbles upon is an instance of the inadequacy of marriage to approximate love. Marianne is “settling” for Colonel Brandon. And yet the alternative, Willoughby, who would make a good lover, would be a bad husband. Elinor is willing to accept that her sister will have a better life as Colonel Brandon’s wife than one of Willoughby’s many partners. We know this because Brandon’s cousin Eliza is said to have died of “lovesickness” for Willoughby after he abandons her. That is the same “lovesickness” that nearly kills Marianne. Marrying Willoughby really might have been the death of Marianne.

So Colonel Brandon it is—but at what cost? When she is in love with Willoughby Marianne’s eyes are “bright”, or “bewitching”, whereas after her recovery she has “a rational, though languid, gaze.” Now that she has recovered from the effects of overlapping physical, medical and psychological pain, Marianne is so without a need for passion she can set her mind on a new “cured” rationality and therefore the prospect of marrying Colonel Brandon. Instead of being tempered, the fire is snuffed out. The romantic, passionate Marianne is transformed into a happy little drone and an acceptable wife.

There is no ideal man for her.

The “dual mating strategy” and Marianne’s marriage

As Elinor realises, the best case scenario would have been for Marianne to have married a Willoughby who was “really amiable.” Someone who was as romantically appealing as Willoughby but as reliable as Brandon. The problem is that such a man doesn’t exist. There are men that a woman can marry, who are willing to invest lots of time in them, and there are men that a woman can truly erotically love, who are frequently the target of other women’s conquests.

Why does Austen do this? Why must her heroines compromise in this way? The answer might be found in biological research.

The geneticists Macken Murphy, Caroline A. Phillips, and Khandis R. Blake published a paper last year called “Why women cheat: testing evolutionary hypotheses in a multinational sample.”, which emphasises the significance of the “dual mating strategy”. After a rigorous survey and statistical analysis, they concluded:

Women in our sample are more sexually attracted to their affair partners, and more parentally attracted to their primary partners, implying a bias geared towards obtaining “good genes” from affairs and parental benefits from relationships.

In other words, there seems to be a strong basis—aligned with previous scientific literature (Pillsworth and Haselton, 2006)—for the idea that women seek extramarital partners for high quality genes and then get their less physically attractive (but more committed) spouses to help raise the extramarital children.

Given the high-risk nature of infidelity as a mating strategy, the majority of women do not mate with more than one partner at a time. (It should be noted that men always cheat more than women do.) However, a “dual-mating psychology” will exist in some women.

On this view, Marianne’s desire is to have Willoughby as an affair-partner and Brandon as a marriage-partner. This, I conjecture, is why Austen insists that Willoughby

lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself…always retain[ing] that decided regard which interested him in every thing that befell [Marianne], and made her his secret standard of perfection in woman.

Even though Willoughby is married to Miss Grey, Austen implies a developing friendship between Marianne and Willoughby. There will not be an affair—and yet Willoughby, after all he has done, will not “[flee] from society, or [contract] an habitual gloom of temper, or [die] of a broken heart.” Austen’s conservative solution is to allow the paternally attractive Colonel Brandon to be Marianne’s husband whilst Willoughby is a distant friend of the family, perhaps occasionally inspiring a romantic dream.

Pragmatic marriages

The ideal man, a hero that would combine Brandon’s paternal attractions and Willoughby’s sexual ones, simply isn’t real. Marianne must learn to happily accept one over the other—but with the comfort of the other’s approval from afar. This suggests that marriage in Jane Austen isn’t a big romantic affair, as we see in adaptations, but is a tool for a functioning society. Jane Austen was still a conservative, and she still approved of marriage, but she kept a twinkle in her eye for the rakes.

**I will record most of the session so that people who cannot join can watch it later.**

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here. Do you love this book, or do you find it boring? Is Catherine Morland sympathetic or irritating? Do you find the Gothic stuff witty or wearing?

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83748033086?pwd=XefDAXj0SHEZKDuO5HypHZbC2H7B4y.1

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Full Austen schedule here.

What was there to say for three hundred pages about Free Indirect Speech…?

You all know about Free Indirect Discourse or Free Indirect Style. This is when the thoughts of a character are expressed directly in the narrative, no speech marks, no “he thought” or “she thought”. Here’s a classic example from Pride and Prejudice.

On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of receiving her brother and his wife, who came, as usual, to spend the Christmas at Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister, as well by nature as education. The Netherfield ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well-bred and agreeable.

This is a passage of third-person narrative. But the section in bold is clearly the words of Miss Bingley. Austen has slipped Miss Bingley’s thoughts into the main narrative without identifying them with speech marks. She ventriloquises Miss Bingley for ironic effect.

Austen uses this technique all the time. She perfected it. It’s her most important contribution to the development of the novel. She uses it so experimentally in Emma that it is she who deserves all the praise critics usually reserve for Flaubert.

Hatsuyo Shimazaki’s thesis makes a clear distinction between Free Indirect Thought and Free Indirect Speech.1

Usually, we just talk about Free Indirect Discourse, bundling internal thoughts and external speech together. Shimazaki argues that Free Indirect Speech is a distinct and subtle technique.

A passage of FIS [Free Indirect Speech] is a report of someone’s speech perceived objectively by another. By contrast, a passage of FIT [Free Indirect Thought] reveals a character’s subjective view. FIS and FIT arise from different perspectives and work almost in opposite ways. They must therefore be seen as different devices, even though syntactically they share the same stylistic form.

The critic Dorrit Cohn had made this distinction (using different terminology) in her seminal book Transparent Minds but said that Free Indirect Thought (which displays consciousness) was far more interesting. Critics have paid much more attention to Free Indirect Thought than Free Indirect Speech. Shimazaki wants to change that.2 She argues that critics became ideological about the way they examined these issues, and wanted a return to empirical scholarship.3

What follows is a reasonably detailed summary of some of Shimazaki’s main arguments, along with a short example of how the idea applies to Emma (spoilers!).

I found this thesis fascinating and I hope it helps you to read Austen a little differently.

Indirect speech in quotation marks…

Look at this passage from Persuasion.

‘How is Mary looking?’ said Sir Walter, in the height of his good humour. ‘The last time I saw her, she had a red nose, but I hope that may not happen every day.’

‘Oh! no, that must have been quite accidental. In general she has been in very good health, and very good looks since Michaelmas.’

‘If I thought it would not tempt her to go out in sharp winds, and grow coarse, I would send her a new hat and pelisse.’

Anne was considering whether she should venture to suggest that a gown, or a cap, would not be liable to any such misuse, when a knock at the door suspended everything. ‘A knock at the door! and so late! It was ten o’clock. Could it be Mr Elliot? They knew he was to dine in Lansdowne Crescent. It was possible that he might stop in his way home, to ask them how they did. They could think of no one else. Mrs Clay decidedly thought it Mr Elliot’s knock.’ Mrs Clay was right. With all the state which a butler and foot-boy could give, Mr Elliot was ushered into the room.

The bolded section is Free Indirect Speech, but the words are within quotation marks. To begin with we know who is talking, Sir Walter or Anne; but in the bolded section “the characters’ speech is presented as ‘a chorus of voices’”. According to M. B. Parkes, this bolded section “represents both direct and indirect speech as well as statements which could be neither.” Parkes saw this use of quotation marks as experimental, containing as they do an assortment of different sorts of speech and narrative. Most writers don’t put this sort of indirect speech in quotation marks: they only use quotation marks for words characters actually said. By doing this, Shimazaki says, Austen is using a sort of Free Indirect Speech combined with proto-Free Indirect Speech.

And she learned it from the novelists of the eighteenth century, notably Samuel Richardson.

Double-voiced speech

Quotation marks for speech became established in the early- to mid-eighteenth century. This allowed for experiments in the way speech was presented, either within or without such marks. This was also the time when reading silently started to become dominant over reading aloud (though of course there was still a significant reading aloud culture). Punctuation developed to meet the needs of people reading silently.

Speech in Sir Charles Grandison should not be regarded simply as a verbatim record but is presented through typographic experiments, in order for the reader to feel the dialogue more vivid, as if it were spoken out loud.

Clarissa contains many passages where speech is reported in the narrative of a character (i.e. the letters contain other people’s reported speech). As Bakhtin said, as soon as we report other people’s speech ourselves, it takes on another quality. It is not just their speech, but their speech as we report it: it becomes double-voiced allowing for “doubt, indignation, irony, mockery, ridicule, and the like.” See this from one of Clarissa’s letters.

'So handsome a man!—O her beloved Clary!' (for then she was ready to love me dearly, from the overflowings of her good humour on his account!) 'He was but too handsome a man for her!—Were she but as amiable as somebody, there would be a probability of holding his affections!—For he was wild, she heard; very wild, very gay; loved intrigue—but he was young; a man of sense: would see his error, could she but have patience with his faults, if his faults were not cured by marriage!'

What do these italics denote? Clarissa knows that the person whose speech she is reporting is inflected with satire and jealousy. With the speech marks, this effect is enhanced. We get the sense of Clarissa mimicking this person, and making satirical emphasis while doing so. It is not just ventriloquism: it is scornful parody. In Shimazaki’s words: “The heroine reports what another character said about herself and the merged voice sounds satirical, particularly when emphasized with the use of quotation marks.” This is a proto-Free Indirect Speech. (I shan’t recapitulate Shimazaki’s evidence base for the wider claim, but I do recommend the whole chapter of her thesis. It’s compelling. Excitingly, she finds that Rasselas (1759) is the first time modern quotation marks are used, which is when we open and close speech ‘in this manner’ with the ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ left out of the marks.)4

Who are the precursors?

After experiments and proto developments in Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, Shimazaki finds sustained proto-Free Indirect Speech in Evelina by Fanny Burney. Written in 1778, this novel comes from a time when speech mark usage had become standardised. The passages marked in bold in this quotation are examples.

He begged to know if I was not well? You may easily imagine how much I was embarrassed. I made no answer; but hung my head like a fool, and looked on my fan.

He then, with an air the most respectfully serious, asked if he had been so unhappy as to offend me?

“No, indeed!” cried I; and, in hopes of changing the discourse, and preventing his further inquiries, I desired to know if he had seen the young lady who had been conversing with me?

No;-but would I honour him with any commands to her?

“O, by no means!”

Was there any other person with whom I wished to speak?

I said no, before I knew I had answered at all.

Should he have the pleasure of bringing me any refreshment?

I bowed, almost involuntarily. And away he flew.

Shimazaki says: “By adding a question mark to a passage of IS [indirect speech], the shift is subtly made from the voice of the reporter, Evelina, to the speaker, Lord Orville.” There is awkwardness here though. The line “would I honour him with any commands to her?” must have been spoken originally as “would you honour me”. If the reader is going to keep up, this sort of thing cannot be sustained very far. The fact that novels were read aloud (we know Burney and Richardson read aloud) may be why these techniques are used sporadically: it soon becomes obvious to the reader how entangled this transposition can become.

This matters because Austen can’t have learned Free Indirect Speech from her predecessors as much as she learned Free Indirect Thought from them. It is a standard critical account that the use of Free Indirect Discourse for consciousness pre-dated Austen in Burney, and that Austen developed the technique and took it much further. But Burney only used fully developed Free Indirect Thought; her experiments in Free Indirect Speech were, as we have seen, more limited. Austen “could not have learned about FIS from them, although she could have noted a few instances of proto-FIS (in the third person)”.

Not what happened: how Anne experienced what happened

One of the most basic functions of Free Indirect Speech is to enable “the transition from narrative to dialogue in Direct Speech, or to a train of thought in Direct Thought”. Free Indirect Discourse is free because there are no “he said” markers, indirect because it fits with the surrounding narrative: its tenses are made to align.

In the eighteenth century, authors often withdrew all narrator presence to create a fictional reality. A novel of letters immerses you directly into the fictional world. The advantage of Free Indirect Discourse is that you can keep the narrator but still immerse the reader in the fictional perspective. Austen achieves this by removing the “he said” markers. “Austen often audaciously dispenses with such signals, and instead guides the reader to read dramatized scenes of dialogue … via the transitional use of FIS.”

This sentence from Burney’s Camilla is an example.

Lionel, the little boy, casting a comic glance at Camilla, begged to know what his uncle meant by a sharper look out?

The boy has asked a question. There is a question mark. But there are no speech marks. So the transition from narrative (“Lionel, casting a comic glance”) to speech is smoothed. The question mark makes this not-quite a part of the narrator’s voice.

Now look at this extract from Pride and Prejudice.

In the intervals of her [Lady Catherine’s] discourse with Mrs. Collins, she addressed a variety of questions to Maria and Elizabeth, but especially to the latter, of whose connections she knew the least, and who she observed to Mrs. Collins, was a very genteel, pretty kind of girl. She asked her at different times, how many sisters she had, whether they were older or younger than herself, whether any of them were likely to be married, whether they were handsome, where they had been educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been her mother’s maiden name?—Elizabeth felt all the impertinence of her questions, but answered them very composedly.

Shimazaki notes that the previous questions are asked according to the conventions of indirect speech “whether they were handsome”, but the final question with its “what” becomes more conversational, more like Free Indirect Speech. This is the first time Lady Catherine appears in the novel, though we have heard much about her. The transition from Indirect Speech to Free Indirect Speech means “the distance between Lady Catherine and the reader is gradually reduced, as if she is emerging from behind a veil.”5

We see the technique again in this passage from Persuasion.

Once she [Anne] felt that he [Wentworth] was looking at herself—observing her altered features, perhaps, trying to trace in them the ruins of the face which had once charmed him; and once she knew that he must have spoken of her;—she was hardly aware of it, till she heard the answer; but then she was sure of his having asked his partner whether Miss Elliot never danced? The answer was, ‘Oh! no, never; she has quite given up dancing. She had rather play. She is never tired of playing.’

What you see in bold is an indirect quotation. It has no speech marks, but a question mark, so it echoes Wentworth. This might seem like a quibble, but look at what Shimazaki says,

This suggests that the narrator is (or pretends to be) uncertain of the content of Wentworth’s question. Compared to the speech in DS and IS, where the narrator is in complete control of the quotation, with an introductory clause such as ‘he said’, this proto-FIS is independent of the narrator’s authority. Instead, it reflects Wentworth’s personal view of Anne, as it is re-created in her own imagination.

Austen is not showing us what happened: she is showing us how Anne experienced what happened, and the Free Indirect Speech technique allows her to do that in a way that immerses the reader in that perspective, rather than clunkily telling them about it.

In Emma, Austen’s most accomplished novel, Shimazaki sees Free Indirect Speech as the crucial element. The standard critical account of Emma is that Free Indirect Discourse is used to tell the story from Emma’s point of view, so that readers share in her errors, allowing Austen to ironise those errors and show readers the limitations of Emma’s perspective.

David Bell has described Emma as a detective novel. It is full of clues that attentive readers can use to unravel the plot. “Hints for revealing ‘mysteries’ are fragmented throughout the novel, but words and deeds of Frank, and other key characters, are made ambiguous so that the reader does not notice facts that Emma herself cannot perceive.”

Shimazaki argues that Free Indirect Speech is the crucial technique Austen uses to achieve this effect. She asks whether this is really a detective story: none of the clues is hidden. Austen’s readers would be used to reading Gothic fiction, where there were clues hidden in the plot, but a novel like Emma raised different expectations. Rather than solving a mystery, the reader is supposed to use the “clues” as part of Austen’s challenge to make us see Emma’s flaws.

Austen’s challenge is that the more ironic she is, the more of the plot she risks revealing. Every time she opts for irony, she is revealing a little more of the mystery. Using Free Indirect Discourse to keep the narrative entirely from Emma’s perspective solves that problem. We stay inside Emma’s head, and so even when Austen ironises, we are limited by Emma’s perspective.

Shimazaki says that Austen does this with both Free Indirect Thought (as critics already note) and Free Indirect Speech. By letting us share Emma’s thoughts, and intentionally directing us away from seeing Mr. Elton and Frank’s thoughts too directly, Austen creates a plot that we are blind to on first reading, but which seems loaded with double meaning on second reading.

Here’s a passage when Mr. Elton is begging off attending at a party. What we don’t know until our second reading is that while Emma is planning to matchmake Harriet and Elton, Elton wants to marry Emma, and neither of them understands the other.

[He] was to ask whether Mr. Woodhouse’s party could be made up in the evening without him, or whether he should be in the smallest degree necessary at Hartfield. If he were, everything else must give way; but otherwise his friend Cole had been saying so much about his dining with him—had made such a point of it, that he had promised him conditionally to come. [FIS]

Emma thanked him, but could not allow of his disappointing his friend on their account; her father was sure of his rubber. [FIS] He re-urged—she re-declined. . .

Elton is fishing for the chance to be close to Emma. Emma has no idea! His motives are smuggled in with Free Indirect Speech. It is not until we read this knowing what is really going on that this becomes obvious. What looks like his over-formal, almost vulgar speech, is in fact awkwardly hilarious, more so when we see how little Emma has understood this is not just a too-polite demurring, but an attempt at insinuation.

Shimazaki shows five stages of plot concealment.

1. Focus our attention on Emma’s preoccupations.

2. Fragment facts within the speech of other characters whose motives Emma misinterprets.

3. Contrasting Emma’s perspective to that of the Knightley brothers.

4. The shift to direct speech as the truth emerges.

5. Emma’s reflection on her actions and Mr. Elton’s speech.

“Austen uses various FIS functions in order to manipulate the reader’s interpretation on a first reading, but conceals the real plot development within the same FIS sentences.”

The same happens with Frank Churchill (who uses more FIS than any other character). Once again, Austen “directs the reader’s attention to Emma’s romantic interest in Frank, in order to divert the reader’s attention from the speech of Frank and Jane embedded in FIS.”

This summary is already too long. But I was fascinated by Shimazaki’s argument and I hope it gets more attention in Austen studies. It really does seem to be the case that Free Indirect Speech (as distinct from Free Indirect Thought) is a distinct and important narrative technique.

1

You might find this table from Shimazaki’s thesis helpful.

2

Shimazaki identified eleven types or uses of Free Indirect Speech in Austen’s novels. For instance:

1. ‘Transition’ is the way FIS enables a smooth shift between the narration and dialogue; 2. ‘Satirized Speech’ describes the narrator caricaturing a character by mimicry of their speech. 3. ‘Formal Politeness’ is a way to express formality of speech and attitude.

This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and what Professor Hermione Lee once called the “English tradition of affection and sympathy for Jane Austen” is thriving. Several new books are being published, the BBC is producing a new documentary, Substack has multiple Austen book clubs. But how well do we really know Britain’s most beloved author?

Though each of the new books has merit, they all claim Austen for modern concerns. Inger Brodey argues Austen undercut her own happy endings about marriage. Devoney Looser says Austen is wilder than we know. Janet Todd says “living with Austen”, and imbibing the lessons in her work, can change your life. Rebecca Romney has written about the women novelists who influenced Austen.

This is nothing new. From the 19th century’s “dear aunt Jane” biography written by Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, to modern feminist readings, Austen has been claimed by more ideologies than she could ever fit. She has been a reactionary and a radical, a bitter spinster and a witty feminist, an evangelical and a moderate believer, a hater of her society and a staunch Tory, an old romantic and an underminer of marriage.

In 2018, Lucy Worsley wrote about Austen and domesticity, taking a feminist angle. In 2016, Helena Kelly presented a thinly evidenced image of Austen as a radical, interested in evolution and female masturbation. We always find the Austen we want to find. This can be bewildering. Can we ever put aside our own concerns and understand the writer on her own terms?

There is a version of Austen still locked in the academic library. Recent scholarship has revealed that Austen’s novels are engaged in debates about Enlightenment philosophy, steeped in contemporary ideas, particularly the work of Adam Smith and David Hume.

As the Austen and Smith scholar Shannon Chamberlain told me, “Austen shared her keen eye for the complexities of human behaviour with the Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith.” These thinkers, she explained, had developed a model of human behaviour that was no longer based on theology and the Fall, but was particular to humans, born out of empirical observation. “Austen imbibed these ideas and created characters who tested them out . . . Smith and Hume and others were pioneering new kinds of moral inquiry. Naturally, Austen was interested.”

That is the Austen I want to see this anniversary year. Not the writer we adapt to our own ideas, but the thinker engaging with the ideas of her time. Jane Austen the worldly philosopher.

The piece goes on to look at the ways Smith’s ideas occur in the novels, particularly Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. I draw on the work of Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris, among others.

Read the whole thing here.

Read the piece

So, the inevitable question: which sermon did he read?

I was perusing Fordyce in the library recently, and it was surely Sermon IV. This sermon deals with the hobby-horse of the age: the immorality of novels. But, perhaps more importantly, it contains some sound common-sense about marriage.

Reading Fordyce is a strange experience when you have Jane Austen in mind. She would surely object to his crabbed and demeaning attitude to proper femininity, which occurs on what feels like every page. No long walks over muddy fields for him!

But who can read this invective against marrying a reformed rake and not feel regret that Lydia did not listen more closely?

That he who has been formerly a rake may after all prove a very tolerable husband, as the world goes, I have said already that I do not dispute. But I would ask, in the next place, is this commonly to be expected? Is there no danger that such a man will be tempted by the power of long habit to return to his old ways; or that the insatiable love of variety, which he has indulged so freely, will some time or other lead him astray from the finest woman in the world? Will not the very idea of a restraint, which he could never brook while single, make him only the more impatient of it when married?

And look at this warning about the folly of wasting your time. Could there be a more suitable passage to read aloud at Longbourn?

If your mornings be spent in rambling and dressing, your evenings in visits and cards, or public entertainments; if this be the general tenor of your transactions, on which side, I beseech you, can the balance be expected to lie at the bottom of the account?

It is when Fordyce inveighs against the reading of Novels that he becomes most Janeite.

(In Sermon VII, by the way, he advocates for women to be readers, just as Lizzie and Darcy do, and in Sermon IV he approves very much of Richardson, Austen’s favourite novelist.) Novels are dangerous. But the old Romances are full of honour and virtue—, much safer reading than novels, which are full of scandal and temptation. That’s because Romances were written in days of higher moral standing.

Alas, Fordyce complains,

The times in which we live are in no danger of adopting a system of romantic virtue. The parents of the present generation, what with selling their sons and daughters in marriage, and what with teaching them by every possible means the glorious principles of Avarice, have contrived pretty effectually to bring down from its former flights that idle, youthful, unprofitable passion, which has for its object personal attractions, in preference to all the wealth of the world. With the successful endeavours of those profoundly politic parents, the levity of dissipation, the vanity of parade, and the fury of gaming, now so prevalent, have concurred to cure completely in the fashionable of both sexes any tendency to mutual fondness.

The Protestant ideal of marriage—the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity, in Cranmer’s splendid phrasing—is what Fordyce laments being lost with the selling of sons and daughters into marriage, phrasing Austen surely echoes in Emma.

All of a sudden, Fordyce stops sounding like a grumpy old patriarch, and takes on the air of a modern, with all the disdain he can muster for the Mrs. John Dashwoods of this world.

What has a modish young gentleman to do with those antiquated notions of gallantry, that were connected with veneration for female excellence, invincible honour, and unspotted fame? Is it not enough for him, if he intend to strike the matrimonial bargain, that by himself, or an old cunning father, he can drive a good one, to get possession of some woman, whose fortune, joined to his own, if any he have, shall enable him to glitter in public, and in private to gratify other favourite inclinations more freely? Provided these grand points are gained in the person he thus trafficks for to be the partner of his life, what signifies her appearance, her understanding, or her character? And those fine Ladies who seek conquest only for show, too well instructed in the superior consequence of that to put any value on so simple a thing as a Heart, merely for its own sake; what else have they to mind but securing, by whatever arts, such settlements as shall place them, when married, on a level with their companions, or if possible above them, in the all-important articles of gaiety and splendor?

He goes on like this. But doesn’t Fordyce here sound very like Jane!? Of course, there is an irony in that sermon being read to some of the Bennet family, but what a shame that Mr. Collins didn’t take the advice himself to pay more attention to the antiquated notions of gallantry.

In solitude, we are apt to feel too strongly whatever relates to ourselves: we are apt to over-rate the good offices we may have done, and the injuries we may have suffered: we are apt to be too much elated by our own good, and too much dejected by our own bad fortune. The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger to a still better temper. The man within the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator: and it is always from that spectator, from whom we can expect the least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn the most complete lesson of self-command.

from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III, Chapter III, Adam Smith (1790 edition)

This should immediately be obvious to you, as Austen readers, as a crucial aspect of novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Austen is a novelist of daily life and conversation. And it is through conversation that moral revelations are made. Her heroines are not brought to their senses by activity, but by discussion. Think of Elinor and Marianne, Jane and Lizzie.

What follows is a summary of some of the ideas in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Of course, secondhand summaries are much less worthwhile than reading the original. My hope is that this will not only give you a better understanding of Austen’s work, but the temptation to read Smith himself.

Who are you talking to?

It matters very much who this important conversation is with. This person is not merely a vessel for good ideas; they must have developed good virtues themselves.

Throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith relies on the idea of an “impartial spectator”. Smith says that we cannot judge ourselves; we must try to judge ourselves as an impartial spectator would judge us.

We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. Whatever judgment we can form concerning them, accordingly, must always bear some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain condition, would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the judgment of others. We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.

Amartya Sen contrasts this to the social contract morality we are familiar with from so much modern philosophy. Whereas the social contract is about a set of established relationships between real people in a real society (and, idealistically, in some sort of global society), Smith’s morality is about impartial arbitration by imagined people. Sen points out that Smith’s criticism of empire, such as the East India Company, was not based on any social contract, but on what the impartial spectator would have made of such behaviour. Smith uses the example of Ancient Greece, where the killing of new born infants was allowed. Long practice blinded them to the cruelty of what they did. Even “the humane Plato” despite his “love of mankind” never criticises the practice. It is not social contracts we ought to use to regulate morality, but the ideal of an impartial spectator.

we even sympathise with the dead

The impartial spectator is important because imagination is the root of morality. When we empathise with someone, we do not feel what they feels they are on the rack and we are not. But we do imagine how it would feel if we were on the rack. So strongly does this work (think of mothers suffering with their infants) that, Smith says, “we even sympathise with the dead.” Indeed, the terror of being dead is one of the things that leads to well-regulated behaviour.

Imaginative sympathy is a crucial human feeling. When we have read a book so much we are bored with it, we can take pleasure in reading it to someone else, and seeing how much they enjoy it: we enjoy their enjoyment, and thus the book again. Our imaginations are highly susceptible to others’. We can summarise Smith saying that moods—shared feelings and dissociative feelings—dominate human life and morality. It is in the constant round of sympathy and disgust, fellow-feeling and looking at each other with incomprehension, that our moral lives are made. Agreement and sympathy are almost synonymous.

With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another… On the contrary, how uneasy are we made when we go into a house in which jarring contention sets one half of those who dwell in it against the other…

We enjoy good feelings, even when they involve weakness, such as over indulgent parents. We gladly abandon ourselves to joy, Smith says, whenever we can. But we dislike intemperance. We do not sympathise so easily with excessive grief or intemperate joy. Our greatest admiration is for a man who can command himself under excessive sorrow. Because we sympathise more with joy than sorrow, we make a parade of our riches and not our poverty. Indeed, this is why we work so hard to get rich. No-one really needs more than the wages of a lowly labourer. We all seek our superfluities. Why?

To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those agreeable emotions…

Hence the “ranks of society”. Even now, in our post-aristocratic societies, we fawn over celebrities and pop-stars, we imagine famous people to be happy, we wish to emulate the prominent. This is why we have aristocratic fictional detectives like Peter Whimsey and why we have the Kardashians. Cultural figures like Harry Potter and Taylor Swift are wealthy and prominent in a manner that allow people who believe themselves un-snobbish to approve of them. Smith says people of sense are supposed to be above all this, but no-one is, unless they very, very much higher or lower than everyone else.

Rich-worship brings both a sense of order to society and the potential for moral corruption. We see the world’s attention go to the rich, not the wise. The vice and folly of the prominent are less despised than the misery of the poor. Most people do not choose the path to wisdom: the greater part of mankind is a mob admiring wealth. However for the middle and lower classes, the pursuit of money and virtue are often the same. Ability, prudence, and temperate conduct are what makes those people successful.

in the light in which he is conscious that others will view him

Despite its problems, sympathy is how we become morally good. All our sense of merit and demerit “arises from the sympathetic emotions of gratitude and love.” And the reverse is true. Think of a man who doesn’t recompense or thank his benefactor, when he has it in his power, and when his benefactor needs help. We cannot approve. The impartial spectator “rejects all fellow feeling” with such a person. (This idea is crucial the plot of Romola.)

Smith tells us we must constantly think about how we appear, or would appear, to others, not how we appear to ourselves. This, too, is a crucial lesson for Austen’s heroines.

We might all be selfish, Smith says, preferring ourselves, but we never actually confess to living like that. We know other people won’t go along with it. This awareness moderates our behaviour.

When he views himself in the light in which he is conscious that others will view him, he sees that to them he is but one of the multitude in no respect better than any other in it. If he would act so as that the impartial spectator may enter into the principles of his conduct, which is what of all things he has the greatest desire to do, he must, upon this, as upon all other occasions, humble the arrogance of his self-love, and bring it down to something which other men can go along with.

Knowing we are being watched—and having the idea of an inner impartial spectator—brings us down from selfishness to proper conduct. It is by knowing what others would think of us that we become moral.

We are delighted when we find a benefactor who values us as we value ourselves. We act so as to keep that person in good opinion of us. But, when we are unable to “enter into the motives of our benefactors”, or when our benefactors become unworthy, our esteem for them falls. Think of Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins. She is a benefactor who is chased not out of fellow-feeling, but from mere snobbery; Lizzie will have nothing to do with her. We must admire our benefactors for good reasons.

Likewise, praise is properly reserved for action, not indolent benevolence. Smith says that the man who has good intentions but who does little of real benefit might receive our love, but still, we say, we owe you nothing. The “loudest acclamations of the world” are for good actions, not good intentions.

We approve of people when we can sympathise with them and their motives. We approve of ourselves when we imagine ourselves in someone else’s position and believe they could sympathise with us. The awareness of other people doesn’t just moderate our selfishness, it gives us the means to be aware that we should be judged impartially too. In the imaginative awareness of other people’s claim to our moral conduct, we create an idealised “impartial spectator” (not unlike the “reasonable observer” concept in the law). This spectator lives within us and acts like a conscience.

We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.

What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved?

Society in this way acts as a moral mirror. Someone who grew up away from other people would not be able to consider their merits and demerits. We learn about beauty from looking at other people, not ourselves. Then we examine ourselves. The handsome can tolerate a few adverse remarks about their appearance; the “deformed” cannot. (This is essentially what Mr. Knightly tells Emma when she mocks Miss Bates, albeit transposed a little.)

So it is with moral criticism. We see other people behaving and begin to examine ourselves, and thus imagine an impartial spectator judging us. That is the only looking-glass we can find for morality. We divide ourselves into two people: examiner and judge, and the one being examined; the spectator and the agent. Virtue’s reward is other people’s love, not our own, so we temper selfishness. Smith says, in lines that could epigraph each of Austen’s novels,

What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?

What pleases us is not mere praise, but the fact of being praise-worthy. Praise reinforces that underlying condition of virtue. Desiring praise for its own sake is contemptible; desiring it for true work is admirable. “The love of just fame… is not unworthy even in a wise man.” So it is that when we do someone wrong, but secret, we still feel ashamed. This is also why people of “sensibility” are more affected by unjust accusations of wrongdoing than criminals are of real accusations of guilt. Smith disagrees with the “splenetic philosophers” who disdain all love of praise. Where we have been praise-worthy, Smith says, we ought to seek praise.

The all-wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren; to be more or less pleased when they approve of his conduct, and to be more or less hurt when they disapprove of it. He has made man, if I may say so, the immediate judge of mankind; and has, in this respect, as in many others, created him after his own image, and appointed him his vicegerent upon earth, to superintend the behaviour of his brethren. They are taught by nature to acknowledge that power and jurisdiction which has thus been conferred upon him, to be more or less humbled and mortified when they have incurred his censure, and to be more or less elated when they have obtained his applause.

Of course, there is always an appeal open from other people to the impartial spectator. External judgement is about praise; internal “impartial spectator” judgement is about praise-worthiness. Hence the judge within is vital. It is only by consulting him that “we can ever see what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions.”

From Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion, Austen’s heroines are Smithian. They are learning how to view themselves in the light which others see them.

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Sense and Sensibility is supposed to be a courtship novel, or a novel of moral antithesis per the fashion of the time, but it starts with neither of those themes. There is, instead, something of the fairy tale about the opening.

The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.

This is a novel about a family that was settled, but is no longer. As in many fairy tales, the unsettling comes from the death of the old man and the arrival of a new ruler, an unfriendly one, and in this case accompanied by the wicked Mrs. John Dashwood.

Under the old regime, the Dashwoods (note the fairytale three sisters) were insulated from the world—they lived “in the centre” of their large estate, away from worldly vice and wickedness. They were respectable and won the general good opinion of all around. This is the classic state of happiness that a fairy tale seeks to disrupt.

Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood bring worldly wickedness into Norland, the “great alteration”. In her excellent reading of the novel, Emily Auerbach points to phrases like the following: “The old gentleman died: his will was read, and like almost every other will, gave as much disappointment as pleasure.” Austen does this again and again throughout the novel. The world, she seems to be saying, is what it is. People are disappointing.

With the arrival of greed, vanity, and selfishness, the three sisters and their mother now have to go and seek their fortune. They set off on their quest into Devonshire, half the country away. Like The Pilgrims Progress they must go through the Slough of Despond. Arriving in their cottage, they are now affronted with worldly vice. Lord Middleton is too saucy. Mrs. Jennings too presuming. Mr. Palmer too rude. Lucy Steele a liar. And so on. Willoughby is Vice himself. The Great Seducer.

Now they will be tested. Will Marianne become as insufferable as Mr. Palmer, or will she learn restraint? Will Elinor allow her self-control to become as deceitful as Lucy, or will she learn to follow her heart? Marianne becomes insolent like Willoughby; Elinor is a little too mocking of Mrs. Jennings, who turns out to be very morally worthy indeed.

They are almost taken in! Just as Pilgrim has to expose Morality and Civility as frauds, so they must see through the machinations of Willoughby, the classic Vice figure, and Lucy Steele. They must learn, too, that the quiet people like Edward and Brandon are more virtuous and constant than they have sometimes believed.

The quest continues to London, with the painful separation from their mother. We might even say that Marianne and Elinor able to get over the Hill of Difficulty by passing into the Valley of Humiliation. London, of course, is Vanity Fair.

It seems that all is lost! Marianne passes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death!

But find their fortune they do, and, as this is a fairy tale by Jane Austen, they find their virtue as well. At the ending, they have settled themselves again, and are once more cocooned away from the world in a state of family happiness.

Mrs. Dashwood was prudent enough to remain at the cottage, without attempting a removal to Delaford; and fortunately for Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, when Marianne was taken from them, Margaret had reached an age highly suitable for dancing, and not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover.

Between Barton and Delaford, there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate; and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.

They survived their pilgrimage, and are rewarded with “strong family affection,” which is what they had gone searching for on the death of the old man. The quest is over.

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Because this is the year of Jane Austen’s anniversary—two hundred and fifty years since her birth—we are being treated to several new books about her work. I shall not review all of them, but some of the more promising critical options will be covered here for paid subscribers. This is a review of Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness by Inger Brodey, a book which I thought was quite poorly argued.

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Why do Jane Austen’s novels end the way they do? No wedding ceremony, no profusions of romance, no sunset scenes. A new book this year, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, argues that Austen’s endings subtly undermine the idea of marriage. Inger Brodey argues that Austen’s endings are “artificial”. It is the arrival of poultry thieves that prompt Mr. Wodehouse to give Emma permission to marry Mr. Knightly. A mysterious viscount appears at the end of Northanger Abbey, allowing a resolution. I shan’t give more example, for fear of spoiling the plots. But Brodey argues there are many “sudden resolutions” which feel “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic.”

This is, of course, the Austen we want. Critics often go hunting for a feminist Austen and are often able to fashion one. Brodey has no qualms about telling us, based on a single rather thin quote in a letter, that “Austen clearly feared the loss of time and independence involved in marriage.” In fact, we know no such thing. The general critical point that Austen not only promoted the happy ending of marriage but also challenged its conventions and strictures is over-stated. You can present marriage in the ambivalent terms which Austen often does (how few of her marriage couples of set a shining example, other than the Crofts?) without that being a means of challenging the institution.

When you are steeped in the jargon and tropes of modern criticism, it is easy to see these ideas in Jane Austen: when you look at her in her own time, on her own terms, the challenge she presents to marriage seems much less theoretical and absolute.

Brodey even quotes someone saying that the coquette characters (think Mary Crawford) invent their own lives far more than the Emma-types and thus are “more of a reflection of the author”. Can this be serious? Because Jane Austen wrote novels and didn’t get married she is more of a Mary Crawford than an Anne Elliot?

Austen’s novels are structured around the moral development of her heroines: that is not a way of showing them to be hampered by their lives, or a “subtle” means of challenging marriage. Brodey claims that Austen prioritises the heroine’s moral growth over the romantic ending. In fact, Austen is prioritising that moral growth because the conventional romance novels of her time were made of formulaic plot with no regard for moral development. Good marriages, Austen tells us, are made of good morals.

Brodey tells us that Austen thinks moral growth is essential to happiness whether or not one marries. True enough. The problem with these arguments, beyond the fact that they are so obviously made up of our ideas, not Austen’s (try quoting Smith or Hume?) is that they all do get married. All of the happy characters get married at the end. Austen did not have to do that. She could have written like the more radical authors of her time. Marilyn Butler made all of this abundantly clear in the 1980s.

Brodey says “she makes a point of showing how easily things could have ended unhappily”, which actually undermines her argument. She claims that the happy ending of Sense and Sensibility is undermined by the fact that Elinor and Edward “had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasture for their cows.” Unlike Brodey, I do not find this to be a “cutting… anticlimax”. She even claims that this juxtaposition implies that Marianne is a “commodity or an afterthought equivalent to their menial farms tasks.” We are expected to swallow this interpretation after having read the whole novel?

Austen does not “associate” Brandon with the pasturage and Marianne with the cows. This is desperate stuff. Were it not written in service of feminism, it would not be taken seriously. Brodey tries to make her point with a comparison to Madame Bovary. This fails because the entirety of Madame Bovary is about this idea. Flaubert’s whole novel is a means of puncturing romantic delusion. That is not what the entirety of Sense and Sensibility is about, and to hinge an argument on a few lines doesn’t change that.

Here’s an example of why this reasoning is selective and unreasonable. Brodey claims that the relationship between the sisters is “the most important” part of the ending. But wait: what about Elinor wishing for better pasture in juxtaposition to her wish for Marianne’s marriage? Those are her thoughts, not Austen’s. Aren’t we now obliged to think that it is she who is “associating” Marianne with the cows? Isn’t it really the sisterly happiness that is subject to a “cutting… anticlimax”?

When you know what you want to find in Austen’s endings, you can find it, but it in this case it involves small evidence, not a reading of the whole book.

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This is a review of Debra Gettelman’s 2024 book Imagining Otherwise, a book I really loved and will write about again quite soon.

The first part is free. To read the rest, and to read all my work about Austen such as whether Jane Austen hates you, Mr. Bennet’s not-so-bad parenting, or why Lizzie Bennett will never be poor, become a paid subscriber. You’ll be able to come to the book clubs (Austen and Shakespeare), as well as read through the archives about Victorian novels, Shakespeare’s plays, and my irregular review of reviews, along with all the other things I write, including why you should stop trying to be happy if you want to find your thing.

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Alternative endings?

Three of Austen’s novels include near the end an account of how the main courtship could have ended differently: Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility.

Why would Austen include three hypothetical plots just at the point when she was concluding her own story? Debra Gettelman’s very excellent 2024 book Imagining Otherwise has the answer.

So many modern scholars and critics rely on theoretical ideas, and perform so-called close readings to find whatever they want to in Austen’s novels. (Coming soon, I have a highly critical review of the new book Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness which does exactly that). Gettelman, in contrast, has paid close attention to the text of the novels and the context in which they were written, so her answers is fascinating and persuasive. It is the most engaging critical work I have read for a while.

Austen knew exactly what she was doing with these alternative endings. She was arguing with her readers.

Not the happy ending we wanted

To see how Austen was reacting to the culture of her time, we need to go in time back a little. Novel reading in the eighteenth century was highly suspect. People worried that it made readers solitary. Gothic novels were thought to “seduce the reader” to an inner world. William St. Clair reports people worrying that reading Byron would stimulate “erotic fantasy”, and this would lead to masturbation and physical decline.

Jacques duBeaux wrote in The Accomplish’d Woman in 1753, that people become “wholly changed” after reading fiction: “they lead quite another life.” In 1750, Johnson worried about the enervating effects of realistic fiction, and wrote that “care ought to be taken that, when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited.”

In Austen’s time, there was great interest in her use of ordinary details. Everyday life had taken over from Gothic and the Romance. But, Gettelman writes, this might have made fiction more risky. Wild fantasy is harmless compared to the way quotidian novels blur the line between reality and fiction.

And we know that reading did affect people’s imaginations. Andrew Piper has argued that the popularity of miscellanies lead to more fragmentary imaginations, for example. (Maybe the medium really is the message.)

What is significant for Austen’s endings, is that reading became participatory. Marginalia of the period frequently contains two sets of ideas: the reader’s compared to the author’s. Romanticism invited readers to use their imagination, to dream while reading. Walter Scott, in his praise of Austen marvelled at how possible this was in Emma as well as in Gothic fiction.

Knowing the characters

It became quite normal, as it is for us, for readers to speak as if they knew the characters. The “natural” or “probable” nature of Austen’s novels, meant readers really could imagine themselves in the fictional world. One reader, Mrs. C. Cage, wrote: “I am at Highbury all day, and I can’t help feeling I’ve just got a new set of acquaintances.” Another wrote that “in Miss A’s works… You actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family.” In 1859, George Henry Lewes wrote: “the reader breakfasts, drives, walks, and gossips with the various worthies, till a process of transmutation takes place within him, and he absolutely fancies himself one of the company.”

Gettelman equates this to the way we call novels “relatable”. And indeed, it is now a commonplace to say you have lived with a book, or that you know the characters. The most common remark about War & Peace is that you do not read the book but live it.

What we must remember, is that this was all new to Austen and her contemporaries. It was a strange new development. For us it is the norm. For them, it was emergent, exciting, and threatening.

The ending we want?

At this time, what Gillian Beer calls “wish-fulfilment literature” was filling up the circulating libraries. These books were made of flat characters, melodrama, episodic plots. But it gave readers the endings they wanted, the plot formulas they craved. Readerly participation lead to readers expecting these endings from the novels they read.

Austen refuses us such things. She enjoyed readerly participation: she provided her family with “little particulars” about her own characters, such as what happened to them after the novel ended. But when she addresses the reader, she is often mocking the conventions of these wish-fulfilment novels, and thus mocking the reader’s expectations.

The hypothetical endings Austen included are very similar to the “popular formulaic romance plots that she knew, and knew her readers expected.”

Imagining the ending

Austen knew her readers were imagining the endings. At the end of Mansfield Park, she “purposefully abstains from dates … that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own.” This is a direct invitation to the readers whom she knew wanted to participate in how the story ended. When she writes “let other pens dwell on misery” she is being ironic, but also serious. She knows her readers will do exactly that.

Gettelman’s book traces this throughout the nineteenth century, and I shall be writing about her work and Middlemarch soon. For now, let’s see what this can show us about the ending of Sense & Sensibility.

The dastardly Willoughby’s just deserts?

Towards the end of Sense & Sensibility, we are told that, far from pining away his life in misery after having lost Marianne, Willoughby goes on to live in fine style.

…that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself.

Gettelman calls this a “mock recitation of novelistic cliches… a rejection of how a predictable romance plot might end.” Readers want Willoughby to be miserable, to suffer for his misdeeds. Austen refuses us the fleeing from society and the broken heart. Far from contracting a gloom of temper

His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

Instead of the imagined, conventional ending, we get life as it probably does carry on. Austen brings in this imagined alternative because she knows her readers are already imagining it, and she wants to deny it.

This is a way of purging readers’ expectations. Look at Elinor’s stern advice for Marianne.

Had you married, you must have been always poor. His expensiveness is acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares that self-denial is a word hardly understood by him. His demands and your inexperience together, on a small, very small income, must have brought on distresses which would not be the less grievous to you, from having been entirely unknown and unthought of before. Your sense of honour and honesty would have led you, I know, when aware of your situation, to attempt all the economy that would appear to you possible: and, perhaps, as long as your frugality retrenched only on your own comfort, you might have been suffered to practice it, but beyond that—and how little could the utmost of your single management do to stop the ruin which had begun before your marriage?

What Marianne imagines as a life of passion, romance, and feeling is reimagined by Elinor as one of hardship, incontinence, and difficulty. Gettelman says this is a “talking cure” a century before Freud. It is only when Elinor reimagines Marianne’s conventional romance as real life that Marianne finally “gets over” Willoughby.

Just as Marianne’s expectations are purged by Elinor’s alternative ending, so are the readers’ with Austen’s.

Imagining otherwise

Think of that moment when the servant comes in and announces that Lucy Steele (hiss) is married to Mr. Ferrars. We imagine how hard this is for poor Elinor. Here is what happens in Elinor’s imagination.

She saw them in an instant in their parsonage-house; saw in Lucy, the active, contriving manager, uniting at once a desire of smart appearance with the utmost frugality, and ashamed to be suspected of half her economical practices;—pursuing her own interest in every thought, courting the favour of Colonel Brandon, of Mrs. Jennings, and of every wealthy friend. In Edward—she knew not what she saw, nor what she wished to see;—happy or unhappy,—nothing pleased her; she turned away her head from every sketch of him.

We are left in this position for six pages. What actually happens gets much less attention. Six pages of thinking about a marriage that doesn’t take place seems quite extraordinary. What doesn’t happen is somehow more vivid.

Austen is not trying to give you the expected ending. She wants no conventional plot. Gettelman says that if we read Austen looking for convention, we are like Captain Berwick in Persuasion, who reads poetry “for the various lines which imagined a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness.” Likewise, Catherine Moreland reads only bad novels, and Sir Walter Eliot reads only the baronetage.

Austen talks to us as better readers. She gives “reparative narrative justice”. She shows us the ending we imagined, the ending we expected from convention, and then shows that we don’t need to regret its loss.

Austen makes us imagine better.

The pride in Pride and Prejudice was derived from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In their excellent study of the intersection of Smith and Austen, Pride and Profit, economics professors Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris trace the ways Austen uses Smith’s ideas in her fiction. (They are drawing on the work of previous scholars, such as Mohler, Knox-Shaw, Valihora). Far from the common-sense moralist she appears, Austen is a true intellectual, as engaged with the philosophy of her times as George Eliot later was.

Mary informs her family that vanity and pride are different: pride is concerned with what we think of ourselves; vanity is concerned with what others think of us. Smith makes the same distinction.

We call it pride or vanity; two words, of which the latter always, and the former for the most part, involve in their meaning a considerable degree of blame. Those two vices, however, though resembling, in some respects, as being both modifications of excessive self-estimation, are yet, in many respects, very different from one another.

All readers know Darcy’s pride. “He declined to be introduced to any other lady.” When Bingley suggests he dance with one of the ladies, Darcy tells him,

I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.

As Smith says, “the proud man never flatters… and is scarcely civil to anybody.” Darcy goes on to reject the idea of dancing with Lizzy because she is “tolerable” but not handsome. He will not humour the women who have been left by other men. Here is what Smith has to say about the proud man.

He disdains to court your esteem. He affects even to despise it, and endeavours to maintain his assumed station, not so much by making you sensible of his superiority, as of your own meanness. He seems to wish not so much to excite your esteem for himself, as to mortify that for yourself.

Could not Jane Austen have written that herself?

When Charlotte talks about Darcy’s pride, she excuses him because of his wealth and station. Lizzy says she could easily forgive his pride if he had not offended hers. Shortly afterwards, there is a discussion about what counts as an “accomplished” lady. Darcy is strict in his standards and Lizzy says he must not know any lady truly accomplished, causing Miss Bingley to complain that Lizzy cuts down her own sex to recommend herself, a trait Smith attributes to proud people.

When they assume upon us, or set themselves before us, their self-estimation mortifies our own. Our own pride and vanity prompt us to accuse them of pride and vanity, and we cease to be the impartial spectators of their conduct.

Lizzy is blind to Darcy’s true character because she too is proud. They have the same failings and must learn the same lessons. It is only when her pride relents that she can see through his. They are both rather too pleased with themselves, and shrug off all sorts of criticism from various people. She knows how to nettle him (pointing to his weaknesses) because that is how to nettle her. When she tells Darcy his defect is to hate everybody, he retorts that hers is to wilfully misunderstand them. This is a temperament Smith defined very clearly.

The proud man is commonly too well contented with himself to think that his character requires any amendment. The man who feels himself all-perfect, naturally enough despises all further improvement. His self-sufficiency and absurd conceit of his own superiority, commonly attend him from his youth to his most advanced age.

Note Smith’s warning that pride means “we cease to be the impartial spectators.” This is the key measurement of virtue in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The idea is repeated throughout. Smith’s contention is that virtuous conduct is the result of seeing ourselves as an impartial observer would. When Lizzy meets Wickham, he admits “it is impossible for me to be impartial” about Darcy. At that point, it is impossible for proud Lizzy too.

The story Wickham tells about Darcy neglecting to support his education (against the wishes of old man Darcy) is exactly the sort of story you would tell if you believed that proud men acted as Smith tells us they do.

To do the proud man justice he very seldom stoops to the baseness of falsehood. When he does, however, his falsehoods are by no means so innocent. They are all mischievous, and meant to lower other people. He is full of indignation at the unjust superiority, as he thinks it, which is given to them.

Smith’s observation maps neatly onto the novel. This is why Wickham admits that Darcy is generally truthful, and often generous and charitable. This well-behaved exterior, Wickham claims, means no-one will believe anything bad of Darcy. The accusation is not of dishonesty but of the hatred a proud man has towards his low-born adopted brother. It is a Smithian accusation.

When Lizzy refuses his first proposal, she accuses him of snobbishness and of cheating Wickham. He makes no denial, but he does point out that it is her pride that has been offended by his remarks on her family’s social position. “But, perhaps… these offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design.” (My italics)

Next day, when she reads Darcy’s letter, her pride is broken. “How despicably have I acted!” she cried. “I, who have prided myself on my discernment!… I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.” These are the tones of love, applied to the development of virtue. Likewise, Darcy has to have his pride broken by the end of the novel. “I have been a selfish being all my life… I was given good principles, but was left to follow them in pride.”

It is once they can both see themselves clearly that they are able to see each other clearly. They must develop the sight of an impartial observer, not a proud one. Or, as Smith puts it,

That degree of self-estimation, therefore, which contributes most to the happiness and contentment of the person himself, seems likewise most agreeable to the impartial spectator.

The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due.

The moral of Pride and Prejudice is very Smithian. The love of well-matched people will involve just enough pride, but no more.

It is common now to see Mr. Bennet blamed for his behaviour towards the Bennet girls, almost as much as Mrs. Bennet. His faults may be more subtle, but they are no less important, it is thought.

But how much can we blame Mr. Bennet? And what does he do wrong, exactly?

The Mischief of Neglect

When Lizzy gets Jane’s two letters telling her that Wickham has run away with Lydia, she regrets the easy treatment that her parents have given Lydia, which encouraged her as a flirt.

The mischief of neglect and mistaken indulgence towards such a girl—oh! how acutely did she now feel it!

Mischief was a much stronger word for Austen than for us. Johnson defined it as “Harm; hurt; whatever is ill and injuriously done.” The OED cites Scott in 1817: “It was hardly possible two such damned rascals should colleague together without mischief to honest people.”

We know who is responsible for the mischief of “mistaken indulgence”:—Mrs. Bennet, whose faults are well catalogued. But Mr. Bennet is here given equal blame for the “mischief of neglect”. Lizzy warned him what would happen before Lydia went to Brighton.

If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character will be fixed; and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt that ever made herself and her family ridiculous.

In reply, Mr. Bennet said, “Let her go, then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an object of prey to anybody.” It is too rarely noted that Colonel Forster ought to have been far more responsible for Lydia, and that Mr. Bennet had no reason to doubt his character. However, we continue.

His negligence continues when the search for Lydia is undertaken.

The whole party were in hopes of a letter from Mr. Bennet the next morning, but the post came in without bringing a single line from him. His family knew him to be, on all common occasions, a most negligent and dilatory correspondent; but at such a time they had hoped for exertion. They were forced to conclude, that he had no pleasing intelligence to send; but even of that they would have been glad to be certain. Mr. Gardiner had waited only for the letters before he set off.

Just as the word mischief is repeated, negligence is repeated. This is Mr. Bennet’s abetting sin. And he knows it. When Lizzy sympathises with him, he says,

“Say nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it.”

She tells him not to be hard on himself.

“No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough.”

And he acknowledges that she had been right to warn him.

“Lizzy, I bear you no ill-will for being justified in your advice to me last May, which, considering the event, shows some greatness of mind.”

Austen goes easy on Mr. Bennet

This is small beer compared to the unremitting scrutiny and scorn to which the narrative submits Mrs. Bennet. She is judged harshly from the first chapter, whereas Mr. Bennet is judged tolerantly.

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married: its solace was visiting and news.

When Lydia is found, and engaged, Mrs. Bennet becomes so cheerful that her spirits are “oppressively high”. This sort of perpetual scorn is never meted out to Mr. Bennet; he is dealt with using a gentler irony.

This essential difference is apparent throughout the novel. Think of the scene where Lady Catherine asks Lizzy about her education.

“Your mother should have taken you to town every spring for the benefit of masters.”

“My mother would have no objection, but my father hates London.”

“Has your governess left you?”

“We never had any governess.”

“No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without a governess! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your education.”

Elizabeth could hardly help smiling, as she assured her that had not been the case.

“Then who taught you? who attended to you? Without a governess, you must have been neglected.”

“Compared with some families, I believe we were; but such of us as wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be idle certainly might.”

“Ay, no doubt: but that is what a governess will prevent; and if I had known your mother, I should have advised her most strenuously to engage one.”

This is the crucial point. Charlotte Bronte earned £20 a year as a governess. Even allowing for more than that, the Bennets could have afforded one. (They are well able to keep a cook, as Mrs. Bennet snaps to Mr. Collins.) Mrs. Bennet could, indeed, have done more. It was her responsibility to engage a governess.

Mr. Bennet’s negligence at least has the virtue of giving his daughters the run of the library. Remember Mr. Darcy says women should not just be accomplished, but “must yet add something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Mr. Bennet cares about that; Mrs. Bennet does not. Mrs. Bennet’s indulgence has no corresponding virtue. The final difference between Lizzy and Lydia is one of temperament. “We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary.” Lydia was indulged away from the benefits of negligence. Lizzy was not. In a system of virtue ethics, the development of temperament through education is crucial. It is this that Lizzy has and which Lydia (and Mrs. Bennet) lack.

In a family of five girls, we must expect the interplay of nature and nurture to result in such differences. Austen calls Mr. Bennet a philosopher ironically, but not entirely ironically. He is a good father to some of his girls; she is not an especially good mother to any of them. It is reinforced to us at the end that none of her meddling resulted in her girls getting married. Indeed, quite the opposite. She is very busy; he is not. But perhaps she has a more negative effect on the girls’ prospects.

Austen is especially mild on Mr. Bennet’s primary failing: his financial imprudence.

Mr. Bennet had very often wished, before this period of his life, that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him. He now wished it more than ever. Had he done his duty in that respect, Lydia need not have been indebted to her uncle for whatever of honour or credit could now be purchased for her. The satisfaction of prevailing on one of the most worthless young men in Great Britain to be her husband might then have rested in its proper place.

Note that Mr. Bennet is regretting that he could not pay Wickham off himself. He is not regretting what happened, as such. It is Lydia’s satisfaction of prevailing on Wickham that is named, not Mr. Bennet’s negligence. The marriage might have been prevented. But saving more money would not have changed Lydia’s character. And remember, the mischief was a double one. Austen continues:

When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless; for, of course, they were to have a son. This son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy; and her husband’s love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.

Note the twinned responsibility: “economy was held to be perfectly useless”; Mrs. Bennet expected a son; between them, they broke even. His neglect has become their neglect. Austen qualifies his failing. Mrs. Bennet’s faults are never qualified in this manner.

What has gone wrong has gone wrong between the Bennets. This is not the result of his moral failure so much as the inevitable consequence of the marriage of such temperaments. When Mr. Bennet agrees to give Lydia one hundred pounds a year, he says “he would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser, by the hundred that was to be paid them; for, what with her board and pocket allowance, and the continual presents in money which passed to her through her mother’s hands, Lydia’s expenses had been very little within that sum.” It is not entirely in his control how much money is spent, or where it is “passed” to.

Temperament governs.

Temperament governs so many of the decisions in this novel. We see this in the fact that Lydia is exactly like her mother. When the news of the elopement arrives, Mrs. Bennet says, “I am sure there was some great neglect or other on their side, for she is not the kind of girl to do such a thing, if she had been well looked after.” How naive! How blind! What could Mr. Bennet do in the face of this? It is twice repeated that Mrs. Bennet wanted to take all the family to Brighton, including this extraordinary exchange after Lydia is married.

“They must all go to Brighton. That is the place to get husbands. What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go!”

“Very true; and if I had my will we should.”

It is no joke that the only thing Mrs. Bennet cares about is getting her daughters married. How they are married, and to whom, is of much less consequence to her (morally, not financially). She would have traded Lizzy to Mr. Collins in a moment. When Lydia invites them to Newcastle where she claims she will get partners for her sisters(!), Mrs. Bennet approves. Lydia, of all people, as matchmaker! This is the morning after the marriage when Wickham has been paid ten thousand pounds to resolve the scandal. When Lizzy asks Mrs. Bennet about their uncle paying the money (which he cannot afford), Mrs. Bennet replies,

who should do it but her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his own, I and my children must have had all his money, you know; and it is the first time we have ever had anything from him except a few presents. Well! I am so happy. In a short time, I shall have a daughter married.

If he had not had a family of his own! This is not just indulgence. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia share a flighty temperament, impervious to the social or moral reality. When Lydia and Wickham come home, Mr. Bennet is austere, Lizzy disgusted, and Jane shocked. Mrs. Bennet goes into raptures. And Lydia? “Lydia was Lydia still.”

Mismatched temperaments struggle to affect each other. (Hence Mr. Bennet’s line that we exist to laugh at our neighbours and give them pleasure in our turn.) Mr. Bennet is trapped. Yes, it is a trap of his own making: he married her: but Jane Austen doesn’t dwell on this point as she might. That absence is telling.

Matching tempers

The whole novel is concerned with this nature-nurture debate. Mr. Collins says Lydia’s behaviour “is the more to be lamented” because the “licentiousness of behaviour” was the result of “a faulty degree of indulgence”. Who disagrees? Not Darcy. Not Lizzy. Not Mr. Bennet.

But then Mr. Collins says,

though, at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age.

This is never contradicted, unlike so much else that Mr. Collins says. Indeed, it is everywhere accepted. This is the fault of Lydia’s personality as much as anything else. Temperament and virtue are closely aligned. When Jane and Bingley are engaged Mr. Bennet says,

“You are a good girl,” he replied, “and I have great pleasure in thinking you will be so happily settled. I have not a doubt of your doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income.”

Like Lizzy, Mr. Bennet is a reader of character. And he can rely on his own experience to know this. The matching of tempers is a great theme of the novel: Jane has “Without exception, the sweetest temper” Mrs. Bennet has ever known and Bingley has a temper of “easiness, openness, and ductility.” When Lizzy realises she should marry Darcy it is because “he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her.”

His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both: by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.

This is exactly what Mr. and Mrs. Bennet do not have. It is a subtle, pointed comment, when Mr. Bennet says Jane and Bingley are well matched, but are too gentle and will overspend their income. Mrs. Bennet calls this absurd as they have five thousand a year. But he knows whereof he speaks. It was all the Bennets could do to break even, a state of affairs in which Mrs. Bennet remains firmly uninterested.

Lydia and Wickham “were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue”; that too is a question of temper.

Austen is an observer of assortative mating. Her characters end up with the partner who suits them socially, morally, intellectually, and temperamentally. This sorting is the great moral action of her work. Lizzy, like Anne Elliot, Fanny Price and Emma Woodhouse, marries into something better, not just in terms of income or property, but in terms of being well-matched to her husband’s personality and virtue. In the Bennet marriage, it is hard to know how matters could have turned out differently without a corresponding increase of some other mischief or misery.

Their temperaments determined it thus.

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This is all wrong. What we are looking at are not the risks of starvation, but of leaving the gentry. The uncertainty is that of not being in the upper class, not that of survival. What can Professor Zlotnick mean by genteel poverty? The Bennet family income is in the top 1%! Sense and Sensibility might be about genteel poverty (though I don’t think so—they are far from Miss Bates!); Pride and Prejudice certainly is not.

If Lizzy Bennet remains single, then, after her father’s death, she will have about £40 or £50 a year, which was maybe twice the average income, and far less than she was living on as part of the £2,000 a year Bennet household. Branko Milanovic called it “measly”. But even if Lizzy is single, this is not starvation level, though it is less than Miss Bates’ income (perhaps £100 or £150).

But Lizzy almost certainly wouldn’t live on £40 a year. Put aside the fact that Jane will get married to someone suitable even if she doesn’t marry Mr. Bingley (one thing Mrs. Bennet gets right is that Janne cannot be that beautiful for nothing) and so Lizzy will always have somewhere to go,—Lizzy has her own prospects.

Lizzy is young, pretty, and full of wit and vivacity. She will surely be able to get married. She jokes that she will meet another Mr. Collins, but that is exactly what will happen. Her choices are not marriage or poverty. They are more like the choice between being Jane Bennet or being Charlotte Lucas. For an instance of this, we need only read the first page of Mansfield Park.

Remember, too, that Mr. Bennet is probably in his forties. He has another twenty years or so of life expectancy. At the end of the novel, four of his five daughters move out. Even if fewer of them leave, he can, presumably, finally start saving money as he ought to have done. He jokes that paying £100 a year for Lydia’s marriage will hardly cost him anything, compared to what she cost to keep at home, so let’s assume he can now save about £200 or 300 a year. If he does this for twenty years, he can leave Mrs. Bennet something like £4,000 or £6,0000, not so much less than the £7,000 Mrs. Dashwood inherits. Not enough for a cook, perhaps, but something.

Lizzy might marry an officer like Lydia (and be able to practice better economy), a clergyman (like Fanny Price), or a Navy Captain (like Ann Elliot). Even on a Captain’s half-pay (for times of non-commission), without Wentworth’s fortune, they would likely have an income of more than £200 a year between them. She will not, like Mrs Bennet, keep a cook, but nor will she be living in poverty.

Remember, on £500 a year, the Dashwoods keep three servants, and hope to save money. Mrs. Jennings thinks a couple can live on £300 a year. If Lizzy does marry a clergyman or an officer, he will likely have a small private income. Wickham was a profligate, who could have been richer. Lizzy would not marry so imprudently.

For Austen’s own Dashwood-like circumstances later in life, this is a very good summary from JASNA. Mrs. Austen and her two daughters lived on £460 a year at Chawton. (Jane invested her book earnings, £600, which gave her another £30 a year.) They had a servant and bought a piano. Austen travelled sometimes, went to the theatre, and went shopping. They were not in any sort of financial trouble. If three of the Bennet women had to live together, perhaps with supplementary income from their married sisters, they would likely be fine. There are risks, but not tremendous, unsolvable risks.

Perhaps, liker her aunt, Lizzy will marry a man in trade who has a very reasonable income—we are not told what, but he is believed by the Bennets to be able to muster ten thousand pounds to pay off Wickham. If she marries a professional, like a lawyer, she might even do almost as well as she did marrying Darcy—there were barristers in London who could earn £10,000 a year, though perhaps not every year.

The risk to Lizzy is staying single. What she faces then is a loss of control. She will become like Miss. Bates, or Fanny in an alternative life at Portsmouth. Austen herself was obliged to live with her father, and then her mother.

But the idea that Lizzy risks poverty is over-stated. What she really risks is living in a lower social class and living under the financial and social constraints of being a woman.

Real problems, but not as real as destitution.