Jane Austen's alternative endings.
Imagining Otherwise by Debra Gettelman
The next Austen book club is this Sunday, 19.00 UK time. The zoom link is sent to paid subscribers over the weekend. We are discussing Sense and Sensibility.
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.
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.