Oh what a charming, funny, vicious book this is, how full of youthful spirit and sound common sense. Can we read Jane Austen’s first novel without gasping and gurgling? Can we read her without stretching our eyes as well as our hearts? In all the popular English classics, who else makes such a high marriage of the comedy of social observation and moral condemnation with the deep satisfaction of true romance? Jane Austen does not preach, but the idea at the heart of her novel is that in order to be loved, people must be worthy of love. Her heroines are held as strictly to this standard as the men. When we laugh with her, she is preparing us for a more permanent and persistent joy. We begin chucklingly, as her young-woman’s angry humour excoriates and exposes; we end contentedly, as the comedy has become the marriages of true minds.
Not everyone reads Jane Austen like this anymore. What Hermione Lee once called “the tradition of affection” was a matter of biography, but it was also a matter of loving the novels as true pictures of true life. It is now normal for scholars and critics to find ways of undermining what any honest and ordinary reader can see for themselves: that the marriages at the end of Austen’s novels are perfectly happy. This is normal love in normal life, not Austen’s subtle attempt to question, complicate, or undermine (three favourite words of un-comic critics) her own endings.
In the Penguin introduction by Professor Ros Ballaster, Austen is discussed in terms that are alien to the popular imagination. It lacks affection, being concerned with the way Austen “renders” her novel, the way its ideas relate to other novels of the period, the way its “syntax… can serve to illustrate the process of categorization through differentiation”, and so on. This sort of opaque criticism, which seeks to confine the novel to some set of extra-literary ideas, can be revealing and insightful, but it can also be narrow, dull, and lifeless. It might be worthwhile, but not until we have shared our affection for Austen.
In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis wrote that he had students whose essays about Jane Austen gave no indication that she was a comic writer. “We are breeding up a race of young people,” Lewis worried, “who are as solemn as the brutes.” The problem with such solemnity—which balked at the idea of The Miller’s Tale being written to make one laugh, and which called Twelfth Night “a penetrating study of the individual’s relation to society”—is that it makes “solemn men, but not serious readers”: “they have not fairly and squarely laid their minds open, without preconception, to the works they read.”
No-one could reasonably accuse Ros Ballaster of Lewis’s whole charge-sheet, but her approach is indicative of a whole modern mood of criticism: she prefers to stand outside the book and say things like “A relativistic terminology of comparatives and negatives asserts the security of positive and absolute essences” rather than to deal with the book in the manner in which it presents itself. Jane Austen had no need of this sort of jargon, and gives the impression that she would have no truck with it; so if we are to treat her as primary herself, as the genius whose work precedes us, we ought to be able to discard it ourselves. No doubt this sort of work is valuable to some people, but it is not very valuable to readers who wish to inhabit Jane Austen’s work.
Last year, another such attempt was made upon Austen. In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Inger Brodey called the endings of Austen’s novels “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic.” Brodey’s speculations about Austen herself and her supposed personal ideas about marriage are based on merely a few lines from letters that offer no such small or single-minded reading. At the end of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Edward are finally married, and Austen writes,
Mrs. Jennings’s prophecies, though rather jumbled together, were chiefly fulfilled; for she was able to visit Edward and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas, and she found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed, one of the happiest couples in the world. They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows.
Austen tells us they are one of the happiest couples in the world, goes to the trouble, in fact, of agreeing with Mrs. Jennings. But Brodey interprets the presence of cows as “cutting… anticlimax.” This is to miss entirely not only the mood of the passage (note it is rather better pasturage), but to alienate it from the weight and spirit of the entire novel. Ever since Elinor is forced to leave her home in Norland at the beginning, she goes in search of a settlement (“settle” recurs significantly throughout). It is all she wishes for to have the love of Edward and a pastoral home. We all know people like this. Some of us, indeed, are people like this. Jane Austen was an Englishwoman of the countryside herself and we might speculate about her in that vein as readily as we make her into a feminist.
A few chapters earlier, it was said: “they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life.” This humour reflects a practical problem, and we ought not to read it as undermining Elinor’s feelings. Even John Keats wrote: “Love in a hut, with water and a crust, / Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.” And it is Elinor who breaks the resolution not to get married until the parsonage is fully repaired. In a novel that makes her “self-command” the central virtue which others must learn, that is a significant breach of feeling.
With an income quite sufficient to their wants thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for after Edward was in possession of the living, but the readiness of the house, to which Colonel Brandon, with an eager desire for the accommodation of Elinor, was making considerable improvements; and after waiting some time for their completion, after experiencing, as usual, a thousand disappointments and delays from the unaccountable dilatoriness of the workmen, Elinor, as usual, broke through the first positive resolution of not marrying till every thing was ready, and the ceremony took place in Barton church early in the autumn.
The repetition of “as usual” should be noticed. The workmen do what workmen usually do; Elinor does not what she would usually do, but what engaged couples so often do. Others in the novel have rushed to marriage (the unthinkable Lucy Steele) but it is Elinor and Edward’s rush that gets affectionate approval. The cows must be read in light of this section, which shows us that all practical concerns are gone, apart from the little ones we expect to live with, even when we are happy. An anti-climax is “A disappointing or underwhelming end to an exciting, impressive, or highly anticipated event or series of events.” (OED) From the perspective of Elinor and Edward’s other problems—his cruel mother, his unfortunate engagement, her lack of money, their lack of settlement, Lucy’s nasty gossiping character, and on and on—their ending is hardly underwhelming. They have finally removed the barriers that everyone else put between them.
As I said, Sense and Sensibility is a vicious book. There are many wonderfully entertaining moments, such as when it is said of Mrs. Ferrars that “She was not a woman of many words; for unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.” Elinor and Edward’s contentment has to be seen against that background too. Compared to all the rogues, Edward’s “amiable heart” is indeed admirable. Much of the viciousness is directed at the dreadful villain Willoughby. When Elinor reads his egregious letter to Marianne (later confessed to be dictated by his fiancee), we are told he has departed from “the common decorum of a gentleman” and has exposed himself to be “deep in hardened villainy.” Elinor is “indignant”, finds him “abhorrent.” Further revelations make him only more ghastly. And yet, despite what we might wish, he gets his own happy ending.
But 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. 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.
This is more like an anti-climax, in the sense that it is out of keeping with what came before—a falling unjustified by the rising that preceded it. Willoughby has been humbled and it is the reader’s expectations—as Austen’s phrase “must not be depended on” makes clear—that are being let-down. The villain went on to live a pretty normal life, with no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.
Properly, though, an anti-climax comes after a period of excitement or intensity. That is what we get when Willoughby arrives late at night to hear if Marianne is dead. For several pages, Austen presents not her cool and rational prose, but something wilder and more alarming. When he arrived, “The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view.” Elinor, the character with the most “self-command”, is seen “starting back with a look of horror” when Willoughby walks in. He has spent the whole day in a frantic ride to reach her: “I left London this morning at eight o’clock, and the only ten minutes I have spent out of my chaise since that time procured me a nuncheon at Marlborough.” This is high drama, and the account he gives of himself is full of revelations and astonishments. At the end “he almost ran out of the room.” And no wonder, he told Elinor he almost hoped his wife would die so he could marry Marianne later on. To go from that to the news that he lives in “domestic felicity” is not quite an anti-climax, but a carefully controlled bathos, a deflating of our expectations which brings out the novel’s angry sense of injustice.
The pasturage of Elinor and Edward’s cows cannot be seriously compared to that. There is no drama from which to make an anti-climax. The cows and the land are part of the settlement that has been wished for throughout the novel. There is one other mention of cows, in Vol. III, Chapter V. (Chapter XLI in continuous order). When Lucy and Edward are going to be married and Colonel Brandon offers Edward the living at Delaford, the narrative says of Lucy:
As for Colonel Brandon, she was not only ready to worship him as a saint, but was moreover truly anxious that he should be treated as one in all worldly concerns; anxious that his tithes should be raised to the utmost; and secretly resolved to avail herself, at Delaford, as far as she possibly could, of his servants, his carriage, his cows, and his poultry.
Now, anyone who loves this novel will wish to hiss a little when Lucy Steele appears. She is a liar: selfish, vain, and venal. She sees the cows, as she sees Colonel Brandon, as a resource, something to be milked. The irony in this passage is unforgiving. There is nothing Lucy will not pluck for her own gain. Whereas Elinor and Edward are more pastoral figures, who wish for better pasturage. These are the ordinary problems we might expect of two such figures, one of who is not entirely practical, and who are choosing to live in a vicarage in the country, unlike so many of the others who chase money, status, and the gaiety of London. For the critics who read like the solemn students C.S. Lewis identified, this will all be obscured by the ideas they have already hung upon the hook of the novel. But for those people who have read Austen as part of their real lives, who have fallen in love, who have had nothing to wish for, it all makes the sort of sense that needs no criticism, no careful unfolding of the supposed lie.
It might seem unnecessary to spend time arguing with such people, but some of these ways of reading Austen are in fact creeping out into the world. Criticism of this sort gets a popular hearing in books like Jane Austen, the Secret Radical and articles in the New York Times (that piece is an introduction to a new edition). The recent Netflix adaptation of Persuasion (while being perfectly acceptable on its own terms) couldn’t quite cope with the meekness in Anne and so dispensed with it. And so a new way of reading is reinforced. But there is a reason why Ang Lee’s version of Sense and Sensibility remains so popular, which is that England is still full of women like Elinor, and they still wish to have old truths expressed, ordinary life taken seriously enough to make a work of great art, and the way we live—or perhaps the way we wish we still lived—to be made into an issue of aesthetic and moral significance. The cows really are a part of Elinor’s happiness, just as they are for so many people who see fields and farms from their window every morning today. Elinor and Willoughby end up with much more similar outcomes than we might hope: in his case, it is bathetic, in hers a question of fulfillment.
The more I read Jane Austen, the more I come to appreciate her quietness. Throughout Sense and Sensibility, comments are made about the consideration—or inconsideration—characters give to each other when they are upset. When Elinor is trying to retain her equanimity, when Marianne is hysterical, Austen is alert to who gives them peace, who intrudes, who closes doors with the consideration of silence. She is not just a novelist of what is seen, but of what is unseen. She brings to our attention the various aspects of life that many people never think about, and she shows us how they work upon our inner lives. This is a very English way of living. Her heroines are so often introverts or learn to love the retreat of their mind. Marianne’s resolution at the end is to read for six hours a day and thus to acquire the “instruction” that will tame her “self-provocation.” Solitude is a virtue from the opening page when we hear that the Dashwoods live in the center of their property. That is the spell the opening line casts like a fairy tale. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. It sounds like this is all happening once upon a time. Jane Austen’s magic is to make it happen now, with the sort of people who are always intruding upon our solitude, imposing upon our feelings, and with the sort of situations that make us realise we must be the ones to become worthy of being praised.
To me, the most interesting and revealing modern scholarship about Jane Austen is the work that sees her as a participant in the Enlightenment, especially as a reader of thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith. (I am thinking of the work of Peter Knox-Shaw, Shannon Chamberlain, Cecil E. Bohanon, Michelle Albert Vachris and several others.) Austen shares with Smith her sense that we must be worthy of being loved. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote, “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?” That could be an epigraph to all of Austen’s novels, but it is especially pertinent to the settlement at the end of Sense and Sensibility. This is precisely what Elinor has not known, and what Marianne has falsely believed. Elinor has waited for confirmation that she is beloved while Marianne has been deceived and must repair herself. Smith’s sentiment is also precisely what Austen shows us about Willoughby: he knows that he deserves to be hated. This is not an art that self-undermines; it is an art of satisfactory justice, which turns a fairy-tale into a story of real feelings, real life. Elinor and Marianne are beloved and deserve to be beloved. Nothing that Willoughby or Mrs. Ferrars does or says can change that now.
And that is why the tradition of affection for Jane Austen survives, whatever else is said about her. She understands the world too well to be too much overshadowed by her critics.
“An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence”
Christopher Hitchens
The tragic truth is that academics are unequipped to deal with humor and thus ignore or misinterpret it.