Revisiting Jane Austen by Elizabeth Kay

National Portrait Museum

I was a teenager when I first read Jane Austen. But how much funnier the books are when seen from an adult perspective, and how different they all are.

Born in 1775, Austen is a product of her times although not blind to the inequalities in society. Although from a relatively modest background, Jane’s own brother was adopted by a wealthy childless family, which made her an acute observer of the advantages conferred by money and breeding. In those days, heroines were traditionally faultless wimps without wit; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet breaks the mould and is the most modern in outlook. One of five daughters, the family home will be inherited by a male cousin, leaving the girls in a difficult position. Jane Austen was very objective about the position of women, and how important it was to marry well or, in fact, at all. So, taking a cursory look at the books one by one and focusing on the central female characters we get a good idea of a fairly wide section of society at the time. Unless you were from the lower classes, of course, when the options were ghastly.

Me presenting flowers to Lady Gammons,
our MP. My mother took period
hairstyles very seriously.

Anne Elliot in Persuasion comes from a family which values presentation over content. Although she is pretty, she is not as pretty as her sisters, and we are led to believe that her appearance has deteriorated from the way she looked at nineteen –twenty-seven is not the bloom of youth in Austen’s day, so she is frequently excluded from social events and taken for granted. She is one of three sisters, so the family home will be inherited (surprise surprise) by a distant male cousin, once again too many daughters and no sons. At 19, Anne was persuaded to end a relationship with a sailor her family thought not refined or wealthy enough. The sailor is deemed okay seven years later, after he has made a lot of money overseas. “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like,” Anne says. She might just have easily said, how quick come the excuses when disapproval is a social requirement.

Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is the eldest daughter of a woman who married beneath her, and with too many children and little income, her adoption by her far wealthier aunt would not be unusual. However, Fanny is made to feel very inferior to her cousins, and denied their advantages. She is consequently shy and inhibited and expects very little of anyone. The one exception is cousin Edmund. He is destined to be a clergyman as his elder brother is the heir. Henry, the brother of the local minister’s wife, decides to woo Fanny for a lark and then actually falls in love with her, as she is unpretentious and kind. Fanny, though, is in love with Edward, so when Henry proposes she turns him down. The family is furious that she has thrown away the chance of a good marriage, as she will remain a drain on their resources, and they send her back to her incompetent mother and alcoholic father. Fortunately all turns out well, and Edmund finally realises what a nice person Fanny is and marries her. Fanny is too nice; even Austen’s mother described Fanny as ‘insipid’.

Sense and Sensibility focuses on what happens to the Dashwood sisters after their father dies and leaves the house to a male relative and they are – relatively speaking – destitute. Elinor is the personification of commonsense, so in a difficult situation she is consequently thoroughly boring and a bit of a prude. Her younger sister Marianne personifies sensibility by being rash and emotional and extrovert, and falling love with someone unsuitable. Buttoned-up Elinor is just the opposite, and when Marianne is trying to find out the contents of a letter Elinor has received and getting nowhere she says “…we have neither of us anything to tell; you, because you communicate nothing, and I, because I conceal nothing.” Eventually they both overcome their personalities and marry well, thereby avoiding the poorhouse.

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is Austen’s parody of a gothic novel, a very popular form of horror story amongst women. Men, of course, read them secretly. Catherine Moreland, the heroine, is necessarily young, gullible, naïve, and unduly influenced by what she reads. She cannot tell when people are lying to her, sometimes quite outrageously, although the reader can. She is the victim of what, today, we would call gaslighting – her so-called friends convincing her she said or did something she didn’t, because her memory is at fault. When she is invited to General Tilney’s Northanger Abbey Henry, the general’s son and the love interest, teases her all the way there with gruesome stories about their destination.  “…you will proceed into a small vaulted room, and through this into several others, without perceiving anything very remarkable in either. In one perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture; but there being nothing in all this out of the common way, and your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apartment…” Disappointingly, the general has modernised the place a great deal – nevertheless, Catherine’s overactive imagination causes her to entertain all sorts of increasingly preposterous ideas about the place, and she becomes sure that the general has either imprisoned or murdered his wife. Her investigations are discovered by Henry, and, contrite, he puts her straight. After a few more misunderstandings she does get to marry Henry, and will end up better off than she would have otherwise, coming from a modest though not impoverished family.

Emma is unusual in that she doesn’t have any money worries and has had a good education. Consequently, she is a snob, blind to her own faults. Most of what I want to say is best said by Emma herself, as we are privy to her thoughts. Emma was one of the first novels – if not the first novel – to employ sustained free indirect discourse. She has a very high opinion of herself, and says: Perhaps it was not fair to expect him (Mr Elton) to feel how very much he was her inferior in talent, and all the elegancies of mind. The very want of such equality might prevent his perception of it, but he must know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior. She interferes in people’s lives, tries to ‘improve’ them so that she can play at matchmaking and allow them to associate with ‘superior’ people. When she finally attains some self-knowledge it’s humiliating, but nevertheless she ends up marrying the only man above her in social standing.

Lady Susan is a very unexpected character, as she is sexual predator. It’s an epistolary novel, started when Austen was only eighteen, and the form gives the author the opportunity for her characters to say things to one another that they would never say face to face, in case they were overheard. Lady Susan is described as “the most accomplished coquette in England”, despite being in her mid-thirties – middle-aged in those days. However, she looks ten years younger, and is very attractive indeed. Recently widowed, she has been staying at Langford, the home of Mr and Mrs Mainwaring and has been thrown out because she has been having an affair with Mr Mainwaring. She is a first class manipulator, accomplished liar, a terrific actress and very bright. In fact, she is an excellent example of a woman who should have gone to university and pursued a challenging and fulfilling career. She was clearly never cut out to be a parent; her poor daughter Frederica is terrified of her. Her mother says of her: “She is a stupid girl, and has nothing to recommend her… the greatest simpleton on earth…” She wants to marry her off as soon as possible, and as Frederica detests the man she has in mind she sends her to boarding school – “I hope to see her the wife of Sir James within a twelvemonth… school must be very humiliating in a girl of Frederica’s age… I wish her to find her situation as unpleasant as possible…” Although the characters lack the subtlety of later creations the book, as a consequence, is very very funny.

Pride and Prejudice is the undisputed favourite of Austen’s novels, even before the emergence from a lake in a wet shirt of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy. Father of five daughters, Mr Bennet had long given up trying to rule the household, and took a back seat to his pushy and domineering wife. Mrs Bennet’s obsession with yearly income is a recurring theme because, once again, we have a family of daughters who will never inherit anything as the house will go to the closest male relative. Elizabeth is lively, clever, witty, can be very sarcastic, like her father, and is consequently his favourite as the youngest two, Lydia and Kitty, are silly immature flirts who are disasters waiting to happen. Lizzie doesn’t care about getting muddy or wearing the latest trimmings and will not entertain the idea of marrying for anything except love. She has firm opinions and her self-confidence is very unusual. She turns down two proposals of marriage, despite the fact that they would have secured her future, and says: “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” She even stands up to Lady Catherine de Burgh who is pompous, domineering and condescending due, in part, to her status.

When Elizabeth finally accepts Mr Darcy, having refused him once, it is because she has fallen in love with him and not because his extreme wealth will ensure the futures not just of herself, but the rest of her family. It looks like a cushy fairytale ending but in reality it wouldn’t have been. Getting accepted by Darcy’s relatives and acquaintances won’t have been easy, as we saw from Lady Catherine de Burgh’s reaction – “Upon my word,” said her ladyship, “you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person.” And after all, she will have to learn to manage a large estate and a big house and dozens of servants instead of just one – the longsuffering Hill, Mrs Bennet’s put-upon housekeeper. Lizzie has changed her station in life, a very difficult and unusual thing to do in Austen’s time.

 If you haven’t read any Jane Austen give it a go. Or do what I did, and read the ones you missed. I laughed out loud, not just once but many times. Austen really does deserve her exalted reputation.