“What would Jane Austen say?” is a fun game to play, but the truth is that we have no idea. For a writer of her renown, the biographical record is unusually thin. No notebooks or diaries survive. After Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed or censored most of Jane’s letters to her, and after their brother Francis’s death his daughter destroyed all of Jane’s letters to him.
The letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.”
The novels are not much help, either. Besides the usual difficulties involved in trying to extract a moral from works of literature, there is the problem of Austen’s irony. She is not just representing characters in her novels; she is representing the discursive bubble those characters inhabit, and she almost never steps outside that bubble. She is always ventriloquizing. Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare: “She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun?”
Instead of asking what Austen is trying to tell us, we might ask what she’s trying to show us. But the answer to that seems to be: It depends on who’s looking. In her lifetime, Austen was popular with a certain class of readers, the fashionable and well-off, who enjoyed her novels, particularly “Pride and Prejudice,” as comedies of manners. They got the jokes, and you always feel good about an author when you are in on her jokes.
But Austen was hardly a best-seller, and by the eighteen-twenties her books were often out of print. The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision; not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described “Pride and Prejudice” to a friend. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”
Queen Victoria was a fan (a taste, possibly the only one, she shared with B. B. King), and after the publication of Austen-Leigh’s memoir, in 1869, Austen enjoyed a revival. What had put off readers like Charlotte Brontë now became the basis of her appeal. Her books transported readers to a simpler time and place. They were escapist fiction. Winston Churchill had “Pride and Prejudice” read aloud to him when he was recovering from pneumonia during the Second World War. “What calm lives they had, those people!” was his thought. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”
The suggestion that Austen might have had anything critical to say about those people would have spoiled the illusion. “She is absolutely at peace with her most comfortable world,” Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, explained. “She never even hints at a suspicion that squires and parsons of the English type are not an essential part of the order of things.”
Still, there were readers who detected an edge. Woolf was one. “I would rather not find myself in the room alone with her,” she wrote. The British critic D. W. Harding, in 1939, proposed that Austen’s books were enjoyed “by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” The title of his essay was “Regulated Hatred.” Lionel Trilling, in 1955, called Austen “an agent of the Terror,” meaning that she is merciless in forcing us to confront our moral weaknesses.
Today, there are two Austens, with, probably, a fair amount of overlap: the recreational reader’s Austen and the English professor’s Austen. For the recreational reader, the novels are courtship stories, and the attraction is the strong women characters who, despite the best efforts of rivals and relations to screw things up, always succeed in making the catch. “Boy meets girl, girl gets boy” is the bumper-sticker version.
This category of reader presumably makes up a big part of the audience for the movie and television adaptations, a steady stream of entertainment product that shows no signs of slowing. Since 1995, there have been at least one screen adaptation of “Northanger Abbey,” two of “Sense and Sensibility,” two of “Mansfield Park,” two of “Persuasion,” three of “Pride and Prejudice,” and four of “Emma.” “Lady Susan,” a short epistolary novel Austen wrote when she was eighteen, was made into a movie by Whit Stillman in 2016, and last year Andrew Davies adapted Austen’s last novel, “Sanditon,” into a miniseries, even though she had finished only eleven chapters of it (about a fifth) before she died.
The English professor likes the strong women, too, and watches the adaptations (with a learned and critical eye). But the professor thinks that the novels are about things that people like Churchill and Leslie Stephen thought they leave out: the French Revolution, slavery, the empire, patriarchy, the rights of women. Those subjects might not be in the foreground, but that’s because they were not inside the English gentry’s bubble. The slave trade was not something that ladies and gentlemen talked about—particularly if they had some financial connection to it, as several of Austen’s characters seem to. There are plenty of hints in the books about what is going on in the larger world. Those hints must be there for a reason.
But what is the reason? Do the novels have a political subtext? Since there are few signs of unconventional political views in the biographical record, one approach is to separate Austen from her novels—what she believed from what she wrote. In “Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics” (Oxford), for example, Tom Keymer, who teaches at the University of Toronto, explains that Austen was a novelist “in whom an implicitly Tory world view is frequently interrogated or disrupted by destabilizing ironies and irruptions of satirical anger that are no less real for the elegance and wit of their expression.”
Literature professors love the notion of texts “interrogating” things; I am a literature professor, and I have certainly used that line. But, in this case, it feels like fence-straddling. It asks us to accept an Austen who is somehow simultaneously conservative as a person and subversive as a writer. Keymer says things like “The courtship plot that structures all six of Austen’s published novels, though sometimes held to imply her endorsement of a patriarchal status quo, is equally a means of exploring themes of female disempowerment.” It’s hard to see how the novels can be “equally” endorsements of patriarchy and criticisms of it.
Keymer doesn’t mention Helena Kelly’s “Jane Austen, the Secret Radical” (2016), but, in some respects, his little book, which is a somewhat cautious introduction to reading Austen, rather than a full-dress critical appraisal, could be thought of as a response to hers. Kelly, as her title suggests, has no trouble naming Austen’s politics. Austen lived, after all, in an age of revolutions, and Kelly thinks that her novels are “as revolutionary, at their heart, as anything that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote.” They just have to be read “the right way.”
“The right way” means treating the brief glimpses Austen gives us of life outside her characters’ social circles—and, once you start looking, you see them all over the place—as pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled, reveals what is really going on. Kelly makes a case, for example, that passing references in “Emma” to ditches and hedges, along with a scrap of conversation about relocating a public path, are meant to signal to us that Emma’s neighbor and future husband, Mr. Knightley, is engaged in an aggressive campaign to enclose his land—that is, to fence it off in order to prevent local people from exercising the “rights of common.”
This was the right to enter private land for specified purposes, such as grazing, fishing, foraging, gathering firewood, and so on, and for many people in rural England it helped make ends meet. Kelly cites the scholar Ruth Perry as calculating that access to private lands (as virtually all lands in England were) essentially doubled the income of farming families. Once those lands were legally enclosed, however, it became a crime to trespass on them. Kelly thinks that the poultry thieves who steal Mrs. Weston’s turkeys at the end of “Emma” are meant to show us the economic damage being caused by Mr. Knightley’s enclosures. Why else would Austen have put them in her story? The plot does not require turkey thieves.
Kelly’s Mr. Knightley, in short, is a heartless landowner intent on building a private fiefdom. She thinks the reason he marries Emma is that he wants to absorb her property, one of the few parcels of land around Highbury he does not already own, into his estate. Keymer would not object to this line of interpretation, presumably—“implication, not explication, was Austen’s way,” he says—but would be reluctant to conclude that it means that Austen was a revolutionary.
In “30 Great Myths About Jane Austen” (Wiley Blackwell), two eminent Austen scholars, Claudia L. Johnson, from Princeton, and Clara Tuite, from the University of Melbourne, take on some of the characterizations of Austen in general circulation: “There is no sex in Jane Austen’s novels,” “Jane Austen was unconscious of her art,” “Jane Austen’s novels are about good manners,” and twenty-seven more.
The book is not an exercise in pure debunking (as entertaining as that would have been), because Johnson and Tuite hold the view that although some of these myths—“Jane Austen disapproved of the theatre,” for instance—are demonstrably false, many have become inseparable from the way Austen is read and received. The scholars’ point is that even mistaken assumptions about Austen reveal something in her work that is worth digging into.
The belief that Austen was hostile to the theatre comes from “Mansfield Park,” whose plot turns on a private theatrical that the novel’s prudish protagonist, Fanny Price, considers objectionable, because it permits people to simulate passions that, in real life, would be illicit. And Fanny proves to be right—one of the amateur actors later runs off with another man’s wife, a woman he had flirted with when they were rehearsing, ruining her reputation.
But we know that Austen loved going to the theatre (she also loved to dance), and that she enjoyed composing and acting in private theatricals organized by her siblings—which makes for an interesting interpretive problem. What is Austen trying to show us about the theatre in “Mansfield Park”? And this turns out to be very hard to pin down.
Like Keymer, Johnson and Tuite are therefore sometimes led into critical impasses, points at which an interpretation can be argued either way. In a chapter on “Jane Austen was a feminist/Jane Austen was not a feminist,” for example, they propose that “both elements of this myth are true and untrue.” Maybe this is the best that can be said on the subject, but it is not a premise that gets us very far.
Johnson and Tuite think that the reason we keep running into conundrums like these is that readers project their own views onto Austen. Some readers want to see a feminist, and other readers prefer to see a writer who does not make it her business to question the status quo. “Because Austen herself is such a mythic, beloved figure,” they explain, “many readers have tended to align her with their own yearnings, social outlooks, and dispositions.”
Surely this is backward. Isn’t it because Austen’s texts are so indeterminate that she is beloved by people who come to her with different prejudices and expectations? And isn’t her mythic stature produced by her writing, rather than projected by her readers? Isn’t inscrutability part of the intention? That we don’t know much about Austen from her letters (or from what we have of them) suggests that she didn’t want people to know much about her, period.
All of Austen’s novels are about misinterpretation, about people reading other people incorrectly. Catherine Morland, in “Northanger Abbey,” reads General Tilney wrong. Elizabeth Bennet reads Mr. Darcy wrong. Marianne Dashwood, in “Sense and Sensibility,” gets Willoughby wrong, and Edmund Bertram, in “Mansfield Park,” gets Mary Crawford wrong. Emma gets everybody wrong. There might be a warning to the reader here: do not think that you are getting it right, either.
“Emma,” for instance, is the only mature novel Austen named for a character, and that is because the entire narrative, except for one chapter, is from Emma’s point of view. The novel is therefore Emma’s story, the story of a young woman who, after considering herself rather too good for the marriage game, ends up marrying the most eligible man in town. Mr. Knightley also happens to be the brother of Emma’s sister’s husband, and, whether it was his intention or not, the marriage does further strengthen the union of their two estates. The Knightleys and the Woodhouses are now one family. The marital outcome consolidates the existing social order. No boats are being rocked.
Many readers also feel, with Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley, a sense of moral closure. For the spark is lit when he reproves her for a rather mild insult to Miss Bates, a woman who belongs to their social class but has lost almost all her income. Being called out for this breach of etiquette is what sets Emma on a path of reappraisal and makes her vow to be a better person, which turns out to be a person who falls in love with her reprover. Proper manners, behaving in a way appropriate to one’s status, is what holds the order in place.
The ending of “Emma” therefore might seem to confirm the belief that Austen is a conservative at heart: this is how she likes things to turn out. But there is another marriage plot in “Emma.” It involves a secret engagement between Jane, an orphan with no prospects, and Frank, the son of a local man (Mr. Weston) who has been adopted and raised by the Churchills, a wealthy family with houses in Yorkshire and London and its environs.
Frank stands to inherit the Churchill estate, but could be cut off if he marries a penniless woman like Jane over the objections of Mrs. Churchill. Frank and Jane both show up in Highbury, and much of the action is driven by Frank’s attempts to see Jane without raising suspicions that they are lovers. There are clues all along, but we miss or misinterpret them because Emma misses and misinterprets them. Emma thinks that Frank is courting her, but he’s only using her as a distraction.
In the end, Frank and Jane’s difficulties are overcome, and they marry. They will probably be much richer than Emma and Mr. Knightley, and they don’t have to spend the rest of their lives in provincial Highbury. It’s an outcome with a completely different spin. Jane and Frank weren’t born to their fortune, and they haven’t really earned it. They just lucked out. Meanwhile, Frank has violated all the canons of proper behavior. He is not who he pretends to be. He lies to everyone; he toys with Emma’s affections; he torments his fiancée by making a show of ignoring her. And yet he gets the girl and the houses. What’s the lesson there?
The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly, because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money. Characters who are in the marriage game just for love, like Marianne Dashwood, in “Sense and Sensibility,” are likely to get burned. Characters in it just for the money, like Maria Bertram, in “Mansfield Park,” are likely to be unhappy.
It’s possible for the parties to settle for considerably less than the maximum, as Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas do, in “Pride and Prejudice.” She desperately needs a husband for financial reasons; he needs a wife for professional ones. She knows that he’s an unctuous creep, and that he proposed to Elizabeth Bennet a day before he propositioned her. And he knows that she knows it. But they establish a modus vivendi. They are fine with setting the love curve at zero.
That’s not good enough, though, for leading characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, and Fanny Price. However dire their financial situation, and in every case it’s pretty dire, they want to marry for love. Mr. Darcy is fabulously wealthy, and Elizabeth, when her father dies, will have almost nothing, but she has no hesitation rejecting his first marriage proposal, because she hates him.
What is exceptional about Austen as a novelist is that she tells us exactly how much money each of her characters has. She gives us far more information than Dickens, who was at least as obsessed with class and income as she was, or George Eliot. We know not merely that Elizabeth will be poor when her father dies. We know precisely what her income will be: forty pounds a year. We also know why Elizabeth’s prospects are so grim: because her father has neglected to plan for his daughters. He has almost no savings, and his property is entailed to the closest male heir—who happens to be the egregious Mr. Collins.
For British readers in the nineteenth century, these numbers conveyed very specific information. Most American readers today probably gloss over them. We don’t know what it signifies to have x number of pounds a year. When we read, in “Emma,” that “the charming Augusta Hawkins, in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect beauty and merit, was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands as would always be called ten,” we can tell there is a joke there, and we might even chuckle fake-knowingly, but we aren’t in on it.
That’s because we don’t know what Austen’s nineteenth-century readers would have known, which is that a fortune of ten thousand pounds represents the minimum point on the money curve. Those ten thousand pounds would be invested in government bonds with an effective rate of five per cent. And, if you had five hundred pounds a year and no dependents, you could live comfortably and did not need to work.
Most of Austen’s characters who are on the marriage market want to do better than five hundred a year, of course. Augusta Hawkins needn’t worry; in addition to her own fortune, she has her marriage to the local vicar, who has an income from tithes. According to Ivan Nottingham, one of the people who have studied Austen and money, with a thousand pounds a year you could afford a comfortable life with a staff of three female servants, a coachman, a footman, a carriage, and horses.
The movie and television adaptations often make a point of showing us just how many servants are around all the time, although in the Keira Knightley “Pride and Prejudice,” released in 2005, the financial condition of the Bennets is made to appear rather shabby. They are shown to live in a ramshackle house with chickens in the yard, and we see few servants. But the family in the novel is actually quite well off. They have a cook, a housekeeper, a butler, a footman, a coachman, horses, and two maids. The Bennets’ problem is not a lack of assets; it’s mismanagement.
Few female characters in Austen have the kind of money that Emma does. She has thirty thousand pounds, and along with her sister she will inherit the family house. Mr. Darcy’s income is ten thousand a year. He is not the richest character in Austen. Mr. Rushworth, in “Mansfield Park,” has twelve thousand a year. (Mr. Rushworth is also a complete chucklehead; he is the man Maria Bertram makes the mistake of marrying.) Those were very large incomes. They place Darcy and Rushworth in the top one per cent of households in Austen’s Britain, even though neither man is a peer.
We can put all these numbers in perspective by noting that the average annual income in Britain was thirty pounds. (Thirty pounds was the typical salary for a governess, the fate that awaits Jane, in “Emma,” if she fails to marry.) Farmworkers had an annual income of around twenty pounds. Men working in paper mills could make about sixty pounds a year. Women workers were paid much less. People who were forced by debt to live in the poorhouse had to subsist on six and half pounds a year, paid from parish taxes.
These levels of inequality persisted through most of the nineteenth century, a period that saw almost no over-all inflation—which is why readers would have known how to “decode” the economic profiles of Austen’s characters. In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Sign of the Four,” published in 1890, Dr. Watson tells the woman who stands to inherit a trove of rare gems, “You will have a couple of hundred thousand. . . . An annuity of ten thousand pounds. There will be few richer young ladies in England. Is it not glorious?” The math is the same as it is in “Pride and Prejudice.”
So is the wealth distribution. In Austen’s day, the top ten per cent of households in Britain owned eighty-five per cent of the national wealth, and the top one per cent, the Darcys and the Rushworths, owned fifty-five per cent. The bottom half owned nothing. If we are inclined to raise an eyebrow at these figures, we should remember that in the United States today the top one per cent of households own more than thirty per cent of the wealth, the top ten per cent about seventy per cent, and the bottom half less than two per cent.
Where Charlotte Brontë and Leslie Stephen went wrong was in assuming that the world of the Woodhouses and the Knightleys, the Bingleys and the Bertrams, was Jane Austen’s world, that she was writing about her own social circle. But Austen did not belong to that circle. She knew and observed people in it, of course, but her own family belonged to what is called the “pseudo-gentry”—families that lived like the gentry, had the gentry’s taste and manners, and often married into the gentry, but depended on a male family member with a job to maintain their style of life.
Austen’s father, George, was the rector of two Anglican parishes, from which he earned, from the combined tithes, two hundred and ten pounds a year. To add to this extremely modest income, the family also sold farm produce, and George and his wife, Cassandra, ran a school for boys out of their house. In 1797, Claire Tomalin tells us in her biography of Jane Austen, the family bought a carriage; in 1798, they had to give it up. In 1800, the farm brought in almost three hundred pounds, but tithes fell, owing to a depression. The Austens, a family of ten, seem rarely to have broken the five-hundred-pound mark.
When clergymen died, the Church made no provisions for their families, and when George Austen died, in 1805, Jane, her sister, and her mother were left with enough capital to pay them two hundred pounds a year. Otherwise, they depended on contributions from the brothers; they lived in a small cottage on the estate of one brother, Edward. Jane’s total income from the four books she published in her lifetime was six hundred and eighty-four pounds. Jane Austen was not “comfortable” in the world of her novels, because she did not live in that world.
Does this mean that she was pressing her nose against the glass, imagining a life she was largely excluded from? Or does it mean that she could see with the clarity and unsentimentality of the outsider the fatuity of those people and the injustices and inequalities their comforts were built on? We can only guess. ♦
