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Persuasions #10, 1988 Pages 127-133
In Search of Jane Austen CATHERINE KENNEY Park Ridge, Illinois Most of us suffer from what has been called, vividly if rather
inelegantly, “the itch for personally knowing authors,”1 especially the authors we love. For some reason, this seems particularly
true regarding great novelists: it is almost as though, when a writer is
capable of making us free citizens of a believable, palpable world, we conclude
that it must be but a short step to find the creator of that world. We try to get at living authors through
interviews and other forms of verbal assault – thinking that if we can only
strike the vulnerable place, the real person will somehow be revealed. When we are deeply interested in a writer from
a time and place far removed from our own, we must work even harder to get to
know her – as the many approaches to “Jane Austen’s England” presented at the
1988 AGM in Chicago demonstrated. This
particular form of time-travel is, in fact, part of the fun of being an Austen
addict at this point in history, and we all enjoy playing the literary
detective. Like the cult of personality, the sense of
historical period is essentially a modern phenomenon. As good moderns, we know that we must investigate the language
and culture, the morals and mores, of an earlier period in order to begin to
understand its art. Without demanding
that we ever find its model in the “real” world, we must have some idea of what
Pemberley was, or is, if we are to appreciate its stunning effect on Elizabeth
Bennet or its significance for her creator.
So, too, for the endlessly fascinating quizzes and Rumfords, curricles
and phaetons that fill Jane Austen’s world. We cannot understand the novels of Jane Austen,
even on the most literal narrative level, if we do not know what she means by
these words, or if we do not understand where her characters are going when
they go into “the shrubbery.” That we
already “know” many of these words only makes the task of reading more dangerous,
because it seems that the author is speaking our language, when often, she is
not. Jane Austen and her twentieth
century readers are not the first people to have been separated by a common
language. Since language shapes our sense of experience,
we get a glimpse of Jane Austen when we learn that she called the midday meal
“noonshine”– a word that seems somehow just bright and homely and plain enough
– or that she was once tormented by a “nidgetty” cap (Letters, 195, 37). I
especially like the second word, which the OED
credits to the novelist’s letters. I
find there are so many “nidgetty” things in my life. While conceding its considerable distance from
all of us, I am still surprised at just how remote Jane Austen’s world is from
some modern-day readers, however. Last
year, at the end of a class discussion about Georgian architecture and design,
one bright-eyed young woman asked, “By the way, what exactly is mahogany?” I would never expect twentieth century
Americans to know a barouche from a baronet, but this particular “picture of intellectual
poverty” (Northanger Abbey, 79) was
beyond even my wildest imaginings.
Sometimes, it seems as though all of Western civilization must be
recreated before taking up any writer with a group of recent high school
graduates. What has brought us to this
pass? If a middle class girl on the
threshold of adulthood considers mahogany an arcane reference, what terms can
be taken for granted? And yet, such
questions are one of the ways we learn: they tell us precisely what cannot be
taken for granted, what we must reconsider. One of the terms that literary people may
invoke without question is “Jane Austen’s England,” but what exactly is
that? Like legions of Austenians, I
have searched for it far and wide, in diverse moods and modes. I want to reconsider what I have discovered
in my rambles in search of Jane Austen, about the hints and guesses I have
caught along the way. I am sure that
others have been more successful in this endeavour than I, for often it has
seemed that the whole world was in a conspiracy to keep me from finding her. I cannot say when I started on this quest. “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot ...
or the words, which laid the foundation.”
Indeed, looking back now, I realize that “I was in the middle before I
knew that I had begun” (Pride and
Prejudice, 380). It is a good thing
that I began early, however, considering my luck. A characteristic effort was the day I went to
the National Portrait Gallery to see Cassandra Austen’s drawing of her
sister. An innocent enough intention,
one would think – something easily accomplished by millions. Yet, on the day I chose, in the picture’s
place there hung only a small sign bearing those most dreaded of words, “In
Conservation.” Whenever I travel, it
often strikes me that the entire world is, like the Musgroves, in a constant
“state of alteration, perhaps of improvement” (Persuasion, 40), but this was a hard blow indeed. If I were discussing literature and not
life, I would say that my not finding that picture of Jane Austen was somehow
emblematic of my entire quest for this elusive figure – as suggestive, in its
way, as the tantalizing image in the well-loved watercolour, also by her
sister, which shows the writer just as she has turned away from view. Is there any other famous picture of a
famous person in which the main subject is viewed from the back?2 Sometimes, when a subject is so elusive, the
most effective strategy may be not to look for anything at all. (Or, as novels tend to tell us, to expect
only to find something other than what we thought we were looking for.) A few years ago, when I was reading some
unpublished Sayers papers at the British Library, I happened to walk past a
display case that caught my eye. Of all
the exhibits I could have noticed, this one contained the manuscript of the
original last two chapters of Persuasion. This prosaic case began speaking to me with
all the power that “immense heavy chest” had for Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey, 163), and its contents
sent out one insistent signal: “READ ME.” If one considers the likelihood of this
happening, of my actually noticing, in that enormous barn of a building,
anything other than what I was ostensibly looking for, it becomes clear that
even if I had not been looking for Jane Austen, Jane Austen had been looking
for me. Perhaps I “had been born
to an extraordinary fate” (Sense and
Sensibility, 378). Every day, on my way back into the subterranean
atmosphere of the manuscript reading room, my “delicious consciousness” (Persuasion, 246) of this tantalizing
prospect became more acute. Promising
myself not to touch it until I had finished my proper job, I requested it for
my last day in London. When I arrived
that morning, in a “state of schemes, and hopes, and connivance” (Emma, 343), I saw that the case was
empty. Only a tiny yellowed slip of
paper, bearing the legend “In the hands of a reader,” lay inside. (Oh, the English, with their interminable
bits of paper!) My own hands feeling fairly empty, I entered
the manuscript room, and saw – to my horror – that no book lay on my desk. “With all the wonderful velocity of [what
passes for] thought” (Emma, 430) in
my disordered brain, I concluded that the idiots had given my manuscript
to someone else! Since I was properly
brought up and have a well-developed sense of guilt, I immediately acknowledged
that this was only right; I was not supposed to be dawdling around with Jane
Austen just then, anyway. Creeping abjectly over to my desk, I spied yet
another slip of paper – but this one carried a magical message: “Your exhibited
manuscript is with the Keeper.” Trying
to suppress the considerable “flutter of pleasure” (Emma, 426) that such a missive would cause in any right-minded
person, I shot across the room and took into hand what R.W. Chapman has called
“this precious fragment.”3 With “a total inattention to stops” (Northanger Abbey, 27), I spent the rest
of the day scrutinizing those tiny sheets – not the metaphoric two inches of
ivory, but the actual pieces of paper, just six inches long by three and five-eighths
inches in width, on which the artist strove to get her last novel’s ending
right. The close, sepia-toned scrawl
covering those sheets seemed somehow so fitting for this tidy, disciplined,
frugal artist – and for the deliberately small compass of her fictional
world. It was almost as though the
paper on which the novel was written was a material expression of the tight
boundaries of the novelist’s world.
Thanks to the Jane Austen Library, which published a facsimile of this
fragment in 1985, readers no longer have to go to London to study the
manuscript, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to catch a glimpse of
the writer at work.4 I had to tell someone about my coup, of course,
so I wrote to the only genuine Janeite I knew at the time, saying “I had held
in my hands” – notice my debt to the dreaded sign-maker’s diction – a
manuscript from one of Jane Austen’s novels.
By return air post, came her terse, unforgettable response: “Don’t wash
your hands!” Buoyed by this success, the next time I was up
at the Bodleian, I requested some of Jane Austen’s letters, as well as her
personal copy of Camilla, which
according to the catalogue, had a note pencilled in it. This was exciting indeed – a chance to see
Jane Austen contemplating Fanny Burney.
It was exciting, at least, until the book came, and I found that I could
not quite make out what the note said.
Whenever I work with manuscript material, I become irrationally
convinced that it is only those lines which cannot be made out that are really
important, and I was sure that some vital clue in the mystery of Jane Austen
was locked in that brief passage. People often say that Jane Austen would be
surprised to see the intense academic and popular interest in her novels today,
but I think she would be even more shocked by the sight of a woman – any woman
certainly, but perhaps even more so, a colonial female – working in the inner
sanctum of Duke Humphrey’s Library.
Even with all her quickness, I do not think the novelist could have ever
foreseen such a spectacle. As long as I was at Oxford, I decided to have a
look at Chapman’s transcript of the manuscript of Sanditon. This is not my
favourite text – not something I would make a special trip to see, certainly,
but in reading it, I caught the sound of Jane Austen clearing her throat, as it
were, while she worked on revisions. It
is interesting to hear her changing a line which was originally drafted as “a
spirit which we admire” to the more felicitous and characteristic, “a spirit
truly admirable,” or working through the hesitations of a passage like “She is
much worse than I expected – meaner – a great deal meaner – she is very mean”
until settling into the distinctive cadence: “She is thoroughly mean. I had not expected anything so bad.”5 Thus, in the search for Jane Austen, we find
hints and guesses, hints and guesses – often when we least expect to. We automatically associate the city of Bath
with the author of Northanger Abbey
and Persuasion, but I had been there
several times before I felt I had seen it as she saw it. I had gone up from London with a friend who
was particularly keen about seeing the restored Roman baths. That interest was quickly satisfied, however,
and soon we found ourselves ambling around town on a brightly sunlit afternoon,
nodding to the very streets and buildings known to Anne Elliot and Captain
Wentworth, spreading, I am sure, “purification and perfume all the way” (Persuasion, 192). Suddenly, the phrase “the white glare of
Bath” (Persuasion, 33) came to mind,
and the words seemed as right as the proportions of the Georgian buildings
shining relentlessly in the sun. Remembering that we could take afternoon tea in
the Pump Room, we decided this was a good excuse for taking cover from the rare
English sun – and surely, I thought, there would be some good Austenian
vibrations in the Pump Room. I knew
that I was in trouble as soon as the string quartet started playing. Their programme that day consisted of some
particularly maudlin late nineteenth century music. This was absolutely insupportable: “I had not expected anything
so bad.” Whatever Jane Austen’s England
is, it is not that. Obviously, they had geared the music to the
food, not the place – or at least, my idea of the place. Not unlike eating a succession of treacle
tarts, listening to such music makes me “sick and wicked” (Letters, 486) and I started to laugh, or rather, to try not to
laugh – a fatal choice. Thinking, as I
was, of the twittering Isabella Thorpe, and of poor Mrs. Allen, who feared her
hair had been “hurt” by a “push” (Northanger
Abbey, 22), did nothing to help me regain my composure. A little boy nearby, noticing what the
combination of hay fever and hysterics was doing to me, asked his mother, “Why
is that lady crying?” and that finished me off. “With what happy feelings of escape” (Letters, 208) did I flee Bath on that hot August day. Without really thinking about it, Jane Austen’s
house at Chawton was the very first place I visited on my first trip to
England. Perhaps the fact that I did
not belabour this choice is the most telling detail of all, and there is
certainly something of her in that house, in its cool, comfortable, unassuming
rooms. Surely they are part of her
England, those rooms where she crafted some of the greatest English prose,
where she “lop’t and crop’t” (Letters,
298) and sent it out into the world. We
often visit writers’ birthplaces, but it is less common, and more provocative,
to be able to walk through the rooms where the work of their maturity was done. As those who have been to Chawton know,
there is a curious ineffable pleasure about being in that place, recalling the
well-loved lines and scenes and characters that were shaped and reshaped
there. The very walls seem to vibrate
with their luminous lives. I remember, on one trip to Chawton, standing in
the late afternoon light, at the window near the small table where Jane Austen
is reputed to have written, wondering what she had seen when she looked through
that window, wondering what she would think now, if she could see this strange
apparition peering out of it. I
remember feeling embarrassed, even impudent, as I stepped over the threshold
into her bedroom – it seemed somehow a slightly indecorous thing to do. What would she think, this most private of
women, about all of these foreigners traipsing through her home? She, who had asked so long ago, “What has
become of all the Shyness in the world?”
(Letters, 178). Could she possibly understand what had
brought me here? Could I? And I remember feeling something I had no
name for until much later. Now I would
call it “gratitude” – gratitude not only for the preservation of this place,
but for all that had made it worth preserving. I have always felt that I caught a drift of
Jane Austen as I moved through that house, ascending its narrow staircase,
taking a turn in the garden, walking round in back and finding her little
donkey cart sitting in the shed, almost as though she has just left it. I think I was close, too, in Winchester – not
so much in College Street, where she spent her last days, nor in the ancient
cathedral which holds her bones, but on a busy commercial thoroughfare, where I
had gone on an errand and stopped to look in the window of a newspaper
office. The newspaper was displaying a
number of old issues under a banner which boasted of “Serving County Families
for Over Two Hundred Years.” (Ah, yes,
I thought; I know some of those families so well.) Superimposed over the fading pictures of generations of Hampshire
life were the fleeting images, reflected in the glass, of the people of
Winchester today, going about their business on an ordinary afternoon, quite
unaware that they were being observed at all, or that they, too, would one day
be relegated to the category of “period” figures by people as yet unborn. In the kaleidoscopic image in that window, I
think we catch a glimpse of the vibrant world, pulsing with life, that is the
novelist’s territory. This kind of perception
is what Dorothy L. Sayers means when she insists on our having a sense of the
contemporaneous quality of the past, or the ability to comprehend a great
artist, from whatever period, in the eternal present of creation.6 In a lovely little book called 84 Charing Cross Road, the American
scriptwriter Helene Hanff examines her own irrational, insatiable desire to see
the England she had read about: “I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look
at the streets. I remember years ago a
guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go
looking for. I said I’d go looking for
the England of English literature, and he nodded and said: ‘It’s there.’ ”7 Although it may be increasingly difficult to
find, many of us still go to England looking for the England of English
literature – and to most lovers of the English novel, that also means Jane
Austen’s England. And yet, the question
persists: where is that? I could never put it on a map, but I did see
it, at least once. It was on what Jane
Austen would have called a fine day, and I was riding on the boat train from
Dublin to London, my head buried, as usual, in a book. I remember looking up for a second, just as
the train slipped down into a verdant valley.
In that instant, the creaking train, the noisy passengers, even the streaked
window next to me melted away – and there it was, something I had seen before
only in my mind’s eye: “a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English
comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive” (Emma, 360). I cannot say even what county we were in, but I know that, to me,
that was Jane Austen’s England, the England of English literature – the England
of memory and desire. It became hers
when she put it into words, when she loved it into being – and it is ours so
long as readers read and remember. It
was born of a capacious mind and is endlessly enlarged by each mind open to
it. It is here, in this room, today. As Eudora Welty has said of the nagging desire
to find Jane Austen: “The reader is the only traveler. It is not her world or her time, but her
art, that is approachable, today or tomorrow.
The novels in their radiance are a destination.”8 And
that is a journey I shall make again and again. Realizing that many in my audience suffer highly
refined sensibilities and should therefore taste poetry – especially great
poetry – very sparingly, I have not pitched this piece in the sublime mode
befitting its subject. I do, however,
offer the following extract, which could just as easily serve as epigraph to
this little history of my unending search for Jane Austen. The Inscrutable, Ineluctable Jane There once was a spinster from Hampshire, Who proved quite elusive of capture – She gave chase to the beaux, As she dodged in the prose – And that
was the source of the rapture. NOTES All citations to the works of Jane Austen are to the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, 3rd ed.
Ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Jane Austen’s Letters, 2nd ed. Ed. R.W.
Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 1 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p.
57. 2 Reproduced in colour on the dust jacket of the
English edition of Lord David Cecil’s A
Portrait of Jane Austen (London: Constable, 1978). 3 The
Manuscript Chapters of Persuasion, Ed. R.W. Chapman (London: The Athlone
Press, 1985), Preface. 4 See above for publication information. 5 Transcript of “Sanditon” by R.W. Chapman in
the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Ms. Eng. misc, c. 122; pp. 14, 36. 6 This is an important tenet of all Sayers’s
literary criticism and religious writing.
It is especially notable in her introductions to The Man Born to Be King (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979) and to the Penguin edition of her
translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
7
Helene Hanff,
84 Charing Cross Road (London: Futura Publications Limited, 1976),p. 91.
8
Eudora Welty, “The Radiance of Jane Austen,” in
The Eye of the Story (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 13.
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