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Persuasions #13, 1991 Pages 69-81
What a Biographer can learn about Jane Austen from
Emma JOHN MCALEER Department of English, Boston College, Chestnut
Hill, MA 02167 Forty years ago Orville Prescott said: “The nice thing about Jane Austen
is the quality of the people who like her. They all are intelligent, attractive
people.”1 I find it
embarrassing, therefore, to confess to this attractive, intelligent audience,
that, as a biographer who went to Emma to learn more about Jane Austen,
the first thing I learned was that Jane Austen could, at times, be as
wrongheaded as her heroine. I allude,
naturally, to the statement she made when she began writing Emma – “I am
going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”2 If that was her set purpose, why, I ask you,
a hundred and seventy-five years hence, have four hundred people converged on
Ottawa to celebrate the happy inspiration that gave existence to Emma
Woodhouse? I know of only one reader
who tried conscientiously to take Jane Austen at her word – John Henry
Newman. But he, too, in time,
capitulated. After repeated readings of
Emma, he owned: “Emma … is the most interesting to me of all her
heroines. I feel kind to her whenever I
think of her.” Newman appears to have
made a trade to arrive at this state of adulation, for he adds: “that other
woman, Fairfax, is a dolt – but I like Emma.”3 Such discriminating judgement could not go
unrewarded. Nor has it. Current report has it that next year Newman
will be canonized. Emma’s own
canonization will, in all likelihood, soon follow, for Lord David Cecil has
told us that Emma belongs in the “final circle of the paradise of
fiction.”4 Bertrand Russell, recipient in 1950 of the
Nobel Prize for Literature, once observed: “No woman’s intellect is really good
enough to give me pleasure as intellect.”
Recalling Lord Russell’s words later A.L. Rowse remarked: “It would give
me pleasure to have Bertie described by the feeble intellect of Jane Austen.”5 Since, with this remark, Rowse has, in
effect, flung down the gauntlet, it behoves us now to ask who this woman was
whom he does not hesitate to thrust into contention with the author of Principles
of Mathematics. One way to draw
nearer to an answer to this question is to examine those aspects of Jane
Austen’s works which are self-revelatory.
Since Emma is, by common assent, the pinnacle of Jane Austen’s
art, surely it is here we have most to learn. At the outset of our labors, however, bearing
in mind Tony Tanner’s caution that in Emma Jane Austen speaks to us in a
“rather elusive authorial voice,”6 we concede that our course is
strewn with hazards. Graham Hough,
indeed, detects “several narrative voices” in Austen. One of the voices Hough hears is “that of the narrator as an
individual woman … sensible, sometimes tart, and frequently amused.” This woman is “permitted to be sharp and
lively and also right.” Now that sounds
like it could be Jane Austen. But that
is far from certain because, as Hough reminds us, “when the characters are
sharp and lively they are often slightly wrong.” He also hears another voice that seems to be “talking on behalf
of society, or Dr. Johnson, or God.”7 So the confusion grows. If we cannot count on Jane Austen speaking to
us in propria persona, where do we go next? Wayne Booth lets in a scintilla of light when he says that while
Jane Austen “does not talk about her qualities … we are seldom allowed to
forget about her for all that.” The
scintilla broadens even as Booth goes on: When
we read [Emma] … we accept her [Jane Austen] as representing everything
we admire most. She is as generous and
wise as Knightley; in fact, she is a shade more penetrating in her
judgement. She is as subtle and witty
as Emma would like to think herself ….
She is, in short, a perfect human being … she even recognizes that human
perfection of the kind she exemplifies, is not quite attainable in real life.8 On the presumption that we have grounded ourselves beforehand in the literary, cultural, intellectual, and social history of Austen’s era, we find ourselves beholden next to examine those aspects of her life, thought, and achievement which grant us some measure of access to her. These are extensive. They include her ancestry, family ties, social standing, reading, travels, religious convictions, social concerns, and awareness of the world around her. Since scrupulous examination of Emma
discloses the presence in it of allusions to, or borrowings from, thirty-five
works, the productions of thirty-one authors, we must limit ourselves here, in
deference to the stringencies of time, to a few, hitherto unnoticed, possible
sources. In Mary Brunton’s Discipline
we find an apparent pattern for Mr. Knightley’s courtship. Mr. Maitland, Ellen Percy’s father’s friend,
is, at thirty-four, twice Ellen’s age.
He has tender feelings toward her and counsels her, no easy task since
she is capricious and wilful. His love
undeclared, he has trouble hiding his jealousy when a callow suitor appears on
the scene. Ellen’s follies
persist. Thus far the plot parallels
that of Emma. But now Maitland
tells Ellen he is going abroad. Only
then does she realize that she loves him.
“I started,” she relates, “as though a dart had pierced me.” Could this phrase have been the genesis of Emma’s
arrow passage? – “It darted through
her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but
herself!” Probably not. Discipline and Emma were
published the same year. Moreover,
unlike Emma, Ellen gets no second chance.
Maitland sails away leaving her to a hard fate.9 In Mrs. Thrale’s letters to Dr. Johnson, a book
we know Jane Austen read, we find a pattern for Mr. Knightley’s remark to Emma:
“I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman
in England would have borne it.”10
When Hester Thrale told Johnson, “I have had my share of scolding from
you,” he replied, “It is true, you have, but you have borne it like an angel,
and you have been the better for it.”11 In Thomas Clarkson’s History of the
Abolition of the African Slave Trade, read by Jane Austen with such
pleasure she told Cassandra that she had fallen in love with Clarkson, we find
a passage that may throw light on Austen’s inference that Augusta Hawkins’s
family may owe a measure of its affluence to the slave trade. The English slave trade, Clarkson reports,
was inaugurated, contrary to the avowed wishes of the crown, by a man quite as
determined to have his way as is the resolute Mrs. Elton – Captain John
Hawkins!12 Where did Jane Austen find the surnames for the
inhabitants of Highbury? Through her mother’s
kinswoman, Winifred Leigh, she was blood kin to John Churchill, first duke of
Marlborough. Family histories prepared
by her relatives, Lady Chandos and Mary Leigh, were well known to the Austens.13 Here Jane would have found that her
great-great grandmother (grandmother of the first duke of Chandos), was Emma
Charlton; that she had a great aunt Serle (name of the Woodhouse’s cook!); that
family baptisms were carried out by a Dr. Smallridge. Mrs. Elton has a friend, Mrs. Cooper. Mrs. Austen’s sister was Mrs. Cooper. But now on to a much more significant tie. In Persuasion, Sir Walter Elliot
deplores Frederick Wentworth’s lack of a connection with “the Strafford
family,” that is, the family of Thomas Wentworth, the renowned Earl of
Strafford. Jane Austen herself, was, in
fact, related to the Strafford family.
Through her mother she was, even as Thomas Wentworth was, directly
descended from Joan Beaufort, granddaughter of Edward III, and from Ralph
Neville, first earl of Westmoreland.
Let it be remembered, moreover, that in July 1628, Charles I created
Thomas Wentworth, Baron Wentworth of Wentworth-Woodhouse! What is more, on the failure of the male
line (a circumstance no doubt given an assist when Strafford was beheaded),
Thomas’s daughter Anne married Edward, second Lord Rockingham, the
Wentworth-Woodhouse title then passing to Rockingham. In time, Rockingham’s daughter, Eleanor Wentworth-Woodhouse,
married Thomas, second Lord Leigh.
Eleanor and Thomas thus were the great grandparents of Jane Austen’s
cousins, Edward, fifth Lord Leigh, and his sister Mary Leigh of Stoneleigh
Abbey, some of whose jewels (presumably Wentworth-Woodhouse heirlooms), were
given to Mrs. Austen, Cassandra, and Jane when Mary Leigh died in 1806. So Jane Austen was twice over connected to
the Wentworth-Woodhouses! Sir Walter
take notice! Chapman, in a buried note in the last index of
the Austen letters, points to the likelihood that Mrs. and Miss ‘Molly’ Milles
of Canterbury were the originals of Mrs. and Miss Bates. Miss Milles, whom Jane Austen had had under
observation at least since August 1805,14 was a great talker and “so
foolishly minute,” Jane says she had to suppress the desire to laugh at her.15 She admired the mother, though,
“because she is chearful [sic] & grateful for what she is at the age of 90
& upwards.”16 Is it by
chance that in the same letter that contains the above remark, Jane tells
Cassandra, “Mrs. Britton called here on Saturday. I never saw her before.
She is a large, ungenteel Woman, with self-satisfied & would-be
elegant manners.”17 Is this
our first glimpse of Mrs. Elton? It was
on her return from this same visit to Kent, it will be recalled, that Jane
began writing Emma. As for Harriet, well, we can hardly forget that
Fanny Knight, Jane’s niece, once treasured a shaving rag once used by Mr.
Plumtre – the immediate inspiration for Harriet’s preservation of Mr. Elton’s
court plaister and pencil stub. Two
letters Jane wrote to Fanny, concerning her want of decision about her amorous
attachments, were written in 1814 and find Jane cast as counsellor to a
veritable Harriet.18 What of Mr. Woodhouse? Well, his fears concerning snowy roads were
not idle. In November 1811, Humphrey
Repton (who landscaped Stoneleigh Abbey), while returning from a ball to which
he had escorted his daughters, was crippled for life when his coach overturned
on a snowy road.19 For
myself I am tempted to believe the foundation of Mr. Woodhouse’s
valetudinarianism was laid during his college years. Did not Parson Woodforde, one of the great diarists of the
eighteenth century, who was at Oxford just about the era when Henry Woodhouse
would have been there, report, on 5 July 1774, “Mr. Woodhouse, a gent: Com: of
University College was very drunk at the Theatre and cascaded [vomited] in the
middle of the theatre.”?20
When
we recall Alice Chandler’s documentation showing that Mr. Woodhouse’s favorite
verse, “Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid,” was actually an obscene lyric,21
need we say more? Yet this is the man
of whom A.C. Bradley wrote: “Mr. Woodhouse is … next to Don Quixote, perhaps
the most perfect gentleman in fiction.”22 Compensation is not without its rewards. Dare we suggest that Jane Austen herself was
Emma? Emma is one of the few characters
she ever described. The description
given is of herself: “Such an eye! – the true hazle eye – and so brilliant!
regular features, open countenance, with a complexion! oh! what a bloom of full
health, and such a pretty height and size; such a firm and upright figure. There is health, not merely in her bloom,
but in her air, her head, her glance.”23 At one point Emma says of herself: “If other
children are at all like what I remember to have been myself, I should think
five times the amount of what I have yet heard named as a salary on such
occasions [i.e. for a governess’s pay], dearly earned.”24 Thus might Jane Austen have spoken of her
own behavior in childhood. In fact, on
a rainy Sunday morning, at Southampton, in early February 1807, Jane took care
of Kitty, the nine year old daughter of Admiral Foote. At the time, she wrote Cassandra: “She is a
nice, natural, openhearted, affectionate girl, with all the ready civility
which one sees in the best Children in the present day; –so unlike anything
that I was myself at her age, that I am often all astonishment & shame.”25 Remarking on “the quality of intimacy” that
readers usually feel with Emma, Lionel Trilling speculated that it derives from
“Jane Austen’s own closeness to her heroine.”26 Tomlinson is of the same mind. Austen has succumbed to
“self-identification” in creating Emma:
“Emma is a projection of some part of herself.”27 Q.E. Leavis sees Emma as Austen’s attempt to
understand herself better and, consequently, to be a better person. “Isn’t it suggestive,” she says, “that Emma,
the heroine who is most thoroughly chastened … closely resembles her author
…. The self-criticism, based on the
conviction of the primary importance of achieving self-knowledge, humility, and
generosity of mind, is what makes the Jane Austen irony so different from …
that of the literature … of our age ….
Her values are moral in the sense of being spiritual ….”28 Was Highbury a place Jane Austen knew? Since it is given, in fact, a more precise
geographical location than any other fictional place in the novels, we feel
sure we could locate it on a map. Yet
Chapman says no actual English town meets in location those geographical
specifications. Still, candidates
continue to be put forward – most recently, Chawton, by Oliver MacDonagh.29 A passing reference in the novel to Cobham
has mustered advocates for that town.30 We now know, however, that in a letter he wrote to Lord Arthur
Russell, 21 October 1869, James Edward Austen-Leigh said his aunt Jane told him
Highbury is Leatherhead, Surrey. In
1918, Mary Trebeck, a native of Leatherhead, made out the best case for this
locale. In 1814, in strawberry season,
Jane visited her godfather, Reverend Samuel Cooke, at Great Bookham, close by
Leatherhead. Trebeck cites these facts:
the pulpit at Leatherhead Church was the gift of a Mr. Knightley. The names Martin, Otway, and Dixon are those
most common in the Parish Registers.
Church House, a young ladies school, such as Miss Goddard’s was, was
situated at Leatherhead. A local
estate, the “Priory,” is like Donwell, just twenty minutes walk from
Leatherhead. At Leatherhead there was
an estate actually called Randalls.
Another, Thornecroft, answers to the location of Hartfield. Rooms like the Bateses, above a shop, were
found at such a location. The road that
passed that site did periodically flood just as Robert Martin said it did. An inn, the Swan, offered a model for the
Crown.31 Jane Austen knew
Leatherhead. Deirdre LeFaye conjectures
that the 1814 visit, undertaken after work on Emma was well advanced,
was a field trip taken so the author could fix Leatherhead more fully in her
mind.32 Finally, while discussing locations, let us not
forget Mr. Elton’s ambuscade at Bath where he staged what might be described as
his color-coded courtship. There was,
we hear, the “dinner at Mr. Green’s and the party at Mrs. Brown’s” for which
Elton sallied forth from his rooms at the White Hart for the wooing that ended
in a swirl of white satin.33
The White Hart was just the place to choose for such a campaign. On 28 June 1793, the diarist Parson
Woodforde noted: “About 10 o’clock this Evening, thank God, we got safe and
well to Bath to the White Hart Inn, where we supped & slept – a very noble
Inn.”34 Four months later,
on 11 October, he further recorded: “We got to Bath … about six o’clock this
Evening, to the White Hart in Stall Street, kept by one Pickwick, where we
drank Tea, supped and slept, a very good, very capital Inn, everything in
stile.”35 In other words,
exactly the habitat for a man laying his snares to catch an heiress. Jane Austen knew the White Hart well. In Persuasion, the Musgroves are
accommodated there in an elegant suite.36 Chapman long ago surmised that Jane Austen hid
in her works many jests that could be relished only by family members. Some of these we have noted in passing, the
use of family names, Fanny’s veneration of Mr. Plumtre’s shaving rag. There are others in Emma. Was it not a jest to give the name Goddard
to the headmistress of a mediocre girl’s school when Jane’s nephews were
attending Winchester College where Dr. William Stanley Goddard had long
presided as headmaster?37
Was it not a jest to put two Alderney cows in Robert Martin’s pasture
when Mrs. Austen had prided herself in owning just such a pair of bovines?38 Many other such touches will elude us but
certainly the most interesting one concerning Emma is found in a letter
Jane wrote to Cassandra in November 1800.
There she passed along tittle-tattle about the rumored matrimonial plans
of Sir Thomas Williams, the widower whose late wife had been their cousin, Jane
Cooper. In the letter is “a palimpsest
of the heroine’s name and the opening sentence of Emma” – “The young
lady whom it is suspected that Sir Thomas is to marry, is Miss Emma Wabshaw
[Wapshare]: – she … is handsome, accomplished, amiable, & everything but
rich.”39 The rumor was not
unfounded. Sir Thomas did marry his
Emma. How singular that this sentence
lingered more than a dozen years in Jane Austen’s mind to re-emerge, remolded,
to stand as one of the most celebrated opening sentences in all of English
literature. Others as well as Trilling have remarked on Emma’s
quality of intimacy. Tanner detects in
it, in keeping with its restricted scope, a “reclusive tendency.”40 Indeed, in Emma Jane Austen seems to
retreat into cosiness, taking shelter in the snug wisdom of the epigram – a
full six dozen of them. There is a
possible way for accounting for this snugness.
In Emma no physical detail is discussed as much as the
weather. There is a good reason for
that. The winter of 1814 was one of the
fiercest in a hundred years. The three
letters written to Cassandra by Jane Austen that winter tell of “cruel weather,”
snowstorms, frost, unrelenting cold, “Thickness & Sleet,” hazardous
roads. “Getting out is impossible,”
Jane wrote and when she did get out she at once caught cold.41 Often in her letters Jane Austen speaks of
the pleasure she took being snug indoors warmed by a good fire. It takes no feat of the imagination to see
her, in that frigid winter of 1814, sequestered in a snug corner, taking
advantage of the isolation the weather mandated and writing steadily away. To that winter Highbury may owe the
quasi-familial cosiness of its inhabitants, to say nothing of Jane Fairfax’s
wet stockings. Coming out of the
confinement it enjoined may have seemed to Jane Austen an experience akin to
the ordeal of childbirth and so she suggests in a letter to her niece Anna who,
while she had Emma, had had Jemima: “As I wish very much to see your
Jemima, I am sure you will like to see my Emma ….”42 Jane Austen’s detractors allege that she showed
no awareness of the political, economic, and social issues paramount to her
era. Emma, however, shows us
that, without the stridency others displayed, she committed herself amply and
sensibly on many of the issues raised by both the political and social
revolutions going on in her day – and that includes gender issues, class
conflict, and the Jacobin insurgence.
Her handling of class conflicts in Emma can best be understood
when it is remembered that her longstanding partiality to Georgian drama, a
genre anchored on class differences, was the determining factor that made her
give a comedy of manners understructure to all of her novels. Class-oriented concerns touched on in Emma
are mercenary marriage, new wealth generated by commerce, social affectation,
clandestine alliances, social games, parental tyranny, irresponsible privilege,
social climbing, youthful defiance, and the tradition of happy endings in marriage
with everyone paired off with a member of their own class. Even the Eltons deserve one another. Most assuredly they do! In Emma it is through her portrayal of
Frank Churchill that Jane Austen quietly repudiates the social dogma of the
Jacobin insurgence. It is, of course,
Frank’s frenchified manners and attitudes that give Mr. Knightley the excuse to
despise him. Even his hint of side
whiskers could betoken republican convictions.
In due time such a man might put himself in opposition to the existing
order and the traditional values on which it was founded. Frank lacked English sincerity. Mr. Knightley targets this superficiality
when he disputes Emma’s description of Frank as “amiable.” “No, Emma, your amiable young man can be
amiable only in French, not in English ….
he can have no English delicacy toward the feelings of other people:
nothing really amiable about him.”43 Previous to making this statement, Mr. Knightley characterized
Churchill’s frenchness by charging him with want of “vigor and resolution,” by
charging him with having recourse to “manoeuvering and finessing,” classic
French terms suggesting guile. Early in
their acquaintance, Emma, without prejudice, remarks Frank’s “indifference to a
confusion of rank.” Later she brings in
a bill of particulars – “extravagance, love of change, restlessness of temper,
which must be doing something, good or bad,” and further tasks him with “a
system of hyprocrisy and deceit, – espionage and treachery ….”44 –
the very traits that marked out, to the English conservative, the Jacobin
adherent.45 At Donwell,
Churchill extravagantly asserts (and this in wartime, too!), “I am sick of
England – and would leave it to-morrow, if I could.”46 This speech scores no points with Emma. Moments before, walking about the
disciplined grounds of the abbey, with Mr. Weston, she had found the stability
she was seeking: “It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English
comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.”47 The irresponsible, carefree freedom of Frank
Churchill, when contrasted with the reasonable, English conservatism of Mr.
Knightley was perceived to be devoid of substance. Emma knew then whose values to trust. Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen’s grandniece, boasted that “No admixture of … foreign blood appears in the pedigree of the Austens.”48 We must not suppose, on that account, that the francophobia of Emma was rooted in racial bias. Jane Austen knew her Leigh heritage too well for that. Through the marriage of the first Lord Chandos to Elizabeth de Grey, Jane Austen was descended directly from two sons of Henry III, two of the children of Edward I, two of the sons of Edward III, and, therefore, counted among her own French forebears, Charlemagne, King Louis IV, Charles, Duke of Louvain, Henry II, Count of Brabant, as well as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabelle of Angoulême, Eleanor of Provence, Blanche of Artois, Isabeau of France, Philippa of Hainault, Gilbert deClare, John deBurgh, and Maud Plantagenet.49 Tracking the chronology of Emma, Jo Modert
determined that the Donwell visit takes place on Midsummer Eve, the Box Hill
outing on Midsummer (a time when, traditionally, young people discover whom
they will marry), and that Mr. Knightley proposed on Old Midsummer. There is yet more manipulation of dates in Emma,
this time in keeping with the liturgical calendar – Mr. Elton proposes on
Christmas Eve: Emma extols Harriet on Childermas, the Feast of the Holy
Innocents; Frank Churchill’s pianoforté is delivered to Jane Fairfax on
Valentine’s Day; Frank tries to confess his duplicity to Emma on Shrove
Tuesday.50 Though it should
not surprise us that the daughter of a clergyman should be mindful of the
various stages of the church year, it behoves us to weigh this factor in a
larger context. In Mansfield Park Edmund Bertram says
that “the most valuable knowledge” we can have is “the knowledge of ourselves
and our duty.”51 There,
apparently, he stated what Jane Austen took to be the proper goal of all of
us. Not only in Emma, but in all
of her novels, striving to establish criteria of sound judgement and right
conduct, she shows a Johnsonian interest in moral growth. Now what does this tell us about Jane
Austen? Q.E. Leavis sums up in these
terms: We
see the marks, over and over again, in the Jane Austen novels, of a fastidious
nature, a fine spirit and a keen sense of honor and of value for integrity ….
her heroines … ultimately criticize themselves for lacking humility,
generosity, self-knowledge, qualities which always turn out to be what Jane
Austen considers the most essential.
Jane Austen is a moralist … whose moral values are not theoretical or
conventional but proceed from self-scrutiny.52 Emma’s lack of humility leads her into folly but it is not an ingrained flaw and the damage it does is not irrevocable. Her tender regard for her father, good will toward Harriet, dutiful concern for the poor, all attest that she is not incorrigible. To whom, then, can she look for the moral instruction she needs? Certainly not to Mr. Elton. Elton is a failed Christian – materialistic, ambitious, greedy, self-serving, uncharitable. His only recorded charity has been his willingness to let Mrs. Bates sit in his pew, the pew which she had occupied for many years when her husband was vicar of Highbury. From the outset of Emma, Mr. Knightley
is set before us as an exemplar of the Christian hero in the Grandisonian
tradition. After riding from London
sixteen miles on horseback he immediately sets out on foot, at night, to walk a
mile to Hartfield to console the Woodhouses who he knows will be engaged in a
“forlorn tête-à-tête” mourning the loss of Miss Taylor, married that day to Mr.
Weston. Knightley’s unobtrusive charity
is ever before us. He watches over and
counsels Emma; he gives his supply of apples to the Bateses; he puts his
carriage on the road to assure them transportation on a winter night; he dances
with Harriet after Elton spurns her; he masterminds the reconciliation of
Harriet and Robert Martin; and, ultimately, even relinquishes the comforts of
his own home to bring Mr. Woodhouse the reassurance of his presence. As a sower of harmony only Sir Charles
Grandison surpasses him. “Mystery,
Finesse” – Knightley says to Emma, “how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove
more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each
other?”53 When Emma says,
much later, “I love every thing that is decided and open!”,54 we
know that Knightley’s precepts and example have prevailed. Her eyes have been opened and now she can
think for herself and, as a consequence, has attained true humanity. Emma’s realization that she has been blind
is the climactic moment of her moral development. With Emma’s awakening Jane Austen personally endorses those
qualities – humility, generosity of mind, and self-knowledge – which Q.E.
Leavis says she considered “the most essential.” The first sixty pages of Emma touch upon
the economic and social circumstances of a score of women. It should not surprise us, therefore, to
learn that Emma leaves untouched few of the issues relevant to the
situation of women who moved in that segment of early nineteenth century
society which Jane Austen knew best.
Although the terms we use to discuss those issues today – female
consciousness, female solidarity, feminist affirmation, the imperatives of
propriety, the ambience of equality, the demystification of the male – were
unknown to her, the concerns they signify were, in some measure, brought into
the open by the questions she asked.
“Most of what we learn by asking the questions raised by feminist
criticism,” says Wayne Booth, “leave [s] Jane Austen looking perhaps even
greater than she did before.” Indeed,
he concedes, she was “by all odds the most perceptive portrayer of women’s fate
of her time … a kind of founding mother of feminist criticism.”55 Jane Austen’s goal was not to persuade
others that women were the equals of men.
What she wanted understood was that woman’s inferior state was not
ascribable to biological reasons but a direct result of the social role men
assigned to women. Women were educated
not for adult life but for getting married.
Emphasis was on accomplishments to be displayed during the period of courtship. Once marriage had been achieved these
accomplishments were obsolescent. Miss
Goddard’s school, where Harriet received her formation, inculcated, it is to be
assumed, the standard courtship skills.
In Jane Austen’s mind the superior seminaries for young ladies, the
“female Etons,” did not answer either.
At such a school, one gathers, Mrs. Elton acquired the art of coquetry,
her obsession with dress and ornament, and her fund of affectation. Jane Austen wanted women to be intelligently
educated. She deplored a world in which
women were expected to hide their knowledge and their cleverness. In Emma, as one of her many concerns,
Jane Austen takes up society’s culpability in imposing economic restraints on
women. Society had so arranged matters that
sons alone inherited. Since daughters
received no practical education the only career open to them was marriage. If a dowry was lacking, even that option
rarely came their way. The unattached
middle-class woman for whom no provision had been made, was in a lamentable
situation. Jane Austen well knew that
since she was one of them. That had
been Miss Taylor’s lot before her marriage.
Mr. Knightley sums it up candidly: “Emma … knows how very acceptable it
must be at Miss Taylor’s time of life to be settled in a home of her own, and
how important to her to be secure of a comfortable provision ….”56 Mercenary marriage was yet another evil of
this era. Even a woman with a
comfortable dowry was not truly secure.
Mr. Elton wants Emma’s wealth more than he wants Emma. She understands this perfectly: “He only
wanted to aggrandize and enrich himself; and if Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield,
the heiress of thirty thousand pounds, were not quite so easily obtained as he had
fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten.”57 And so he does. Jane Austen saw that women often acted against
their own interests or those of other women.
Isabella Knightley is described as “a model of right female happiness”
and so she is by Biblical reckoning.
She submits her will to her husband, thinks as he does, accommodates
herself to his habits and temper, and does his bidding. So submissive is she, she does not even
realize she lives with a man who has a bad temper.58 To Jane Austen Isabella falls far short of
ideal womanhood. Still less appealing
to her were such invertebrates as Harriet Smith. Touched at one point by Harriet’s tenderness of heart, Emma says,
“I would not change you for the clearest-headed, longest-sighted, best judging
female breathing.”59 This
enumeration renders to the reader a useful service. Even as it calls attention to Harriet’s intellectual
shortcomings, it tells us what qualities Jane Austen thought a woman should
have. On one occasion Mrs. Elton says: “I always take
the part of my own sex …. I always
stand up for women ….60 On
another, she finds it “quite one of the evils of matrimony” that wives have to
leave their homes for those of their husbands.61 Later, of course, she lodges the sole
protest when Mr. Knightley forsakes Donwell Abbey to live with Emma.62 She speaks of Elton as “my Lord and Master,”63
but is rapidly making him over in her own image. Her manifestos are self-promotional. A fraudulent feminist, she is no more an asset to the feminist
cause than she is to her husband. Women in executive roles appear several times
in Austen novels. None is
commended. In Emma it is Mrs.
Churchill’s role and she abuses it. She
is an upstart, we learn, who gained through marriage a station in life she had
not been educated to occupy. The
failure is society’s because it had failed to prepare women to carry such
responsibilities as might fall to their lot. Jane Austen did not want women to be mindless,
spineless, or tyrannical. She disliked
pseudo-feminists and women who denigrated their sex. She conceded that a man could be a maturing force in a woman’s
life. Conversely, she thought a woman
could be a maturing force in a man’s life and believed further that it was not
degrading for a man to be raised to a higher level of understanding by a woman. Common assent has it that Jane Austen’s most
convincingly masculine heroes are the two she created last. Here Mr. Knightley is our topic. In him Jane Austen singles out those traits
she found best befitting a representative of true manhood – a mind alert,
decided, and prompt to act; a manner downright and authoritative; vigor and
resolution; integrity – strict adherence to truth and principles; an open
temper; disdain of trick and littleness; eschewal of ceremony. She allows, nonetheless, for human
failings. Of Mr. Knightley’s jealousy
of Frank Churchill, A.C. Bradley wrote: “[for Jane Austen] that is not only the
way a man is made, but the way he should be made.”64 Finally we come to the quality which Mr.
Knightley possessed in abundance but which is found lacking in Frank Churchill
– “English delicacy toward the feelings of others.”65 This quality encompasses most of Mr.
Knightley’s noble deeds but, most especially, it includes that capacity that
disposes a man to put greater value on a woman’s mind than he puts on her
physical attributes. Mr. Knightley’s
solicitude for Emma’s intellect was unceasing. Jane Austen knew that the existing social
fabric aggravated the differences between men and women, but she would like to have
lived in a world in which men and women respected one another’s intellects,
and, in doing so, reached their full potential as rational beings. This becomes possible for Emma and Mr.
Knightley only when they attain awareness of their love for one another in that
scene which furnishes the novel a climax which is, at one and the same time,
emotional, moral, and intellectual. At
the start of that scene both principals are mistaken about the other’s
feelings. With tender grace, however,
each is able to put aside self-interest to think of the other’s need. Knightley is willing to be silent, at Emma’s
bidding. Emma is willing to hear
Knightley declare that his heart is given elsewhere.”66 Throughout the novel Emma’s integrity has
never been in doubt. What has been
lacking in her has been a capacity for humility, generosity, and
self-knowledge. How fitting then that
it should be her rational decision, arrived at humbly, unselfishly, and freely,
that makes it possible for Mr. Knightley to speak, and, as a consequence, for
their love for one another to become known.
It is then that Jane Austen makes known to us what true womanhood, true
manhood, and true humanity meant to her, and, in so doing, shares with us the
fullness of her own peerless humanity. NOTES 1 Orville Prescott, Jan Struther,
and Lyman Bryson. “Jane Austen: Pride
and Prejudice,” Invitation to Learning, ed. George Crothers (New York,
1951), p. 429. 2 James Edward Austen-Leigh, A
Memoir of Jane Austen (London, 1870), p. 148. 3 Ian Ker, John Henry Newman:
A Biography (Oxford, 1988), p. 138. 4 Lord David Cecil, Early
Victorian Novelists (London, 1935), p. 52. 5 A.L. Rowse, “Lady Ottoline’s
Vanished World,” in Portraits and Views: Literary and Historical
(London, 1979), pp. 204-205. 6 Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA., 1986), p. 200. 7 quoted in Frederick M. Keener,
The Chain of Becoming (New York, 1983), pp. 273-274. 8 Wayne C. Booth, “Control of
Distance in Jane Austen’s Emma,” in The Rhetoric of Fiction
(Chicago, 1983), pp. 264-265. 9 Mary Brunton, Discipline
(London, 1986), pp. 54ff, 141, 163, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1933), Emma, 408. All
further references to Jane Austen’s novels are to the volumes in this edition. 10 Emma, p. 430. 11 A. Hayward, ed. Autobiography,
Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (London, 1861), I, 60. 12 Thomas Clarkson, Abolition
of the African Slave Trade (London, 1808), I, 40-41. 13 C.H. Collins Baker, “Lady Chandos’ Register,” The Genealogists’
Magazine, 10:8 (December 1948), 255-264; 10:9 (March 1949), 299-309; 10:10
(June 1949), 339-352. Agnes Leigh, “An
Old Family History,” National Review, 49 (1907), 277-286. 14 Jane Austen’s Letters to her
sister Cassandra and others, ed. R.W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London, 1952), #45
(24 August 1805), 161. Hereafter cited
as L. 15 L, #89 (26 October 1813), 360-361. 16 L. #86 (11 October 1813), 342. 17 L, #86 (11 October 1813), 343. 18
L, #103 (18 November 1814), 103; Emma,
pp. 338-340. In Fanny Burney’s Cecilia,
Henrietta Belfield also treasures relics of the object of her devotion (Bk. V, Ch. viii; Bk. X, Ch. iii); see E.E. Duncan-Jones, Notes
and Queries, 196 (1951), 15. 19 Edward Hyams, Capability
Brown and Humphrey Repton (New York,
1971), p. 206. 20 James Woodforde, The Diary
of a Country Parson, 1758-1802 (London, 1949), pp. 96-97. 21 Alice Chandler, “ ‘A Pair of
Fine Eyes’: Jane Austen’s Treatment of Sex,” Studies in the Novel, 7
(Spring 1975), 88-103. 22 A.C. Bradley, A Miscellany
(London, 1929), p. 52. 23 Emma,
p. 39. 24 Emma,
p. 382. 25 L, #49 (8 February 1807), 179. 26 Lionel Trilling, Beyond
Culture: Essays on Literature (New York, 1965), p. 44. 27 Thomas Tomlinson, “Jane
Austen’s Originality: Emma,” The English Middle-Class Novel
(London, 1976), pp. 33-34. 28 Collected Essays of Q.E.
Leavis, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 29-30. 29 Oliver MacDonagh, Jane
Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds (New Haven, 1991), 137-145. 30 Emma, p. 95; L. #92 (2
March 1814), 375-377. 31 Mary Trebeck, “Was Highbury
Leatherhead?” TLS (13 June 1918), 276. 32 Anon. “The Original of ‘Highbury’,” Collected Reports of the Jane
Austen Society, 1966-1975 (Folkestone, 1977), pp. 60-61; William and
Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, revised and
enlarged by Deirdre Le Faye (Boston, 1989), p. 191. 33 Emma, pp. 182, 186. 34 Woodforde, p. 439. 35 Woodforde, p. 445. 36 Persuasion, p. 216. 37 James Sabben-Clare, Winchester College: After 600 Years, 1382-1982
(Southampton, 1981), pp. 35, 199, 200. 38 Emma, p. 27. 39 Joseph Kestner, “Two Letters of Jane Austen: The Writer as Emetteur/Recepteur,” Papers on Literature & Language 14, 254; L, #27, (20 November 1800), p. 92. 40 Tanner, p. 205. 41 L, #92 (2 March 1814), #93 (5
March 1814), #94 (9 March 1814), 375-386. 42 L, #124 (December 1815),
449. Anna Jemima Lefroy was born 20
October 1815. 43 Emma, p. 149. 44 Emma, pp. 198, 205, 399. 45 Ward Hellstrom, “Francophobia in Emma,” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900, 5 (1965), 607-617. 46 Emma, p. 365. 47 Emma, p. 360. 48 Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, Personal
Aspects of Jane Austen (London, 1920), p. 11. 49 Collins’s Peerage of England,
ed. Sir Egerton Brydges (London, 1812), VI, 719-721; IX, 421. 50 Jo Modert, “Chronology within
the Novels,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey et al
(New York, 1986), 57-58. 51 Mansfield Park, p. 459. 52 Leavis, pp. 28-29. 53 Emma, p. 446. 54 Emma, p. 460. 55 Wayne C. Booth, The Company
We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, 1988), p. 435. 56 Emma, p. 11. 57 Emma, p. 135. 58 Emma, pp. 140, 95, 121. 59 Emma, p. 269. 60 Emma, p. 306. 61 Emma, p. 273. 62 Emma, p. 469. 63 Emma, pp. 296, 455. 64 Bradley, p. 49. 65 Emma, p. 149. 66 Emma, pp. 429-430. |
