During one of his many visits to the Woodhouse home, Mr. Knightley teases Emma, “‘I have a piece of news for you.  You like news—and I heard an article in my way hither that I think will interest you.’”  Before Knightley can share this information, however, the conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Jane Fairfax and Miss Bates, herself “[f]ull of news” about Mr. Elton’s sudden engagement (E 185).  Thus, Knightley’s surprise is spoiled.  This moment, better than anywhere else, illustrates the local, rapid nature of information exchange in Austen’s work.  While Highbury is perhaps the most gossipy neighborhood in Austen’s oeuvre, such localized networks, lubricated by a rota of calls, parties, and chance encounters, appear across Austen’s novels.

This literary emphasis on the sociological aspects of information exchange was typical of the period:  Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have argued that “network novels” such as Austen’s were crucial in the development of the novel and endemic in a society marked by increasing literacy and proliferating reading materials (311).  A compulsive reader of both fiction and periodicals, “Austen was one of several writers who saw the implications of such a dramatic change in the nation’s reading habits” (Hessell 248).  As such, Austen’s work maintains incessant focus upon the contemporary perils and potentialities of increasingly rapid—and depersonalizing—information structures.  Instead of being clipped from the pages of a periodical, the “article” announcing Elton’s engagement originated as a letter from Elton himself to Mr. Cole, though, as we can see, it very quickly spreads through Highbury via word of mouth (E 186).  Knightley’s pun on the word article in the scene discreetly gestures to the ways that, in Austen’s work, such grapevines subvert and displace the role of newspapers, alongside the information carried within them. 

What Austen habitually calls news is, like the networks through which it circulates, almost entirely local.  Though the Napoleonic Wars and their ensuing trauma provide a backdrop to Austen’s novels, her characters are never directly caught up in such sweeping events.  Northanger Abbey, drafted during the politically turbulent 1790s, contains only oblique references to large-scale unrest.  In Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas’s position as a member of Parliament is mentioned only in passing, and the Bertram family never discusses his political career.  Instead, the news circulated in Austen’s novels is of a much more domestic scope.  Austen was, of course, concerned with the major events of her day.  Her poem “On Sir Home Popham’s sentence—April 1807,” written after the naval hero was court-martialed for the unauthorized takeover of Spanish Buenos Aires, demonstrates just how closely Austen watched current events.  Scholars such as E. J. Clery and Claudia L. Johnson have examined the more subtle ways Austen worked contemporary politics into her novels.  These national and global subjects, however, are only rarely topics of conversation for Austen’s characters and hold relatively little value in the information market.  While Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet, like many Austen characters, finds “solace” in “visiting and news,” the information she gleans during these calls does not concern naval victories, trade, or parliamentary acts (5).  She is instead most occupied by events in her own neighborhood, and particularly at the Netherfield estate.  In Austen’s work, news is a host of other petty details.  The Grants’ planned trip to Bath is “a capital piece of Mansfield news” for Lady Bertram, though she regrets she has no one with whom to share it (MP 493).  Meanwhile, in Persuasion, William Elliot’s arrival in Bath is “a piece of news of some interest” to Anne (147).  “News” is a series of narratives and speculations about the communities of families, friends, neighbors, and rivals who comprise the novels’ social fabric.  In Austen’s work, news is gossip. 

Quests for information are an important component of the Austen heroine’s journey—from Marianne Dashwood’s attempts to track her errant lover, Willoughby, to Catherine Morland’s mission to uncover the truth behind Mrs. Tilney’s untimely demise.  “Jane Austen’s novels are filled with single, eligible women who desperately need information,” says Jan B. Gordon (61).  This desire to find information is hardly confined to the novels’ “single, eligible” heroines.  In Persuasion, the invalid Mrs. Smith recounts her nurse’s efforts to deliver “‘something . . . entertaining and profitable’” from her conversations with upper-class patients (169).  Meanwhile, “very chatty” Sir John Middleton, from Sense and Sensibility, is a prolific gossip and schemer, not unlike Emma Woodhouse (36).  Chapters on gossip in Austen by Gordon and Patricia Meyer Spacks have focused on its commonalities with financial speculation, mostly through case studies of individual novels.  There is more to be gained, however, by studying the movement of news across Austen’s novels.  Beyond being mere small talk for Austen’s characters, gossip performs a major structural role within her work.  Plots turn on the revelation of sensitive information, like that of Frank Churchill’s secret engagement (“‘the oddest news that ever was’” [E 440]) or the “bad news” of Wickham’s greedy duplicity (PP 302).  In fact, Austen’s novels are themselves about networks of people—both male and female—who desperately need information.  These dynamics enable one of Austen’s most impressive literary trademarks:  the vast, dynamic socio-informational networks that scaffold her novels.  These networks cycle news through webs of interested friends, family, and neighbors.  In the end, it’s the constant churn of news that operates as a social adhesive in Austen’s work, making analysis of informational transfer essential to understanding and critiquing Austen’s fiction. 

Despite the booming periodical culture of the age in which Austen lived, as well as her work’s focus on information exchange, official sources of news, like newspapers, play a peripheral and often unsatisfactory role in her work.  In Persuasion, Anne Elliot tracks Captain Wentworth’s rising career, using “only navy lists and newspapers for her authority” (32).1  The navy lists and newspapers, however, don’t carry the information she’d most like to know:  whether he’s alive, rich, or still single.  A bit more successfully than Anne, Fanny Price discovers her cousin Maria’s elopement with Henry Crawford via her father’s borrowed newspaper.  But there are limits to how much she can learn of the situation, as “it was not known, even to the editor of the newspaper, whither they were gone” (MP 509). 

Austen’s usage of “only” and “even” in these passages is subtle and gestures to the burgeoning but tenuous role newspapers played in the lives of Austen and her characters.  Persuasion’s narrator implies the inevitable incompleteness of consulting “only navy lists and newspapers” for relatively minute, personal information.  In fact, such phrasing seems to question whether a newspaper, and, by extension, someone who often consults such periodicals, can be a true “authority” at all.  These questions of authority appear again in Mansfield Park, wherein the editor of Mr. Price’s newspaper admits that even he cannot resolve the reported narrative, again suggesting that information critical to Fanny cannot be gleaned via mass-market news.  In the end, Anne must supplement the navy lists and newspapers with her own personal knowledge of Wentworth:  “she could not doubt his being rich;—and, in favour of his constancy, she had no reason to believe him married” (32).  In Mansfield Park, Maria is harder to pin down; it is not known, even to the members of the couple's own families, whither the pair has gone.  Fanny and the Bertrams must again speculate that “there was every reason to conclude her to be concealed somewhere with Mr. Crawford” (522). 

These two episodes illustrate the reality of information transfer and reception in Austen’s novels:  rather than deriving from more “official” sources, like directories and periodicals, the digestion of news is instead a much smaller-scale endeavor, deriving from knowledge accrued through first-hand experience—that is, through the maintenance of interpersonal relationships.  The newspapers in Austen’s novels are less likely to be dynamic channels of information than props.  They are often shown in characters’ hands—as in the case of Sense and Sensibility’s Mr. Palmer, who is constantly perusing a newspaper—but the information inside them is rarely shared, disadvantaging periodicals in relation to more relevant news bearers, like letters and gossipy conversation.  Even within Austen’s narration, characters’ attempts to ascertain the contents of newspapers fail.  In one scene from Sense and Sensibility, bored by her mother’s jabber, Lady Middleton “exerted herself to ask Mr. Palmer if there was any news in the paper.  ‘No, none at all,’ he replied, and read on” (SS 125).  Palmer’s rejoinder sounds hyperbolic, but it hits at a truth:  in Austen’s work, there is rarely any useful news in the newspaper. 

This complication is far from unique to Austen and echoes the real-life frustrations of relying on newspapers in the decades before the electronic telegraph.  Despite the eighteenth-century’s ever-expanding networks of people, goods, and information, written messages could still only be carried as far and fast as the people transporting them, be it via foot, carriage, or ship.  For merchants and investors, information about the comings and goings of ships and cargo was precious.  And, while newspapers did carry such information—as well as updates on market fluctuation—Anne L. Murphy explains why no serious investor relied solely upon newspapers for news:  in addition to the logistical challenges of transporting them, “the slow speed at which newspapers were printed and circulated meant that many investors would have found it necessary to seek their information from more direct sources” (114).  Thus, eighteenth-century investors’ “complex information network, . . . may have included newspapers and price currents, but was also created through letters between acquaintances and business contacts, and in face-to-face meetings, most notably via conversations conducted, or overheard, in the Royal Exchange or the coffee houses of London” (114). 

Sense and Sensibility’s narrator playfully alludes to the staleness of newspapers while paraphrasing the Palmers’ birth announcement, pronouncing it “a very interesting and satisfactory paragraph, at least to all those intimate connections who knew it before” (279).  In a moment of sharp irony, news of Mr. Palmer, a man whose nose is always in a newspaper, is already old at the time of publication.  A similar scene plays out in Mansfield Park.  Henry Crawford, hoping to win Fanny’s favor by bringing news of her sailor brother William’s return to England, walks to the manor “with the newspaper in his hand, which he had hoped would bring the first tidings.”  He soon discovers, however, that Fanny has already received “a few hurried happy lines” from her brother (270).  Henry’s reliance on mass-market news has left him at a disadvantage, and this folly demonstrates in miniature the dangers of putting too much value on information gleaned from the papers. 

Mansfield Park also alludes to negative effects that newspapers can have on the immediate awareness of their readers.  Later in the novel, when Henry ventures to Mansfield Park to “thorough[ly] attack” Fanny into accepting his marriage proposal, Edmund serves as chaperone.  Once Fanny’s lone advocate in the household, Edmund now tries to make himself unobtrusive, “[sinking] as quietly as possible into a corner, turn[ing] his back, and [taking] up a newspaper” (395).  In this instance, the newspaper’s function isn’t to provide information, but rather to shield its reader from certain knowledge.2 

The performative reading of newspapers was a trick Austen seems to already have been familiar with.  In 1808, three years before the publication of Sense and Sensibility, she jokes that, during a recent meeting between Cassandra and their brother Edward's brother-in-law Sir Brook Bridges, the latter “could not be really reading, though he held the newspaper in his hand; he was making up his mind to the deed, & the manner of it—I think you will have a letter from him soon” (27–28 December 1808).  Austen imagines the newspaper as a tactic of diversion, a partition between the holder and some uncomfortable task—in this case a looming proposal of marriage. 

In Edmund Bertram’s hands, the newspaper also becomes tacit encouragement of Henry’s unwanted advances and a way to tune out Fanny’s obvious discomfort.  In Northanger Abbey, General Tilney’s newspaper serves a similar purpose.  The patriarch, who has zealously promoted his family and the Northanger estate to Catherine in the hopes of acquiring her presumed inheritance, is shown reading a newspaper while the biggest threat to his project unfolds.  Catherine, distraught at the news that her friend Isabella Thorpe has jilted James Morland for Frederick, the eldest Tilney son, joins the general, Henry, and Eleanor at the breakfast table: 

Catherine could hardly eat any thing.  Tears filled her eyes; and even ran down her cheeks as she sat.  The letter was one moment in her hand, then in her lap, and then in her pocket; and she looked as if she knew not what she did.  The General, between his cocoa and his newspaper, had luckily no leisure for noticing her; but to the other two her distress was equally visible.  (208) 

Though General Tilney doesn’t intentionally use the newspaper to block out Catherine’s distress, his paper functions in the same way as Edmund’s:  it shields him from knowledge and perception, preventing him from recognizing the grief of a female member of his household.  The general’s performative interest in large-scale news—like politics and trade—distracts from domestic conflicts whose effect is visible only feet away.  

This scene at Northanger Abbey and the one heralding William’s letter in Mansfield Park are strikingly similar in both structure and detail.  Each passage encourages the reader to view the letters not as props but as dynamic vehicles of information.  Austen charts the journey of William’s letter, “written as the ship came up Channel, and sent into Portsmouth, with the first boat that left the Antwerp, at anchor, in Spithead” (MP 270).  This sequence gives readers an idea of the physical distance the letter has travelled, while undermining Henry Crawford’s own source, a newspaper.  The implication is that Fanny’s familial connections, even when complicated by the logistics of seafaring and postage, are a more efficient means of receiving information than Henry’s paper, which was “esteemed to have the earliest naval intelligence” (271).  Similarly, in the breakfast scene at Northanger Abbey, Austen’s narrator calls the reader’s attention to the movement of James’s letter, which travels from Catherine’s hand, to her lap, to her pocket.  Once again, the reader is encouraged to view the letter as a mobile object, travelling from one place to the next.  In both scenes, newspapers are only mentioned at the end, after the heroine and reader have received the letter’s information.  Henry’s newspaper becomes an instrument of disappointment, a metaphor for the negligible role he plays in Fanny’s personal life, despite his efforts.  General Tilney’s single-minded focus on his own paper anticipates the disclosure of his naivety in believing John Thorpe’s extravagant lies about Catherine’s inheritance.  General Tilney’s mistake is further underscored by the narrator’s observation that he is the only one at the table who fails to notice Catherine’s distress.  Thus, both scenes dramatize the tension between the era’s two dominant modes of information circulation—the newspaper and the letter—with Austen clearly favoring the latter. 

News exchanged in letters, however, is only supplementary to the novels’ primary drivers of information circulation:  gossipy conversation.  Unlike those written circulating texts, gossip is everywhere in Austen’s novels.  It can exist in every space, every mind.  The company of Miss Bates, “full of trivial communications and harmless gossip,” “exactly suit[s] Mr. Woodhouse” (E 20).  Even the most sensitive conversations can occur in the open, as when, in the drawing room at Barton Park, Elinor Dashwood and Lucy Steele discuss Lucy’s secret engagement to Edward Ferrars.  Although Elinor and Lucy are screened by a nearby game of Casino and Marianne at the pianoforté, “wrapt up in her own music and her own thoughts” of Willoughby, since one of the card players is the nosy Mrs. Jennings, the conversation is risky (SS 166).  Emma’s Mrs. Weston similarly has few qualms with raising sensitive topics in public.  At the Highbury assembly, confessing her suspicion of a Knightley–Jane Fairfax match, she revels in “‘the luxury of a large party,’” where “‘one can get near every body, and say every thing’” (240). 

Though Lucy and Elinor, Mrs. Weston and Emma assume that no one is listening in on these confidential conversations, Austen’s narrators are eavesdropping and passing this information along to readers.  In this way, the relation of information from narrator to reader is subject to the same epistemological contingencies as any other gossip exchange in the texts.  “When information comes by means of gossip,” Spacks observes, “one can hardly avoid noting that it has been filtered through multiple consciousnesses” (9).  Austen’s narrators—distinct from the characters, the reader, and even Austen herself—are quite clearly doing this work.  Like any other gossipy conversation in which a story is being related secondhand, readers are dependent upon the knowledge, perception, and analysis of the narrator.  Carole Berger alludes to this dynamic in her work on what she calls the “problem of judgement,” wherein Austen forces readers into the same interpretive dilemmas as her heroines.  Central to the problem of judgment is availability of information.  The Wickham plot twist, Berger observes, is dependent “on information withheld from the reader” (535).  Pride and Prejudice’s readers are forced to evaluate Wickham using the same information provided to Elizabeth—that is, the story Wickham has given about his own history, as well as the cautions of Jane Bennet, Caroline Bingley, and Mrs. Gardiner.  When Wickham’s duplicity is finally revealed, 

the reader may discover that these improprieties and inconsistencies have also escaped his notice, even though they were available for detection. . . . [T]he reason lies in a rhetoric sufficiently ambiguous to allow for the distortion of our perceptions through bias.  (Berger 537) 

Because all this information was originally relayed to Elizabeth and, via the narrator, to the reader in the form of gossip, these problems of judgment are themselves closely implicated in the novel’s gossip structures, dragging reader and heroine into worsening informational messes.  In other words, the reader is rendered yet another node in the novels’ information networks. 

By implicating the reader in the novels’ gossip structures, Austen naturalizes gossip, presenting it as a complex and critical social structure and allowing it to circulate free from stigma.  This overwhelming emphasis on gossipy conversation leaves little to no room for the big-picture perspectives of newspapers.  In an era in which the dissemination of information is steadily depersonalized and society increasingly segmented, Austen’s insistence upon the unrivalled value of in-person conversation and, more specifically, gossip renders the creation and circulation of news as a way not only to conceptualize Austen’s authorial project but to position her work within its literary and historical contexts.  Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have argued that “the eighteenth-century novel was first and foremost a network novel” in terms of both form and content (311).  Austen’s novels, with their emphasis on expanding webs of people and information, both embody and advance such generic conventions.  Ileana Baird has made a case for reimagining “the eighteenth-century as a networked community rather than a competing one” (4).  This reconceptualization of the eighteenth century opens new windows of inquiry into the period.  Through the novels’ networks, as through the real-life networks of the eighteenth century, flows “a lively public dialogue on a variety of issues of common concern” (Baird 16).  As we’ve seen, in Austen’s work, these “issues of common concern” are overwhelmingly the commonalities of common life:  the return of a loved one after a long separation, the vacation plans of one’s neighbors, the termination of an unwise and hasty engagement.  News items of these happenings run continuously and concurrently, like the many columns of a broadsheet, passed around breakfast tables and tea tables, during spontaneous encounters and weekly calls.  Altogether they create a vibrant and textured world that gestures to the literary and societal innovations of the period while celebrating the neighborhood ties that continue to hold that society together.

NOTES

1Hazel Jones has previously written for Persuasions On-Line about the applications and impacts of the navy list, in both Persuasion and history. 

2“Newspapers figure more centrally in Mansfield Park than in any other novel of Austen’s,” argues Robert Miles. Miles’ article “Mansfield Park and the News” focuses on Austen’s own newspaper reading habits, and the probable content of newspapers circulating within the Bertram household.