Jane Austen For Dummies (16 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Although her family remained hopeful because Austen's condition alternated periods of weakness with periods of seeming recuperation, the author, herself, sensed that she was declining. On April 27, 1817, she wrote a will, leaving everything to her sister, except for a legacy of £50 to her bankrupt brother Henry, who'd helped her greatly with the business of getting her manuscripts to publishers, and an equal amount to Henry's housekeeper. She didn't have the will witnessed, probably to keep up the spirits of those close to her. After paying her legatees, funeral costs, and a few small debts, Austen's estate gave Cassandra £561 and change.
Agreeing to the desires of her family, she decided to go to Winchester, 16 miles from Chawton, where Giles King Lyford, a highly respected surgeon at that city's County Hospital, practiced. (Lyford had helped relieve her symptoms earlier.) Accompanied by her sister, Austen traveled to Winchester on May 26, 1817, using James's carriage, while Henry rode on horseback next to it. She would never again see Chawton. Her old Manydown friend, Catherine and Alethea Biggs' big sister, the widowed Elizabeth Bigg Heathcote, lived in Winchester, and arranged for the Austen sisters to live near her at No. 10 College Street. In June, they were joined by James's second wife, Mary (Martha Lloyd's sister), who came to assist Cassandra in her nursing of Jane.
Lyford knew that Austen was beyond help. In early June, Austen's death seemed inevitable, so several of her brothers and James's wife came to be with her in her final moments.
On July 17th, Jane Austen looked the weakest she had ever appeared and slept a lot. When Cassandra asked her if she wanted anything, her sister replied that she wanted only death and asked her sister to pray for her. Lyford came and gave her something to comfort her, causing her to grow completely tranquil by 7:00 p.m. She died peacefully the following morning, July 18th,
her head in the lap of her sister, who closed her eyes.
Writing to her niece Fanny, Cassandra mourned, “I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed,â She was the sun of my life . . . I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself” (Letter, July 20, 1817).
At the time of her death, with an illness that manifested symptoms for more than a year, Austen would've been thought to have died from “a slow decline” â the vague phrase that newspapers used to identify a drawn-out, undiagnosed illness. (A death from a brief undiagnosed illness was called “a rapid decline.”) But history has identified a cause â doctors and scholars agree that Austen likely died from Addison's disease, a malfunction of the adrenal glands, which affects every tissue and organ in the body.
Winchester, home to the historic Winchester Cathedral, was, in Austen's day, the major city in her native borough or county of Hampshire. Because of her family's Hampshire clerical connections, she was laid to rest in the north aisle of the Cathedral's nave on the morning of Thursday, July 24th.
Since the 19th century, Jane Austen's tomb has been a shrine â a pilgrimage site for visitors to Winchester Cathedral. But when they come to her tomb and look down to the stone floor to read the epitaph engraved in bronze covering her resting place, they read only of her Christian virtues and goodness. The reason for their visiting her grave is missing: The epitaph says nothing of her writing novels. Only after 1870 did a brass memorial tablet appear on the north wall of the nave, near Jane Austen's grave, telling the viewer that “JANE AUSTEN, known to many by her writings” is “buried in this Cathedral.” Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh had the tablet placed in the Cathedral, using the profits of his
Memoir
of his aunt to pay for it.
In 1900, a public fundraiser provided a memorial stained-glass window with St. Augustine, whose abbreviated name is Austin (with an i), at the head; David plays the harp in the top center; St. John holds a Bible opened to his Gospel in Latin at the center of the bottom. Other figures in the window carry scrolls that have quotations from Psalms. All of these figures represent Jane Austen's religious character. A Latin inscription reads (in English translation): “Remember in the Lord Jane Austen, who died 18 July, A.D. 1817.”
Henry Austen prepared obituaries for the press, acknowledging his sister as the author she was. As her literary executor, he also prepared for the press
Susan,
on which his sister had clearly worked since its original completion. After seeing an anonymous novel called
Susan
out in 1809, Austen changed her heroine's name to Catherine. Henry must've changed the title to
Northanger Abbey.
Likewise, he probably changed
The Elliots
to
Persuasion,
and indeed, both the word “persuade” in various forms and the concept of persuading are strikingly evident in the novel. The two novels, her first completed work and her final completed work, appeared as a two-volume set on December 17 (the day after her birthday), 1817, published by John Murray. Henry's “Biographical Notice” prefaced the novels and identified the author as Jane Austen. It sold briskly.
Cassandra returned to Chawton Cottage and cared for her mother. After Mrs. Austen's death, Cassandra visited her brothers and their children, also inviting them to visit her at the Cottage. To Cassandra we owe most of the information existing about her sister, for she made sure that her nieces and nephews learned about their aunt. But to Cassandra we also owe the loss of much information. For before her death, she burned possibly 3,500 letters written by her sister. Deirdre Le Faye, the world's expert on Austen's letters, suggests that the destroyed letters were full of information Cassandra deemed too personal for others to read.
Inspiring the Aspiring Novelist
In This Chapter
Coming from a family of readers
Citing drama as a source of education
Understanding the influences on Austen
W
riters may well be born. But they're also certainly made. As Dr. Johnson, Jane Austen's favorite moralist said, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Fortunately, Jane Austen grew up in a family of enthusiastic readers of all kinds of literature: histories, biographies, newspapers, plays, poems, and novels. While the novel genre was still new (and therefore lacking critical stature that poetry and drama had) when Austen was growing up, Austen observed that her family was a group of enthusiastic readers of novels and “not ashamed of being so” (Letter, December 18â19, 1798).
Being inspired to write by what one has read is a frequent occurrence. Original creativity is also a great part of a novelist's craft. So, too, is observational power, especially for a novelist like Austen, who focused on the world in which she lived and wrote realistically about people and events that were familiar to her contemporaries. Not that the Meryton Assembly (a public ball) in
Pride and Prejudice
is a replica of the Basingstoke Assemblies that Austen, herself, attended and where she danced many an evening. But she knew the manners and customs of assemblies and the ladies and gentlemen who attended them. This chapter suggests some of the writers, people, and events that inspired Jane Austen.
Probably the most intriguing part of Austen's comment about being part of a family of novel readers is her adding that they're “not ashamed of being so.” Ashamed of reading novels? Actually, yes, some people were at the time she wrote that letter. The novel was still a new form of literature. Poetry and drama had been around since the Ancient Greeks and Romans. But as explained in Chapter 2, the British novel was conceived and developed in the 18th century. And so under the leadership of Jane's father, the Austens were a progressive and sophisticated group in terms of their literary tastes because they read and enjoyed novels. (For details on the early novel, see Chapter 2.)
As the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, Austen read the Bible in the King James Version and
The Book of Common Prayer
of the Church of England. These books were practically required reading for all young people of the gentry class (particularly if your father was a clergyman). Austen doesn't quote Scripture in her novels; as Chapter 13 explains, she was quiet about religion in her personal life, but as someone who read her
Prayer Book
regularly, she absorbed its writing style. A keynote of that style is the repetition of words and/or phrases or the gradual escalating of words and/or phrases for rhetorical effect. (Rhetoric means the effective use of language.)
Austen knew how effective rhetorical repetition could be, when used for both serious and comic effects. For the former effect in a scene in
Mansfield Park,
she writes in nearly consecutive phrases that escalate in intensity, separated only by six lines. Speaking of Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, she says: “Edmund proposed, urged, entreated it â ” and then “. . . she could not, would not, dared not attempt it” (MP 1:18). This is the style of repetition one hears in “The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper, or Holy Communion in the 1662 version of
The Book of Common Prayer,
which is the edition Austen would've owned and known intimately.
It may seem jumpy to move from religious prose to secular prose. But in the case of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1745â1789), the jump is appropriate because he was Austen's favorite moralist and a great influence on her prose. Literature's Age of Sensibility, which is discussed later in this chapter, is also known as the Age of Johnson because he was the dominant literary figure of the period. Dr. Johnson was a complete realist. He fought hard for self-knowledge and believed everyone should do the same. The greatest danger, he felt, was filling one's mind with illusions. A devout Christian with deep faith in God, he also championed reason, believing that thinking reasonably meant thinking morally. Turn to Austen and she, too, emphasizes self-knowledge and reason. Those who dwell in illusion (like Marianne, Elizabeth, and Emma do for some time in their respective novels) find themselves misled and must, instead, come to know themselves, even if it causes anguish. His prose style can also be compared to the
Prayer Book
's balanced and parallel phrases and sentences. So Austen inherited her phrasing from both the
Prayer Book
and Johnson's secular writing, demonstrated in such works as his
Rambler
essays and short fictional piece,
Rasselas,
all of which she read repeatedly and absorbed.
In the evenings when Mr. Austen or other family members read aloud to the others, they often read Shakespeare. In
Mansfield Park
(3:3), Fanny reads
Henry the VIII
aloud to Lady Bertram, who later tells Henry Crawford, who takes over the reading and reads with great dramatic effect, that Fanny “âoften reads to me out of those books'” â those books being either a collection of Shakespeare's plays or plays by Shakespeare and other hands. As Henry Crawford states in the same chapter, Shakespeare “âis part of An Englishman's constitution.'”
Austen's earliest use of Shakespeare cites him as a source in her mock
History of England,
written when she was about 16, showing she had his work at her fingertips. But while Austen, as an Englishwoman, had Shakespeare in her constitution, her writing doesn't overflow with direct references to his plays. In fact, when she does cite Shakespeare in her novels, it's in a more subtle way. For example,
Mansfield Park
is thought to be her most “Shakespearean” novel. In this novel, Henry Crawford reads
Henry the VIII
to Fanny and Lady Bertram with great dramatic effect (MP 3:3). The play was a good choice for Henry Crawford's reading, for like Henry the VIII with his six wives, Henry Crawford has real trouble being constant to one woman. References to Shakespeare appear here and there in her novels, including
Julius Caesar
in
Mansfield Park
(1:13),
A Midsummer Night's Dream
in
Emma
(1:9), and
Romeo and Juliet
in
Sense and Sensibility
(1:12).
Shakespeare's chief influence on Austen is seen in her ability to capture human nature in the way Shakespeare does, as well as in the dramatic character of her writing (that is, presenting her plot largely through characters' talking, through dialogue). These characteristics have traditionally led critics and readers alike to view Shakespeare and Austen together. Indeed, Shakespeare and Austen are two of England's greatest literary exports and symbols of “Englishness.” (For more on Austen's “Shakespearean” quality, see Chapter 1.)
The second great English classic writer whom Austen read was John Milton â the superb mid-17th-century poet. His most famous work is the epic poem
Paradise Lost.
This book-length poem imaginatively renders the creation of the earth and Adam and Eve, life in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve's fall, and their expulsion from Paradise. Milton's goal in the epic was to “justify the ways of God to man.” While Austen's literary aims weren't nearly so high, she uses Milton's epic in her work in varied ways.
If
Mansfield Park
is Austen's most Shakespearean novel, it is also her most Miltonic. Once again, Henry Crawford first brings up Milton by deliberately putting the accent on the wrong word in a line from
Paradise Lost.
Protesting his sister's efforts at marrying him off to one of the Bertram sisters, Henry quotes
Paradise Lost
and calls marriage “âHeavens
last
best gift'” (MP 5:19). In the line's original context, Adam awakens to find the newly created Eve and calls her “Heav'n's last best gift,” with the implied accent on the word “best.” It is even possible to think of Henry as
Mansfield Park
's serpent, tempting both Bertram sisters and attempting to tempt Fanny.
A Miltonic temptation motif also underlies many of Austen's books. Consider
Northanger Abbey:
Frederick Tilney tempts Isabella Thorpe, who loses the innocent James Morland because of succumbing to the temptation of Frederick's money and future as an elder son who is in line to inherit substantial property. Catherine Morland succumbs to the temptation of thinking that a Gothic mystery and murder occurred at the Abbey. She's ejected from the Abbey paradise because General Tilney falls for the lies of John Thorpe.
Jane Austen's eldest brother James enjoyed producing plays or “theatricals” in the Austens' barn or dining room when he was home from the university for the holidays in the 1780's. The Austen family, and occasionally some of the boys who boarded at the Steventon Rectory as Mr. Austen's students, assumed roles. The family probably acted Shakespeare, or at least read his plays aloud, and often turned to recent plays for their productions, some of which are listed next:
The Rivals:
They performed Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy
The Rivals
in the summer of 1784, when Jane was 9 years old. Though young when she saw it at home, aspects of this still wonderfully humorous, laugh-filled play must have stayed with her. Satirizing 18th-century sentimentality,
The Rivals
is a comedy of manners, a realistic presentation of the customs and fashions of the day, usually in a satirical way. The hero and heroine frequently engage in witty repartee, and the satire is typically aimed at would-be wits and dandies.
The Way of the World:
Another famous comedy of manners from an earlier time (1700) that Austen must have known is William Congreve's brilliant
The Way of the World.
The hero and heroine, Mirabell and Millamant, engage in clever conversation in which one sometimes
caps
(completes or surpasses) the other's remark in the vein of Elizabeth and Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice.
The WonderâA Woman Keeps A Secret:
Over the Christmas holidays of 1787, the Austens acted this comedy by Susanna Centlivre, dating back to 1714, as well as David Garrick's (1717â1789, the greatest actor in 18th-century England) adaptation of John Fletcher's
The Chances.
Both comedies deal with ladies and gentlemen in love and the jealousy love can prompt.
The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great:
Tom Thumb
was Austen's last major production, performed in spring, 1788. More famous today
as the novelist who wrote
Tom Jones,
Henry Fielding was also a playwright, and this is his most famous and brilliant farce: A farce is a comedy that arouses laughter from ridiculously improbable situations and coincidences, slapstick humor, and coarse jokes.
Tom Thumb
(1730) satirizes both the linguistic absurdity (pompous dialogue) of the previous century's “heroic” drama and the “greatness” of courtly life. Fielding's play, complete with the villainous parents and thwarted lovers typical of heroic drama, concludes with the characters ludicrously killing each other off. Just picture 13-year-old Jane laughing hysterically at such nonsense!
“Heroic” drama, usually in the form of tragedies, appeared on the British stage from around 1660 to the end of the 17th century. Known for its elaborate scenery and grandiose language used to express extravagant emotions, as well as the character types mentioned in the previous paragraph, heroic drama was easy for Fielding to parody and mock.
As both a viewer and reader of plays, Austen learned a great deal that she would apply to her fiction writing. The next section considers how she applied what she learned from drama to her writing.
Just as in a play, where the audience doesn't have a narrator to tell them about characters and so learns about characters from what they say and how they say it, Austen lets characters tell about themselves. In turn, you assess the characters as you read what they say.
Consider how Austen presents Wickham, along with Elizabeth's initial response to him, in
Pride and Prejudice:
He appears shortly after the hero-to-be, Darcy, has behaved badly to Elizabeth Bennet and hurt her pride, causing her to form a prejudice against him. Into her life comes Wickham: handsome, charming, and an old acquaintance of Darcy. Having been insulted by Darcy, Elizabeth is flattered by Wickham. Because Darcy refused to dance with Elizabeth at the Meryton Assembly, claiming she was not pretty enough, Wickham chooses to sit with Elizabeth at her Aunt Phillips's supper party (PP 1:16). Five points for Wickham! Elizabeth sees that the other young ladies in the room desire Wickham to choose them, but he has selected her. She goes from being rejected to being preferred. Elizabeth had earlier seen Darcy and Wickham barely acknowledge each other on the street â and Austen shows what a great writer she is by observing that “Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red” (PP 1:15). And so Elizabeth, having witnessed this little scene, is curious about the men's relationship.
Wickham quickly obliges by asking her how long Darcy has been in town. Answering him, she lets her negative feelings about Darcy surface when she says, “âI think him very disagreeable.'” This is all Wickham needs to hear â though first-time readers don't know why. He says, “âI have no right to give
my
opinion . . . as to his being agreeable or not . . . I have known him too long . . . It is impossible for
me
to be impartial.” But he soon goes into a long (and it turns out, false) story about how Darcy has mistreated him. Having picked up on Elizabeth's animosity toward Darcy, Wickham feeds her prejudice against him and gains her favor. The clever Elizabeth Bennet (and frequently even the clever reader who has witnessed Darcy's earlier poor behavior toward Elizabeth) falls for Wickham's story of being misused and abused by Darcy. Oblivious to Wickham's prefacing it by saying that he wouldn't give his opinion of Darcy, Elizabeth proceeds down a path of misinformation until, learning the truth, she berates herself, saying, “âHow despicably I have acted! . . . I who have prided myself on my discernment! . . . How humiliating is this discovery! . . . Till this moment, I never knew myself'” (PP 2:13).
As readers of the page, you see Austen's characters on the stage of your imagination; you listen to their words and watch their behaviors in an effort to understand them. You discover the truth about the characters as the other characters do. Austen usually doesn't have to narrate the facts about them. She shows her readers the characters and lets you hear them in dialogue.
A good playwright knows how to bring characters onto the stage. Austen does, too. Having Darcy and Wickham reunite in a chance meeting on the street is an effective way to bring them together in front of the other characters. Their cool greeting indicates that something has happened between them in the past, but Austen can hold back her hand and arouse interest because meeting as they do in public, neither raises the past with the other. Indeed, in
Pride and Prejudice,
Austen brings four strangers into town â Darcy, Bingley, Wickham, and Collins â and each will in some way upset the equilibrium. Give each of the men a cowboy hat, and you'd have the setting for the conflict in a western movie!
Another great entrance occurs in
Sense and Sensibility
in the way she brings Willoughby into Marianne's life. A reader of romances and a young woman of excessive feeling, Marianne wants to meet the man of her dreams. She goes walking up a hill, ignoring the warnings of imminent rain. When the sky begins to pour, Marianne runs down the hill and slips on the mud, twisting her ankle. And there, in the mist, hunting, with his dogs and gun, appears Willoughby, handsome and strong, ready to rescue Marianne from the rain and mud and carry her home. The fairy-tale entrance of Willoughby turns him into Marianne's prince charming: From her reading, she was ready for him, and with the accident, he had the perfect opportunity to enter as her hero. This incident makes Marianne only more vulnerable to his charm and to the pain he will inflict by later rejecting her for the very un-heroic reason of wanting more money.
My two personal favorite entrances occur in
Mansfield Park:
The first occurs when the young Bertrams and their friends are about to start the full rehearsal of their play. With the unexpected absence of Mrs. Grant, they've pressured Fanny to act. Though highly reluctant, she finally agrees to read Mrs. Grant's part. But as they're about to begin, Julia Bertram, who isn't in the play, comes rushing in to announce, “âMy father is come! He is in the hall at this moment'” (MP 1:18). Sir Thomas has been overseas in Antigua, and he will neither approve the play they've chosen nor like what they've have done to his house. But more important, Fanny is unexpectedly saved from acting.
The second great entrance in
Mansfield Park
occurs moments after Sir Thomas's arrival home. The “actors” have used Sir Thomas's “dear room” â probably his study â and the connecting billiard room for their green room and theater. Finally home after his long time in the West Indies, Sir Thomas desires to see “his own dear room” (MP 2:1). Hearing someone “almost hallooing” in the billiard room, he immediately enters, finds himself on a stage, and is almost knocked backwards by “a ranting young man” (Mr. Yates), who's still practicing his role and in so doing gives “the very best start he had ever given in the whole course of his rehearsals.”
Ranting and starting were familiar acting styles of the day. As opposed to natural acting, acting in the 18th-century was so highly mannered that it would look preposterous today. Actors ranted or declaimed their lines with real extravagance as they “started”: gestured with their hands extended forward, the right to affirm, the left to negate. Thus, Mr. Yates starts and nearly knocks Sir Thomas off the stage when he unexpectedly interrupts Yates's rehearsing.