Jane Austen For Dummies (18 page)

While Richardson was Austen's favorite novelist, we can also conclude that she knew Fielding's
Tom Jones
(1749) very well. In her first collected letter, she mentions that Tom Lefroy, with whom she has been dancing, is “a very great admirer of
Tom Jones,
and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which
he
did when he was wounded” (January 9–10, 1797). To remember the color of Tom Jones's coat means Austen read and certainly re-read the book with care. Fielding was also the author of the comical play
The Tragedies of Tragedies; or, The Life of Tom Thumb the Great,
which the Austens performed in 1788, and which may well have inspired her style of ridiculing sentimental novels as discussed earlier in this chapter.

Educated at Eton and then at the University of Leyden (Holland), Fielding had a far more extensive acquaintance with the world than Richardson did. His first novel was actually a parody and satire of
Pamela
called
Shamela,
which proposes that Shamela is actually an artful manipulator of men, out to snare Mr. B. by holding back, rather than protecting her virtue for the sake of her honor and moral good. His later novels,
Joseph Andrews
(another swipe at
Pamela,
as Joseph is Pamela's virtuous brother!) and
Tom Jones,
take his characters all over England, where they meet all kinds of people. Dr. Johnson said of Fielding that he wrote characters of manners — characters that can be understood by a more superficial observer — as opposed to Richardson's characters of nature, whose psychology we come to understand. While Fielding's characters are shown with less depth than Richardson's, Fielding more fully surveys the world around him and comments upon the follies and vices of society, which he satirizes. Among his many contributions to novel's formation, Fielding brought society at its broadest into its pages.

Fielding wrote as a man of the world: Young Tom Jones has numerous sexual encounters with all types of women, from the good-natured country girl to the dangerous sophisticate in London he meets on his travels. Tom meets fine gentlemen, drunken squires, country poachers, and city thugs. His journey teaches him a major lesson: the need for prudence. While Austen's characters have less worldly experiences than Tom Jones — after all, as Chapter 1 stressed, Austen wrote as a “Lady” — she, too, sets her heroines on journeys through which they learn more about themselves and the society in which they live. Even Austen's least-traveled heroine, Emma, reaches both sexual maturity and mature self-knowledge by the conclusion of he novel. Also in the tradition of Fielding, Austen criticized what she thought needed correction: vanity (
Pride and Prejudice
's Lady Catherine, Mr. Collins, and Miss Bingley), greed (
Northanger Abbey
's General Tilney and
Sense and Sensibility
's Lucy Steele), and human cruelty (
Mansfield Park
's Aunt Norris), to name a few traits and characters. But while Fielding painted with a broad brush, Austen painted with a fine one.

If Richardson showed in
Pamela
and
Clarissa
that the thoughts and feelings of young women were important, albeit in extreme circumstances (Pamela fears rape and Clarissa is raped), Fanny Burney in her three most famous novels,
Cecilia
(1782),
Camilla
(1796), and
Evelina
(1778),
brought to the novel the experiences of young women of contemporary society in realistic circumstances involving interpersonal relationships with family members and friends. In each of the novels mentioned, Burney presents the experiences of intelligent young women entering the world of society. In so doing, Burney brought the comedy of manners — in which Austen would excel — from the stages of the theaters to the pages of the novel. Moreover, she made novel writing for women respectable.

Austen actually took the phrase
Pride and Prejudice
from the final chapter of
Cecilia,
where the phrase appears three times in capital letters on one page.

Critics have studied
Cecilia
's specific influence on
Pride and Prejudice.
Burney's
Camilla
was published by subscription, meaning the publisher would issue a prospectus for a book and people would sign up to buy the book, sometimes putting money down. In this way, the publisher had a good idea of who was buying the book and how many would be sold. Among the subscribers to
Camilla
(and there were many, including some of the most famous names in England) was “Miss. J. Austen, Steventon,” who at the time would have been 20 years old. Turning again to literary critics who look at “intertextuality” — a fancy way of saying how one book influences another — I note that they see
Camilla
's influence on
Sense and Sensibility,
as
Camilla
involves two sisters in their courting days, and Camilla's suitor is Edgar, while Elinor's is Edward. That Austen admired the novel is clear from her commenting in a letter about an acquaintance whose two most pleasing traits were not putting cream in her tea and liking
Camilla
(Letter, September 15–16, 1796).

Jane Austen said that she never modeled a character on a real person. But as an astute observer of people, she occasionally found a personality trait here and there to flesh out a fictional character.