Happy birthday, Jane Austen.
I know several otherwise well-read people who refuse to read her. They think romance beneath them, have no patience for the sorrows and desires of English landowners in the 19th century, no interest in young women’s frocks and parties.
I’ve also taught students who come to Austen, born on December 16th, 1775, with glee. Here, at last, amid 18-century literary theory and poetry, is something they might read for fun, Cinderella stories and hot men with big houses.
[ ‘Badly done, Emma!’ Jane Austen needed only a picnic to torment her readersOpens in new window ]
I let them down gently, because at least the early Austen can be read that way, if you’re adamantly literal-minded and don’t look too hard. I’ve always loved the final chapter of Northanger Abbey, which is a book about reading much more than it’s a book about love. The ending, far from providing a big white dress and happiness ever after, is outrageously casual, interrupted by addresses to “my readers, who will see in the compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening to perfect felicity” – ie, you know from the paper consumption that we have to have a wedding now.
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Austen’s later novels are less obviously satirical, but she’s always undermining the form of the romantic novel. Her heroines’ closest and most sustaining relationships are with their sisters and best friends. They must marry because otherwise they are at risk of falling through the net of patriarchal society. In Pride and Prejudice the Bennet sisters’ family assets will pass to a male relative on their father’s death. In Sense and Sensibility the Dashwood sisters and their mother have to move across England when their brother, inheriting all assets from their father, wants the family home for his new wife. Fanny in Mansfield Park and Anne in Persuasion are unwanted daughters, liabilities to their fathers and drains on resources who can never be grateful enough for bed and board. Emma seems like the only exception, but she too must be constantly attending to a self-centred father whose weak-mindedness is no barrier to the absolute control of land and livelihoods.
[ Attention, men: Books are sexy, but staring into a phone is notOpens in new window ]
Mrs Bennet, the money-minded figure of fun in Pride and Prejudice, sees far more clearly than her romantically-inclined daughters. If they don’t marry, and marry well, they are at risk of destitution. If they took jobs, or were trained to take jobs, they would become unmarriageable. The servants can always take their labour elsewhere for more pay or better conditions, but the wives and daughters are trapped and dependent.
Pride and Prejudice is most often read as a romantic comedy, partly because of the many TV adaptations and the two-century fashion for a Byronic hero, but if you read the book you’ll see that Elizabeth begins to love Darcy when she sees his house. (Anyone might fall in love with Chatsworth.) It is his reference from his housekeeper that seals the deal: “he is affable to the poor ... the best landlord and the best master that ever lived.”
Kindness is naturally an attractive quality but Elizabeth already knows that however he may approach “the poor”, Darcy is rude and supercilious in the drawingroom. In beginning to love him here, she aligns herself with those who know him as a “master”, and Austen shows that she’s correct in doing so. Elizabeth will have no power and little agency as Darcy’s wife, but she will have a nice house and financial security.
We have to read against the grain of Austen’s prose to believe in any of her romances. Emma Woodhouse and Marianne Dashwood, both lively teenaged girls, marry didactic middle-aged men. Fanny Price’s Edmund is really in love with a more glamorous and less virtuous woman. Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennet get men who might at best be described as strong and silent but whom the reader experiences as moody, arrogant and wealthy.
The point is that these are happy endings, under the circumstances. Think, if you’re an Austen reader, of Charlotte Lucas, who “sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage” in marrying the odious William Collins. Charlotte, getting on in life and bullied by her father, says “I am not romantic ... I ask only a comfortable home”. And when Elizabeth visits her later, she finds a woman pragmatic in arranging to meet her own needs while minimising time with her annoying husband, and undoubtedly better off than she was as an unmarried daughter.
Austen’s work is serious in its cynicism, comic in observation. For her heroines, sisterhood is love and heterosexuality is more like work.
