Or, why fictional accounts of a real but vanished world please me
Sometime in the late 1980s, after marrying for the first time, I returned to my local vocational college to once again mount an attempt to turn my life around. There had already been radical changes in my life. I had become a Christian. As a consequence of my first conversion I had met the woman who would subsequently become my first wife, married her, and we had set up home together. And as a consequence of marrying into that particular family I had become determined to gain a Degree. Jenny's brother had attended Cambridge University and come away with a Master's degree (as a side note, he had actually only earned a Bachelor's Degree, but at Cambridge they give you a Masters as a kind of complimentary leaving gift). Her sister, Joanne, intended going to University (and subsequently did) while Jenny herself, when I first met her, was in the final stages of a mixed Liberal Arts Degree.
I was damned if I was going to be the only one in that family (beside her mother and father) without one.
I left school at sixteen with a handful of paper 'qualifications' that qualified me to do nothing - least of all attend University. So I went back to school and took courses in English Literature, Maths, History, and Sociology. I scraped passes in Maths, History, and Sociology - and did brilliantly in English Literature. In fact, I did so well in that subject that my tutors had no other expectation than that I would undertake a Degree in that subject. I chose to do otherwise, and went on to gain a First (the equivalent of a 4.0 grade average overall) in Social Science, and from there went to a post-graduate school and gained a Master's in political philosophy.
So much for the backstory. As I said, during my period at vocational school I excelled in the study of English Literature. Of all the books and plays we studied in class, I remember only two: Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park' and Peter Schaffer's wonderful play 'Equus'. And of those two it was Austen's Mansfield Park that had the greatest impact and the longest lasting effect. I've been a devotee of Austen's work ever since. I've read almost all of the known canon of her work: all the major novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Emma), minor works such as Northanger Abbey, the unfinished and little known fragment Sanditon, and some of her juvenilia, written as exercises in the practice of the craft she was later to command with such perfection.
Her command of language is unequalled; her humor is ferociously, blackly sardonic; her ability to create a world in miniature, and make every character inhabiting that world a living, breathing reality, is unrivalled. And as voice from the past that describes a world now as dead and gone as that of the Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt, there is no author that I know of that can in any way be compared to her - except, perhaps, the far less well known Georgette Heyer, who lived long after Austen and wrote about the same period in history as a raconteur of events she could not possibly have witnessed. Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. Heyer was born in 1902 and died in 1974. While they wrote about the same period their styles could not be more different. Heyer was a writer of English Regency romances; Austen was a social commentator whose principal theme was the perversions produced in the lives of the women of her day by the 'Marriage Mart' (as it was then called), a commentator whose writings were in her own day considered fundamentally shocking.
In a poem about Byron, W. H. Auden had this to say of Austen:
You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of 'brass,'
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
Austen was an impoverished 'gentlewoman'. Meaning that she did not belong to that class of persons who were regarded as being rightly, properly, and naturally, servants. Neither was her family old enough, exalted enough, or wealthy enough to be part of the upper reaches of English society at the time. They were respectable but lived on the edge of poverty, and had her family not been able to support her, and she to supplement her family's income through her writing, the only occupation that would have been legitimately available to her was that of Governess to the children of others.
She regarded such a condition with utter horror, not because she was a snob but because she was very much aware of the indignities and horrors to which such a position would have subjected her. The Governess occupied a twilight position in the life of a family. Neither a servant, nor a part of the family, they could be cast adrift and left destitute at a moment's notice. And in a society as dominated by rank and wealth as was 18th century England, to be in such a position, neither one thing nor another, was in itself a form of torment.
A woman who did not marry at all was an object of derision. A woman who did not marry into wealth was subject to all the socio-economic forces we know today - but without having the options open to a woman of today. She could not work outside her home - such a thing was inconceivable. She could, if desperate enough, take in washing and sewing - but the monetary reward for doing so was barely enough to keep body and soul together, and for a gentlewoman to do so would be the occasion for social stigma, and personal shame and disgrace.
Which is why money, and marriage, and the connection between the two, are at the heart of everything she wrote. A new movie version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, was recently released. In consequence of the movie, and the BBC TV series, Pride and Prehudice is perhaps her best known work. While it's a book I've read several times and very much enjoyed, I don't think it's her best work. I prefer Persuasion. Both works deal with the lives of women who live in straitened circumstances while occupying social positions that seperate them from the teeming masses of the servant class and also keep them at the margins of 'good' society; that social strata that was able through either inheritance or commerce to command all the good things of life - including, at that time, social respect. They are liminal beings, caught in the nomansland that is nether sea nor shore.
Which is why, in Pride and Prejudice, so much is made of the income of Mr. D'Arcy and Mr. Bingley, the two principal male characters of the book. The one commands an income of ten thousand pounds a year, the other of five thousands. This sounds like nothing at all today, but in contemporary terms it equates to millions. In the circumstances of the time in which she wrote, D'Arcy was as wealthy as Bill Gates is; and Bingley was not far behind. The woman who married either of them was assured of a life of luxury and ease for herself; and, just as importantly, was able to secure to other members of her family unrivalled connections and opportunities.
To her contemporaries, Austen's dissection of this situation, which was unflinchingly honest and uncompromising, was utterly shocking - precisely because she was a woman and, therefore, supposedly utterly oblivious to such stark realities and content to be dependent upon her male relatives to protect her from the world and to provide for her needs.
In Mansfield Park (the book I first read, and by far and away my favorite) the daughter of the house, herself belonging to a family of real wealth, is confronted by a marriage into greater wealth still - a most advantageous match, as Austen would say. The man in question is however an utter bore, entirely conventional, and unspeakably vain and stupid. He could give to the daughter a life of unparalleled luxury - and unequalled boredom. She goes through with the marriage, convinced that extreme wealth, and the social position and prerogatives it will bring, are compensation enough for any degree of boredom. She finds, too late, that it is not - and absconds with her lover. They are caught, of course. He suffers nothing but the enhancement of his reputation as a Rake. She, on the other hand, is imprisoned for life by her father.
In Sense and Sensibility, the women who form the focus of the book are made subject to the machinations of men whose sole concern is the money they might bring to a marriage, and the expense of keeping them. The Romantic ideals meant to surround and penetrate marriage are utterly exploded by Austen's depiction of marriage as nothing more than a cattle-market, in which the fattest (ie wealthiest) cows are the most sought after, in which every other consideration of love, of compatability, of respect, are utterly disregarded. It's no wonder she shocked her contemporaries and scandalised them: so ruthless is her depiction of the role of money, and so savage her humor.
As a reporter of a world now utterly vanished and gone, as a commentator upon its manners and mores, she is in my opinion unequalled - and much of the fascination with her writing that I feel has to do with entrance into that long dead world, with her ability to make it live. But if that were all there was to her writing she would be an anthropologist, not a writer of novels. And nothing could be further from the truth. Her characters live, breathe, move about, remain in the mind as real presences long after the last page has been turned. And I'm convinced that the greatest of her creations is the inimitable and extraordinary Fanny Price, central character of Mansfield Park. Fanny is not the daughter I referred to earlier. Fanny is yet another of Austen's liminal personalities, belonging neither to the sea of poverty nor to the shore of wealth. She remains indelibly in my mind, as much a real person as anyone else I've ever encountered, and perhaps my favorite fictional character.
Back in the day, when I first studied Mansfield Park, I remember my fellow students regarding Fanny with near universal disdain. What they disliked so intensely was her passivity. Throughout the novel, one of Austen's longest, Fanny doesn't actually do anything. Instead, Fanny is the kind of person who brings things into being by simply being there. Her passivity is the foil to, and the cause of, much of the otherwise frenetic activity of the other characters. It takes awhile for the reader to grasp that her quietness and reticence is not a flaw in her character (a lack of self-confidence, as we would say now) but a deliberate strategy that requires an iron resolve to carry through. Fanny is hopelessly, utterly, absolutely dependent on the good graces of the family that takes her in, to whom she is related through the disastrous marriage of Lady Bertram's sister to a handsome drunkard and wastrel.
She exists in the lap of luxury through the generosity of the Bertrams - and is made to feel that debt at every turn. Her existence depends entirely on her being able to appear as each member of the Bertram family imagines her to be, and the only form of independence she possess is that of imagination and understanding. She is by far Austen's cleverest character. There is a famous sequence in the book in which the Bertrams build an informal theatre in the family home with the intention of staging a scandalous and ribald play. Fanny is asked to play a minor role, a role that no one else wants - and reacts with horror.
Her horror derives from her realisation that she is being required to surrender the integrity of her personality in the impersonation of an odious character; integrity that has been hard won and hard to maintain. On the surface her reaction appears almost hysterical - and it was this 'hysteria' that most aroused my fellow students' disdain. What they failed to grasp, as almost everyone in this day and age fails to grasp, is that actors are liars. We worship them now, actors; but for much of their history actors have been despised as those who lie so convincingly that we believe them to be other than they are. It's not that she is required to lie to others, and in public, that fills her with disgust; but the fact that, in order to impersonate someone she is not successfully, she must lie to herself and believe the lie. An actor who is not convinced of the authenticity of his impersonation is a failure as an actor: and Fanny will not lie to herself. A creature as powerless and out of control of her circumstances as Fanny is, has only one option if she is to find any sense of authenticity and integrity in her own life - through the exercise of enormous and unrelenting self-control. In the play, she is required to abandon that sense and assume, at the capricious will of those to whom she is beholden, an identity she finds odiously repugnant. She refuses, but under the horrendous pressure brought to bear upon her by the family to which she is indebted for everything she has, she wavers - and is saved from herself only at the last moment by the return of Sir Thomas Bertram, paterfamilias and absolute lord of everything that transpires in the Bertram household.
Sir Thomas is mightily pleased by Fanny's resistance to the projected performance, so pleased in fact that he determines to sponsor her marriage to a fashionable and very eligible suitor - a man Fanny regards with the same distrust and repugnance that she regards actors, and for the same reason. She has no proof, but deep in her soul she knows Henry Crawford to be a consummate liar, a liar whose lies serve nothing but the gratification of his lusts. And so it proves, since the wily Henry absconds with Sir Thomas's daughter - but only after a period of wooing Fanny in which her passivity and reserve inspires in Henry a fleeting but genuine desire to be worthy of her. While it is genuine, Henry's passion for Fanny is no more deeply rooted than is the passion of any actor for his leading lady. He never surpasses his role as a man of wealth and fashion and, during an absence which he has undertaken in order to prove the truth and reliability of his regard for Fanny, he once more abandons himself to the only truth he is convinced of, his lust for sexual conquest.
At the deepest level what fascinates me in her writing is what can only be called her perception of character as fate. Her characters never escape themselves, never redeem themselves, never transform into something else. Fanny is perhaps the only one of her characters to realise this. She cannot escape herself; she can, and almost does, betray herself; and, unlike any other of Austen's creations, she turns her fate into virtue through the exercise of conscious will. Though in appearance Fanny is utterly passive, within herself she engages in ferocious struggle always to be true to what she understands as the best in herself.
To a lesser degree, all her heroines engage in this same struggle - just as, I'm certain, Jane herself did. It is this moral struggle always to be true to the best in oneself that informs the very best of her writing. And it is, in the end, the reason that motivates my love for her work.