JUVENILIA

VOLUME THE FIRST, VOLUME THE SECOND, VOLUME THE THIRD

Jane Austen's first literary efforts date from 1787, when she was almost twelve years old, and continue until 1793 or so, when she was nearly eighteen. Two of the juvenile works that bear commentary in their own right—Love and Freindship [sic] and Sir Charles Grandison—are discussed below. One other, The History of England, is a minor masterpiece of a sort, compressing centuries of English history into an uproarious synopsis of monarchs and their foibles. Other early writings, such as Lady Susan and The Watsons, more properly belong to Austen's minor works and are discussed in that section.

Austen divided her earliest works into three volumes and made fair copies of them. She continued to correct and revise these volumes until 1809. She never intended to publish them—they were strictly written for family and private amusement—but she kept them in good order. As Austen's extant letters date only from 1796, these volumes are the earliest surviving Austen writings, and they contain twenty‐seven separate items.

In themselves, most of Austen's juvenile writings are slight literary games, fascinating for their window into her stylistic and thematic development and often quite funny, but certainly not masterpieces. For Austen students, however, this work reveals Austen's comprehensive knowledge of eighteenth‐century prose traditions, her interest in the nature of women's voices in eighteenth‐century narrative, and her sense of how those traditions and voices might be recast. The most common narrative device she used for this work is that of presenting a series of letters. The juvenilia mimic and puncture the conventions of the popular sentimental fiction of the decades that preceded them, and rework some of those conventions in what are Austen's earliest experiments with narrative presence and narrative voice.

Some of the juvenile pieces are brief anecdotes, while others are more extended burlesques. Many are mere fragments and remain static, and others begin in midstream. There is a tough mind at work here, as Austen shows little mercy to the targets of her satire. As with her later fiction, she attacks vanity and hypocrisy and ridicules superficiality and self‐importance. The attacks are real, but so is the sense of mischief that softens them. Austen's subject matter ranges from the decoration of a new carriage to murder, adultery, tea, fainting fits, letter‐writing, shoes and bonnets, and the trappings of domestic civility. She practices deploying various rhetorical modes and moral stances, and hones her command of language and ironic wit.

LOVE AND FREINDSHIP

Love and Freindship (this was Austen's spelling) is the best known of Austen's juvenile writings, and the earliest whose transcript bears a date (13 June 1790). She was not yet fifteen when she wrote it, and it is an extended joke on epistolary form and on sentimental fiction. Already in this early work, Austen demonstrates a literary sophistication capable of dissecting both the forms of storytelling and the inherent absurdity of popular sentimental themes. Most comic epistolary intrigues depend upon a continuous revisionism: Each letter corrects, amends, interprets, or contradicts the perceptions gathered in the letter before it. Love and Freindship, however, opens with a jab at the conventional apologies that had been synonymous with epistolary novels, undercutting the immediacy of “writing to the moment” that Samuel Richardson had claimed for the form, in which the heroine traditionally fends off unwanted suitors with one hand while writing frantically, and often in the present tense, with the other.

The subject of this hilarious burlesque is “[a] sensibility too tremblingly alive” and the moral is “beware of fainting fits.… Beware of swoons.”¹ The story revolves around exaggerated outbursts of emotion, or rather, around the collected, objective, retrospective description of such outbursts, as “Sophia shrieked & fainted on the Ground—I screamed and instantly ran mad—. We remained thus mutually deprived of our Senses some minutes, & on regaining them were deprived of them again—” (p. 99). The humor derives not so much from the instantaneous swooning depicted, which would be merely silly in a third‐person narrative, as from the absurdity of a retrospective account of such behavior. The epistolary framework of the story gives it a direct address that claims an utter lack of self‐consciousness: “It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself—We fainted alternately on a Sofa” (p. 86).

Austen parodies her heroines' hothouse sensibilities by overemphasis as well as by a near‐maniacal linguistic skewering of the conventional gestures of sentimentalism in the eighteenth‐century novel. Laura's and Sophia's fainting fits also serve as an ironic commentary on the decorative role of women. These heroines manipulate and exaggerate the outward appearance of frailty in order to gain power over others. The heroines' helplessness is a façade, much like the epistolary form in which it is couched. As fainting suggests female frailty and invalidism, so the letter promises an authentic intimacy and confidentiality that it does not deliver.

SIR CHARLES GRANDISON

Sir Charles Grandison or The Happy Man, billed as “A comedy in Five Acts,” is a slight dramatic work and the only play of any length that Jane Austen wrote. It is based on Samuel Richardson's seven‐volume novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1753 and 1754. The manuscript remained in the family of Austen's oldest brother, James, and was commonly thought to have been the work of James's oldest daughter, Anna Austen Lefroy, but it is in Jane Austen's hand. The manuscript's existence was not widely known outside the Austen family until it emerged in 1977, stunningly, as a “new” work by Jane Austen. Critical consensus now makes it part of the Austen canon, and Brian Southam published a scholarly edition in 1980, with a Foreword by Lord David Cecil.²

Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is not as well known as his earlier novels, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), and remains virtually unread. But it was the favorite Richardson novel of the Austen family. Southam refers to the book's “chilling reputation for long‐windedness and tedium, and its unstomachably perfect hero.” Grandison represents exemplary goodness as a Christian virtue, and is “a paragon of gentle gentlemanliness, of English virtues and Christian benevolence, Chaucer's ‘verray parfit gentil knight’ translated into the mid‐Augustan chivalry of domestic honour, social cultivation, and the errantry of good works.”³ Given the perfection of his hero, it is no wonder that the Austen family found Richardson's novel ripe for burlesque treatment in a family theatrical performance.

Austen's Sir Charles Grandison belongs with her earlier, slight juvenile work; it is, essentially, an extended joke. There are amusing moments for an Austen reader. Sir Hargrave Pollexfen announces, “I wish women were not quite so delicate, with all their faints and fits!” (p. 42). Charlotte Grandison, Sir Charles's willful sister, presents the satirical view to the heroine, “There is something monstrous frightful, to be sure, my dear Harriet, in marrying a man that one likes” (p. 55). On the whole, however, Austen's Sir Charles Grandison cannot compete for stylistic mastery or ironic meaning with the more accomplished of her early work such as Love and Freindship [sic].

THE SIX MAJOR NOVELS

NORTHANGER ABBEY

The plot of Northanger Abbey uses a device standard to many eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century novels: A young woman is either bereft of parental, and especially maternal, guidance, or she finds herself in a situation where this guidance is unavailable to her, or she is given parental figures who are unable or unwilling to provide guidance. Thus the heroine is left on her own to form judgments, make decisions, and forge her way in the world. Catherine Morland's childhood is unexceptional, and her key characteristic is an addiction to reading gothic romances, especially those of Ann Radcliffe.⁴ At first glance, she does not appear to embody the usual trappings of a heroine, as the novel's first sentence points out: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.”⁵

Catherine visits Bath under the chaperonage of the Allens, kind but rather ineffectual people, so she is separated from her family and set more or less on her own. In Bath, Catherine forms a friendship with the vapid Isabella Thorpe, and she meets the Tilney siblings, Henry and Eleanor, when Henry arranges to be introduced to her and asks her to dance. She forms an attachment to Henry without fully understanding her own mind. In contrast to the manipulative and self‐interested Thorpes, the Tilneys represent good breeding and good family, as well as landed wealth. John Thorpe, Isabella's brother, is pushy, self‐absorbed, and boorish. The Thorpes incorrectly believe the Morlands to be wealthy, and Isabella sets out to capture Catherine's brother James. John pursues Catherine, who is too naïve and blind to social nuances and expectations to realize what he is about. The jealous John Thorpe thwarts Catherine's growing intimacy with the Tilney family.

The central action of Northanger Abbey concerns Catherine's four‐week visit to the house of the title's name, the home of the Tilneys. There she receives her education, in the form of disenchantment from the illusions and fantasies she has harbored about Gothic buildings and the secrets they might hold. Each time she wanders into a corridor or room expecting darkness and cobwebs, she finds light and space. Having talked herself into and out of various sinister surmises and suspicions, including the notion that General Tilney had mistreated his wife, Henry finally sets her right with a famous speech.

Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understaning, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetuated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open?

(Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, pp. 197‐98)

Catherine retreats from this speech with tears of shame: “The visions of romance were over” (p. 199).

Yet, having been humbled by the absurdity of imagining General Tilney a murderer and Montoni‐like villain, she misses something more plausible but equally sinister. When General Tilney learns that she has no wealth or portion and believes that she has imposed upon his family, he treats her with real cruelty by abruptly sending her away to travel seventy miles alone by post, and without understanding her offense. When she finally learns the truth, it appears that “in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty” (p. 247).

Catherine returns to Fullerton after an absence of eleven weeks, and the narrator gives us an ironic picture of this homecoming to an ordinary country village. Her parents and siblings, who join her in the realization that General Tilney has been inhospitable and dishonorable, greet Catherine warmly. Her heart has been broken and her illusions shattered because of money. Throughout this novel, Austen offers detailed discussions of estates and expectations in the form of raw numbers. In Northanger Abbey, more than in Austen's later novels where economic foundations are equally present, the reader learns the details of exactly how much wealth each character commands.

But, of course, Northanger Abbey is a comedy of manners and must end happily with the settling of the hero and heroine into a marital bliss approved by both their families, and such does occur in due course. Henry breaks faith with his father in a quarrel and follows Catherine home, where he behaves very much like an Austen hero, making his professions of love without the narrative quoting him directly: “his first purpose was to explain himself, and before they reached Mr. Allen's grounds he had done it so well, that Catherine did not think it could ever be repeated too often” (p. 243). Among the earliest of Austen's six major novels in composition date, Northanger Abbey is also the lightest. A comedy of manners like the other novels, Northanger Abbey at the same time parodies the popular genre of the Gothic romance with which the protagonists are so enamored, and whose heroines Henry Tilney refers to as “Julias and Louisa” (p. 107). At the same time that she makes fun of this sensational, hothouse genre (while extolling the virtues of engrossing fictional entertainments and giving Ann Radcliffe her due as a skillful and imaginative storyteller), Austen also portrays her main character as wanting the life of a romance heroine while actually being a thoroughly ordinary young bourgeois woman with a good heart, very little experience or psychological insight, and a tendency to occasional lapses of rational judgment. Well‐educated, widely read, worldly, and prone to intelligent raillery, Henry Tilney represents the mentor figure who teaches Catherine how to read situations and people, how to ascribe motives to others, and how to know her own mind. Henry is a younger and more casual and forgiving version of Austen's later mentor‐hero, Mr. Knightley, in Emma.

Catherine Morland remains bluntly straightforward in saying what she thinks, thinks the best of everyone until forced to recognize that many people have flaws, and believes what she reads until humiliation makes her realize that common sense does not always accord with romance fiction. People are not what they seem to be, and neither are circumstances or even physical environments.

Northanger Abbey establishes Austen's novel‐writing artistry by building on, playing off, and ultimately differentiating itself from the popular strain of women's fiction of the period. Austen takes on a powerful foremother in Ann Radcliffe, and she uses irony to turn General Tilney into a bourgeois villain and to make his treatment of Catherine underscore the ways in which she represents an ordinary bourgeois woman who slowly learns to think for herself and trust her own moral instincts. Disenchanted at the end, Catherine is nevertheless rewarded with the love of a handsome, comfortable, and kind hero who understands her and loves her for the artless person she is.

Like Don Quixote before her and Emma Bovary after her, Catherine Morland has read too much and believed too much in her formative reading of romances and fantasies. Unlike them, she forms an adult mind of her own in the course of the novel. The narrative irony of Northanger Abbey emphasizes these lessons, as Catherine's views are formed in subtle moments of realization. Irony is nowhere used to greater effect than when the narrator, largely through the consciousness of Henry Tilney, makes fun of the propensities of Gothic fiction, as Catherine's “passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney” (p. 141).

Catherine and the Tilneys discuss literature and history in addition to theories of the picturesque in landscape and attitudes toward drawing and taste. This extended conversation covers many kinds of reading and intellectual reverie and includes remarks about the play between fact and invention in historical writings. Catherine has little patience for the “quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome” (p. 108). Catherine also paints an interesting picture of the sort of home schooling many children received when she comments that learning one's letters can be torturous. “You think me foolish to call instruction a torment,” she tells Henry and Eleanor Tilney, “but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words” (pp. 109‐10).

In many ways, Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's novel of education. As reading is a central activity in Northanger Abbey, the novel serves as a precursor to the more psychological focus on the cognitive development of Austen's later and more complex protagonist, Emma Woodhouse of Emma, a woman who begins many books but completes few.⁶

Because the parody of a popular genre so defines Northanger Abbey, it is especially compelling that this is the work in which Austen offers up her most powerful defense of the novel as a legitimate genre of social commentary and literary artistry. Thus Northanger Abbey represents Austen's most self‐conscious and self‐reflexive work of fiction. While the Tilneys offer a spirited defense of the pleasures of serious history, in the end Catherine Morland and the comic novel carry the day.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

During the final editing of Sense and Sensibility in April of 1811, Austen remarked to her sister Cassandra: “I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.”⁷ Written at around the same time as Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility bears some resemblance to Austen's more overtly satiric effort. Both works contain ironic discussions about the picturesque and the fashion for landscape appreciation; both involve a world where gossip reigns supreme; both delve in detail into the economics of family alliances and marriages; both treat social hypocrisy with ironic contempt; and both concern female protagonists whose romantic idealism causes them difficulties and requires them to suffer disenchantment before they can gain real happiness. Yet Sense and Sensibility is notably darker than Northanger Abbey. Austen's first published novel tasks its main characters, both female and male, with severe disappointments in love.

Austen writes in Sense and Sensibility with a less mature ironic voice, more overt satire, and less sophisticated narrative interventions than she was to develop in her later novels, but the story she tells is as complex and fraught as any she ever invented. The central characters are the Dashwood women, a mother and her three daughters. Left with little to live on after Mr. Dashwood dies, they leave Sussex for Devonshire, where they encounter a dashing visitor to the neighborhood, John Willoughby, and he and the middle daughter, Marianne, form a flamboyant and ill‐disguised liaison that flouts propriety and flourishes on private outings and poetry. When Elinor's beau Edward Ferrars proves to be engaged to another woman and Willoughby abruptly leaves, publicly snubs Marianne, and marries an heiress, Elinor and Marianne are devastated, and each responds to these severe disappointments in accordance with her temperament.

The novel opens with an extended discourse on the financial circumstances of the Dashwoods, and the economic arrangements of John Willoughby and the Ferrars family come importantly into play as the plot unfolds. When Willoughby marries Miss Grey, who brings him the vast sum of £50,000, the voluble Mrs. Jennings reports the gossip: “Fifty thousand pounds! And by all accounts it won't come before it's wanted; for they say he is all to pieces. No wonder! Dashing about with his curricle and hunters!” (p. 194). And when the secret engagement between Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele is revealed to Edward's imperious mother, Mrs. Ferrars disowns him and bestows the family estate on his younger brother, Robert.

Behind the unfolding of the economic and romantic dramas that take center stage in Sense and Sensibility lies an embedded and centrally important story concerning one of Austen's most unprepossessing and unpromising heroes, Colonel Brandon, the 35‐year old who is described as “silent and grave”⁸ and who falls under Marianne's spell almost immediately. Marianne and Willoughby make fun of him, and he remains a kind of background figure in the novel's first volume. Yet in many ways, Brandon's situation reflects Austen's extensive reading in eighteenth‐century fiction and echoes the dark, mysterious circumstances that shadow the romantic heroes created by Austen's predecessors. As a young man, Brandon had fallen in love with a childhood friend named Eliza, who was forced to marry his brother and was mistreated by him in such a way that they divorced. Eliza fell into sexual dissolution and penury, and she died of consumption, leaving an illegitimate infant daughter. Colonel Brandon raises the daughter, also named Eliza, and local gossip purports him to be her natural father. On a chaperoned visit to Bath, the second Eliza is seduced by Willoughby and becomes pregnant, and Willoughby abandons her shortly before he meets the Dashwoods. Brandon sends her and her child to the country and fights a duel with Willoughby.

The importance of the Eliza stories lies in the way the events of the novel echo the secret past that haunts several of the characters. In Sense and Sensibility, none of the key romantic alliances that become permanent derive from first loves. This is very much a novel about learning from disappointment, disillusionment, and tragedy, and moving on to find a mature marital love. Elinor is Edward's second attachment, as Marianne is Brandon's second love.

Sense and Sensibility speaks of settlements and annuities, jointures and income, the cost of keeping servants and carriages, furniture and plate, and hunting dogs and horses. The characters all come from the landowning classes, but they are constrained by intricate rules about the way property moves from one generation to the next. The entrenched system of primogeniture—the inheritance by the first‐born son of the entire estate, so that younger brothers have to make their way in the world through a career in the Church or the military—makes rivals of siblings. Family values may receive great lip service, but the property system as Austen depicts it in fact divides rather than unites families, especially siblings, and it treats women most unfairly.

Therein lies the novel's moral center. To gain comfort and social standing, a woman needs a man of a certain status. At the same time, to maintain her moral worth, she must resist the goads to pursue and “catch” a wealthy man. When the Dashwood sisters dispute how much money is necessary to maintain a comfortable household, it is the sensible Elinor who speaks a central economic truth. To Marianne's question, “What have wealth and grandeur to do with happiness?” her older sister replies, “Grandeur has but little … but wealth has much to do with it” (p. 91).

While the novel's title appears to suggest that the Dashwood sisters' characters are to be compared and contrasted, in a world in which marriage leads primarily to material prosperity, as critic Margaret Anne Doody points out, the nature of a woman's temperament hardly matters.⁹ In many ways, the men are as much reflected in these comparative terms as the women. Colonel Brandon becomes sensible and rational after grievous and tragic disappointments, Edward Ferrars recovers from early impetuosity to become solemn but happily rational, and Willoughby suffers more lastingly from the fruits of his own indulgence in sensibility than any of the other characters. At the same time, Elinor and Marianne differ more in their surface behaviors than in their deepest emotions.

Austen's narrator remains at the side of Elinor, through whose eyes the reader receives and judges the story. The novel seems chilly to many readers, partly because Elinor, long‐suffering and selfless, seems insufficiently rewarded in the end with Edward Ferrars, who is one of the more melancholy and feckless men in Austen's repertoire. Elinor thinks for herself and keeps her own counsel. Unlike Austen heroines such as Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and Emma Woodhouse, Elinor does not require a moral or romantic education. Until Austen created Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Elinor Dashwood represented her most mature, intellectual protagonist, a woman who knows what she has to learn and learns what she has to know.

Much of the novel is told in style indirect libre (free indirect style) from Elinor's point of view. That is, Elinor does not speak directly, but the narrator recounts what goes on in her mind in a nearly conversational way. As Doody notes, Elinor's careful approach to the world of appearances is crucial because Sense and Sensibility is a novel about knowing and about epistemology, the philosophy of what is knowable.¹⁰Sense and sensibility are not so much modes of being or distinctions of character and temperament, as many critics have taken them to be, as they are ways of approaching the world and taking in evidence.

In the world that Austen depicts in Sense and Sensibility, there is little hard evidence. Clues abound—rings that contain locks of hair, faces that blush or go pale, behaviors that seem to communicate something but then are followed by actions that communicate the opposite—but it is nearly impossible to know anything for certain. Characters constantly wonder and conjecture, guess and assume, doubt and become misled. As one critic has remarked, the novel's language is filled with modal verbs: “might,” “would,” and “should.”¹¹ And Elinor understands more than the others both the ways in which she can be misled and the stakes involved. Yet despite this insight, a series of misapprehensions of just these sorts propels the novel's action. Austen's irony serves to ensure that Sense and Sensibility, whatever its serious moral lessons, remains a comedy of manners.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

While Northanger Abbey parodies the genre of the female Gothic, and Sense and Sensibility in part satirizes the novel of sensibility, Pride and Prejudice is harder to categorize. The novel features a number of common plot devices: an infelicitously married couple who bear their incompatibility for the sake of social propriety (Mr. and Mrs. Bennet); proud, aristocratic heroes whose first declarations of love to the heroine offend her because of their arrogant claim that only an inability to overcome their feelings prompts them to seek a wife in a lower social circle (Fitzwilliam Darcy); heroes who initially accommodate the wishes of indomitably judgmental elders whose belief in social rules thwarts individual desire (Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh); society women whose frustrations lead them to treat sarcastically those they resent (the Bingley sisters); and hedonistic characters who ruin themselves and bring sorrow to others (Lydia Bennet and George Wickham). But much as Pride and Prejudice emerges from various eighteenth‐century novel traditions, it does not depend upon the literary forms or conventions of the past, but forges a new and ironic comedy of manners all its own. The verbal sparring between Elizabeth and Darcy perhaps recalls the depiction of courtship in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, but it is new to prose fiction.

The plot of Pride and Prejudice is better known than that of any other Austen novel. The Bennet family has five daughters, and with no male heir, their family home at Longbourn and its £2,000 a year will go to a distant cousin, the obsequious Mr. Collins, upon Mr. Bennet's death. Hence the famous opening line—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”¹²—might be better phrased, as Isobel Armstrong points out, as “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman without possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a husband.”¹³ This novel tells a story about the possibility of social mobility at the turn of the nineteenth century. Can class be overcome, either by moving from the bourgeoisie to the landed gentry as Bingley does, or by forging a contract between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as Darcy and Elizabeth arguably do in the end through their marriage? Most readers have understood Pride and Prejudice to concern only social and personal relations, but the presence of the army and the allusion in the last pages to “the restoration of peace” (p. 387), a reference to the 1802 Peace of Amiens, would have situated the work clearly for contemporary readers as a story set after the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic wars. This was a period in which the merchant and professional classes took up their positions in a challenge to the landed aristocracy, of which Darcy represents one of the last scions.

Charles Bingley rents Netherfield Park with money earned from trade, and brings his sisters to the neighborhood of Longbourn to take up residence there and his friend Darcy to visit. The local families, principally comprising the Bennets and the Lucases, immediately want to be included in this new and high social circle, and everyone meets at the Meryton assembly. The Bingleys admire the eldest Miss Bennet, Jane, and invite her to visit. While at Netherfield she falls ill, prompting her younger sister Elizabeth to walk several miles across muddy fields to tend to her, arriving in the flush of exercise to the ridicule of the Bingley sisters, who think her unrefined. Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley develop an attachment during this visit, while the “lively, playful” (p. 12) Elizabeth judges Darcy cold and critical as he begins to find himself admiring her intelligence and becoming bewitched by her “fine eyes” (p. 27). The key to this courtship lies in the gradual change from Darcy's original contempt for Elizabeth as a dance partner and her persistent dislike of him to something that comes about precisely because she so firmly resists him. The attractiveness of an uninterested woman also plays a role in the later Mansfield Park, in which Henry Crawford pursues Fanny Price more intently as she makes it increasingly clear that she will not change her mind and accept him.

Two key subplots augment and interrupt the romantic and satiric conquests of the elder Bennet sisters. The distant cousin upon whom Longbourn is entailed, Mr. Collins, a clergyman, comes to visit because he has heard it reported that the Bennet daughters are amiable, and his position as inheritor of their home leads him to feel obliged to court one of them as a recompense for taking his cousins' estate. Finding that Jane's affections are elsewhere drawn, he settles on Elizabeth. Mr. Collins is one of Austen's finest comic creations, a delightful caricature who is by turns ridiculous and pathetic, oily and awkward; he represents obeisance to the older aristocratic classes in the way that he fawns on Lady Catherine de Bourgh. When Elizabeth declines him, Collins proposes to Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth's closest friend and a woman who sees the practical need that she marry with clear‐eyed sense.

A militia corps encamps at Meryton, and Elizabeth develops an attachment to the charming George Wickham, an officer who tells her that his boyhood friend Darcy has betrayed him by refusing him a living that he had to bestow, fueling Elizabeth's already settled dislike of Darcy into real hostility.

Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth is one of the most amazing and brilliantly contrived scenes in Austen's repertoire and perhaps in all English fiction. Agitated and uncomfortable, he opens his declaration with “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you” (p. 189). The rest of the discussion follows in free indirect style with Darcy alluding not only to his emotional attachment but also to his sense that a connection with the inferior Bennets will degrade his family. Elizabeth's response, equally indirect at first, consists largely of resentful anger. This unprecedented anti‐courtship exchange between an unmarried wealthy man and a comparatively poor unmarried women remains a literary classic, capped by Elizabeth's pronouncement that “I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry” (p. 193).

Darcy leaves with dignity, and he writes to Elizabeth to explain his history. “How differently did every thing now appear in which he was concerned!” thinks Elizabeth (p. 207). “Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd,” and she feels shame at herself and humiliation at her actions: “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (p. 208). Shortly, Lydia Bennet is invited to Brighton, where the regiment is encamped, “a situation of such double danger as a watering place and a camp” (p. 237). Lydia's heedless behavior produces a key goad to the plot of Pride and Prejudice when she runs off with Wickham. Much of the rest of the novel is taken up with laborious efforts to find Lydia and Wickham, to discharge Wickham's debts, and to arrange their marriage, much of it brought about by Darcy's good offices. When Elizabeth learns the details, her view of Darcy undergoes a final metamorphosis: “For herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him. Proud that in a cause of compassion and honour, he had been able to get the better of himself” (p. 327).

The marriage, however, does not take place until a second unprecedented scene occurs in which Lady Catherine de Bourgh condescends to visit Elizabeth in order to warn her away from her nephew, calling her “a young woman of inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to the family” (p. 355) and famously asking, with reference to the scandal of Lydia and Wickham, “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” (p. 357). Elizabeth refuses to promise that she will not marry Darcy, asks Lady Catherine to leave, and assets that she is “resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me” (p. 358).

On one if its surfaces, Pride and Prejudice might appear to be a Cinderella fairy tale: two deserving but poor women win the hearts of handsome, rich, and kind men. The Collins and Wickham subplots, however, mar this surface appearance. Wickham's elopement with Lydia rocks even the somewhat fatuous Bennets in its production of gossip, scandal, and threat of ruin, even though Darcy's money and influence salvage the connection. Less obviously, Collins's indiscriminate courting of whoever looks game to be his wife and his acceptance by a talented and sensible woman raises more profound questions about marital arrangements. Charlotte's decision to marry Collins represents the most straightforward comment Austen ever made on the economic constraints that dictate women's ability to choose a husband.

Charlotte bears her lot because marriage to the painfully formal Collins is preferable to the alternative of dependent spinsterhood. Obsequious Collins may be, and embarrassingly gauche in his slavish obeisance to Lady Catherine, but he is neither improper nor evil. Charlotte has become accustomed to being the one sensible person in a silly family, and her marriage will conform to that experience. Mr. Collins saves Charlotte from the even greater humiliation of poverty and dependence, and for her part, Charlotte sees her marriage for exactly what it is and no more.

In contrast, George Wickham is a true if light‐hearted and charming villain. Importantly, he first appears in the novel with “all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and a very pleasing address” (p. 72). Like John Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, Wickham has been brought up and educated with many advantages and has intelligence, good looks, and an easy glibness in conversation. Also like Willoughby, Wickham's tastes are expensive, he grows dissipated and unable to command his own desires, and he adds manipulative economic contrivances and near blackmail to these faults. Unlike Willoughby, Wickham never sees the folly of his ways and repents, nor does he snare a wealthy woman to subsidize his pleasures (although arguably he gains access to Darcy's wealth through his marriage to a Bennet). The Wickham story takes up much of the novel and synthesizes its themes of appearance versus reality and the trials of what people say and think against how they behave.

When the characters fail to understand the nature of social interaction—most notably in the Bennet parents' failure to realize that Lydia cannot be safe in Brighton—misunderstandings ensue. Much of Pride and Prejudice turns on the nature of gossip, news, and information in a circumscribed society, where judgments are formed by hearsay and innuendo. What, finally, can be told and what must remain secret? That question haunts the novel as does a related question concerning whether it is ever possible to know others with justice and to judge rightly other people's motives (not to mention one's own).

The original title of this novel, First Impressions, alludes to personal characteristics. The changed and final title, Pride and Prejudice, is more philosophical. A similar change of title occurs in the predecessor novel when Elinor and Marianne, with its lens trained on two particular women, becomes Sense and Sensibility, with a focus on more abstract concepts. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen does not simply contrast a proud man who learns to be humble and a prejudiced woman who learns to ask more questions before she passes judgment. Rather, she asks the reader to consider to what degree any of us can ever know another fully, without tainting our knowledge with our preconceptions and our wishful thinking. In this sense, Austen's first two published novels resemble one another as works about epistemology, the ability to know. Austen portrays a world where appearances reign and social stature depends on public perception. At the same time, she tells her readers that true knowledge may not be visible through a social lens.

MANSFIELD PARK

Whereas Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice all had their beginnings in the 1790s when Austen was in her early twenties, Mansfield Park dates from the years immediately preceding its publication, when Austen was in her late thirties. Austen remarked of Mansfield Park, “Now I will try to write of something else;—it shall be a complete change of subject—Ordination.”¹⁴ This passage also presents Austen's sense that this novel would be a departure from her earlier marriage plots.

Although ordination indeed forms an aspect of the novel—and Austen had asked her sister to inquire about some of its details from their ordained brother James Austen—service to the Church and ideas about Evangelicalism form only a small portion of the concerns of Mansfield Park. Indeed, given that the stupefyingly inane Mr. Collins was her previous clergyman character, ordination seems an odd choice for a subject. The story opens with a portrayal of the Ward sisters and their history. Maria Ward married Sir Thomas Bertram and became Lady Bertram, the mistress of a large estate and the mother of two sons and two daughters; Miss Ward had to settle for the Reverend Mr. Norris, a friend of Sir Thomas who was given the Mansfield living (neither member of this couple has a given name and Mr. Norris dies before becoming a real character in the story); and Frances imprudently married a Lieutenant in the Marines, broke with her sisters, and began to have “a superfluity of children.”¹⁵ Fanny Price, Frances' eldest daughter, arrives as a charity project at the age of ten amid some concerns on the part of the Bertrams that she can never be an equal to her cousins and might become a burden.

The diffident Fanny Price comes to Mansfield and is lodged in an attic room and treated as though she belongs in a rank somewhere between a servant and a poor relation. She is of no importance to the elder Bertram son, Tom, and is held in contempt by her cousins Maria and Julia. The younger Bertram son, Edmund, befriends her and becomes a welcome companion. Sir Thomas and Tom leave to tend to unspecified troubles on their plantations in the West Indies. During their absence, Maria, the older daughter, becomes engaged to a wealthy neighboring landowner, Mr. Rushworth, “a heavy young man, with not more than common sense” (p. 38) who has little beyond his wealth and family connections to recommend him. The Mansfield living was destined for Edmund but the reversion was sold to help pay Tom's gaming debts; upon Mr. Norris's death it is assumed by the purchaser, Dr. Grant, and Mrs. Grant's half‐brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford, come to visit. If Fanny and Edmund are the novel's heroine and hero, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry are its anti‐heroine and anti‐hero.

The first volume of Mansfield Park contains two of Austen's great set pieces, the visit to Rushworth's Sotherton estate and the family's plan to put on a play, Lovers' Vows, Elizabeth Inchbald's version of August Kotzebue's Natural Son. As Northanger Abbey had introduced the subject of the landscape picturesque into Austen's works, and Pride and Prejudice turns part of its plot on Elizabeth Bennet's visit to Pemberley with the Gardiners into an occasion for disquisitions on views and houses, so Mansfield Park uses the houses and grounds of its title location and of Sotherton to depict the domestic spaces, the furnishings, and the gardens of the landed classes, using these geographical and spatial markers as metaphors for the scope of their class influence. This was an age of “improvements” and “prospects” and competing theories of landscape architecture. Several of Austen's novels, most notably Mansfield Park, contain references to the chief garden designer of the day, Humphrey Repton. The playacting episode focuses on the morality of the particular play Lovers' Vows and of acting more generally, and sets up the novel's key plot developments in the intricate erotic dance of jealousy between Edmund and Mary and Fanny, and Maria and Henry and Julia and Rushworth.

At Sotherton, Mary and Edmund discuss the clergy, the expectations of second sons, and morality and wit. As they fall into a dispute about the size of the woods, they leave Fanny alone on a bench, and Maria Bertram, Rushworth, and Henry Crawford join her. When Maria wants to pass through a locked iron gate into the park, Mr. Rushworth goes off to fetch its key. Henry urges Maria to pass around the edge of the gate to circumvent its “feeling of restraint and hardship” (p. 99) and, thus challenged, the two leave Fanny alone a second time, to be joined by Julia, who likewise “scrambled across the fence” (p. 101). Rushworth arrives soon after, “mortified and displeased” (p. 101) to find the others gone off without waiting for him. Rushworth, too, leaves, using his key. Fanny goes off to seek Edmund and Mary, and finds them after their own visit to the park through an unfastened side gate. Eventually, everyone reconvenes, many of them quite out of sorts or out of breath: “By their own accounts they had all been walking after each other, and the junction which had taken place at last seemed, to Fanny's observation, to have been … much too late for re‐establishing harmony” (p. 104).

The maneuverings and conversations of all these characters at Sotherton mirror the operations of the novel as a whole. Clusters of characters come together, part, and regroup in an elaborate choreography that reflects one of Austen's concerns in Mansfield Park, to depict a world in which alliances shift and reform, and where very high stakes attend the arrangements that remain when the music stops. The Sotherton episode opens in the confined chapel with serious discussions about family prayers, the role and status of the clergy, and the moral value of marriage, then moves outdoors to a more expansive round of imprisonment and escape through and around locked gates and doors, where the game of partnering and triangulating has clear erotic overtones.

Tom Bertram returns from Antigua before his father, who is detained by business, and he introduces to Mansfield an Oxford friend, John Yates, a younger son of a lord, who is as idle and irresponsible as Tom. The two young men put forward a theatrical presentation, and they turn Sir Thomas's billiard room into a theater for the purpose. Edmund at first objects on moral grounds.

I think it would be very wrong. In a general light, private theatricals are open to some objections, but as we are circumstanced, I must think it would be highly injudicious, and more than injudicious, to attempt any thing of the kind. It would show great want of feeling on my father's account; absent as he is, and in some degree of constant danger; and it would be imprudent, I think, with regard to Maria, whose situation is a very delicate one, considering every thing, extremely delicate.

(Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, p. 125.)

Maria's flirtations with Henry Crawford have become evident to all, including Rushworth, and Julia Bertram has set her marital sights on Henry, with the family's approbation, as well. Edmund calls upon the rigidity of Sir Thomas's sense of decorum, especially for his daughters, but he is overruled and eventually, through the seductions of Mary Crawford, he joins in the acting plans after saying unequivocally at first that he would not do so. The group scraps over what sort of play to put on—comedy or tragedy—before settling on Lovers' Vows, a play that turns on the abandonment of a pregnant woman, the recognition of an illegitimate child, and a woman who avows her love to her tutor, and would have been considered quite risqué in Austen's time.

Edmund asks Maria to give up her idea of acting in the play, finding it unsuitable, but is laughed at for his prim scruples. In the event, everyone participates, even luring Fanny into a small part. The play serves as a microcosmic variant on the relationships between these characters, with jealousy flaring as Rushworth slowly realizes how Henry Crawford and Maria are making a fool of him, and Fanny uneasily watches the growing attraction between Mary Crawford and Edmund. Fanny herself becomes a more central figure in the household through this episode. Once Edmund compromises with his conviction that acting is wrong and decides to be in the play, the novel's moral compass turns.

The household begins to deteriorate as scene painters arrive, Fanny and Julia retreat, and “Every body began to have their vexation” (p. 164). This episode contains both burlesque elements and aspects of near‐tragic chaos, and hence remains one of Austen's most unsettling extended narrative sequences. The climax occurs when Edmund and Mary ask Fanny to help them to rehearse a scene that Fanny finds shocking and, to end the first volume of the novel, Sir Thomas unexpectedly arrives home, announced by Julia throwing open the door and uttering the news with “a face all aghast” (p. 172).

Sir Thomas finds his house in disarray, disapproves, and in short order burns every copy of Lovers' Vows he finds. A cynicism pervades Mansfield Park. The novel focuses on two sets of threesomes: Edmund and Mary and Fanny on the one hand, and Henry and Maria and Fanny on the other. They work in opposition to one another. The decent and judicious Edmund is nearly seduced into a calculated and too worldly love by Mary, who disapproves of his professional plans, until he finds redemption in Fanny's devotion and propriety. And Henry is nearly redeemed by his love for Fanny until he runs off with the married Maria Bertram Rushworth and condemns her to irrevocable ignominy.

Austen readers tend to hold extreme views about her third published novel. Readers either love it passionately as their favorite of the six major novels, or they find it to be the weakest of the six. Few hold a middle position about this complex work. The reason for this polarizing of positions about Mansfield Park rests in its heroine. Fanny Price begins the novel as a diffident refugee brought to her uncle's mannered estate from her dubious lower‐class home in Portsmouth. The most docile, mousiest, and oddest of Austen's heroines, Fanny moves more and more to the center of the novel, until at the end she represents the moral anchor of Mansfield itself.

A key source of recent critical debate about Mansfield Park has concerned the Bertram colonial possessions in the West Indies, where they raise sugar cane and keep slaves. In some ways, this backdrop, alluded to frequently but only clearly discussed a handful of times in the novel, relates to the theme of ordination, in that the Evangelical movement in which Edmund would seem to fit opposed slavery and worked for the abolition of the slave trade during Austen's lifetime, and Austen's own religious and moral sympathies lay in that direction. Mansfield Park was written during the final years of the Napoleonic wars, a period in which agriculture in England was relatively depressed, much of the economy depended upon sugar from the West Indies, and the professional classes were beginning to forge new ideas about public service. The younger son Edmund in this novel represents hard work and self‐discipline in opposition to characters such as Tom Bertram and John Yates, who represent the lazy self‐importance of the dissolute gentry. Edward Said has argued that the colonial background to Mansfield Park makes the novel a landmark in colonial literature, and much has been written in response to his argument.¹⁶ Certainly, Fanny Price is the only character in the novel who purports to be interested in her uncle's stories about Antigua.¹⁷

The colonial debates have focused on Austen's interpretation of the economic underpinnings of life on an estate such as Mansfield Park. Another approach might be to examine the microcosm of colonialism represented by the way Fanny is plucked from her impoverished and disadvantaged home in a naval port to be rescued with education and civility at Mansfield in the safe interior of Northamptonshire. Treated virtually as a servant and given accommodations unlike those of the rest of the family, Fanny eventually asserts herself, revolts against expectations by refusing to marry Henry Crawford, and returns to redeem at least two of her siblings, William and Susan, the latter of whom takes her place at Mansfield. Ironically, William's naval promotion is a calculated part of Henry Crawford's courtship of Fanny; his situation also makes likely the success of the younger seagoing Price brothers. Fanny wins her emancipation and eventually marries one of her colonizers, the benevolent second son Edmund Bertram. The turnabout in Fanny's situation might, after all, be a clearer way to understand Austen's global and economic politics than an attempt to elevate the brief discussions of slavery in Antigua to the forefront of the novel. The younger Prices have more energy, capacity, and ambition than any of the Bertrams; this, too, provides clues to Austen's class politics.

EMMA

John Murray offered Austen £450 for the copyright of Emma, but he wanted Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility to be included in the package, and she turned down the offer. Austen wrote a letter in December 1815 in which she expressed anxiety that readers would find Emma less witty than Pride and Prejudice and less sensible than Mansfield Park. To the Countess of Morley, an early reader of the novel who had sent a note of praise, Austen wrote on December 31, 1815, that she was encouraged to find “that I have not yet—as almost every Writer of Fancy does sooner or later—overwritten myself.”¹⁸

Emma returns Austen to her preoccupation with epistemology: What can we know and, more important, how can we make sense of our knowledge? She asks other questions as well: What should we try to know about others, and when should we mind our own business? All of Austen's major works are comedies of manners, but Emma is Austen's purest comedy and her most reassuring portrait of manners. There are no tragic backgrounds with stories like those of Colonel Brandon and the two Elizas, no charming but dangerous seducers such as Willoughby and Wickham, not even a difficult and unforgiving character such as General Tilney. Characters have their weaknesses, but none is so glaringly weak and misjudging as Emma Woodhouse herself, a beautiful and wealthy young woman who dominates the village of Highbury.

Emma contains forays into the problems of class mobility and exegeses on social hypocrisy, as do all of Austen's works. But in Emma, these passages are comically ironic without having a submerged dark side. The secret engagement of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax exhibits qualities of deception that verge on the sinister but never arrive there. The spirit of separation that creates an almost carnivalesque disorder at Box Hill is ultimately put right, and everyone's happy place is restored.

Emma believes her understanding and psychological insight to be completely reliable. In the course of the novel, she discovers the opposite to be true, and learns to exert less power over others and to pay more attention to knowing and controlling herself. In her first disagreement with Mr. Knightley concerning Harriet Smith and Robert Martin, Knightley expostulates, “Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have. … Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do.”¹⁹ The novel abounds with variations on the word “blunder,” a word that at one point is the answer to a word game in a story filled with riddles, charades, puzzles, and enigmas. Emma improves in sense as her small humiliations mount, and she is finally rewarded with knowing who she is and what she wants. Because the novel's village is so circumscribed, and Austen's focus remains so thoroughly on Emma and stays almost entirely within Emma's perspective on events and feelings, Emma has the tightest plot line of the major novels.

The opening sentence lays open the whole of the Emma problem, as Austen's opening sentences tend to do: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twentyone years in the world with very little to distress or vex her” (p. 5). Emma's problems derive, in fact, from her comfort and her temperament.

The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

(On Emma Woodhouse in Emma, pp. 5‐6)

Emma centers on the education of Emma Woodhouse: learning to be humble and to examine her own motives as she comes to an enlightening self‐knowledge.

Pride and Prejudice features a mother who does a poor job of raising her daughters in Mrs. Bennet, and Mansfield Park features bad mothers indeed, with Lady Bertram's indolent inattention to her children, Mrs. Price's overlooking her daughters and poor household management that creates chaos around them, and the childless Mrs. Norris's busybody meddling in the affairs of other people's children. In Emma, the adult characters have virtually no mothers at all. The characters Emma, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax each must manage without mothers, and when Miss Taylor leaves, Emma experiences her first real grief from the loss. Harriet Smith, “the natural daughter of somebody” (p. 22), lives as a boarder in a girls' school. Jane Fairfax faces the real possibility of having to work as a governess, a position she likens to that of a slave whose life is not her own to regulate. Churchill himself bears an oblique relation to the woman who might have mothered him, his vain and tyrannical aunt Mrs. Churchill, and some of his weakness and vanity might be said to derive from poor or absent mothering.

However, the focus stays fully on Emma Woodhouse throughout this novel. First, she takes up the unpromising Harriet Smith as a project. She finds Harriet attractive and pleasant to be with and at the same time unthreatening to Emma's own reign in Highbury. She separates Harriet from Robert Martin, a local farmer, and decides on a plan of action: “she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners” (p. 24). Emma persuades Harriet to aspire to Mr. Elton, the Highbury vicar and “a young man whom any woman not fastidious might like” (p. 35). Then she encourages Harriet to fantasize about first, Frank Churchill (fantasies that exist only in Emma's mind) and, by accident, Mr. Knightley himself, the highest‐ranking man in the village, as potential suitors before poor Harriet is finally able to get out of Emma's clutches and reconcile with Mr. Martin, a man she loves and with whom she can be happy and appropriately settled.

Emma misses the fact that she is the woman Elton, in fact, aspires to, and that he is a conceited man who thinks Harriet too common for him. Emma endures an embarrassing but wonderfully rendered carriage ride while Elton makes his unwanted professions to her, and she has to take responsibility for humiliating her friend. Emma's conversation with Mr. Knightley about class and rank, along with Elton's more self‐serving definitions of these positions, anchor the novel in its social analysis as a book with a very clear sense of who belongs where. Those who maneuver around their class positions, such as Jane Fairfax, find themselves in a social limbo that disconcerts everyone around them and makes them vulnerable to embarrassment and hardship.

The story of the secret engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax provides one of the novel's central intrigues. Even before she meets Frank, Emma decides that, were she to marry, he might be a suitable match for her. And even before Jane Fairfax arrives in Highbury, she feels threatened by having a potential rival for the role of most beautiful and accomplished young woman in Highbury. Unlike Emma, Jane is a woman educated to be a governess; however, her relative impoverishment does not take away her independence of experience or spirit. Emma indeed has reason to be jealous, because Jane is her equal except in social and economic rank. Her presence reminds readers that Emma's position in society very much depends upon her family and her wealth.

From early in the novel, the consummate matchmaker Emma declares that she herself will never marry. “I cannot really change for the better,” Emma tells Harriet. “If I were to marry, I must expect to repent it.” “I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry,” she goes on. “Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want; I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband's house, as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's” (p. 84). Mr. Woodhouse, a cantankerous invalid, indeed proves a small obstacle to Emma's marriage to Knightley, and will have to be accommodated with unorthodox measures, requiring that her husband come live with her rather than the reverse. When Harriet worries that Emma will have the dreadful fate of being an old maid if she persists in her decision not to marry, Emma makes an odd speech about independence and economics in relation to marital alliances:

“Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! The proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.”

(p. 85)

As it happens, these remarks describe one version of Miss Bates, and suggest the cloud that hangs over both Jane Fairfax, who speaks of the governess trade as akin to the slave trade, and Harriet Smith. The trajectory of the novel works away from Emma's rather thoughtless if sociologically astute musings, until she comes to find herself alone and discontent and self‐reproachful at the moment when she learns to understand herself at last.

The set piece and climax of Emma comes in the Box Hill episode, which takes place on midsummer's day and bears some phantasmagoric relation to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. As critic Terry Castle points out, Austen captures in this scene the quality of cranky, overheated discontent that a failed group outing can have, and it causes Emma to be struck with a stab of malice delivered toward the comic‐pathetic character of Miss Bates, a poor spinster who is always good‐natured despite her rather depressed situation.²⁰ The outing begins well, then rapidly deteriorates:

Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there. Seven miles were traveled in expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving; but in the general amount of the day there was deficiency. There was a languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over. They separated too much into parties … during the whole two hours that were spent on the hill, there seemed a principle of separation … too strong for any fine prospects, or any cold collation, or any cheerful Mr. Weston to remove.

(p. 367)

The wandering disharmony at Box Hill reminds Austen readers of the gate‐evading misconnections and annoyances that plague the party at Sotherton in Mansfield Park. Some of the same principles of misunderstanding and self‐delusion operate at Box Hill, though without the adulterous undercurrent of sexual immorality that buzzes around Sotherton. Frank works to amuse Emma, and she becomes “gay and thoughtless” (p. 368), producing the most trivial yet also the most heinous of Emma's social misjudgments when she openly insults Miss Bates by making fun of her tendency to talk incessantly about nothing. Even Miss Bates, slow on the uptake and nearly incapable of anger, realizes that she has been insulted.

As he hands her into the carriage to leave Box Hill, Knightley, who is “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them” (p. 11), upbraids her for using insolent wit “to a woman of her character, age, and situation” (p. 374). Emma blushes and tries to shrug off the reprimand, which comes not because Miss Bates is not as ridiculous as Emma sees her to be, but because her poverty and discomfort require compassion. Her mortification at the rightness of his reproach causes her to act sullen, and the day ends with Emma “vexed beyond what could have been expressed—almost beyond what she could conceal. Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life” (p. 376). Extraordinarily, Emma weeps “almost all the way home,” tears that Castle argues may be the first real tears, and the most realistic, in all of English literature.²¹

Emma visits Miss Bates, makes amends, and is forgiven, but the episode remains odd. In a story in which Emma's deluded errors cause real mischief to the material lives of others, it is a brief, thoughtless remark to an older woman who is a relative nonentity in Highbury society that reveals the crux of Emma's self‐destructive lack of insight and self‐knowledge. In minding the manners of everyone around her, she has failed to mind her own.

Some critics have proposed that Emma bears a resemblance to the detective novel, as Emma tries to solve various mysteries, notably concerning the shady character presentations of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. If so, Emma Woodhouse may be the literary world's most inept detective, missing every clue and hint until she is thunderstruck with the realization that she loves Mr. Knightley: “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” (p. 408). After Knightley's profession of love and Emma's famous and maddening non‐reply—“What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does” (p. 431)—the narrator provides a commentary on their zigzagging non‐courtship that could stand for the novel as a whole: “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken” (p. 431). In the comic world of Highbury, relative truth rises to the surface and wins the day, but not before it is ringed about with the enticing possibilities of self‐deception.

PERSUASION

Jane Austen spent almost a year composing Persuasion, from August 1815 to August 1816. There are two versions of the ending, and the two final chapters of Persuasion represent the only surviving manuscript portions of any of Austen's major novels. In the last months of her life before illness forced her to stop writing, Austen worked on Sanditon, a work that, even in its unfinished state, suggests a return to high satire and the precise delineation of social and personal absurdities. But Persuasion was a bit of a departure from her usual affectionate assault on sentimentality and romance.

Persuasion continues a narrative tactic that also characterized Emma: There is a rhythm that moves from ease to tension, then to reversal and renewed ease. Both novels have theatrical qualities in their plot trajectories, as circumstances build to a suspenseful turn, coalesce and explode, calm again, then crystallize into significance. This rhythm derives from the central plot scenario. When she was nineteen, Anne Elliot fell in love with Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer, and accepted his proposal of marriage. Anne's father, the proud and snobbish Sir Walter Elliot for whose character “vanity was the beginning and the end,”²² opposed their alliance, as did Lady Russell, a family neighbor and friend who became a mother‐figure to Anne when Lady Elliot died. Neither Sir Walter nor Lady Russell could brook an alliance with a man who had no fortune and not much of a family name, and Lady Russell persuaded Anne to give up an imprudent engagement and separate from Wentworth. At the same time, Anne is little valued by her family. Although she possesses “an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, [Anne] was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way;—she was only Anne” (p. 5).

The title of Persuasion returns Austen to the abstract conceptual titling of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Anne “had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure,” Wentworth believes, and he remains resentful. “She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over‐persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity” (p. 61).

When the novel opens, nearly eight years have passed since the lovers' parting; the Elliot finances have seriously dwindled; and Sir Walter is forced to let Kellynch Hall to Admiral and Mrs. Croft. This arrangement brings Wentworth, now a Captain in the Navy who has distinguished himself in the service, advanced in rank, and “made a handsome fortune” (p. 30), back into Anne's purview, as Mrs. Croft is his sister. Wentworth has not married; and Anne, who “had been forced into prudence in her youth, … learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning” (p. 30). Anne Elliot is twenty‐seven years old when the novel opens, by far the most mature of Austen's heroines. She is the only Austen heroine who has a past.

Persuasion is a more physical novel than Austen had previously written. Two accidents form climactic moments: young Charles Musgrove's fall in which he breaks his collar bone and injures his back, and Louisa Musgrove's near‐fatal fall on the Cobb in Lyme Regis. Both accidents test Anne's resilience and coolness in a crisis. Captain Harville's lameness dates from a war injury, and Richard Musgrove died of a fever in the West Indies. Multiple deaths precede the novel's action as well, most notably those of Lady Elliot and of Mrs. Elliot. Mr. Elliot wears a black band around his hat and the Elliot women wear black ribbons. Mrs. Smith's illness defines her decline and makes her helpless and older than her years. Anne Elliot herself begins the novel with the note that “her bloom had vanished early” and she has become “faded and thin” (p. 6); Wentworth remarks to Anne's sister Mary Musgrove that Anne is “so altered he should not have known” her again (p. 60). Critic John Wiltshire has argued that the human body is at its most vulnerable in Persuasion.²³ From this perspective, Persuasion may have paved the way for Austen's focus on invalidism in her final fictional effort, Sanditon, a fragment in which she otherwise seems to move in new directions.

Human emotions are more vulnerable in Persuasion as well. As Anne has to come to terms with having been influenced in an intensely private decision and repented of that decision, so Wentworth has to overcome his bitterness in order to find his way back to Anne and to forgive her. Austen carries out the details of these emotional developments with some of her most powerful and effectively staged scenes. Most notable is her use of eavesdropping, an activity often engaged in by Austen characters, but nowhere more intensely than in Persuasion.

On a walk early in the story, Anne finds herself behind a hedgerow from which vantage point she overhears a conversation between Louisa Musgrove and Wentworth. The conversation snippet begins in medias res and its context makes no difference. Anne hears Louisa tell Wentworth, “What!—would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person?—or, of any person, I may say. No,—I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it” (p. 87). Wentworth responds, “It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on.—You are never sure of a good impression being durable. Every body may sway it; let those who would be happy be firm” (p. 88). The second notable eavesdropping scene decides the conclusion of the novel. Wentworth overhears a conversation about constancy in men and women.

Emma moved Austen in the direction of a tighter plot structure; Persuasion is Austen's shortest and most tightly plotted novel. There is the usual allotment of misunderstandings; however, all the plot elements serve the tension—erotic and narrative—that builds when Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth meet so many years after their failed engagement.

Persuasion has one of the clearest temporal structures of any of Austen's novels. Characters frequently allude to the precise dates of events, and the years that have intervened between the broken engagement and the current narrative loom large. For Sir Walter, the past represents the family tradition and status that he wishes to uphold; for his daughter, who looks toward the future, the past represents the mistake of her life and its turning point. Like Elinor Dashwood, Anne must struggle for self‐control, and she must balance self‐respect with emotional repression as she confronts a renewal of acquaintance with Wentworth.

Most of Austen's novels offer little prehistory before the narrative begins. In Persuasion, foreshadowing and decisive pasts abound: Sir Walter Elliot has lost his wife and become estranged from his male heir, Mr. Elliot. Mr. Elliot has failed to marry Elizabeth, Anne's older sister, and then married a woman who has died. Charles Musgrove proposed first to Anne before he married her younger sister, Mary. At school, Anne Elliot became friends with Miss Hamilton, now Mrs. Smith, who has her own sad history. Frederick Wentworth has a long and distinguished war history and set of naval friends in Harville and Benwick. And, of course, Anne and Wentworth became engaged and then Anne succumbed to “persuasion” and broke the engagement.

This dwelling on the past establishes one of the novel's major themes, the changing of the guard from the old, landed aristocracy typified by Sir Walter Elliot and his obsession with Debrett's Baronetage of England [that “book of books” (p. 7) to the new professional classes]. The Napoleonic wars that pitted Britain against France enriched a new group of military and commercial men whose class claims have nothing to do with inherited estates or birth. The narrator holds up for ridicule Sir Walter and the other representatives of the aristocracy in the novel, Lady Dalrymple and her daughter Miss Carteret. In contrast, the naval officers who abound in Persuasion represent education and self‐sufficiency. The aristocrats lack manners and hospitality and fall back on empty formality, while the professional men exemplify inner substance, the value of friendship, tolerance, an embrace of change, and inner strength.

An early conversation about naval men sets up the class conflict that anchors part of the plot of Persuasion. “The navy, I think, who have done so much for us, have at least an equal claim with any other set of men, for all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give,” Anne argues when Admiral Croft presents himself as a possible tenant for Kellynch Hall. “Sailors work hard enough for their comforts, we must all allow,” she continues. Sir Walter feels differently, finding the naval profession offensive, “as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of” (p. 19). In Sir Walter's world, personal worth is based on birth and heritage. In the new professional world, worth (part of Wentworth's name) depends upon merit.

Austen's previous heroes had been landowners or clergymen; Wentworth deviates from that background in important ways. As a consequence, the ending of the novel contains some ambiguities. Whereas Austen's earlier heroines move into a world they know when they marry, Anne Elliot looks forward to a life of adventure, movement, and change. Admiral and Mrs. Croft represent not only the happiest married couple in all of Austen's works, but also the most unconventional couple. Mrs. Crofts challenges gender roles when she accompanies her husband on board ship, participates in financial negotiations, and intervenes to give the reins of the family equipage “a better direction.” Self‐sufficiency and new forms of status may be available for women as well as men, the novel suggests.

The long series of wars between France and England that ended in 1814 made naval officers wealthy and rendered them prominent social figures as well. Napoleon's unexpected escape from Elba renewed hostilities in Europe and suggested that no peace would ever be reliably lasting. The “dread of a future War” (p. 273) referred to in the novel's last sentences is quite real. So readers cannot be sure what the future holds for the Wentworths, other than a happy acceptance of change and social progress.

MINOR AND INCOMPLETE WORKS

LADY SUSAN

Lady Susan did not appear in print during Austen's lifetime. James Edward Austen‐Leigh published it for the first time in the 1871 edition of his Memoir of Jane Austen, and he gave the work its title.

Two eighteenth‐century novels may have influenced Lady Susan: Henry Fielding's 1741 parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, a wicked send‐up of its inspiration called Shamela, and French novelist Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). These earlier works use epistolary form with multiple correspondents, and their competing and crossing letters, like those of Lady Susan, unmask rank hypocrisy and display outrageous manipulation of the emotions of the characters whom the protagonists exploit. Lady Susan Vernon, like her notorious predecessor Madame de Merteuil in Les Liaisons dangereuses, captivates the reader's imagination even as she behaves with repellent amorality to get what she wants.²⁴

The plot of Lady Susan is as outrageously complicated as its heroine. Lady Susan Vernon, thirty‐five and a widow billed as “the most accomplished Coquette in England,” comes to visit her brother‐in‐law and his wife in “that insupportable spot, a Country Village”²⁵ in order to escape a mess that she has created by having an affair with a married man. On arrival, Lady Susan promptly sets about to seduce Mrs. Vernon's brother Reginald de Courcy, the only son and heir of his venerable family. At the same time, she plots to marry her daughter Frederica to the oblivious, dim‐witted, but wealthy buffoon Sir James Martin. Lady Susan uncharitably and unfairly describes her daughter as “the greatest simpleton on Earth … who was born to be the torment of my life” (p. 245), and “a stupid girl, & has nothing to recommend her” (p. 252).

Letters fly chiefly between Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson, her confidante and co‐conspirator in London, and between Mrs. Vernon and her mother, Lady de Courcy, with occasional missives from others and a lot of quoted and indirect dialogue. The pleasure in Lady Susan derives from its eponymous heroine's “captivating Deceit” (pp. 248‐49). While Lady Susan herself delights in what she calls the “exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person pre‐determined to dislike, acknowledge one's superiority” (p. 254), the other characters are alternately charmed by her considerable art and artifice and horrified at her duplicity and their own susceptibility to it. The reader follows suit.

Lady Susan works her art through her linguistic fluency, and she prides herself on being able to persuade anyone of anything and being able to talk her way out of any difficulty. “If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence,” she writes. “Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty” (p. 268). Her technique involves the fine use of words to maneuver through any social pitfall.

Lady Susan's analysis of her first pass at coercing her daughter into a marriage with Sir James illustrates her simple philosophy: She aims to maximize her economic and social status and her emotional power over others, because for her, all personal pleasure derives from status and power.

Upon this whole I commend my own conduct in this affair extremely, & regard it as a very happy mixture of circumspection & tenderness. Some Mothers would have insisted on their daughter's accepting so great an offer on the first overture, but I could not answer it to myself to force Frederica into a marriage from which her heart revolted; & instead of adopting so harsh a measure, merely propose to make it her own choice by rendering her thoroughly uncomfortable till she does accept him. But enough of this tiresome girl.

(Lady Susan in Lady Susan, pp. 253‐54)

For Lady Susan, social life is a game that involves high stakes and risks, and she is its consummate player. In complaining about her daughter, she writes, “Artlessness will never do in Love matters, & that girl is born a simpleton who has it either by nature or affectation” (p. 274).

Yet, of course, Lady Susan gets her comeuppance in the end. An expository “Conclusion” to the epistolary narrative explains that because some of the characters are together and others permanently estranged, the correspondence has ended (“to the great detriment of the Post office Revenue” [p. 311]). Readers learn that Frederica is living under the care of her aunt and uncle, and that Lady Susan herself will marry Sir James Martin. The narrator remarks at the end that it is not possible to know whether Lady Susan was happy with the choice of Sir James, “for who would take her assurance of it, on either side of the question?” She remains an anti‐heroine and tantalizingly enigmatic.

Critic Terry Castle has pointed out that Lady Susan's double standard infects the reader and that Austen herself does not entirely condemn her character's subversive talents. Castle writes of Lady Susan's “incorrigible will to power, her gaiety, her erotic rebelliousness, her triumphant contempt for all the ‘romantic nonsense’ that keeps other women subservient.”²⁶ She may be evil, but the form that evil takes is quite compelling.

In Lady Susan, Jane Austen initiated the fictional use of twin psychological concepts, employing the terms consciousness (in the sense of “self‐consciousness”) and embarrassment in what were early instances of these rather modern concepts.²⁷ So while Lady Susan carries on the parodic digs at hypocrisy that preoccupy Austen's earlier juvenile writings, this extended and more accomplished short novel moves significantly toward Austen's mature facility with ironic social satire and psychological judgment.

THE WATSONS

Jane Austen began writing The Watsons in Bath in 1804 (the manuscript bears an 1803 watermark), and she abandoned it in 1805 following her father's death. Austen never returned to this story despite hints about how the plot would have unfolded and real narrative promise. The Watsons is the darkest of Austen's fictions, and when she put it aside, she remained silent, with the exception of some verses and an inquiry concerning the copyright of Susan, until she began to revise Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility in 1809 or 1810.

If Jane Austen introduced modern psychological concepts into her work with Lady Susan, she constructed a story around the psychology of anxiety and dread in the unfinished The Watsons. This brief work abounds with multiple references to awkwardness and anxiety and mentions of consciousness and conscience, embarrassment, shame, and alienation, all relatively new terms for the period. Emma Watson is a sophisticated heroine who analyzes her social and emotional situation with acute insight.

The plot of The Watsons is complex. Emma Watson has been living with her aunt and uncle, and she returns home at age nineteen after her uncle has died and her aunt has remarried an Irishman, thus cutting her out of the inheritance she and her family had expected for her. After an absence of fourteen years, during which she has had no contact with her family, Emma finds a sensible but invalid father, two petulant, irritable, and self‐interested sisters who see her as an unwelcome rival for the small number of available men in the neighborhood, and a boorish brother who has moved to a neighboring town and married a wealthy but vain wife. An older sister, Elizabeth, worries and meddles but is good‐natured and warm‐hearted. As with many novels from the eighteenth century, the Watson mother has died before the novel begins.

The Watsons opens with a local ball, a segment that offers an intriguing historical account of the social protocols of assemblies. Emma finds herself the center of attention as a new face in the circumscribed social gathering. She marks herself as kind, amiable, and morally responsible when she rescues a boy of ten whose haughty dance partner has reneged on her promise to him, thus making herself interesting to the boy's aristocratic companions. By the end of the fragment we have of this story, Emma has attracted the attentions of the arrogant and socially inept Lord Osborne, the smooth‐talking but vapid social climber Tom Musgrave, and the agreeable, gentlemanly clergyman Mr. Howard.

Meanwhile, Emma's straitened economic situation pains her, and she fights back tears when her cruelly dismissive brother remarks, “What a blow it must have been upon you!—To find yourself, instead of heiress of 8 or 9000£, sent back a weight upon your family, without a sixpence.” He goes on mercilessly: “After keeping you at a distance from your family for such a length of time as must do away all natural affection among us & breeding you up (I suppose) in a superior stile, you are returned upon their hands without a sixpence.”²⁸ Toward the end of the fragment, the narrator sums up Emma Watson's predicament quite grimly:

[S]he was become of importance to no one, a burden on those, whose affection she could not expect, an addition in an House, already overstocked, surrounded by inferior minds with little chance of domestic comfort, & as little hope of future support.

(pp. 361‐62)

A dismal set of circumstances indeed, with people characterized by “Hard‐hearted prosperity, low‐minded Conceit, & wrong ûheaded folly” (p. 361).

For all the gloomy prognostications, the existing text of The Watsons hints that Emma, more congenial and better brought up than her sisters, may find a husband who is both in possession of a comfortable income and social standing and worthy of her affections. Cassandra Austen reported that Emma would have received and declined an offer of marriage from the wealthy if slightly creepy aristocrat Lord Osborne, who can speak of nothing but horses and ladies' fashions in shoes, and she was to have ended up happily engaged to Mr. Howard, whose love she was to have won despite the efforts of Miss Osborne to secure him for herself.

Yet despite the apparently intended happy ending, The Watsons diverges from the plot of Pride and Prejudice, with which it shares some superficial plot resemblances: a group of sisters with little fortune to recommend them as marriage partners; ineffectual parental guidance; obnoxious suitors; and a heroine whose sensibility permits her to see with great acuity precisely where her social situation places her. In The Watsons, the sisters without means who are in search of suitors are snappish, cross, jealous, and resentful of one another and the world. More important, women must compete fiercely with one another for eligible men in the world of The Watsons, a world of palpable social awkwardness, disappointments in love that cause shame as well as heartache, and excruciating anxieties about the future.

In addition to the psychological complexity and anxiety exhibited in The Watsons, bursts of inspired prose enliven this work. As the novel progresses, Austen reveals a developing narrative style and set of writerly techniques that she was later able to deploy more fully. The fragment opens with an effective method of speaking for and about a group consciousness with a writing method that might be called the communal passive voice. Here is the opening sentence:

The first winter assembly in the Town of D. in Surry was to be held on Tuesday October 13th, & it was generally expected to be a very good one; a long list of Country Families was confidently run over as sure of attending, & sanguine hopes were entertained that the Osbornes themselves would be there.

(p. 314)

Far from representing a lack of agency, the passive verbs here and throughout The Watsons present a social ethos that controls the lives of everyone in this well‐defined, hierarchical, rule‐bound community, introducing a theme of social politics that defines all of Austen's mature fiction.

Given the unpromising future the Watson sisters face, it would have been interesting to know how Austen would have resolved their fates. Austen's grasp of economics is forthright in this fragment of a novel, extending even to the stunning moment when Emma chastises Lord Osborne for not understanding that “Female Economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one,” at which “Lord Osborne was silenced” (p. 346).

Snatches of the famous Austenian irony appear in The Watsons. Using a combination of the communal passive voice and indirect discourse, the narrator paints a satiric picture of the ball atmosphere:

The cold & empty appearance of the Room & the demure air of the small cluster of Females at one end of it began soon to give way; the inspiriting sound of other Carriages was heard, & continual accessions of portly Chaperons, & strings of smartly‐dressed girls were received, with now & then a fresh gentleman straggler, who if not enough in Love to station himself near any fair Creature seemed glad to escape into the Card‐room.

(p. 328)

Some turns of phrase reflect Austen at her wicked best. The tongue‐tied, dense Lord Osborne can think, for example, of little to say when he pays a post‐ball visit, but “after hard labour of mind, he produced the remark of it's being a very fine day” (p. 345). And Emma's self‐absorbed, conceited sister‐in‐law “eyed her with much familiar curiosity & Triumphant Compassion” (p. 349), lording it over her impoverished relative at the same time that she reveals her own moral inferiority in this brief phrase.

Austen also sets out her trademark character and plot devices in The Watsons. The dilemmas Emma Watson faces seem trivial—how to avoid being escorted home in Tom Musgrave's curricle, for example—but represent the typical Austenian method for revealing depth of character in confrontation with social proprieties. Emma wants to get home as quickly as possible and Tom's offer would facilitate this. Yet she does not want to invite intimacy with this forward young man. She needs to remain proper and polite, yet dislikes the pressure to act in a way that displeases her and invites misunderstanding. These are the moments in Austen's fiction that prove decisive, and Emma's superior strength of will emerges as she negotiates this social precipice with aplomb, creativity, and decorum, as befits an Austen heroine.

SANDITON

Nothing can be quite so simultaneously depressing and exhilarating for a lover of Jane Austen than to read the wonderful fragment of a novel she left when she died. In the last months of her life, Austen composed the beginnings of Sanditon, a work she was obliged to abandon during her final illness. She began to write Sanditon in January 1817, and the last date on the manuscript is 18 March 1817. She died on 18 July, exactly four months later, and her health quickly deteriorated during the period in which she composed this last work of fiction. It seems fitting, then, that Sanditon concerns health and invalidism and paints an especially vivid picture of hypochondriacs.

This novel fragment is magnificent, and thus underscores the enormous loss to the canon of English literature represented by Austen's premature death. “There are some great writers who wrote too much,” novelist Margaret Drabble wrote. “There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.”²⁹

Sanditon departs from Austen's serious later novels and returns to the sort of burlesque she practiced in Northanger Abbey, but on a different subject, that of invalidism and fashionable watering places. The idea that a dying woman depicted hypochondriacal characters with so much energy and real fun and such a skewering of the state of medical knowledge gives some hints about Austen's own character and courage in the face of her last illness.

Highly satirical and at times hilarious, Sanditon presents some of Austen's most promising comic characters and situations. Mr. Parker is “an Enthusiast;—on the subject of Sanditon, a complete Enthusiast” and a man “of a sanguine turn of mind, with more Imagination than Judgement.”³⁰ His wife is “the properest wife in the World for a Man of strong Understanding, but not of capacity to supply the cooler reflection which her own Husband sometimes needed, & so entirely waiting to be guided on every occasion, that whether he were risking his Fortune or spraining an Ancle, she remained equally useless” (p. 372). As “Every Neighbourhood should have a great Lady,” the imperious Lady Denham, seventy years old, “born to Wealth but not to Education” (p. 375) fills that role exquisitely. When the heroine Charlotte Heywood becomes experienced with Lady Denham's economic interactions and judgments and her notion that lawyers and clergymen and military officers are worthless because they produce no heiresses for her nephew to marry, she thinks, “She is thoroughly mean. I had not expected any thing so bad.” “Thus it is, when Rich people are Sordid,” she concludes (p. 402).

The three hypochondriacs, Diana, Susan, and Arthur Parker, are drawn with exaggerated raillery and comic glee. The Parker siblings combine extreme preoccupation with their bodies and bodily functions, with eating and exercise and air, that they take to extravagances such as bleeding themselves with leeches for ten days running or pulling three teeth at once. Their vocabulary tends to phrases such as “Spasmodic Bile” (p. 386). Far from appearing to be as ill as they pretend, Diana officiously organizes the lives even of strangers; Arthur sits next to a roaring fire to nurse his burly constitution with cocoa and buttered toast; and Susan “had no Hysterics of consequence” on their journey until they arrived just in sight of Sanditon (p. 407).

The pompous sentimentalist Sir Edward Denham provides equal mirth to the reader and returns us to Austen's narrative concerns about novel‐reading in Northanger Abbey. Sir Edward fancies himself erudite and sensitive, and he virtually pummels Charlotte with ridiculous quotations from Scott, Campbell, and Burns until she “began to think him downright silly” (p. 398). Sir Edward's disquisition on novels and literary taste beautifully sends up the intellectual snobbery of the day while offering a parody of fashionable language. Poor Charlotte survives this onslaught of words to conclude that their tastes in reading do not coincide and to discover that Sir Edward has primarily enlarged his vocabulary and denigrated his own style through his reading, without in any way improving his mental acuity or capacity for critical judgment.

Sanditon begins more actively than other Austen fictions, with a dramatic carriage accident on a country lane. In the twelve extant chapters, an intriguing scene is set for various plot developments, but not much actually transpires. It is clear that more raillery at the expense of invalidism and hypochondria would have filled many pages. In addition, Austen presents a strong grasp of economic conditions in the Parker‐Denham effort to merchandize and turn a profit from Sanditon. The presence of several unmarried and various situated young men and women—one of them described as a West Indian mulatto—offered rich material for Austen to have mined had she lived to do so. It is not surprising that several writers have made attempts to complete this promising narrative material.

ADAPTATIONS

A spate of imitators and completers have finished Jane Austen's unfinished works, published fictional sequels to the novels, and even published historical murder mysteries with a fantasy Jane Austen playing the plucky detective.³¹ The latest entry into what we might call the Austen augmentation market—often these works pretend to be found manuscripts—is a slim volume purporting to print the expurgated sex scenes from the Austen oeuvre.³² These works are not part of the Austen canon, but they represent a phenomenon that is very much tied to the world of Jane Austen and deserves some attention.

In addition to the literary additions to Jane Austen's output—with works by writers such as Joan Aiken, Julia Barrett, and Emma Tennant, entries by Austen kin Anna Austen Lefroy and Joan Austen‐Leigh, and a novel inspired by Austen by Fay Weldon³³—the movie industries in England and the United States have found Austen's novels to be fertile ground for cinematic treatment. Austen movies first appeared in 1940, with a production of Pride and Prejudice that starred Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. Interestingly, it was Harpo Marx who presented this idea to Hollywood after seeing a 1935 Australian theatrical production based on Pride and Prejudice. Marx sent a telegram to producer Irving Thalberg proposing that the role of Elizabeth Bennet would be perfect for Thalberg's wife, actress Norma Shearer. Shearer postponed the project, and Thalberg died before MGM made the film. The English writer Aldous Huxley helped with the screenplay, and the studio advertised the movie with the tag line “Bachelors Beware! Five Gorgeous Beauties are on a Madcap Manhunt!” The plot is significantly altered by having Lady Catherine de Bourgh, played by Edna May Oliver, arrange the match between Darcy and Elizabeth.³⁴

A particularly strong set of movie productions of Austen novels appeared in the mid‐1990s. Seven movies or television series came out between 1970 and 1986, and in 1995 and 1996, six additional adaptations of Austen novels for the screen appeared. These movies of Austen fiction brought with them new mass market editions of the novels on which they were based. Scholars and literary critics have begun to look at the Austen filmography as a way to recover how readers have interpreted Austen's meanings for their own times.³⁵

In 1995, British actress Emma Thompson worked with director Ang Lee to produce a relatively faithful screenplay of Sense and Sensibility. Thompson played Elinor Dashwood, with Kate Winslet as Marianne, Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars, Greg Wise as Willoughby, and Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon. The movie enjoyed box office as well as critical success and brought renewed popular attention to Austen's work. Also in 1995, the BBC and writer Nick Dear produced a film of Persuasion, directed by Roger Michell, with Amanda Root as Anne Elliot, Ciaran Hinds as Captain Wentworth, Corin Redgrave as Sir Walter Elliot, and Sophie Thompson as Mary Musgrove. The same year, a BBC and Arts and Entertainment production of Pride and Prejudice written by Andrew Davies and directed by Simon Langton scandalized some Austenites with a version of Pride and Prejudice in which Colin Firth, playing Darcy, dived into a lake on the Pemberley property and emerged dripping wet. This sexualized portrait made Firth a screen idol. That production also starred Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and was shown on television in a mini‐series format.

The following year, in 1996, another major movie star, Gwyneth Paltrow, brought attention to Austen with a movie of Emma. Jeremy Northam played Mr. Knightley and Ewan McGregor played Frank Churchill in this movie, written and directed by Douglas McGrath. The same year, a television production for the Arts and Entertainment Network, written by Andrew Davies (who also wrote the televised version of Pride and Prejudice) and directed by Diarmuid Lawrence, featured Kate Beckinsale as Emma. So suddenly in 1995 and 1996, Austen novels seemed to be everywhere in popular culture.

In 1999, a movie adaptation of Mansfield Park took more liberties with the story than had the earlier films. Writer and director Patricia Rozema, known for experimental and feminist movie work, created a movie that brought some of the recent critical work on colonialism to bear on Mansfield Park, the epicenter for global analyses of Austen. Rozema gave Fanny Price more backbone than she appears to have at the beginning of the novel. In addition and more controversially, she created a movie in which the slave trade and the presence of slaves at the Bertram plantations in Antigua figure as a nightmarish backdrop to the action in England.

The renewed and popular appeal of Austen's work in Hollywood cannot be explained simply. The factors that help us understand the sudden ubiquitous mass cultural presence of Austen in the 1990s might include the fact that Austen's work, after all, arguably focuses on three best‐selling topics: money, sex, and love. In addition, in a period in which values are splintering and new forms of technological media are proliferating, Austen provides a glimpse into a simpler world where moral issues were clearer, life options were more circumscribed, and choices were, in general, fewer.

Two recent Austen‐related works, updates rather than true adaptations, deserve some mention. In 1995, alongside the Austen movie mania, Paramount produced a movie titled Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling, and starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd. The movie is set at a high school in Los Angeles and offers a comic send‐up of angst among wealthy American teenagers with cell phones. Clueless is a funny coming of age story that works in its own right. At the same time, its plot closely follows that of Austen's Emma. The protagonist meddles in the affairs of others while failing to understand the nature of her own feelings. Other parallels abound. The protagonist falls for a man who turns out to be unavailable, as was Frank Churchill, but here because he is gay, and everyone realizes it but the heroine. The man the protagonist loves is under her nose all along—he is her stepbrother. And an incident in a mall replaces the attack by gypsies in the novel. In Clueless, albeit in a late twentieth‐century context, Heckerling captures on film Austen's ironic voice, something most of the movie adaptations of Austen's novels fail to do.

Helen Fielding's novel Bridget Jones' Diary, is less successful than Clueless, both as a work of fiction and as a movie, but it became wildly popular.³⁶ The movie casts Colin Firth, to date the sexiest Darcy, as Mark Darcy. Like Clueless, the story is set entirely in the modern day, in fashionable London rather than Los Angeles, and features a plot closely based on the plot of Pride and Prejudice. Renée Zellweger is the heroine torn between a handsome cad (Hugh Grant as the Wickham character) who is her boss and the distant and proper Darcy, about whom the cad has told her what turn out to be lies to cover for his own misdeeds with respect to Darcy. Both Clueless and Bridget Jones's Diary bring a sharp focus to the ongoing appeal of Austen's irony and cutting wit. At the same time, these contemporary stories also update and renegotiate the marriage plot for a post‐feminist era.

Notes

1. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 78; 102. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

2. Jane Austen's “Sir Charles Grandison,” ed. Brian Southam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980). References to the text of the play will be given parenthetically.

3. Southam, “Introduction,” ibid., p. 20.

4. Ann Radcliffe was the major practitioner of the female Gothic novel that Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland so dote on. Her two best‐known works are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797).

5. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 13. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

6. Many Austen characters are judged by what and how much they read and by how they respond to their reading.

7. Ibid., p. 182.

8. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. I, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 34. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

9. Margaret Anne Doody, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xiii.

10. Ibid., p. xxxiii.

11. Zelda Boyd, “The Language of Supposing: Modal Auxiliaries in Sense and Sensibility,” in Janet Todd, ed., Jane Austen: New Perspectives (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 142‐52.

12. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

13. Isobel Armstrong, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xxiv. Note that this revision, however apt, destroys the comic irony of the original.

14. Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 202. Mansfield Park is set in Northamptonshire.

15. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. III, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 92‐93. Moira Ferguson offers a postcolonial analysis of Mansfield Park in “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender,” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. Laura Mooneyham White (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), pp. 103‐120. See also The Postcolonial Jane Austen, ed. You‐me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (London: Routledge: 2000) for readings of Mansfield Park from a global economic perspective.

17. Austen does require, to be sure, a plot device for removing Sir Thomas from Mansfield. The lack of his moral guidance fuels much of the story; the Rushworth engagement would no doubt not have taken place had he remained at home.

18. Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 309.

19. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. IV, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 64. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

20. Terry Castle, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

21. Ibid., p. xx.

22. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 4. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

23. John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health” (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1992).

24. The situation in Lady Susan also forecasts Austen's portrait in Mansfield Park of the complicity between Mary Crawford and her brother Henry in his amorous intrigues and, ultimately, his pursuit of Fanny Price.

25. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 248; 245‐46. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

26. Terry Castle, “Introduction,” to Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. xxvii‐xxviii.

27. Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defines “consciousness” as the perception of what passes in one's own mind, citing Locke, and the internal sense of guilt or innocence. Johnson offers two definitions of “embarrassment”: perplexity and entanglement. Margaret Anne Doody has written about Frances Burney's modern and new presentation of embarrassment in Evelina, a novel published in 1778 that Jane Austen knew well, in Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes about these concepts in women's fiction in Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), which includes a chapter on Mansfield Park.

28. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 352. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

29. Margaret Drabble, “Introduction,” Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 7.

30. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 371; 372. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

31. Helen Barton has written The Jane Austen Quiz Book and Maggie Lane published The Jane Austen Quiz & Puzzle Book. Stephanie Barron has written five detective novels that feature Jane Austen as the main character. There are also whole industries of Austen memorabilia, from umbrellas to playing cards to bumper stickers.

32. Arielle Eckstrut and Dennis Ashton, Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). For a list of pre‐1975 adaptations, see Andrew Wright, “Jane Austen Adapted,” Nineteenth‐Century Fiction 30 (1975): 421‐53.

33. This is only a very partial list of the most prolific of the Austen adapters. Joan Aiken's books include Emma Watson: The Watsons Completed (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), Eliza's Daughter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), Jane Fairfax: A Novel to Complement Emma by Jane Austen (London: Gollancz, 1990), Mansfield Revisited: A Novel (London: Gollancz, 1984), and The Youngest Miss Ward (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). Julia Barrett's books include Presumption (New York: M. Evans, 1993), The Third Sister: A Continuation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1996), and Jane Austen's Charlotte: Her Fragment of A Last Novel (New York: M. Evans and Co., 2000). Emma Tennant has published Emma in Love: Jane Austen's Emma Continued (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), Pemberley, or, Pride and Prejudice Continued (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), and An Unequal Marriage, or, Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

    Austen's niece Anna Austen Lefroy (1793‐1872) wrote Jane Austen's Sanditon: a Continuation, ed. Mary Gaither Marshal. (Chicago: Chiron Press, 1983). A great‐great‐grandniece, Joan Austen‐Leigh, published A Visit to Highbury/Another View of Emma (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) and Later Days at Highbury (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). Fay Weldon wrote Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1984). Weldon also wrote a novel called Darcy's Utopia (London: Collins, 1990) and a screenplay of Pride and Prejudice that the BBC produced in 1979.

34. See Rachel M. Brownstein, “Out of the Drawing Room, Onto the Lawn,” in Jane Austen in Hollywood, second ed., ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001): 13‐14.

35. For a collection of such essays, see Jane Austen in Hollywood, second ed., ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001).

36. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel (New York: Viking, 1998); the Miramax film appeared in 2001 and was written by Richard Curtis and directed by Sharon Maguire.