William Deresiewicz Read online

  Ja n e A u s t e n a n d t h e R o m a n t i c P o e t s

  Jane Austen

  and the

  Romantic Poets

  William Deresiewicz

  Columbia University Press N e w Yo r k

  Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright Š 2004 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by Yale University toward the cost of publishing this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deresiewicz, William, 1964 Jane Austen and the romatic poets / William Deresiewicz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0231134142 (alk. paper) 1. Austen, Jane, 17751817—Knowledge—Literature. 2. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Austen, Jane, 17751817—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 5. Romanticism— Great Britian. I. Title. PR4038.L5D47 823’.7—dc22 2004 2004058253

  Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jill

  Contents

  Acknowledgments chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 chapter 4 chapter 5 Introduction 1

  ix

  Early Phase Versus Major Phase: The Changing Feelings of the Mind Mansfield Park: Substitution 56 86

  18

  Emma: Ambiguous Relationships

  Persuasion: Widowhood and Waterloo Notes 159 197

  127

  Bibliography Index 209

  Acknowledgments

  y first thanks must go to Karl Kroeber, who displayed unfailing wisdom, wit, and patience during my seemingly interminable stay in graduate school. I entered my first course with him convinced that nineteenthcentury British fiction was the last field I would want to specialize in and left it unable to imagine how I could study anything else. Although my student days seem distant now, I would also like to take this opportunity to thank some of the others whose inspiration and guidance most importantly shaped me during those years: Adele Siegel, Paul McNeil, Edward Tayler, Tobi Tobias, Michael Seidel, Julie Peters, Andrew Delbanco, and Kathy Eden. Neither graduate school nor an untenured professorship are experiences one can sanely survive without the friendship of fellow students and colleagues. Among the most cherished of these friends have been Morgan Brill, Piotr Siemion, Paul Vita, Gaura Narayan, Renee Tursi, Pericles Lewis, Chris Miller, Amy Hungerford, Nigel Alderman, and Wes Davis. A special thanks to Blakey Vermeule, coach, confidant, and co-conspirator through many a lunch and late-night phone call, and to George Fayen, equal parts mentor and friend, unsurpassed model of pedagogic excellence to generations of students and colleagues.

  M

  This project began as a little idea that flew into my ear one day while I was teaching a seminar on Jane Austen in the spring of 1999. Thanks to the students who shared their love of Austen with me that term. Thanks also to the colleagues without whose support and feedback this book would not be what it is. Linda Peterson, Paul Fry, Joe Bizup, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Michael Thurston offered acute criticisms at the proposal stage. Ruth Yeazell and David Bromwich read the entire manuscript with generous minds and probing eyes, and offered savvy advice about publication as well. Thanks also to the readers for Columbia University Press, who helped me to imagine an audience unbiased by personal association. The editors and staff of the Press—Jennifer Crewe, Kerri Sullivan, and Juree Sondker—have been a dream to work with. A special thanks to James Shapiro, for championing the manuscript at a crucial point in its travels through the publishing maze, and to Clare Howell, for very generously donating her indexing services. Thanks also to the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University for helping defray production costs. The bulk of this book was written during a year’s leave in India. Thanks to Yale University for the Morse Fellowship that made the leave possible, and thanks also to the friends who kept me supplied with library books, printer paper, ant traps, and other necessities from across the sea: Clare Howell, Karin Roffman, Ravit Reichman, and my sister, Ellen Schwartz. My largest debts are to my parents, who made it all possible, and to my wife, Aleeza Jill Nussbaum, who makes it all worth doing in the first place.

  x

  Acknowledgments

  Ja n e A u s t e n a n d t h e R o m a n t i c P o e t s

  c h a p t e r

  o n e

  Introduction

  The long interval that elapsed between the completion of Northanger Abbey in 1798, and the commencement of Mansfield Park in 1811, may sufficiently account for any difference of style which may be perceived between her three earlier and her three later productions … [I]n her last three works are to be found … a deeper insight into the delicate anatomy of the human heart, marking the difference between the brilliant girl and the mature woman. —J. E. AustenLeigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen1

  ane Austen’s nephew may have gotten his dates slightly wrong,2 but he was the first to identify one of the most striking facts about his aunt’s work. Though her six novels were published within about six years of one another, the last three represent manifestly greater artistic achievements than do the first. While that much has been a critical commonplace since the days of AustenLeigh, it has never been anything more than a commonplace—often noted, scarcely ever discussed.3 Early phase and major phase, as I will call them: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. The former brilliant, cutting, breathtakingly assured, the latter something still more: deeper, denser, more complex, more confounding. Their incontestably great artistic merits notwithstanding, the novels of the early phase are essentially straightforward marriage plots, intricately designed but morally and emotionally unambiguous. In the major phase, Austen discards her allegiance to reason and resolution to emerge as an explorer of uncharted and disturbingly equivocal regions of selfhood and relatedness. From a maker of marriages, she becomes an investigator into “the delicate anatomy of the human heart.” What accounts for this change? Again, pride of place must go to AustenLeigh. Jane Austen was twenty-three—a brilliant girl, in her nephew’s terms—when she finished the last of the three manuscripts that would later

  J

  become the novels of the early phase. Her father was still alive and well, their family home in Steventon still unthreatened by the prospect of removal. By the time she began Mansfield Park at the age of thirty-five, however, her father had died; her family had moved house six times, among three different towns, with long intervals, after two of the removals, of shuttling from friend to friend; she had accepted a proposal of marriage just short of her twenty-seventh birthday—the age by which Charlotte Lucas has become desperate enough to accept the hand of Mr. Collins—then rejected it the next morning; she had sold the manuscript of Northanger Abbey (then called Susan), only to see it languish on the publisher’s shelf; and at last, her family having settled in the Chawton cottage she would call home for the rest of her life, she had seen Sense and Sensibility accepted for publication and put into proof. The brilliant girl had become a mature woman.4 But something else happened during those twelve years, something that could not have failed—and as I will argue, did not fail—to have a profound impact on Jane Austen’s art. Her long period of silent growth, together with the six subsequent years of continued development until her death, coincided with and can to a considerable extent be attributed to the most significant literary event of her lifetime: the flowering of the poetic movement that later became known as British Romanticism. It was not known as such until many years later, nor were the poets eventually grouped under that rubric classed together at the time.5 But by the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century—1807, at the lates
t—it had become clear to literate Britain that something very important was happening in English poetry: that Wordsworth and his fellow “Lake Poets” were leading a revolution in poetic form, diction, and subject matter, as well as in the very idea of what it meant to be a poet.6 Lyrical Ballads appeared in September 1798, just after Austen had begun work on Susan.7 By 1816, the year she finished Persuasion, nearly all of Wordsworth’s significant work (excluding, of course, the Prelude) had seen print. Nor were Wordsworth and Coleridge the only important new voices. All but one of Scott’s verse romances, as well as the first three of his novels, appeared during the period, all of them to tremendous acclaim. And while Blake would have been unknown to Austen and the careers of Shelley and Keats not yet sufficiently underway by 1816 to have attracted attention, in 1812 Byron burst onto the scene with Childe Harold III and, within two years, his four Turkish Tales. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron: Austen responded not to a movement, but to four powerful individual talents, just as she had earlier responded to some of the leading talents of the mid-to late 18th century—

  2 Introduction

  Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, Burney. That Austen was profoundly shaped by the literature she read as a youth—that hers is an art that begins in imitation, parody, and creative adaptation—has been a matter of critical consensus and intensive scholarly investigation for as long as critics have been writing about her work.8 It is striking, then, how little thought has been given to what she read as an adult and how it shaped the very different kinds of novels she wrote as an adult.9 Criticism liberated itself from the notion of Austen as exclusively a figure of the eighteenth century several decades ago, but it has yet adequately to consider in what form and in what ways she absorbed the ideas and perspectives of the new century.10 Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, and Burney first incited her to fiction, gave her narrative and linguistic forms, models of consciousness, themes and attitudes to play with and react against. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron pushed her to the new recognitions for which her longer experience of life had stored her. However magnificent the achievements of her early phase, Austen’s encounter with the Romantics deepened her art, darkened it, made it more intuitive, ambiguous, and unsettled, but also more bold and mature. That Austen has affinities with, and was even influenced by, the Romantic poets, is not as strange an idea as it once would have seemed. For a long time, Austen and the Romantics occupied two different critical worlds: prose versus poetry, eighteenth century versus nineteenth century, conservative versus radical, female versus male.11 More recently, especially with the rise of feminist criticism, connections between Austen and Romanticism have been traced in a number of ways. But attempts to expand the British Romantic canon, as well as related attempts to define a specifically female Romanticism, however valuable in themselves, while they do usually relabel Austen as Romantic, do not bring her any closer to the poets in question.12 The same may be said of attempts to define a Romantic form of the novel.13 A number of studies have identified Romantic characteristics in Austen’s work as a whole and/or general thematic similarities between the novelist and the canonical, or formerly canonical, poets, especially Wordsworth.14 Others have pointed to specific novels, or more commonly, specific characters, scenes, or elements, as displaying typically Romantic attributes.15 But while these lines of investigation have yielded valuable insights, they imply no more than a Zeitgeist kind of affinity. A few studies do begin with specific allusions to argue for a more direct appropriation of Romantic materials on Austen’s part, but only a very few, and only with respect to Persuasion, the sole novel of hers in which such allusions are obvious.16 No study yet exists

  Introduction 3

  that argues for a sustained, major influence, one that structures whole novels and pervades an entire phase of her career. In making such an argument, I will not be seeking to answer the question of whether Austen is a Romantic, still less that of what “a Romantic” or Romanticism is.17 Nor will I be scoring the novels of the major phase against some checklist of Romantic attributes.18 I will not be seeking to discover Austen’s ideas about the Imagination, or Nature, or freedom, or the self as creator of values. Nor, as I indicated above, will I be discussing her work in relation to the whole of British Romantic literature, so much of which was unknown to her. There will be no consideration of Blake, Shelley, or Keats; Mary Shelley, Peacock, Hazlitt, or Lamb. The Wordsworth Austen knew had written no Prelude or Peter Bell, the Coleridge had published no Sibylline Leaves or Biographia Literaria. Austen’s Byron wrote romances, not comic epics, her Scott mainly verse romances and as yet only three novels. Instead, I will trace the specific impact the works available to her had on the novels she wrote after they became available. My second chapter will argue not only that there is a systematic set of differences that distinguish the novels of the major from that of the early phase, but that this system of new perceptions, attitudes, and concerns bears unmistakable witness to an encounter with the four poets in question, and in particular, with Wordsworth. My chapters on Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion will each discuss her exploration of a specific concern that she can be seen to have drawn from the poets. These concerns each relate to some question of feeling and relatedness; each novel can be seen as an investigation into a hidden mechanism of psychic and affective life: “substitution” in Mansfield Park, “ambiguous relationships” in Emma, “widowhood” in Persuasion. But if Austen began with what she drew from the poets, she proceeded in her own directions, by her own means, and within the armature of the literary form she had already brought to perfection, the novel of courtship and education, the female Bildungsroman. In retracing these explorations, then, I will begin where the influence of the poets is most openly gestured to, with specific allusions and echoes, but as each chapter progresses, the poet or poets in question will gradually fall out of the discussion as I follow Austen across the new ground she charted for herself. Such is the nature of influence: not a shackling of consciousness into imitative postures, but a startling of the imagination into the pursuit of new possibilities.19 Several preliminary questions remain, however. First, couldn’t those aspects of Austen’s later work that suggest the influence of the British Romantic

  4 Introduction

  poets be attributable to such “proto-Romantics” as Thomson and Cowper, poets with whom she had been intimately familiar from an early age? Alternatively, weren’t certain ideas and aesthetic impulses simply in the air in the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century? Next, whatever these poets’ fame, what evidence is there that Austen read Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron, and more important, what evidence is there for what she thought of them?20 Finally, given that each of her first three novels underwent some revision during the last years of her life, how legitimate is it to consider them as products of Austen’s youth in the first place, and thus to divide her career into two distinct phases? The first two questions are quickly answered. The very fact that the attributes in question show up only in the later novels indicates that they are not the result of the influence of the authors she already knew as a youth. Whatever was done for her by Thompson and Cowper—and Richardson and Johnson and Burney—was done by the time she began the first of her three early manuscripts. As for certain ideas and aesthetic impulses being “in the air” in the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century—yes, they were, but what was the “air” of that period composed of, with respect to the issues most important to the work of those four poets, if not that work itself? Those ideas and impulses were in the air because they put them there.21 Which brings us to the third question: how familiar was Austen with the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron, and what did she think of it? The standard view holds that she probably did not read the first pair, or if she did, thought no more of them than of the second—which is to say, not very much at all.22 None of the four is among the authors her family mentions as her favorites. Her brother Henry, in the biographical notice affixed to the posthumously publ
ished Northanger Abbey/Persuasion, tells us that “[a]t a very early age she was enamored of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men … Her favorite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse.“23 He also makes it clear that her admiration of Richardson, particularly Sir Charles Grandison, was very strong. AustenLeigh offers a similar enumeration: “[a]mongst her favorite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high.“24 There is no explicit mention of Wordsworth in her novels or unfinished manuscripts until we find him in Sanditon among the favorite authors—along with Scott, Burns, and others—of the absurd Sir Edward Denham, that Don Quixote of Don Juans.25 Coleridge is not mentioned at all in her novels or manuscripts, nor is either poet referred to in her letters. Scott and Byron, of course, are alluded to prominently in Persuasion;

  Introduction 5

  Scott is mentioned—along with Cowper and Thomson—as among the favorite authors of Marianne Dashwood and is quoted admiringly by Fanny Price; and both poets are referred to in the letters, Scott several times, Byron once. To begin with Scott and Byron, the traditional critical assumption is that, because they are the authors Persuasion’s Captain Benwick reads as a way of wallowing in his grief, and because the novel seems to ask us to see Captain Benwick as overemotional and even perhaps, at the deepest level, insincere, Austen must have regarded them with derision.26 To this are added two pieces of evidence from the letters. On Scott: “Ought I to be very much pleased with Marmion?—as yet I am not.“27 On Byron, with supposedly damning irony: “I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.“28 There is good reason to question the standard reading of this evidence, however, in part because it is far from the only evidence that bears on the question. To begin with, we have Anne and Benwick’s agreement, in their conversation about poetry in Persuasion, as to the “richness of the present age,” a characterization that clearly refers primarily to Scott and Byron (“the first-rate poets”) and that Austen gives us no reason to take with anything but complete seriousness (121). As for Scott in particular, the remark about Marmion is hardly the letters’ only mention of him, or even of that work. Less than seven months later, we find Austen sending a copy of Marmion to her brother Charles, and over four years later, we find her quoting it from memory.29 Apparently, despite what her brother Henry would later say about the tenacity of her opinions, she did learn to be “very much pleased” with it. That this was her reaction to Scott’s verse in general may be deduced from her comment on the publication of his first work of fiction: “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair … [I] do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it—but fear I must.“30 Finally, in later letters we find her casually alluding to a circumstance in The Antiquary, his third novel, and eagerly anticipating his two works on Waterloo, The Field of Waterloo and Paul’s Letter to His Kinfolk.31 As for Byron, that remark about The Corsair tells us, in my view, precisely nothing—except that Austen was interested enough in Byron’s work to have read his latest effort within five weeks of its publication. The letters are full of that kind of irony, directed at things Austen admired and took seriously as well as things she did not. What is more, as the fuller context makes clear, the remark is not aimed at Byron at all, but at the fact that she finds herself writing to her sister—something she took very seriously indeed—yet again.