William Deresiewicz Read online

  6 Introduction

  Having just posted a letter two days before, she begins the new one with, “Do not be angry with me for beginning another Letter to you. I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.” It is the “triviality” of writing to Cassandra, not of The Corsair, that is being sent up. Far more relevant to an assessment of Austen’s opinion of the poet is the fact that she took the trouble to transcribe his poem “Napoleon’s Farewell” from the periodical in which it appeared, one of only five known occasions on which she copied out someone else’s verse. Nor did she transcribe it verbatim, but rather made some halfdozen alterations that signify a high degree of involvement with its sentiments.32 Far more important than this interesting but incidental evidence, that Austen put Scott and Byron in Persuasion and Scott in Sense and Sensibility to satiric use is the highest evidence not that she scorned their work, but that it deeply stirred her. To see Austen’s satire as a mark of disdain is fundamentally to misunderstand it. Who else, after all, does she satirize? More than anyone, Cowper and Gilpin.33 For Austen, satire was the sincerest form of flattery. Nothing could be more obvious from the juvenilia than that the fiction she ridicules with such merciless glee she also passionately, guiltily adored. For one thing, she could never have known such books well enough to lampoon them as brilliantly as she does if she had not been reading them by the bucketful—and no one keeps reading what they simply despise. Parody, at that point, was an indirect way of handling her own divided response, her feelings of guilty pleasure. In the novels—Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion— she confronts that response directly. Cowper, Gilpin, Scott, Byron: what, after all, does she satirize about them? Not their work itself, but—and this is substantially true of Radcliffe and Burney in Northanger Abbey, as well— the way their work was read, or misread. And yet she was not trying to protect her favorite authors from bad readers; she was one of those bad readers, as the juvenilia tell us, and she knew it. She was trying to protect bad readers—which is to say, all readers—from being carried away by their emotions. It is the central insight of Marvin Mudrick’s celebrated study that Austen feared what she most loved, and that what she most feared were exactly the kinds of extreme passions those authors inspired.34 She recognized the claims of sense, of course—of reason, of prudence—but the claims of sensibility—of energy, of desire—she did not have to recognize; they thrust themselves upon her. She esteemed “Elinor,” but she loved “Marianne.” She esteemed Pope, of the poets she encountered in her youth, but she loved Cowper;35 of the poets she encountered in her maturity, she esteemed

  Introduction 7

  Crabbe, but it is to Scott and Byron that she paid the supreme compliment of creating a character who loves them not wisely, but too well. As for Wordsworth and Coleridge, given their great prominence, it is virtually certain that by 1811 a reader such as Austen would have long known their work very well.36 A reader whose reading was, as her brother tells us, “very extensive in history and belles lettres” and whose memory was “extremely tenacious”;37 a reader carefully attuned and exquisitely responsive to the latest developments in the fiction, poetry, and drama of her day; a reader who, as a writer, is always very careful to show us what her characters read, and that the most avid readers among them read what is most up-to-date38—that such a reader would have neglected to read just those two poets, two of the halfdozen most important new poets of her adulthood, is improbable to the point of being incredible.39 As for what impact they had on her, the evidence, admittedly, can only be indirect. Coleridge does not seem to have been a major influence in his own right, though his contributions to Lyrical Ballads, as well as individual poems she may have encountered elsewhere, surely contributed to her reception of the great complex of WordsworthianColeridgian ideas and themes I discuss in my next chapter.40 But Wordsworth is a different matter. Although this has seldom or never been recognized, Austen makes allusions to his work in both Mansfield Park and Emma. In both cases, however, these allusions are also and more obviously allusions to other authors. In both cases, in other words, Austen, in making her Wordsworthian reference, plays a complex and sophisticated double game. The source of the allusion in Mansfield Park is less controversial. A number of critics have seen the representations hanging in Fanny Price’s East room as pointing, at least two of them, to Wordsworth: “three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland.“41 The more obvious reference here is to Gilpin, whose immensely popular series of books on the picturesque beauties of the British landscape included one devoted to the region of the River Wye—the book that made Tintern Abbey famous in the first place—and another on the Lake District of Cumberland and Westmoreland. Indeed, the presence of the transparencies argues that Fanny, like her creator, was “at a very early age … enamored of Gilpin on the Picturesque.” But while Fanny may look at them and think of Gilpin, Austen expects us to think of both him and Wordsworth. I will discuss this double reference more extensively in my chapter on Mansfield Park, but suffice it to say for now that Austen is suggesting not simply that the kind of looking Fanny does in that scene is Wordsworthian,

  8 Introduction

  but that it is Wordsworthian as opposed to Gilpinesque. In other words, Austen is doing exactly what Wordsworth himself was doing by setting his poem “a few miles above Tintern Abbey”: alluding to Gilpin as a way of marking his or her distance from him—and in Austen’s case, her closeness also to Wordsworth. Is it credible that Austen would have expected her readers to recognize “Tintern Abbey” as a reference primarily to Wordsworth? Gilpin’s volumes remained quite popular, but by the time Mansfield Park appeared in 1814, their initial publication lay some two or three decades in the past. Wordsworth, meanwhile, as we have seen, had become one of the most prominent figures in contemporary English poetry.42 By the time Emma appeared at the end of 1815—with the publication the previous year of The Excursion and, earlier in 1815, of the first collected Poems—he had become more prominent still.43 Austen could have felt even more confident that her readers would recognize a reference to his work, and she capitalizes on this familiarity to play the same kind of game she did in Mansfield Park. This time the double allusion sets Wordsworth against Cowper, again precisely as Wordsworth himself does in the passage to which the allusion points. Knightley, “however he might wish to escape any of Emma’s errors of the imagination,” cannot help but observe “symptoms of intelligence … symptoms of admiration … a look, more than a single look” that give him suspicions of a private understanding between Frank and Jane. Still, he worries that he might be mistaken, might be acting “like Cowper and his fire at twilight, `Myself creating what I saw.’ “44 But while Knightley is thinking of Cowper, Austen knew that her readers would be thinking of Wordsworth, of the use he makes of Cowper’s famous line in “Tintern Abbey”: ” … eye, and ear,—both what they half create,/ And what perceive” (106107).45 For what Knightley is doing at that moment, after all, is precisely “half-perceiving, halfcreating”—observing signs and imagining, correctly, what lies behind them. This is not quite the kind of imaginative halfcreation Wordsworth has in mind, but it does offer the same contrast to Cowper’s (and Emma’s) creation-from-whole-cloth—a responsible use of the imagination, grounded in careful observation, to discover hidden truths. And this is exactly the use of the imagination Austen demands of her readers throughout the novel, both through the many puzzles and riddles she has us play along with her characters and, more important, through the very structure of the novel itself, a grand mystery story or puzzle-text that continually forces us to read clues and guess at the hidden truths that lie behind them. Again, Austen is taking a text that Wordsworth had already played a variation on—a text a generation old, but still very well known—and playing her

  Introduction 9

  own variation on both the author of her yo
uth and that of her maturity. In so doing, she is also measuring the distance between the work of her youth and that of her maturity. If Northanger Abbey, with only Gilpin at its disposal, could only ridicule too “picturesque” a way of seeing, and if Sense and Sensibility, with only Cowper at its disposal, could only ridicule too “poetry-ofsensibility” a way of seeing, now Austen has Wordsworth to help her envision the positive converse of these negatives, uses of vision and imagination that deepen rather than distort the perceptible surface of things. That the allusions in both novels refer to the same poem strikes me as giving more weight to this reading rather than less. “Tintern Abbey” seems to have been a poem that laid hold of Austen’s imagination very strongly indeed, as it did of the imaginations of so many readers after her. Finally, the last of the preliminary questions I enumerated above: is it legitimate to consider Austen’s first three novels as products of her youth? We know, after all, that AustenLeigh’s chronology is misleading in more than just the small matter of the completion date of Austen’s first attempt at Northanger Abbey. That manuscript was worked on again in 1803 and possibly yet again in 1816, though in both cases the changes were probably quite minor, as I will discuss below. Far more significant are the revisions she is thought to have made to the manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in the years just prior to their publication in 1811 and 1813, respectively. If either of these revisions was extensive—and it has long been common wisdom that the revisions to Pride and Prejudice, at least, were very extensive—then we are far less justified in regarding the novel or novels in question as creations of her early twenties and therefore far less justified in seeing the differences between her first and last three novels as resulting from whatever may have happened after 1799, whether in Austen’s outward experience or in her inner life as a reader. Indeed, at least one critic enumerates her major novels not as Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, but as Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma.46 This common wisdom, however—the standard account of the evolution of Austen’s manuscripts—is, as I hope to show, seriously flawed: based on circular logic, doubtful premises, and unwarranted inferences. There is no hard evidence to refute the claim that Pride and Prejudice is—in all its essentials of conception, design, and execution—the work of an astonishingly gifted young woman, but of a young woman nevertheless. Nearly all the information we have about the evolution of Austen’s manuscripts comes from the testimonies of three members of her family, each

  10 Introduction

  writing at an increasingly greater distance of time.47 By far the most extensive and reliable of these is the memorandum made by her sister Cassandra, presumably shortly after the novelist’s death. Omitting the information she provides about the three later novels, the chronology of whose composition has never been in serious dispute, the memorandum reads as follows:48 First Impressions begun in Oct 1796 Finished in Augt 1797. Published afterwards, with alterations & contractions under the Title of Pride & Prejudice. Sense & Sensibility begun Nov. 1797 I am sure that something of the same story & characters had been written earlier & called Elinor & Marianne[ … ] North-hanger Abbey was written about the years 98 & 9949 To begin with the most contentious issue, that of the transformation of First Impressions into Pride and Prejudice, Cassandra does not say when those “alterations & contractions” were made or how extensive they were. AustenLeigh, however, writing fifty-two years after his aunt’s death, adds that “The first year of her residence at Chawton [18091810] seems to have been devoted to revising and preparing for the press `Sense and Sensibility,’ and `Pride and Prejudice.’ “50 We also have testimony from Austen’s own hand on this point, though it is very brief and raises more questions than it answers. Fretting to Cassandra about the shortness of the finished novel, she writes, “I have lopt and cropt so successfully however that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S. & S. altogether.“51 There are two things to note about this much-pondered statement. First, it gives no indication when the lopping and cropping took place; as the letter was written the day after the novel’s publication (on January 28, 1813), Austen couldn’t have been referring to something that had happened very recently. It could have happened in 1812, as most critics now believe, or it could have happened two years earlier, during “the first year of her residence at Chawton.” The significance of this uncertainty will become clear below. Far more important for the matter at hand, whenever this revision occurred, Austen’s statement gives no support to the theory that it involved anything other than shortening and tightening, “lopping and cropping.” As for the evolution of Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility, additional testimony comes from Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913),

  Introduction 11

  published ninety-six years after the novelist’s death by William and Richard Arthur AustenLeigh, the son and grandson of J. E. AustenLeigh. Relying on the unpublished memoir of J. E. AustenLeigh’s sister Caroline (written in 1867 and consulted by her brother during the preparation of his own Memoir two years later), the authors of the Life claim that Elinor and Marianne had been an epistolary novel and was read out to the family before 1796.52 This may or may not be true,53 but in fact the question has no bearing on the present discussion, since it leaves undisturbed Cassandra’s claim that Sense and Sensibility assumed its present title, and began to assume its next form, in November 1797. When it finished assuming its next form— that is, when the work begun in that month was completed—Cassandra does not say, though presumably it was sometime in 1798, before the start of work on Susan. It must surely be seen as significant, however, that Cassandra’s memorandum mentions no later revision, so that the changes made to it during “the first year of her residence at Chawton,” if any, were surely not very extensive. As for Susan/Northanger Abbey, in 1816 Austen finally bought the copyright back from the publisher who had purchased it in 1803. She then altered the title to Catherine and composed a short advertisement that begins by noting that “[t]his little work was finished in the year 1803.“54 There is no saying exactly what “finished” means—whether the production of 17981799 was altered only in some small way or more extensively revised. Nor can we say what else may have happened to the manuscript in 18161817 other than the change of name. In March 1817 we find Austen writing that “Miss Catherine is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out.“55 The letter is dated five days before Austen is believed to have broken off work on Sanditon, the novel she had begun some seven weeks earlier.56 Illness clearly forced the cessation of the new project; whether she had actually done any work on Catherine or only contemplated doing so we do not know.57 The critical consensus, however—which in this case I see no reason to question—is that neither in 1803 nor in 18161817 was the earlier work significantly altered.58 And that is all we can say about the evolution of Austen’s manuscripts based on these direct and indirect testimonies.59 The very sparseness of these testimonies, however, has encouraged scholarship to say a great deal more, especially with regard to Pride and Prejudice. Why? I spoke above about circular logic. Many critics profess themselves unable to believe that so accomplished a work of art could have been written by so young a person (or perhaps, given what Keats and others achieved at comparable ages, so

  12 Introduction

  young a woman). Pride and Prejudice as we have it could not have been written by a twenty-one-year-old—so the reasoning goes—therefore the revisions at Chawton must have been extensive; the novel is investigated, the revisions at Chawton are found to have been extensive, and the conclusion is drawn that the novel was not written by a twenty-one-year-old. In fact, that is precisely the logic that motivated the investigation that originally established the idea of an extensive revision in 1812. The theory was first proposed by R. W. Chapman in his still-standard edition of the novels. At the end of the appendix in which he puts the theory forward, Chapman writes that “Pride and Prejudice has always seemed to me a book of greater maturity than is credible i
f we suppose it to have been written, much as we know it, when its author was only one-and-twenty.“60 “Has always seemed to me”: a conviction in search of a proof. But is it really not credible that Pride and Prejudice was written by a twenty-one-year-old? For one thing, its relative immaturity is precisely what AustenLeigh has in mind in the epigraph that heads this chapter; it is also implicitly what I will be discussing throughout the next chapter. Relative immaturity—we would do well to keep in mind what Virginia Woolf says about the astonishing artistic maturity Austen already displayed at fifteen.61 More important, who are we to say what Jane Austen—what a mind like Jane Austen’s—was or was not capable of at any given moment in her development? Personally, I don’t find it credible that Pride and Prejudice was written by anyone, at any age. The human quality represented by the creation of a Pride and Prejudice—call it genius, or talent, or creativity; a gift from the gods or genetic good luck—is never easy to understand, or perhaps even accept, by those of us who do not possess it (and often even by those who do). A writer like Austen, and especially the early Austen, only makes the matter worse, for as with Shakespeare, the magnitude of the achievement seems utterly incommensurate with what is known of the life that produced it. We know what feats of preposterousness this has led to in Shakespeare’s case. In Austen’s it has led only to the doubtful premises and unwarranted inferences I spoke of before. Chapman’s work on Pride and Prejudice was based on that of Sir Frank MacKinnon, who sought to ascertain the internal chronology or “dramatic date” of Mansfield Park by comparing the few full dates given in the text with the calendars of the twenty years or so in which Austen is likely to have set it.62 MacKinnon’s method is based on the premise—a very doubtful one, in my view, for reasons I will explain below—that Austen consulted almanacs in constructing the chronologies of her novels in order to ensure that those