Everybody loves Jane Austen, just as everybody loves Oscar Wilde and Billy Connolly. It’s true that an American critic in the Sixties called her a frigid old maid, but those were the days when promiscuity was mistaken for liberation — at least by the male portion of the population.
Now, on the 250th anniversary of her birth, Austen is less an author than an institution. She belongs more with the House of Lords and the Bank of England than with Thackeray and Trollope. The British have an insatiable appetite for studies of her, however coy or twee. If you want to retire tomorrow with a fat bank balance, write a book called Jane Austen and Dogs. There aren’t actually any dogs in her fiction, but no matter. The Secret Sex Life of Jane Austen would do even better if you’re prepared to lie through your teeth for a couple of hundred pages. Studies of a gay Austen, predictably enough, abound.
It is with Austen, though, along with Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, that the novel in Britain becomes a serious literary form, not simply a matter of Gothic horror or soppy romance. Before she came to write, the genre was seen by polite society rather as The Sun is regarded in Oxbridge senior common rooms: despised as swashbuckling or sentimental trash, rather than a medium of serious moral inquiry. Austen was well aware that she was up against a widespread contempt for what she was creating, but refused to concede that fiction was just fantasy for upper-class women with too much time on their hands.
“In the end, there is no clear distinction between the moral and the aesthetic; and this is true of Austen’s own fiction.”
One might also claim that she invented the typical English prose style. Reading her work, the bluff, hearty tones of Henry Fielding now seem antiquated, along with the sanctimonious moralising of Samuel Richardson. In their place, we have a style of writing which is good-humoured but not quite genial, reasonable and temperate yet also quietly devastating. It’s this supple, self-assured prose, laden with ironies and obliquities, which descends from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James and E.M. Forster, and which even finds a resonance as late as John Le Carré. Fiction of this kind is mannered but not elaborate; sharply satirical, yet intent on keeping its cool. The very shape of Austen’s sentences, with their delicate equipoise and complex symmetry, reflects the social and moral values she upholds. Previous novelists tended to deal in epic characters and events, but Austen is one of the first English writers to find moral significance in such minor but critical matters as remembering to light a fire for someone in their bedchamber, or failing to wait for a companion who has gone off to fetch you a key. What the Henry Fieldings of this world would scarcely have noticed becomes of momentous importance to an author on whom nothing is lost.
Given this miniaturising way of seeing, more typical of a woman of the time than a man, Austen has sometimes been accused of overlooking the great historical events of her time (the Napoleonic wars, for example). Yet nothing could be more crucial to the social history of her age than the fortunes of the landed gentry and aristocracy. By and large, it is these men and women who populate her fiction, and generally speaking they aren’t looked upon in a favourable light. This is partly because Austen wasn’t of their number herself. She was the daughter of a clergyman of modest means and earned at most £1,000 from her writing, but her family had connections with the wealthier gentry. In this sense, she was on the fringes of the social order she observed, half in and half out, familiar enough with its ways to portray it convincingly yet enough of an outsider to be dismayed by its selfishness and arrogance — the appalling Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Pride and Prejudice being a memorable example of the latter.
Later novelists in Britain would find themselves in an equally ambiguous position. The major Victorian novel — the Brontë sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy — is the product of the lower-middle class. Its authors are close enough to the common people to dramatise their lives from the inside, but at the same time aspiring, reasonably well educated and on terms with their social betters. If the internal exile finds himself in a painful place, caught between alternative identities and chronically anxious, it’s also a peculiarly creative one. From Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound onward, 20th-century “English” writing is dominated by literal émigrés rather than spiritual ones.
Austen’s position, then, in the genteel society of her time was an awkward one. As a semi-outsider, she found herself upholding the ideal values of the gentry and aristocracy in the face of an actual upper class which consistently violated them. She was sufficiently part of that class to have a quick eye for the size and value of a landed estate, and the likely social status of its proprietor. She rarely sees anyone working on the land. All the same, what she sees around her, as well as good sense and sound judgement, is a landed class which is investing more and more in trade and the financial markets; and though Austen had nothing against honest tradesmen, she saw this as threatening to undermine the social order she esteemed. In her eyes, the gentry weren’t just a bunch of entrepreneurs, but the linchpin of a whole paternalist way of life. Hence the ritual trips to poor tenants’ cottages and the dutiful tending of low-life sickbeds which figure in her fiction.
But social mobility was on the increase, as the impecunious younger sons of baronets were in pursuit of the daughters of city merchants. There is a chink in even the most closed family known as marriage, through which insidious influences may enter. Urban wealth, moral frivolity, glib metropolitan manners and ruthless self-interest were invading the tranquillity of the English countryside. The custodians of English culture were at risk of being infected by various forms of moral anarchy, from the disowning of parental authority to the giddy pursuit of fashion, from sexual flightiness to the worship of money.
Throughout Britain, finance capital was flying to the aid of mortgaged estates about to sink without trace; but in Austen’s eyes, there was a high price to pay for this liaison between city and country in terms of conduct and manners. Manners for her meant not the passing of beefburgers without dropping them on your partner’s lap, but a whole other set of moral values that were now under siege: kindness, considerateness, patience, sympathy and deference. Grace and good breeding were matters of virtue and self-discipline, not simply drawing-room airs which any charlatan might assume. There was a new cult of spontaneous feeling abroad, which would later be called Romanticism. For Austen, all this was dangerously subjectivist and self-indulgent; there was something to be said for sensibility, but it needed to be firmly restrained by sense.
One could write much of this history by tracking the fortunes of the word “gentleman” in the English language. A merchant or industrial capitalist, however prosperous and well-connected, couldn’t be a gentleman in Austen’s time, but his public-school-educated son certainly qualified. In Emma, Robert Martin is a “gentleman-farmer”, man deemed “respectable and intelligent” by the head of the local gentry, Mr Knightley; but this doesn’t mean that Knightley would invite Martin on a shoot or propose marriage to his sister, since he isn’t gentlemanly enough.
A growing alliance was being sealed between landed, mercantile and industrial capital by the public-school system, in which the sons of dukes learnt not to patronise the offspring of cotton barons. The had to learn to be less proud, and the middle classes less prejudiced. The result was a powerful ruling bloc which later in the 19th century would prove easily capable of taking on and defeating the burgeoning working-class movement. Over the Channel, in revolutionary France, the nobility and the bourgeoisie had faced each other across the barricades; in England, the two classes combined in a spirit of moderation for which the nation became renowned. If ever we decide to drive on the right, we shall do so gradually.
Yet if Austen was an astringent critic of upper-class society, she delivered that critique with a stylishness and lightness of touch which were themselves part of that social order. The question is how to unite sobriety of judgement with vivacity of spirits, a combination brilliantly illustrated by Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The ideal is to be both good and fine. You need sprightliness but not levity, independence of thought but not errant individualism. Emma Woodhouse of Emma has too much liveliness, whereas Fanny Price of Mansfield Park has too little. Austen’s own prose is an exemplary fusion of the instructive and the entertaining.
Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice remarks that she first became aware of her affection for Mr Darcy when she set eyes on his elegantly laid-out estates. The reader suspects for a moment that this is ironic, as though Elizabeth were to confide that she first fell in love with him when she saw the size of his bank balance. But there is no irony intended. What Elizabeth means is that the way Darcy has laid out his estates is a moral as well as aesthetic affair — a matter of sound judgement, a sense of proportion, an aversion to vulgar spectacle or useless ornamentation. A man’s taste is a guide to his soul.
In the end, there is no clear distinction between the moral and the aesthetic; and this is true of Austen’s own fiction, which blends artistic pleasure with moral insight. The problem, as the novels themselves reveal, is that there are people in the world who have the manners of an angel and the morals of a tomcat.
