Marianne Dashwood

Marianne (Kate Winslet) and Elinor (Emma Thompson)

 [Image source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/culture/2017/7/15/15955872/movie-of-week-sense-sensibility-jane-austen . From Ang Lee's 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.]


Two sisters; the sweet-tempered elder one is fond of drawing, the passionate younger one plays the pianoforte. That's the premise of Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance (1790). But contrasted sisters feature in many other novels of the 1790s, too.

In Radcliffe's novel the lead role in the story is very definitely taken by the younger sister Julia; after the first couple of chapters Emilia is given nothing further to do, and is finally consigned to a future in the shadows, a premonition of Sonya's fate in War and Peace. Anyway, Jane Austen reverses the emphasis. She presented Sense and Sensibility (1811) principally from the viewpoint of the elder sister, Elinor Dashwood. A balanced view of the book should probably focus much more on Elinor. Yet it's Marianne who asks the questions, who bothers us, and who gives this Jane Austen novel its distinctive flavour.

Marianne's sensibility, or rather her belief in the sensibility valorized by novels, is extreme. For Marianne is doctrinaire on these points; "her opinions are all romantic", Elinor tells Colonel Brandon (Ch 11). In that respect Sense and Sensibility, specifically Marianne's part in it, continues the critical examination of current literary values that was played out by Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (written 1798-99).

The practical difference between the sisters is perhaps better stated without using the words of the title. The sisters aren't enormously different in either sense or sensibility. But Elinor, we are told at once, has a "coolness of judgment" that contrasts with the "eagerness" and "imprudence" manifested both by Marianne and their mother (Ch 1). In a precisely similar situation, i.e. an agreeable admirer who doesn't declare himself, the sisters behave in opposite ways. Elinor, re Edward Ferrars, doesn't allow her feelings full rein (Ch 4). Marianne, re Willoughby, does just that (Chs 9 - 16).

"I do not attempt to deny," said she, "that I think very highly of him -- that I greatly esteem, that I like him."
   Marianne here burst forth with indignation --
   "Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again and I will leave the room this moment."
   Elinor could not help laughing. (Ch 4)

And we laugh too, at this early juncture. A younger sister (Marianne isn't yet seventeen) may harmlessly give vent to vehement opinions, prejudices that are essentially literary, particularly in a matter where her own heart isn't engaged and she isn't called on to act.

Those literary prejudices continue to operate in her early opinion of Willoughby: "His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story" ... "that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue" (Ch 9).

There's still some laughter in the next dialogue of values between the sisters, but it's getting more strained. Sarcasm? Reductiveness? Neither sister can be quite exonerated from those charges.

"Well, Marianne," said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, "for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already ascertained Mr Willoughby's opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary dispatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask." --
   "Elinor," cried Marianne, "is this fair? is this just? are my ideas so scanty? But I see what you mean. I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank. I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull and deceitful: -- had I talked only of the weather and the roads, and had I spoken only once in ten minutes, this reproach would have been spared." (Ch 10)*

Elinor's unprompted comment, offered under the guise of playfulness, contains at least two grains of sand. One of them Marianne doesn't notice; the implication that Willoughby's expressed opinions chime in all too neatly with Marianne's own, that he follows her lead and, in consequence, shouldn't be taken on trust. (And, in fact, we soon see that he's loose with the truth; he "does not dislike" Colonel Brandon, and almost immediately afterwards claims the privilege of continuing to dislike him as much as ever (Ch 10).)

 The other is an older sister's mockery of the limited range of a younger sister's preoccupations. (It's the same kind of joke about the young that the narrator (or Elinor?) makes re Sir John's entertainments: "in winter his private balls were numerous enough for any young lady who was not suffering under the insatiable appetite of fifteen". After all, Marianne isn't so much beyond that age.)

In Marianne's reply, perhaps the word "reserve" is the key term here. For Marianne it's plainly pejorative, like the other three adjectives she uses, "spiritless, dull and deceitful". But "reserve" might also describe Elinor's behaviour throughout the novel, and particularly, of course, in regard to the undeclared Edward Ferrars of that earlier conversation.

Yet Elinor too sees "reserve" as a word with a negative valency. This is a joint judgment by the sisters, on Lady Middleton:

Her manners had all the elegance which her husband's wanted. But they would have been improved by some share of his frankness and warmth; and her visit was long enough to detract something from their first admiration, by shewing that though perfectly well-bred, she was reserved, cold, and had nothing to say for herself beyond the most common-place inquiry or remark. (Ch 6)

Later, Elinor reflects on the nature of Lady Middleton's reserve: "Elinor needed little observation to perceive that her reserve was a mere calmness of manner with which sense had nothing to do" (Ch 11).

Reserve must not be cold; frankness and warmth are positive goods; but reserve arising from sense (prudence, discretion, sensitivity to others' feelings, propriety) is a practical good, a necessity. Thus, Elinor and Colonel Brandon, the moral grown-ups of the novel, both in their beliefs and in their behaviour. Here they are talking about Marianne's "romantic" opinions:

". . . A few years however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of common sense and observation; and then they may be more easy to define and to justify than they now are, by any body but herself."
   "This will probably be the case," he replied; "and yet there is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions."
   "I cannot agree with you there," said Elinor. "There are inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne's, which all the charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward to as her greatest possible advantage." (Ch 11)

To which Colonel Brandon makes this enigmatic addendum:

". . . but a change, a total change of sentiments -- No, no, do not desire it, -- for when the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous! I speak from experience. I once knew a lady who in temper and mind greatly resembled your sister, who thought and judged like her, but who from an inforced change -- from a series of unfortunate circumstances" -- Here he stopt suddenly . . .  (Ch 11)

The story he refers to is eventually narrated in Vol II Ch 9. But to dread youthful romanticism being succeeded by misery and even by "falling" (as happened to the not-very-similar Eliza) is scarcely an argument in favour of that romanticism.

But still, for all her bad manners, for all her wilful wrongness, for instance about the weather (twice with very fateful effects), there's some deep things to be said for Marianne's ardour, though Brandon doesn't quite manage to say them. Without her emotional candour and her eagerness, what is life for? It cannot be just a matter of prudence and reserve, of crossing the Ts, of negotiation and maintenance, of avoiding a mess. Marianne's imprudence and refusal to hold back gives meaning as well as trouble to the lives of those around her, and when she looks back on it from her own respectable married existence it may continue to give meaning to that, too.


*

* The subjects of literary discussion between Marianne and Willoughby are men: Pope, Cowper, and Scott. Scott is an interesting inclusion; he couldn't have been a topic of general conversation until 1805 at the earliest, so Austen is stretching the chronology of a tale that was originally composed and set in the late 1790s. Perhaps Austen was bent on including a current author; Cowper had died in 1800. 

After Northanger Abbey, Austen tended not to name woman authors. (The play Lovers' Vows is immensely important to Mansfield Park, but we never hear of Elizabeth Inchbald.) It's as if Austen formally cedes the traditional claim that creation is an essentially male affair. But the concession is subversive. It, so to speak, clears the decks for the real literary debate to which Sense and Sensibility contributes; a debate taking place between woman authors. The irony in Elinor's reductive report cuts not only at Marianne's youthfully limited interests but also, I sense, at the male authors under review. The gentle implication is that these official bastions of the world of letters, precisely because they are men, don't actually have much to contribute to the deeper concerns of Austen's novels. If they did, she wouldn't name them. 

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (1814)

Anna Massey as Mrs Norris in the 1983 BBC series of Mansfield Park

[Image source: https://austensmansfield.wordpress.com/tag/mrs-norris/ . Miss Sneyd's industry and sense are of the highest order. ]


*

.....when she was found one morning by her cousin Edmund, the youngest of the sons, sitting crying on the attic stairs.
“My dear little cousin,” said he, with all the gentleness of an excellent nature, “what can be the matter?” And sitting down by her, he was at great pains to overcome her shame in being so surprised, and persuade her to speak openly. Was she ill? or was anybody angry with her? or had she quarrelled with Maria and Julia? or was she puzzled about anything in her lesson that he could explain? Did she, in short, want anything he could possibly get her, or do for her? For a long while no answer could be obtained beyond a “no, no—not at all—no, thank you”; but he still persevered; and no sooner had he begun to revert to her own home, than her increased sobs explained to him where the grievance lay. He tried to console her.
“You are sorry to leave Mama, my dear little Fanny,” said he, “which shows you to be a very good girl; but you must remember that you are with relations and friends, who all love you, and wish to make you happy. Let us walk out in the park, and you shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.”
On pursuing the subject, he found that, dear as all these brothers and sisters generally were, there was one among them who ran more in her thoughts than the rest. It was William whom she talked of most, and wanted most to see. William, the eldest, a year older than herself, her constant companion and friend; her advocate with her mother (of whom he was the darling) in every distress. “William did not like she should come away; he had told her he should miss her very much indeed.” “But William will write to you, I dare say.” “Yes, he had promised he would, but he had told her to write first.” “And when shall you do it?” She hung her head and answered hesitatingly, “she did not know; she had not any paper.”
“If that be all your difficulty, I will furnish you with paper and every other material, and you may write your letter whenever you choose. Would it make you happy to write to William?”
“Yes, very.”
“Then let it be done now. Come with me into the breakfast-room, we shall find everything there, and be sure of having the room to ourselves.”  

(Mansfield Park, Chapter II)




*


There's a very strict line, a line that's never crossed, running down the very centre of Mansfield Park. One one side stand Fanny, Edmund and Sir Thomas Bertram. On the other side stand Aunts Bertram and Norris, the Misses Bertram, Tom, and the Crawfords.

Defining the terms of this binary is not quite easy. It is not exactly the good vs. the wicked, though we might use those terms -- "wicked", of course, meaning worldly and selfish rather than criminal or satanic. But anyway, that's not really it. Sir Thomas, a chilly parent, has done a lifetime of harm to his daughters, albeit inadvertently. Edmund, we find, is unsteady, self-deceiving, and prone to incorrect judgments. But though their behaviour may sometimes be bad and harmful, they remain, as definitely as ever, on the side of that line that forever distinguishes them from the vanity of Maria or the lightness of Mary.

It's more a matter of gravity vs. levity. Or of those who genuinely set a value on moral principle vs. those who really don't. One might almost say, of our good trio, that they feast on moral principle: it's their culture. They're always talking about and thinking about it, even if their behaviour falls short sometimes. (Author and reader are of their party, too.)

After Edmund and Mary keep Fanny from going riding, Mary gracefully apologises for her selfishness, and asks to be forgiven, but she doesn't feel guilty in the slightest. Edmund, on the other hand, after taking a censorious survey of his aunts' various selfishnesses and blindnesses, then inwardly and seriously berates himself for neglecting his cousin. He has done wrong. He has the moral discrimination to know it. He feels guilty. It's how only the good react, though none of this will prevent him from neglecting Fanny again.

*

The lovely scene in which the young Edmund and Fanny first become fond of each other is a fateful one. Love lays its fortifications so early. I don't exactly mean to identify the moral division with the exclusiveness of love, but Fanny does: she thinks of Mary not as her rival but as bad for Edmund. In the end the line holds. That works out well from Fanny's point of view (and Austen makes no bones about Fanny's self-interest, her possessiveness, jealousy, loneliness...). It makes a very happy ending for these two people that we really care for. (And by that stage of the book, we care for Sir Thomas too.)

And yet part of what makes Mansfield Park such a complex and deep reading experience is that at its heart, alongside all the comic brilliance and the eventual happy ending, along with all this the book is in some ways a tragedy, too.

The tragedy, too, is about the intransigence of the line. And so Henry and Mary, for all their charms and their agreeableness and their intelligence and sensitivity, can never be redeemed, they can never enter the charmed circle of the grave and good.

It isn't, you may say, a tragedy from the Crawfords' own point of view. There's little to suggest that they really know what they've lost.  Austen is far above saddling the Crawfords with punitive descents into turpitude and disappointment, as many other authors would do.

The tragedy is, rather, for us readers; for most of us, anyway. We vainly wish, every time we read Mansfield Park, that somehow or other Mary and Henry may come to good. We feel that Edmund and Fanny's gravity and principle could be so much enhanced by a little melding with the Crawfords' spirit and originality. And vice versa, of course. 

(A different Edmund, for example, might have learnt something from Mary's spirited attack on his wretched clock-bullying. There's a littleness about Edmund and Fanny. You feel it again about the planned stargazing on the veranda; the stargazing that Edmund immediately forgets about. Heartbreaking for Fanny: but isn't there something arrested in childishness about Fanny's and Edmund's Arcturus worship, is it really a mature basis for a marriage? Mary's materialism and worldliness are chilling, but her assaults on the pettiness of a clerical life do have some traction with us.)

Each of the Crawfords, at different times, comes so close. They have always possessed  intelligence and sensitivity far beyond, say, Maria Rushworth. As readers we so want to reward gracefulness: but Mary is capable of real perceptions and kindnesses as well as graces (so Edmund isn't wholly deceived about her merits, which Fanny's dogged though unspoken condemnation refuses to acknowledge). And Henry, up to the disastrous elopement, has begun to develop under Fanny's unsparing eye into a thoughtful, kindly, even lovable nature. It's not to be.

Austen's delineation of this so-near-and-yet-so-far story demands moral material to work upon that is not merely simplistic. Hence the moral grey areas, at least to appearance, of the theatricals (about which Miss Sneyd is wonderfully lucid); the story just wouldn't work if everyone automatically made the same moral judgments about it: we need a spectrum.

Of the two Crawfords, Henry's story matters less to us: he's a consummate actor, his inconstancy is bound to break out, it was a good escape for Fanny (though the narrator remarkably claims that the marriage would have worked out rather well in the end). Mary, like her brother, is a performer. A play of wit she will have, whether the facts are there to support her or no. But with her, more than her brother,  it's a compulsive performance; a matter of her very identity. Mary, with all her interest in Edmund, can never not speak lightly of the church. Her society values have become her personality. She is indeed as strong-willed about maintaining her own kind of moral integrity as Fanny is: in their so different ways, both characters are incessant.

The desolating wisdom of Mansfield Park is that people can't change, much. It's the same, of course, with the Prices in Portsmouth. Nor can Fanny, once formed at Mansfield, resume being the person she would have been in a Portsmouth that has forgotten her. But the closing pages are illuminated by one thorough exception: Fanny's young sister Susan (because she's still young enough not to be "formed" already). They also lash out with real hatred at Aunt Norris. The hatred is richly deserved, but it reminds us that Fanny is no angel, and also that this supremely poised author is deeply involved in her own stories.

*

Mansfield Park (1814) was perhaps Austen's most popular novel in her own time. None of her novels received any public notice during her lifetime, but she recorded some private ones. That of  "Lady Gordon" is notable:

"In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you the least expect to meet in common life, whereas in Miss A----'s works, & especially in M. P. you actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive, so perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident, or conversation, or a person, that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life been a witness to, borne a part in, & been acquainted with."

For many subsequent  Janeites, however, Mansfield Park is the least beloved of her works. It's commonly regarded  as unfilmable (possibly as a result of the attempts in 1999 and 2007),  and it's true that much of the story takes place within the mind of a heroine who rarely speaks her thoughts . But that would hardly scare good actors or directors. Maybe the real issue is that, seen from outside herself, Fanny's love of Edmund would seem too blatantly apparent to credibly pass without notice either from him or from his family. (I wouldn't mind a look at the 1983 BBC series, if it was available in the UK.)

Among literary novel-readers generally, its reputation stands higher, some of us considering it Austen's most amazing novel, its intricacies and darknesses rather adding to its interest. (It has also been prominently attacked, but that's never a bad thing.)

*

The Librivox reading of Mansfield Park,  by Karen Savage, is just fabulous:
https://librivox.org/mansfield-park-by-jane-austen-version-2/ .

*

A wealth of posts about Mansfield Park, organized by Sarah Emsley:
https://sarahemsley.com/2014/04/09/your-invitation-to-mansfield-park/

Two excellent chapters on Lovers' Vows and Mansfield Park generally, in Paula Byrne's The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood (2002). Byrne abundantly illustrates the relevance of both Lovers' Vows and the unchosen plays (e.g. The Heir at Law) to Mansfield Park. Very illuminating on Tom Bertram.

She is harder on Sir Thomas than I have been, particularly in regard to his anger at Fanny's refusal to marry Henry. Likewise, she thinks he yields too easily to Maria's bravado about her betrothal: he must take some responsibility for the disastrous outcome.

She contrasts Sir Thomas' intransigence with Baron Wildenhaim in the play. She concludes:

A detailed analysis of the complex relationship between the two works suggests that, although Sir Thomas Bertram condemns the theatricals, Jane Austen does not. The opposite is more true, thanks to the contrast between the two fathers: it is the theatricals that condemn Sir Thomas.

Still, I think this is too one-sided. Baron Wildenhaim was after all a seducer... Sir Thomas, we are sure, has never slipped. I think part of the fascination of Mansfield Park is that, for all the irony, Austen does assign great value to the gravity of Sir Thomas (and Edmund, and Fanny).

believing the words

Hubbel Palmer as Mr Collins in the 2003 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, transposed to modern-day Utah

[Image source: http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol29no1/chan.html]


In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Collins proposes to his cousin Elizabeth Bennet and, of course, she turns him down. Collins, however, doesn't seem to understand the refusal, suggests that young ladies say No when they mean Yes, and ponders aloud: "perhaps you have even now said as much to encourage my suit as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the female character".


Collins is ridiculous, complacent, and utterly lacking in sensibility. But still, his difficulty is genuine. Since he possesses a theory that would fully account for why Elizabeth might refuse his proposal while still intending to marry him, in what sense should he understand her?


A bad situation, this lack of trust in a person's words, and it can lead to worse things than an unduly prolonged proposal.


Collins might have been helped if he had had a little insight into body language and other non-linguistic clues, but that was what not many men of his time did have. Indeed, the question of whether a woman liked a man was deliberately censored from thought. as being indelicate towards the woman as well as uncomfortable for the man to contemplate seriously.


But everyone, not just Mr Collins, is stupid and blind in some respects and to some degree. Collins' difficulty is our difficulty.


What if you believe in despite of the words, or (most likely) you don't know what to believe?


There's no safe advice. You cannot say, for instance:  If in doubt, abide by the words.


And the principle No-one ever got sacked for choosing IBM just doesn't apply when it comes to human relationships.


Cue for another Claes Andersson poem!




*


Nowadays I don't trust you any more
than I always trusted myself
As soon as I turn my back you deceive me
And right you are
I would do the same if I were I
Someways I'm not me anymore
I get extended bouts of faithfulness and caring
It's some kind of revenge
Now when there's nothing more to massacre
we could have it fairly good together, you and I
But you! You don't mean a word of what I say!
Go to hell but come back




(Trans. Lennart and Sonja Bruce, in Poems in Our Absence, Bonne Chance Press 1994)




*




Recent dramatizations of this scene have wanted to emphasize the force and conviction of Elizabeth's refusal. Collins' maddening refusal to understand her (in the novel) has tended to be underemphasized.












Jennifer Ehle and David Bamber (1995)







Keira Knightley and Tom Hollander (2005)




Recommended: An edit that combines the above two renderings along with the same scene from the 1940 film featuring Melville Cooper as Collins and Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet

Jane Austen: Emma (1816)

Jane Austen, pencil-and-watercolour sketch by Cassandra Austen, currently on display in the National Portrait Gallery

[Image source: http://austenblog.com/2010/05/09/a-closer-look-at-images-of-jane-austen/ . This is the only fully authenticated portrait of Jane Austen that shows her face; there is a painting by Cassandra that shows Jane, but from the back.]

Emma is an epic of class distinction, or what might be better named class definition. The class being defined is the upper-middle class gentry, not quite titled. The same class that Scott in Ivanhoe five years later would call the Franklins of Merry England.

Knightley, the novel's most skilful operator, is relaxed in his nuances. He behaves well to the lower orders, he does not imagine what is not the case. When he discusses class distinction he is talking about classes or sub-classes that are lower than his own: we don't hear Knightley on the nobility. He uses the terms "line" and "set", apparently interchangeably, to talk about the place that Harriet Smith inhabits: Mrs Goddard's. But his definitions are also nuanced by "situation" - Miss Bates is in a situation which is economically straitened. Though her "line" is comparatively high, she ought not to be made the butt of Emma's thoughtless wit. 

Knightley praises Robert Martin too, but he doesn't pretend that the relationship is an equal one. The exact wording is: "He knows I have a thorough regard for him and all his family, and, I believe, considers me as one of his best friends." That sounded terribly patronizing to me, until I grasped that this is "friend" in the nineteenth-century sense of supporter, backer, well-wisher, someone who's in your court. It doesn't imply that Robert Martin is under any illusion about Knightley being his best mate. 

Maybe the sentence is still patronizing, but it's within the context of a firm grasp of what amount to social realities. Emma is an imaginer, that is the source of her errors, but Knightley speaks up for sense. Yet he is not (his term for Harriet) artless, except that comically both he and Emma turn out to have their humanly artless sides too, when it comes to making love. 

*

Harriet is a little embarrassing: I mean, for Jane Austen. In a book that so relishes its expansive accounts of discussions, there's a significance to its suppressions, to the things that are not given to us. They include (in I, XVII) the painful interview between Emma and Harriet at Mrs Goddard's, in which the error over Mr Elton is revealed; this is reported to us, not word by word, but summarized into Harriet's tears and good behaviour. 

When the same situation recurs with regard to Mr Knightley, another supposed admirer of Harriet who is to be revealed as an admirer of Emma, this time it's decided to operate by letter.

You remember how, after Emma's crashing remark and Miss Bates' painful response, the Box Hill scene carries on as if it was blithely unaware of how our faces altered, of the shock and awkward silence that only we, apparently, have been conscious of. True, the scene gutters and fizzles, as if others beside ourselves might be feeling this tension, this awareness of some debt that remains unpaid, but not a word is said about it. When Knightley berates Emma, it comes upon us as a relief. 

We are not permitted to read Emma's letter (III, 14). And now, though this time we are really uncertain of the author's sanction, the tension of the Box Hill scene reappears. It persists throughout the following chapter, in which Emma and Knightley hugely enjoy reading Frank Churchill's letter and indulging in discussing the finer discriminations of someone else's behaviour. This comfortable scene is also courtship between the pair, a foretaste of married bliss. Yet all the time we a little distracted by waiting for, what will also be presented only in summary, Harriet's reply (III, 16). Of the latter, we are told:

Harriet expressed herself very much, as might be supposed, without reproaches, or apparent sense of ill usage; and yet Emma fancied there was a something of resentment, a something bordering on it in her style...

The "very much" has an odd effect, as if we feel it leading up to "very much injured" or "very much gratified", but instead it's left hanging in the air. We can uneasily attach it to "without reproaches", though since this is an absolute position the effect of "very much" is actually to weaken it, to convert it into  "mainly (but not altogether) without reproaches". Austen is, it seems, unwilling to put us through witnessing Emma's awkward delivery of difficult news; perhaps also, unwilling to contemplate Harriet's reaction in detail.

But in the crisis that led up to all this, she did allow us to hear a Harriet we might not have expected:

"I never should have presumed to think of it at first," said she, "but for you. You told me to observe him carefully, and let his behaviour be the rule of mine - and so I have. But now I seem to feel I may deserve him; and that if he does choose me, it will not be any thing so very wonderful."

Harriet commands this scene, and three times the word "she" (as in "said she") emphasizes that for a moment Harriet is stage-centre, no longer an appendage to Emma but the principal interlocutor. Surely it is hard to read this without being aware that in some way Harriet understands that Mr Knightley belongs to Emma, and takes a little revenge for the earlier episode with Mr Elton. Just for a moment she asserts herself against being "placed", however variously, by her social superiors.

*

The first scene of Emma is a wonder. The visitor, Mr Knightley, "a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty" appears, and at first this unassuming entry leaves us uncertain what kind of dramatic status the visitor has. Arriving as a messenger from London, the possibility is briefly present that he is precisely one of those utility characters who, rather than being important to the story in their own right, perform the miscellaneous dramatic duties of e.g. delivering messages. For a short time afterwards, we enjoy the always-fresh - because never long-lasting - pleasure of being allowed to observe someone who is a perfectly new character to us, though he is not at all a new acquaintance to the other persons present - though just how old and significant a friend he is to Emma and her father we are not yet fully aware. Mr Knightley takes, in fact, quite a modest line, is nothing like so dominant a force as we will come to know him.

"Not at all, sir. It is a beautiful, moonlight night; and so mild that I must draw back from your great fire."

These are his first quoted words. Weather, in Emma, is not a frequent topic, but it is always significant and superbly evoked: light snow in December, a July rainstorm. It's as if Austen already sees the whole book before her. Thus that light anticipation of Miss Bates on Box Hill, when Mr Woodhouse misconstrues Emma's teasing and says:

"I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed.. I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome."

Emma is quite innocent of this implication, yet that she can be so misconstrued subtly reveals a potential in her for sharpness which, hundreds of pages later, springs into actuality.

And how naturally this conversation leads up to Emma's "innocent" pleasure in match-making, to which her father adds fuel:

"Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretel things, for whatever you say always comes to pass."

*

The second volume of Emma verges on idling. Frank Churchill, we too easily understand, is of no particular importance to Emma. The other main introduction of this second volume is Mrs Elton, whom we are very glad to know, but a little of Mrs Elton goes a long way. No-one would wish this volume away, but it's remarkable how (thinking of those appraisals of Emma as "flawless" and  the "Parthenon of fiction") it's structured around an empty quarter.

(2009)

another note on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - Naturalism

Penguin English Library jacket (1970s style) - turning a detail of Branwell's bad picture into an iconic image

[Branwell's painting of 1833-34, commonly referred to as the Gun portrait, showed himself and his three sisters. Emily was 15 or 16 at the time.

The Gun Portrait, from an old photo

Arthur Bell Nichols thought the painting so poor (or so unflattering to his late wife Charlotte) that he destroyed it, retaining only the part showing Emily, who definitely came out best.

Emily, from the Gun Portrait (NPG)

Even so, the portrait is markedly improved by the cracks (which, for instance, make her nose look interestingly snub instead of characterlessly straight). But what above all transformed the effect is the Penguin jacket-designer's crop.  This, by eliminating the back of Emily's head, conceals the Victorian sloping shoulder-line and the languid hair, and creates an altogether more forceful image. Here is a woman, we're convinced, who already has Wuthering Heights in her sights.]

*

This note is about David Daiches' 1965 Introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of Wuthering Heights.

And first some trivia.


DAVID DAICHES

1.  Professor Daiches was an interesting man - read his 2005 obituary in The Scotsman:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/professor-david-daiches-1-720657

His surname (Jewish/Yiddish rather than Scottish) is pronounced  "day chiz"  or "die chiz". That's probably how you pronounced it already, but it's good to know..!


NOVELETTISH

2.  Daiches (referring to an article by Thomas Moser, in which Heathcliff is identified with the Id) says:

This view involves an admission that the latter part of the book - Heathcliff's revenge and its final abandonment, the growth of love between the younger Catherine and a now-civilized Hareton - is inferior and indeed novelettish, the grafting on to the real novel of a conventional moral pattern ... etc etc. 

OED novelette, n. :

1. A story of moderate length having the characteristics of a novel. Now: a short, light, romantic, or sentimental novel (freq. depreciative).

These days the unusual word "novelette" is apparently still used in the world of writing competitions to refer to a fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novella, i.e. 7,500 - 18,000 words, approximately.

But generally the meaning of "novelette" over the past two centuries has been derogatory. Classically it evoked books that were typified by sentimentality, triviality, and trite morality.

The novelette of the 'eighties was a romantic love story, in which the poor governess always married the duke, or the lady of title the gamekeeper,  who always turned out to be a duke or an earl in disguise. Midway through the story there had to be a description of a ball, at which the heroine in her simple white gown attracted all the men in the room; or the gamekeeper, commandeered to help serve, made love to the daughter of the house in the conservatory. The stories were often prettily written and as innocent as sugared milk and water; but, although they devoured them, the women looked upon novelette reading as a vice, to be hidden from their menfolk and only discussed with fellow devotees. .... An ordinarily intelligent child of eight or nine found them cloying; but they did the women good, for, as they said, they took them out of themselves.

(Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, pp. 109-110)

Novelettes might be chauvinistically dismissed as reading material for young ladies or uneducated persons.  The novelette might be regarded as namby-pamby.  A typical example is A.A. Milne's send-up "The Seaside Novelette".

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/37693/

"Penny-novelettes" were, I suspect, the direct forebears of what my own generation called "Mills and Boon romances". Economics plays a big part in this. The novelette was cheap. Hence it tended to be short and written without much care. Appealing to connoisseurs was out of the question. Originality was out of the question. The skill was to hit off broad effects for a popular audience.

(The word novelette could also be used to mean trashy genre fiction, e.g. a "pornographic novelette").

Read more »

Brief hist

A double-header for the home counties:

Jane Austen's Emma

Harold P. Clunn's The Face of the Home Counties

Plus, on Intercapillary Space:

Samples from The Many Press