Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta on the fine craft and delicate irony in Jane Austen novels

During the last two weeks, on a period of enforced rest to recover from an illness, I reread the novels of Jane Austen. I was returning to the novels after a long time. As I began to read, I realised how much I had missed the finely crafted sentences, the almost musical movement of the plots, the delicate irony.

Putting down the last novel (and my favourite), Persuasion , I thought of these lines written by W.H. Auden in his poem, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. Auden had published the poem in a travel book that he co-wrote with Louis MacNeice, ‘Letters from Iceland’ (1937):

“You could not shock her more than she shocks me;/ Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass./ It makes me most uncomfortable to see/ An English spinster of the middle class/ Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,/ Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety/ The economic basis of society.”

Auden is talking about Jane Austen, of course. Although they are structured as romantic comedies, Austen’s six novels are really all about the same fundamental theme: society’s obsession with rank, privilege and money, and how this obsession plays out in the relationships of men and women.

Prettified Jane

Or, in other words, as Martin Amis summarises the plot of Pride and Prejudice : “(Darcy is) tall, dark, handsome, brooding, clever, noble, and uninhibitedly rich. He has a vast estate, a house in town, a ‘clear’ ten thousand per annum. His sister Georgiana has thirty thousand pounds—whereas Elizabeth’s dowry amounts to about a quid a week.”

All the more befitting, then, that 200 years after her death, this “English spinster of the middle class”, whose great subject has always been “the economic basis of society”, should finally feature on the British £10 note.

Not that this decision came easily. It was the result of a social media campaign started by the British feminist-activist Caroline Criado-Perez. What does it say, however, that in the 21st century, Criado-Perez received online rape threats for her campaign? Just think: over 200 years, Jane Austen’s books have sold millions of copies, been translated into the world’s languages, been adapted into innumerable film, television and theatrical adaptations, been the themes of tour packages, tote bags, and book club meetings. Her novels are seen as among the finest accomplishments of the form. And yet: rape threats, just for asking that her face appear on a currency note.

Two hundred years ago, Jane Austen published four novels anonymously during her lifetime. It is telling that even today, so many women are still constrained to post anonymously on social media for fear of online abuse and rape/ death threats.

Also interesting, but not surprisingly, the picture of Austen to be used is not based on the one painted by her sister Cassandra—which shows her with bags under her eyes and a half-smirk on her thin lips—but another, painted many years after Austen’s death, which shows a softer, prettier expression. Such are the challenges in the representation of women’s achievement, even in the 21st century.

Two hundred years later, it’s still fascinating to read the responses of different writers to her fiction. Many male writers speak of it in condescending terms; others are downright vitriolic. I wonder what made Mark Twain remark nastily: “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Or Tennyson, who huffily tried to reduce Austen’s stature: “In the narrow sphere of life which she delineated, she pictured her characters as truthfully as Shakespeare. But Austen is to Shakespeare as asteroid to sun. Miss Austen’s novels are perfect works on small scale—beautiful bits of stippling.”

Surprisingly, even Henry James, whose style draws so much from Austen’s own, is pompous and petty about her characters: “Her heroines… had undoubtedly small and second-rate minds and were perfect little she-Philistines.” Even the good that he can say is nothing more than patronising: “Little touches of human truth, little glimpses of steady vision, little master-strokes of imagination.” Everything is “little”.

Grand dinners

As for D.H. Lawrence, he dismissed her as “this old maid… English in the bad, mean snobbish sense of the word.” And Edward Said viewed Mansfield Park as nothing but an endorsement of imperialism.

Surely many readers took Austen’s self-deprecating words too seriously when she described her fiction as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour.” Miniatures can represent the world in ways that are as complex as broad canvases.

Not all critics missed the point of Austen’s fiction, however. Lionel Trilling described her fiction as the first modern novels, describing the moral life; Virginia Woolf wrote famously that “Of all great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, said Emily Dickinson decades later. One of Austen’s great contributions to fiction was in the development of the slanted perspective; the style of ‘free indirect discourse’ in which the novel has a third-person narrative voice but which also takes us into the perspective of the fictional character, letting us share their little self-delusions, their errors of judgement, their mistakes and finally their reflections, reminding us that the novel and its narrator are a part of the social structure that it is critiquing from within.

But even before the six great novels, Austen had written a number of pitch-perfect comic pieces that were later collected and published by her family. These pieces are an intelligent delight, romping through decorum, rank and connection; through form, flourish and literary affectation; and every other holy cow of the period. Nothing was too sacred for her wit.

No one who reads the first paragraph of ‘Sir William Mountague: An Unfinished Performance’ can imagine that Austen has anything but an ironic smile for pomp and rank: “Sir William Mountague was the son of Sir Henry Mountague, who was the son of Sir John Mountague, a descendant of Sir Christopher Mountague, who was the nephew of Sir Edward Mountague, whose ancestor was Sir James Mountague, a near relation of Sir Robert Mountague, who inherited the title and estate from Sir Frederick Mountague.”

Or, about another character: “He was a very rich young man and kept a great many carriages of which I do not recollect half.” Or this description of the family of ‘The Beautifull Cassandra: A Novel in Twelve Chapters’—“Her father was of noble birth, being the near relation of the Duchess of —-’s butler.”

Austen’s early comic pieces are a delight, romping through every holy cow of the period. Nothing was too sacred for her wit

Cassandra herself is no ordinary young lady: “She then proceeded to a pastry cook’s, where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the pastry cook and walked away.”

In ‘A Letter From A Young Lady, Whose Feelings Being Too Strong For Her Judgement Led Her Into The Commission Of Errors Which Her Heart Disapproved’: “I murdered my father at a very early period of my life, I have since murdered my mother and I am now going to murder my sister. I have changed my religion so often that at present I have not an idea of any left.”

Most perfect of these little pieces is ‘The Adventures of Mr. Harley’—a brilliant story of 125 words. After reading the ‘juvenilia’ (they are anything but; they are precocious, scathing and witty) one realises what a tremendous artistic journey Austen has covered by the time she completes her six novels. In her juvenilia, she is scathing and hilarious; in her novels, she is subtle and mature.

Here, in Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), is a one-line summary of a dinner party so typical of Austen’s ironic social perspective: “The dinner was a grand one, the servants were numerous, and everything bespoke the Mistress’s inclination for shew, and the Master’s ability to support it.”

If the novels are about domestic matters—two or three families, a walk in the park, a dinner conversation, a relationship—they are also about the society within which the plots are set: one that is pervaded by conspicuous consumption and patriarchy, and underpinned by a rigid class system, consciousness of rank and connections, and inequality that makes the numerous Have-nothings scurry about serving the indolent Haves.

The old world is slowly coming apart. It is increasingly becoming difficult to live with the luxurious idleness of the past; and that, hints Austen, is no bad thing. Old families look for smaller places to move to. New families, with self-made men of the new naval meritocracy, take their place: such as the Crofts in Persuasion , a naval couple who bring a whiff of sea air and brisk cosmopolitanism, as well as a new kind of optimism and the sense of a new kind of equality in their relationship.

Middle-aged women don’t do very well in Austen—not only the exasperating Mrs. Bennet but also women like the indolent Lady Bertram who wants a shawl from the colonies, and Mrs. Norris who sponges a packet of cream cheese from the Rushworths’ housekeeper. Unlikeable old patriarchs like Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park make way for sensitive, more educated and morally upright men like Edmund Bertram and Frederick Wentworth.

Men’s advantage

And the young women themselves? Elena Ferrante—the great 21st century writer who also writes under a pseudonym—notes how the young women in Austen’s fiction live carefully restricted lives, not going to college, not travelling alone, not going out to work—and fighting over the men, who fight over property. But for all this, the women miss nothing as they watch the men bumbling along. Ferrante reflects on the last sentence of Sense and Sensibility : “And among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.”

The phrase “though sisters”, remarks Ferrante, seems to bring us up against the real conflict that has been playing out within the pages of the novel.

Indeed, Ferrante is one of those writers who today continues Austen’s project, of which Anne Elliot tells Admiral Croft towards the end of Persuasion : “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story…the pen has been in their hands.” It’s time we heard the women tell their own stories, with the pens in their hands.

The author is in the IAS and is currently based in Bengaluru.