Jane Austen (32 page)

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found something to do to them, putting in gold and talking gravely."

He wanted them all to be brought to him again in two months' time, but Edward would not promise. Jane was not at all pleased with Mr.

Spence; she said she could understand that the little girls' teeth might be in a critical state, but that "he must be a lover of teeth and money and mischief to parade about Fanny's."

For their second visit to the theatre, to see Garrick's
Clandestine
Marriage
, Jane was put into the hands of the hairdresser. She said:

"He curled me out at a great rate. I thought it looked hideous, but my companions silenced me by their admiration." As she was

accustomed to wearing a cap, she had thought that, with nothing but a bit of velvet round her head, she might catch cold, but she did not;

"the weather," she said, "is all in my favor."

When the visit to Henrietta Street was over, Jane went back with the party to Godmersham. Henry's establishment, to say nothing of

Edward's, had accustomed her for the moment to a state of luxury and elegance quite removed from the simplicities of Chawton, but it had not made her less mindful of the affairs of the cottage. She wanted to know if they had begun on the store of new tea, and on the new white wine. "My present elegancies have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a cat if I see a mouse."

The principal happening at Godmersham in September was the

annual fair at Goodnestone. The development of shops and stores all over the country makes it difficult for us to understand the

importance of fairs to those living out of range of the towns in the early nineteenth century. The booths supplied a bewitching variety of goods, from the severely practical to the altogether frivolous. Jane described the Goodnestone Fair as that famous one "which makes its yearly distribution of gold paper and colored persian

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through all the family connections." To be on the spot, Fanny went for a day or two to her grandmother at Goodnestone Farm; Lizzy and Marianne accompanied her, and so did their father, who had been repenting very much of his promise to do so, and had hoped the day would turn out wet, but unfortunately for him the morning was

perfectly clear. Jane was writing in the library, and had it therefore entirely to herself; she thought of Cowper's
Alexander Selkirk
; "I am mistress of all I survey," she said, and added that if she liked to repeat the whole poem there was nobody to stop her.

She constantly sent news to Chawton of the children. She

disapproved rather of Edward and George, who were now at home: they seemed to think of nothing but field sports out of doors, and showed themselves idle and greedy in the house; but afterwards she wished she had not said this; she was touched by their both staying to the Communion Service on Sunday. As she said: "After having much praised or much blamed anybody, one is generally sensible of something just the reverse soon afterwards." In the evening, at least, their occupation was innocent enough: they sat side by side making rabbit nets, "as deedily . . . as any two Uncle Franks could do."

But the boys were inclined to be something of a nuisance. At

Chawton there was a Mary Doe; the little girls had left a hare behind and told her that if she would look after it till they came again they would give her something for her trouble. Mary had been gathering nuts, with some idea that the young Mr. Knights wanted them, and Cassandra wrote about this in her letter. Jane read that part of the letter to the old nurse Sackree, and Sackree did not approve at all.

"She saw some signs of going after her in George and Henry, and thinks if you could give the girl a check, by rather reproving

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her for taking anything seriously about nuts which they said to her, it might be of use."

The thirteen-year-old Lizzie had had a letter from her Aunt

Cassandra, and her Aunt Jane was much amused by her saying that she
would
answer it, but she had so much to do, it might be four or five days before she could. Jane said: "This is quite her own message spoken in rather a desponding tone."Louisa, who was nine, sent best love and "a hundred thousand million kisses."

Jane was glad to hear that Alethea Bigg and her sister Mrs.

Heathcote, with their friend Miss Charlotte Williams, had been at Chawton and found much to approve of in the cottage. She was

delighted by the warmth of Charlotte Williams' appreciation;

besides, Miss Williams had the eyes Jane always admired. "Those large dark eyes always judge well. I will compliment her by naming a heroine after her."

On October 13th Charles arrived at Godmersham with his wife, little Cassy and the baby. They were so late that dinner had reached the stage of dessert, and their coming had been given up for that day by everyone but Jane. She and Fanny hurried out to the hall to meet them; little Cassy was so tired and bewildered that at first she did not seem to know anybody, but by the time they reached the library she had kissed her Aunt Jane very affectionately. "It was quite an evening of confusion as you may suppose--at first we were all

walking about from one part of the house to the other-then came a fresh dinner in the breakfast-room for Charles and his wife, which Fanny and I attended--then we moved into the library, were joined by the dining-room people, were introduced and so forth--and then we had tea and coffee which was not over till past ten."

The next day the gentlemen went out to shoot. Jane said: "I wish Charles may kill something, but this high wind is

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against their sport." The coldness suited Edward very well; he was extremely cheerful, but Jane imagined that poor James at Steventon must be running his toes into the fire. Within doors Jane improved her acquaintance with her sister-in-law and her little niece. Mrs.

Charles, née Palmer, had handed on a good deal of her family's appearance to little Cassy. "Poor little love," said her Aunt Jane. "I wish she were not so very Palmery, but it seems stronger than ever."

Charles was so extremely devoted to his wife and children that he kept them on board with him; but Cassy had lately suffered so much from seasickness that her Mama was beginning to think she ought to be left on shore. The difficulty was, Cassy could not bear to leave her parents, and her Papa was most unwilling to part from her. He was so much engrossed with his family that it was quite difficult to get him out. Jane said to Cassandra on October 21st: "I think I have just done a good deed--extracted Charles from his wife and children upstairs and made him get ready to go out shooting, and not keep Mr. Moore waiting any longer."

"Southey's Life of Nelson!"
she exclaimed. "I am tired of Lives of Nelson, being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it." To Frank himself she sent, while at Godmersham, an interesting piece of family news: the

temperamental Anna had become engaged again, this time in sober earnestness, to Mr. Ben Lefroy. Ben, the son of Mrs. Lefroy and brother of the present Rector of Ashe, was in many respects a good match for Anna Austen; he was sensible, religious, well connected and possessed of a moderate income. Anna's aunt said: "We are anxious to have it go on well, there being quite as much in his favor as the chances are likely to give her in any matrimonial connection."

The family had not actually foreseen this event, but Anna's behavior had been such that they were kept in

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a constant preparation for something. The chief drawback to the match that Jane could see was that "he hates company and she is very fond of it; this with some queerness of temper on his part and much unsteadiness on hers, is untoward."

Mrs. Austen sent Jane a very "comfortable" letter, "one of her foolscap sheets quite full of little home news," saying among other things that Anna had been on a short visit to Chawton. Ben was to come over and meet his prospective grandmother-in-law, and Jane said this would be an excellent time to pay his visit, "now that we, the formidables, are absent." For Cassandra was in Henrietta Street.

Henry's servant had given notice because he wanted a place in the country. When Jane first heard of his going, she was afraid Henry had been obliged to turn him off. Now she said: "I am glad William's going is voluntary and on no worse grounds. An inclination for the country is a venial fault. He has more of Cowper than of Johnson in him, fonder of tame hares and blank verse than of the full tide of existence at Charing Cross."

Sense and Sensibility
had gone into a second edition. Mary, who had been staying at Cheltenham, had heard it well spoken of there, and said that one of their acquaintance meant to buy it. Jane said: "I wish she may . . . I cannot help hoping that
many
will find themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it."

The autumn was darkening into winter, and the party at

Godmersham was cleared of the visiting family and the gentlemen who had been staying there to shoot. Fanny, as the mistress of the house, was necessarily occupied some part of the day about its concerns. There was a great deal of time and peace in which to work upon
Mansfield Park
.

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At noon of a November day Jane broke off her writing with the

words: "I did not mean to eat, but Mr. Johncock has brought in the tray, so I must--I am all alone. Edward has gone into his woods. At the present time, I have five tables, eight and twenty chairs and two fires all to myself."

She had said of
Pride and Prejudice
that it was too light and bright and sparkling, that it wanted shade. Such a charge could never be brought against
Mansfield Park
.
Pride and Prejudice
and
Mansfield
Park
stand to each other in something of the relation of
L'Allegro
and Il Penseroso
; the spirit of beauty which informs each book is in one case that of lively, and the other, pensive pleasure.

When Henry Austen entitled the story of Catherine Morland

Northanger Abbey
, he was adopting a method his sister had already used; but
Mansfield Park
, on which she bestowed the name herself, is named with far greater justice than
Northanger Abbey
.
Mansfield
Park
has not the powerful structure of the novels that immediately precede and follow it, but there is a unity imposed on its story by the fact that it takes place almost exclusively in the house and its immediate neighborhood.
Mansfield Park
itself is the matrix of the story to an extent that could not be claimed for Northanger, or Pemberley, or Hartfield, or Kellynch. We have, it is true, Fanny's excursion to Portsmouth; an eventful day is spent at Sotherton; there is a description of Edmund's Thornton Lacey; Fanny's brother comes ashore; Sir Thomas Bertram returns from a voyage to Antigua, in the course of which he was nearly nabbed by a French privateer; but for the greater part of the book we are conscious of no life, in village or town or distant county, except what is within Mansfield Park itself, and the Parsonage at one side of its part, and the White House at another. In the seclusion of this green retreat, where some of the characters are fixed, and from and

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to which the others go and come, the heroine is, for the greater part of the book, immovably settled; as the lowest and the least, the fagger of errands for Mrs. Norris and the tacker-on of Lady

Bertram's patterns, she has no gaieties to take her out, dances in neighboring great houses, or public balls at Northampton, or

extended rides, since when the others took them, her horse was wanted for Mary Crawford. Edmund's determined efforts for her

pleasure took her as far as joining the expedition to Sotherton and dining one evening at the Parsonage. All she sees and hears, all she thinks and feels and suffers for the important part of the book, is experienced in the radius of the house with its great and lofty rooms, the park, with its scattered trees and closer wood, the rose garden, the shrubbery and the lane. It is this characteristic that gives the book something of a spell, a legend; the sensation of faery is heightened by the fact that the heroine is, morally speaking, in a beleaguered castle, surrounded with fear and grief and loneliness and despair; placed at a disadvantage with the worldly by the insignificance of her position, and with almost everybody else by her own

nervousness, and still further handicapped by a passion which she believes to be hopeless, she makes the appeal of the heroine in distress. Her story has the psychological attraction of Cinderella's.

To be able to say so much of a novel invested with all Jane Austen's powers of realism, which contains, moreover, her strongest portrait of a truly hateful woman and her one contribution to the painting of squalid interiors, is to give some idea of the story's complex and subtle strength. Fanny Price wanders through forests and

enchantments drear; she is also nagged by Mrs. Norris, and banished to her father's home, where her mother is perpetually whining about a torn carpet and the doors are slammed till her temples ache.

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The character of Fanny is not of a kind to be generally popular, and yet there is, as Professor Bradley has pointed out, a select band of those who prefer
Mansfield Park
to
Pride and Prejudice
. The dissatisfaction which many people feel with her has perhaps been best explained by the suggestion of Lord David Cecil that Jane Austen has not exactly caught the likeness she meant to convey; and the people who like and are attracted by Fanny are those who can visualize the original from the somewhat imperfect portrait.

The difference between
Pride and Prejudice
and
Mansfield Park
is epitomized in the difference between their heroines. Fanny possesses just those qualities which make a person an object of interest and sympathy rather than an object of desire. Her misfortunes are so keen that were not her fortitude quite equal to them, she would be a downright nuisance.