Morals and Manners

English novelist Jane Austen was born Dec. 16, 1775.

Most of Jane Austen’s admirers have entered her world through the matchless opening sentence of “Pride and Prejudice”: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” And, as a corollary to that truth, anyone who is not instantly seduced into following the fortunes of the Bennet family is not worth cultivating as a lover, as a friend or even as a casual acquaintance.

After the resolution of Elizabeth Bennet’s affections, one usually rushes--though one should be wary of any excess in this world--on to “Sense and Sensibility” and shares the emotional complexities suffered by Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as they fall in and out of love with a variety of suitors. Already alerted by Miss Austen’s patterns of strategy, the by now devoted reader senses the importance of Col. Brandon, in spite of that character’s limitations and antiquity--”a quiet serious man of five-and-thirty”--and delights in the author’s portrayal of the vulgar Mrs. Jennings and her impossible son-in-law, as all the threads of narrative are skillfully drawn together.

By this time the reader has become enslaved and is happy to know that other parts of Jane Austen’s world await exploration: the opening of “Northanger Abbey,” parodying the melodrama of popular 18th-Century Gothic fiction; the moral issues raised in “Mansfield Park”; the self-delusions of “Emma” and the softer tones of “Persuasion,” which tradition tells us reflects something of Jane Austen’s own emotional life through the character Anne Elliot. Whatever we learn of that side of Austen, however, must be drawn from her letters and the world of her fiction--though it appears probable that she actually accepted the hand of one of her suitors somewhat rashly one evening, only to release him the following morning.

Jane Austen’s world is a world in which decorum is valued and any form of hypocrisy is exposed with little mercy. Lack of experience may be excused, but deliberate deception is not to be tolerated any more than mischievous meddling.

Though Jane Austen’s father was a clergyman of moderate means, the Austens as a family did not fit the standard pattern of austere clerical behavior. They enjoyed reading aloud or in private not only the novels of Fielding, Richardson and Sterne but also the popular novels of the day in a time when novel reading was still considered a not-entirely respectable form of entertainment. The family’s taste in poetry responded to Scott and Cowper, and for Jane Austen, herself, particularly to Crabbe. On one occasion she declared that if such a thing were possible, she would welcome being Mrs. Crabbe.

Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, praised Jane Austen’s “delicate subsatirical humour”--a neat phrase, but a little too cautious for today’s sensibility. Some critics have gone so far as to claim that the novels show hatred, but that seems too harsh a word. Scorn and contempt for sham, certainly, but always with an undercurrent of mocking laughter.

What we know of Jane Austen’s day-to-day life comes from her letters. That we know as much as we do is surprising. Her sister, Cassandra, burned many letters and cut out passages from those she kept in order to save her sister from being considered frivolous or unkind. Of the letters, Leslie Stephen wrote a single sentence: “They are trivial, and give no new facts.” Trivia they certainly contain--hardly a disqualification today--but they also show the frankness of family conversation and, in spite of Cassandra’s censorship, enough passages remain for Margaret Drabble to write that the letters “retain flashes of sharp wit and occasional coarseness that have startled some of her admirers.” Probably the most frequently quoted of these comes early in the collection when she writes to Cassandra: “Mrs. Hull, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

More than once she refers to a Miss Debary: “She looks much as she used to do, is netting herself a gown of worsteds, and wears what Mrs. Birch would call a pot hat. A short and compendious history of Miss Debary.”

No stranger to social life, Jane Austen delighted in the ballroom. She writes Cassandra after one party: “There were 20 dances, and I danced them all, and without any fatigue.” And in response to a complaint from Cassandra about having danced four dances with a Mr. Kimble, Jane asks, “Why did you dance four dances with so stupid a Man ?” She was indiscreet on occasion, for the morning after another party she confesses to Cassandra, “I believe (sic) I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today.” But she was fully in control of her senses at another gathering where she met three young ladies and wrote to Cassandra, “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.” A woman we would probably never have heard of otherwise is immortalized in nine words: “Mrs. Powlett was at once expensively & nakedly dress’d.”

A small anthology of comments on married couples could be gathered: “Mrs. Badcock & two young Women were of the same party, except when Mrs. Badcock thought herself obliged to leave them to run around the room after her drunken Husband. His avoidance, & her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene.” And: “On the subject of matrimony, I must notice a wedding in the Salisbury paper, which has amused me very much, Dr. Phillot to Lady Francis St. Lawrence. She wanted to have a husband I suppose, once in her life, and he a Lady Frances.”

That she appreciated cleanliness and deplored disorder is quite clear. After Cassandra and her lap dog had visited, Jane wrote: “Give my love to little Cassandra! I hope she found my Bed comfortable last night and has not filled it with fleas.” And after a visit of her own to another family: “The house seemed to have all the comforts of little Children, dirt & litter.”

The unwary should be warned that Jane Austen’s world, once entered, exerts its influence far beyond its origins in provincial English society. Two hundred years after her birth, the fictional metaphors of morals and manners of her world remain as seductive as ever.