London, May
MY DEAR ALICE,
In Mansfield Park there is a young lady, a Miss Crawford, who behaves very badly. She speaks slightingly of the clergy. She is quite without respect for the Admiral uncle in whose household she was brought up, and to whom therefore she should be grateful. She says she has a large acquaintance of various Admirals; she knows too much about their bickerings and jealousies, and of Rears and Vices she has seen all too many. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’ But of course we do. Rears and Vices! Strong stuff! Miss Crawford mocks religious feeling. She remarks, on being shown round the Rushworth Elizabethan chapel, ‘Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Miss Eleanors and Miss Bridgets — starched up into seeming piety, but with their heads full of something very different — especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at — and, in those days, I fancy parsons were inferior even to what they are now.’
That makes Fanny angry. So angry she can hardly speak. It is the only time in the whole book that she is swayed by unholy passion. She is angry, you see, on Edmund’s behalf. Edmund is training to be a parson. Fanny is an unusual Austen heroine: she is good, almost unspeakably good. Edmund is more usual: he is of the Mr Knightley mould. He is kind, noble and instructive. He rather fancies Miss Crawford, in spite of her bad behaviour, perhaps even because of it, and she is certainly the one character in the book with whom one would gladly spend a week on an off-shore island: she is witty, lively, lovely and funny at other people’s expense. She is selfish — she unfeelingly makes use of Fanny’s horse, to Fanny’s detriment, since Fanny seems quite unable to take care of herself — and admits it. Miss Crawford, in fact, doesn’t mind being bad. Fanny simply can’t help being good.
Now Jane Austen started to write Mansfield Park in 1812. She had been living in Chawton, with her mother and sister, since 1809. It is tempting to suggest that the struggle between Miss Crawford and Fanny was the struggle going on in the writer between the bad and the good. The bad bit, which could write in a letter to Cassandra, ‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourne 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.’ (Now that’s far, far worse than anything Miss Crawford ever said.) And the good bit, which struggles to live at peace in a modest home with her mother and sister, and to continue to believe that her father was ‘good and kind’, (and not, as I tend to believe, the callous and egocentric model for Mr Bennet), and takes in Mansfield Park the personification of Fanny. And even more tempting to go back to Jane Austen’s early childhood, and see in that powerful description in Mansfield Park of the arrival of a small, timid girl, into a strange family — on the whole kindly, but stupid — a portrait of herself, sent away to a school where she nearly died, among strangers, and to suggest that the split between good and bad never, in Jane Austen, quite reconciled and resulting in her early death, started there. The rebellious spirit, raging at being so cast out by mother and father, learning the defences of wit and style — Miss Crawford. The dutiful side, accepting authority, enduring everything with a sweet smile, finding her defence in wisdom — Fanny. So tempting, in fact, that I shan’t resist. I shall offer it to you as an explanation of Jane Austen’s determination to make the unctuous Fanny a heroine.
And also add that she must have missed her father very much, but in a rather, to us, unexpected way. Mansfield Park was the first new novel she wrote after his death — though she worked over Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, novels of which we know he approved. I think she was trying hard, especially hard, to be good: as if without his controlling spirit all morality and self-control might fly away, dissipate, unless everyone was very, very careful. When Sir Thomas, the patriarch, leaves his family to go to Antigua for a time, his fear is — and it seems to Jane Austen a reasonable fear — that if they are without his direction, without his watchful attention, they will behave without restraint and rapidly go to pieces. And so indeed they do — Good heavens! Amateur theatricals!
Mansfield Park throbs with the notion that what women need is the moral care and protection of men. Fanny marries Edmund in the end (of course), ‘loving, guiding and protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than anyone else at Mansfield, that he should learn to prefer soft light eyes [Fanny’s] to sparkling dark ones [Miss Crawford’s].’
Oh, Miss Austen, what wishful thinking do we not have here! It has come to my notice, Alice, that in the real world the worse women behave, the better they get on. (Discuss, with reference to your female friends, and their mothers.)
Well, perhaps we should look to fiction for moral instruction: we should not see it, as we have come to do, as a mirror to be held up to reality. Perhaps writing should not be seen as a profession, but as a sacred charge, and the writer of a bestseller not run gleefully to the bank, but bow his head beneath the weight of so much terrifying responsibility. To be able to influence, for good or bad, the minds of so many! In China they do not have ‘novels’ in our sense: they have fiction, it is true, but fiction that points the way to good behaviour, both at an individual and a social level. Such works are exhortations to hard work, honour, good cheer, and the power of positive thinking, and sell by the hundred millions. And in Russia any individual writer who flies, in the name of art, or truth, in the face of an accepted group morality, is seen as irresponsible, even to the point of insanity. It is a different way of looking at things. I have some sympathy with it. It is, oddly enough, readers and not writers who believe so passionately that writers should be free to write what they want. I do not think Jane Austen would have thought they should be: certainly not on the evidence of Mansfield Park, a book in which virtue is rewarded and bad behaviour punished, and the abominable Julia, disgraced, is obliged to go and live with the awful Mrs Norris. And serve both right.
Your loving Aunt,
Fay