There are two traits in her character which are pleasing; namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea.
—Jane Austen in a letter to Cassandra, January 1796
The company was seated for dinner on the second night of the camp, and as we discussed the villainous General Tinley from Northanger Abbey, the subject turned quite suddenly to torture.
“You know, surely,” said the lady in the blue bonnet, “that Jane based the general on a real-life model?” One gentleman at the table made a face to indicate he knew where this was going and had no interest in coming along. Others nodded their heads, and the lady leaned forward, lowering her voice and glancing behind her, as though the general himself might appear at any moment.
The tale begins in farce and ends in tragedy, but the short version is that the Austens’ neighbors in Hampshire included one family of straight-up villains who were deep into torture. The scion of this family was a stammering young man named John Wallop, Third Earl of Portsmouth. From childhood, when he boarded with the Austens as one of George’s pupils, the earl showed signs of idiocy and occasional psychosis—one reason his family engaged trustees to oversee his estate, including the solicitor John Hanson, who was also Byron’s lawyer, and who sometimes hosted Byron for hunting parties in the neighborhood.
“Of course, the English aristocracy is full of nincompoops,” the lady told the table, “but Wallop was simply a fiend.” As a young man, the earl rejoiced at any chance to inflict pain. He starved his servants, tormented frogs with a fork (here, one woman at the table stopped eating), and would visit slaughterhouses to whip the hogs who were about to die, telling each one in turn: “Serves you right!” Often he beat his oxen about their heads with an axe. His fascination with death was such that he would attend the funerals of strangers and, when there was not a dead stranger at hand, would have his servants stage a mock ceremony so that he could laugh at it. The earl also took to beating his servants. He pursued these pastimes with no appearance of remorse, or understanding of what remorse might mean—a bright-eyed young torture enthusiast. Or, if you join Miss Blue Bonnet’s more sympathetic view, “a silly broken creature without a heart whose father probably broke him in the first place.” (One woman at the table winced at this description of the madman. Another gentleman, who had not been listening, asked me to pass the bread.) When chance provided, the earl would prey on the sick or the convalescing: when one of his coachmen broke his leg in an accident, the earl waited until the doctor had set the leg, then went into the room where the man was recovering and rebroke it. His main erotic pastime involved hiring women-servants of the neighborhood to draw his blood using lancets and then carry it in a basin under their petticoats while he watched; this is also how the earl thought that insemination happened.
Even though he was almost certainly impotent, the family wanted to make sure the earl had no legitimate offspring, so, when he was thirty-one, they married him to a forty-seven-year-old woman who did her best to keep him in line while the second brother, Newton, waited to succeed to the title. During this period, Jane Austen and her family went to several dinners and balls at the Wallop family seat, and Austen’s letters show no sign that she knew what the earl got up to; in one instance she notes his wife’s new dress, while after another of his balls, she acknowledges that she got carried away with the wine: “I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day.”
But the earl was soon to go from villain to victim. Upon the death of the earl’s first wife, Hanson, the family lawyer, spirited him to London, where the lawyer then insisted on introducing his three daughters to the earl and told him to pick one. The earl chose Laura, who was deemed the prettiest, but somewhere en route to the chapel, the lawyer pulled a switcheroo, and the earl found himself shortly thereafter reciting the marriage vows not to Laura but to her elder, apparently plainer sister Mary Ann. Byron, whom Hanson engaged as a witness at the wedding, recalls that at the rushed ceremony, the earl recited his vows like a schoolboy doing Cicero—“[Portsmouth] responded as if he had got the whole by heart; and, if anything, was rather before the priest.”
Byron saw the wedding as just another instance of an idiot nobleman about to enter a joyless marriage and could hardly have known that Mary Ann rivaled her new husband for sadism. She took to beating him, kept a whip under her pillow, and installed her lover in the house, a man named William Alder, who (so the servants said) would sometimes creep into bed with Mary Ann while the earl snored at her side. At one point, Alder began torturing the earl regularly and keeping him under lock and key. Eventually, the earl regained sovereignty over his own house and banished his wife, along with the three children she had produced with no help from him. In a sensational trial after Austen’s death, the earl was accused and then acquitted of madness. He lived to eighty-four, and in his final years became a sort of crazed faux monarch who called himself the King of Hampshire.
A few of us had heard the story before, or part of it; the Portsmouth saga appears in Claire Tomalin’s celebrated biography of Austen, but David Nokes’s biography ignores the more lurid aspects, and a lot of Janeites, even if they know about the earl, have little interest—he was just a kook in the neighborhood, of little significance because the families were not close. Others, like the lady in the blue bonnet, think of the tale as a reminder that even in bucolic Hampshire lurked deception, madness, and violence so unimaginable as to verge on comic.
The table was silent after the tale was concluded. One gentleman had left his seat, and the lady who had put down her fork at the mention of tormented frogs began, tentatively, to eat once more.
“But could Jane have known?”
“Jane must certainly have known,” said Miss Blue Bonnet.
“Jane could not—she writes about him in a letter, I forget which, and mentions nothing of—”
“But he was at school under Jane’s father! He boarded in their house as a boy—”
“Exactly—back when he was just a stammering bed-wetter, not the worst villain on the earth.”
“So you don’t think General Tilney is drawn from the wicked earl?”
“I should think the general would be much more interesting if Jane had based him on the earl. In the book he’s just a coldhearted grasper.”
“That’s true, no one mentions him torturing the hogs.”
“Or torturing the coachman!”
“Though Catherine does imagine him abusing his wife.”
I entered the fray. “He does sound like a character who might have appeared in the Juvenilia.”
Miss Blue Bonnet looked at me as though I’d just saved her family from debtors’ prison. “My dear, exactly! I’ve said it myself. Where else could Jane have got the inspiration for those bloodthirsty villains?”
I demurred. “Well, Swift, for one.”
The lady considered. “Yes,” she said, “yes, Swift is there.” She paused to sip her wine. “But you must remember that Cassandra burned a lot of Jane’s letters. It is thoroughly possible”—she turned to the woman who had blanched at the frogs, and repeated—“thoroughly possible that Jane knew of the earl, and wrote all about him.” I gave a half-bow to concede the possibility.
I was beginning to learn the secret of mealtimes in Austenworld. In some ways they offer the most gossipy and delicious interactions that world has to offer. The shared passion, the disputed biographical details, the disagreements over recipes and interpretations—these bubble during the lectures and panels but wait until a teatime pause to express themselves in full. Meals are also the most democratic part of these gatherings. At the table, one’s manners are on fullest, clearest display (are you a bad listener? do you chew with your mouth open?), but digesting in company is also democratic, a reminder of equality (we are all animals together at the trough). In Austenworld, then, meals are much more about the rank and file than about the elites. Here, conversation goes to the quick, to the bold, and to those who care the most—not to those with credentials or book deals. It’s anarchy, it’s art, it’s where the most interesting conversations happen, and where judgments are discussed, refined, and rendered without mercy.
Meals are also the moment when Janeites of all stripes—academics, civilians, and those between the two—take time to discuss manners directly, often in reference to Austen’s Juvenilia, which contain some of my favorite scenes of etiquette, and its opposites, in all of literature. The Juvenilia were very much a hot topic at the summer camp. A month or so in advance, James had asked all attendees to read (or reread) the Juvenilia, the better to enjoy the grad students’ theatricals based on these works. They’re ruthless little things, hardly the sort of work we associate with the blushing maiden-aunt in Henry’s biographical note. The sketches, micro-novels, playlets, and epistolary excursions included in the juvenile notebooks are all quite direct in their parodies of literary convention, but in their deepest comedy they depict the barbarities of civilized life, and how the conventions of polite conversation enable and deepen those barbarities. Most people, including a lot of semipro Janeites, have never read them. To come upon the Juvenilia for the first time is a revelation of disturbing hilarity. It’s like discovering that, preparatory to his anatomical sketches, Leonardo da Vinci had dedicated himself to virtuosic cartoons of dismemberment: a primal comedy as prelude to a refined and civilized art. Austen wrote them all between the ages of twelve and sixteen, and for anyone who thinks of Austen as a mere stenographer of good manners, they are a life-giving tonic.
The most obvious and delectable irony of these squibs is the dissonance between the refinement of the form and the soullessness of the acts described. Observe how Austen begins Henry & Eliza:
As Sir George and Lady Harcourt were superintending the labours of their haymakers, rewarding the industry of some by smiles of approbation, and punishing the idleness of others by a cudgel, they perceived, lying closely concealed beneath the thick foliage of haycock, a beautiful little girl not more than three months old.
Touched with the enchanting graces of her face, and delighted with the infantine though sprightly answers she returned to their many questions, they resolved to take her home, and having no children of their own, to educate her with care and cost.
Seldom has a fairy tale about a beautiful changeling begun with such violent tyranny, so coolly described—and this deadpan, vicious sense of fun pervades the Juvenilia, through scenes of blackout drunkenness, gambling addiction, matricide and patricide. Nor should we forget cannibalism. Later on in Henry & Eliza, the heroine hurls her children out a prison window and finds herself suddenly peckish:
But scarcely was she provided with the above-mentioned necessaries, than she began to find herself rather hungry, and had reason to think, by their biting off two of her fingers, that her children were much in the same situation.
Whenever someone tells me that Austen is the poet laureate of table manners, I refer them to this passage. Still, it does little good. You cannot argue with someone who is resolved to find Austen anodyne and safe. Austen’s early fictions demonstrate experiments with voice that illuminate the technique of the later novels. In parodying the more tawdry romances of the earlier eighteenth century, Austen began to ventriloquize her own audience, absorbing convention and expectation into a voice that belongs to a sort of unthinking moral majority—the same sense of socially determined certainty that gives the first sentence of Pride & Prejudice its kick. These are the same entrenched norms against which Austen’s heroines must contend in the “mature” novels—think Lizzy Bennet dropping the mic on Lady Catherine in Volume III of Pride & Prejudice. In a sad bit of irony, Austen has become so associated with Empire-waist dresses and arch table talk that for many she now represents a certain set of mindless norms, her novels mere wax museums of the sanitary foibles of the gentry. But Austen’s mannered parrotry has always served a darker purpose, that of exploding apparently harmless social conventions that exist only to ensure the appearance of civility where none is felt, mechanisms that render everyone a hypocrite and sometimes precipitate the irresponsible (and unfashionable!) behavior they are meant to prevent. And yet without ritual, without community and the claustrophobia that comes with it, we can find ourselves helpless against the ancient animal instincts.
“We long for an age when people knew the rules of deportment, and followed them,” James said when convening the summer camp. The men and women with whom I ate throughout the camp seemed to accept this broad notion, but a lot of them justly qualified their nostalgia. After all, this was a majority-women conference, ostensibly dedicated to conjuring a period during which few to none of them would have owned property, and many would have been married off to a dullard of a clergyman, or—like one of Austen’s cousins—shipped off as a mail-order bride to an officer in the East Indies. So it makes sense that Janeites gravitate toward the Juvenilia, which seem to hint at this complicated, contradictory nostalgia for “order.” Austen’s juvenile notebooks dramatize a world of rules wherein the logic is broken. A mother notices that her children have gnawed off her fingers, and her response is merely to sigh and to make a deduction. There is a similar dismantling of apparently rational social discourse in Love & Freindship [sic], a thirty-page epistolary novella that parodies the stock melodrama of mid-eighteenth-century fantasy-romance fiction. At its heart, the passage in question is an elaborate knock-knock joke and an exercise in high nonsense that applies very well to modern-day intercourse between academics and lay readers:
One Evening in December as my Father, my Mother and myself, were arranged in social converse round our Fireside, we were on a sudden greatly astonished, by hearing a violent knocking on the outward door of our rustic Cot.
My father started—“What noise is that?” said he. “It sounds like a loud rapping at the door,” replied my mother. “It does indeed,” cried I. “I am of your opinion,” said my father, “it certainly does appear to proceed from some uncommon violence exerted against our unoffending door.” “Yes,” exclaimed I, “I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.”
“That is another point,” replied he. “We must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock—though that someone does rap at the door, I am partly convinced.”
The circumstances of the larger story have little bearing on the virtuosic comedy of this tableau. (“Unoffending” and “partly” are especially satisfying.) I will merely say that the visitor is a mysterious stranger who proposes to the narrator, Laura, within four minutes of meeting her, a spoof on what the critic Marvin Mudrick calls “the lachrymose novels” of the eighteenth century. The scene is a wicked jab against certain fastidiously boring conventions of polite conversation—precisely the sort of conversations in which Austen haters suspect Janeites of being forever involved.
It is hard not to make a further deduction, like the mother who has lost her fingers: namely, that this family is utterly mad, unfit for the public, quite possibly dangerous.
Often, this fireside scene reminds me of the academic cloisters I have known, where residual high theory and subatomic specialization can preclude engagement with simple social realities—the arcane scholar or absentminded professor more concerned with principles than with people. Scholars are parsing, deskbound creatures. Even after the partial recession of high theory and Saussurean linguistics, the public profile of the learned academic is closely associated with deconstructive instincts, “moral relativism,” and every species of twenty-first-century sophistry, leaving us at once suspect and laughably shortsighted, prone to the microfixations of Mr. Collins, that cold fish who directs houseguests through his Kentish garden “with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.” I’m not merely parroting mindless stereotypes here; any scholar of a healthily self-critical bent will see herself, on occasion, as the punch line in this fireside tableau. Laura’s father is quite literally an armchair philosopher, too satisfied with his own logic games to do the decent thing and just open the door. At the summer camp, when I mentioned this scene during tea, one of our nonacademic Janeites turned to me with a look of deep seriousness. “This is the scene I picture every time I e-mail a hotshot professor with one of my foolish questions.”
In the summer of 2008, the scholar and avowed Janeite William Deresiewicz published an essay in The American Scholar on “the disadvantages of an elite education,” in which he complained that he didn’t know how to speak with his plumber:
There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
“So unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language”! The thing reads like a conquistador’s report from the New World. (One wonders what the plumber made of Deresiewicz.) On its publication, the piece was justly maligned for its snobbish heresies, but hardly any critics took time to praise its candor. More than a few academics have trouble socializing beyond the academy; Deresiewicz merely admitted it. It is natural to think here of Darcy 1.0, who acknowledges in the second volume of Pride & Prejudice that he lacks “the talent which some people possess … of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.” In the case of Deresiewicz, the difficulty is in “conversing easily” with someone who hasn’t earned multiple Ivy League degrees. At the tender age of thirty-five, an American public intellectual was forced to admit that, like Laura’s father, he didn’t know precisely how to open the door. From my limited experience, Austen not only encourages us to open the door—she shows us how.
It should also be noted that when a decorated Janeite neglects to open the door, whether through snobbery or through a lecture full of needlessly complicated dialectics, the hoi polloi will have words to say about it. I learned this on the first night of the summer camp, during dinner, where our conversation ranged between assessments of the chicken (“Delicious, and not at all rubbery,” as one of my table companions noted with surprise); hopes and fears for the ball; and fascinated apprehension among those who would be cosplaying for the first time. But the assembly also tended to lapse into extended quotation—as I learned for the first time in North Carolina, there are few scenarios at a Janeite conclave for which attendees cannot summon a line from Austen. “Evelyn, that dress is divine, you are a paragon of fashion—” “Lud! I deserve neither such praise nor such censure,” and so on.
Once we had finished dinner (those who had forgone coffee looked ready to faint), our postprandial chatter was delayed by a lecture from a distinguished professor from Duke, who told us all about “The Networked Novel and What It Did to Domestic Fiction.” I thought it was grand stuff, if a bit high-flying. The nonacademics on either side of me disagreed forcibly. It had been a heady address, full of technicality and shop talk that mystified what should have been a lucid, accessible argument, and a handful of our nonacademic visitors seemed ready to fume. These objections were largely, I think, the result of the speaker’s somewhat preening lexicon, which felt borrowed more from Silicon Valley than from mainline literary theory: by this account, in the eighteenth century, the domestic novel was secretly being subverted from within by something called the “networked novel”—a mode of realist fiction that unsettled easy ideas of hierarchy, of the possibility of stability in a closed community. This so-called networked novel then “disrupted” normative notions of a self-sufficient domestic world. No wonder the Janeites were ready to disrupt the speaker in question—perhaps even to expel her from the network.
At table talk perhaps more than anywhere else, the Democratic Republic of Janeites is in control—not the academic gatekeepers. This scholar had “talked down” to them, and political equilibrium would not be restored until the Janeites had prosecuted the case against her and dissipated the offensive taste left behind—a taste, apparently, that no volume of hot tea could wash away.
* * *
On the second night, once we had finished our discussion of the mad earl and were nearing the end of soup, conversation turned to the delicate subject of Austen fan-fiction. “There’s a book called Second Impressions,” said the older lady in the blue bonnet, “and it’s really quite clever.” (The title is a riff on First Impressions, Austen’s original title for Pride & Prejudice.)
“I have yet to read Second Impressions,” rejoined another lady in between slurps. “But those books simply lose me when they become overtly sexual.” We laughed; she didn’t. “I am as happy as anybody to speculate on the domestic felicity of the Darcys, but I balk when it comes to…” She broke off at the most respectable point.
“… awful sex scenes?” I offered.
“Yes. Awful. It just starts to feel all … icky.”
“Like walking in on your parents,” said a younger participant. The first lady considered this last remark.
“You know, I think that’s true,” she said. “It isn’t so much that sex doesn’t happen—of course it does—but the magic is somehow broken when the descriptions become so clinical, and Mr. Wickham starts to sound like something you’d watch on pay-per-view in a hotel.”
“Well, now I’m curious what you’ve been watching when you retire to your room each night.”
I found myself somewhat out of my depth in this conversation, having read only one piece of pornographic Austen revisionism, Ann Herendeen’s homoerotic rendition, Pride/Prejudice, in which Darcy and Bingley needle each other for being gay. (“When have you ever looked at a woman but to find fault?” Bingley asks Darcy in an early chapter. “As far as marriage is concerned, my fundament is as close to a wife as you’ll ever come.”)
But the table was in agreement about the general boringness of Austenian smut, though we were each careful to speak sotto voce. Many of the writers who traffic in this occasionally seamy idiom will often appear at dinners like this one, and, as we learn more than once in the novels of Austen, it is important at a country assembly to pass judgment as quietly as possible. There was something coy, too, in these complaints, an implicit acknowledgment that our own respective Janeisms were no less frivolous or whimsical than the fan-fictioners’, and a recognition that Janeism is a big tent that takes all kinds. The formal and informal mix together, as do high and low, Marxist analysis rubbing shoulders with culinary history and fan-fiction. Janeism is a pastiche or palimpsest, or a quilt, like the giddy genre-mix of the Juvenilia: deep psychology and potty humor.
The marriage of opposites is not merely an aesthetic fixture, or a plot device from the early novel—it’s also a model for living and for accommodating other people; a model for withholding judgment and banishing prejudice; and a model for high-flying academics who could learn a great deal from the civilians who live just around the corner. Pride & Prejudice for this reason is the ideal text for bringing different stripes together. As Donald Gray wrote in 1993:
Pride and Prejudice, like [Austen’s] other novels, is a story about people who learn, or fail to learn, how to be, do, and recognize good in the ordinary passages of lives that would be unremarkable if Austen had not made it clear that a kind of moral salvation depends on what Elizabeth and Darcy make of themselves by learning about one another.
This is the most succinct answer to why Jane Austen’s apparently modest domestic fictions carry such weight—why their appeal, at least among bourgeois readerships, is so universal and so firm. There is nothing frivolous in what we “make of [ourselves] by learning about one another”—the true frivolity is to sit around the fireside, debating epistemology instead of opening the door. As James put it to me later: “Austen is a kind of lingua franca that enables people to talk to one another.”
* * *
At the dinners, one also began to notice the couples for whom the summer camp doubled as a romantic getaway. Some, in the tradition of Chapman and Metcalfe, had fallen in love with each other in part through discovering a mutual love for Austen, and there are various academic power-couples across the world whose unions owe their beginning to an indiscreet moment at an Austen conference; as Kipling’s narrator says in “The Janeites,” Austen remains a “bit of a match-maker” even in death, and at the larger conferences I occasionally met a child conceived (the parents told me) with the aid of Austen’s prose as aphrodisiac.
Most of the couples, though, are “mixed” marriages, wherein one partner (often but not always a woman) is the true believer and the other partner a willing or sporting participant. On the first evening of the summer camp, I met one such couple, a vivacious pair of sixtysomethings, the woman slim and glamorous in her bonnet and evening gown and the man stout and kindly in an officer’s jacket, rarely taking his eyes off his wife, whom he regarded at all times with a smile of mingled deference and infatuation. While we sat together over a late dessert, they explained their routine. The husband had performed theater in his college days, the wife said, distinguishing himself in yellow stockings as Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “He had never read a word of Jane,” she told me, “but the first time I asked him to join me at a JASNA ball, he didn’t blink—he went to have his costume fitting the very next day!”
The husband nodded at her and addressed me without looking at me. “It is a bit like playing a role,” he conceded, sounding almost bashful. “And of course we have our games—”
“He means courtship,” she translated. The man grinned as if at his own foolishness and put down his cake fork.
“Sometimes we will separate before the ball, and observe one another from across the room—” he began.
His wife, unable to hold back, cut in: “—and sometimes we dance with other people!” The statement had a quality of risqué confession, and she raised her eyebrows as though we were discussing a major scandal. The husband giggled.
“She lends me out,” he explained. “She won’t tell you this, but I think it’s because there are often so few men around, and she likes to see the women dancing.”
“Liar!” she declared in triumph. “He’s being very bad—the reason I have him dance with other people is so I can watch him.” She squeezed his hand. “He’s very good.” Her mate shook his head.
“We’ve been taking lessons for some years, and I can claim only competence.”
The wife persisted. “It is thrilling to watch him charm the others.” They looked at each other and she coaxed him. “You can be so charming and I’m not sure you even know it.”
“But we always end up together,” the man continued, dodging the compliment. “After we’ve spun the room with other people, that is.”
His wife leaned toward me and spoke in a stage whisper, widening her eyes suggestively: “We always pretend that it’s the first time we’re meeting.”
“That actually sounds really fun,” I said.
“It is. My friends tease me about it”—she paused and laughed—“they say that we are kinky.”
“That’s not what it’s about,” the man said quickly. “That’s not why—”
She now held his hand in both of hers. “It’s nothing improper, just a little game, a vacation almost…” She broke off and they looked at each other, and it was difficult not to think of Admiral and Mrs. Croft in Persuasion, one of those older couples whose mutual good humor and evident marital bliss make such an impression on Anne Elliot. Like the Crofts, this couple have no children, and like the Crofts, after many years of marriage they are still visibly in love.
After a long, private pause—for its duration there was no one in the room except for the two of them—the husband turned to me as though awaking and said: “It can be a pleasure to meet one’s wife as a stranger.”
The following day, while stealing a quiet moment in the shade of a tree, I spotted the wife in close conference with two other women, one on each of her arms as they traipsed across the quadrangle en route to a plenary discussion on “Mothers and Daughters in the Novels of Austen.” The husband followed them at a distance of a few paces, laden with various objets: under his right arm, he carried a clutch of hardbound books, while his wife’s reticule—a tiny period handbag—dangled from his wrist. On his left arm was a tote bag with an image of Colin Firth scowling in a frilly collar, and he busied his left hand snapping photos of the three ladies in procession. Occasionally he would stop to request that they turn around to effect a tableau. The ladies smiled and pretended to primp their hair, like Betty Boops of the Regency. Before the quartet exited my field of vision, I saw the husband bounding in pursuit of the three women, yelping a bit and waving the reticule in the air. When we bumped into each other the next day, he told me he was worried his wife had forgotten her heart pills.
“My wife’s friends said I had made a spectacle of myself,” he said, smiling at the figure he had cut. “Still, it would hardly have been good manners not to inquire.”