The long interval that elapsed between the completion of Northanger Abbey in 1798, and the commencement of Mansfield Park in 1811, may sufficiently account for any difference of style which may be perceived between her three earlier and her three later productions … [I]n her last three works are to be found … a deeper insight into the delicate anatomy of the human heart, marking the difference between the brilliant girl and the mature woman.
—J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen1
Jane Austen’s nephew may have gotten his dates slightly wrong,2 but he was the first to identify one of the most striking facts about his aunt’s work. Though her six novels were published within about six years of one another, the last three represent manifestly greater artistic achievements than do the first. While that much has been a critical commonplace since the days of Austen-Leigh, it has never been anything more than a commonplace—often noted, scarcely ever discussed.3 Early phase and major phase, as I will call them: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. The former brilliant, cutting, breathtakingly assured, the latter something still more: deeper, denser, more complex, more confounding. Their incontestably great artistic merits notwithstanding, the novels of the early phase are essentially straightforward marriage plots, intricately designed but morally and emotionally unambiguous. In the major phase, Austen discards her allegiance to reason and resolution to emerge as an explorer of uncharted and disturbingly equivocal regions of selfhood and relatedness. From a maker of marriages, she becomes an investigator into “the delicate anatomy of the human heart.”
What accounts for this change? Again, pride of place must go to Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen was twenty-three—a brilliant girl, in her nephew’s terms—when she finished the last of the three manuscripts that would later become the novels of the early phase. Her father was still alive and well, their family home in Steventon still unthreatened by the prospect of removal. By the time she began Mansfield Park at the age of thirty-five, however, her father had died; her family had moved house six times, among three different towns, with long intervals, after two of the removals, of shuttling from friend to friend; she had accepted a proposal of marriage just short of her twenty-seventh birthday—the age by which Charlotte Lucas has become desperate enough to accept the hand of Mr. Collins—then rejected it the next morning; she had sold the manuscript of Northanger Abbey (then called Susan), only to see it languish on the publisher’s shelf; and at last, her family having settled in the Chawton cottage she would call home for the rest of her life, she had seen Sense and Sensibility accepted for publication and put into proof. The brilliant girl had become a mature woman.4
But something else happened during those twelve years, something that could not have failed—and as I will argue, did not fail—to have a profound impact on Jane Austen’s art. Her long period of silent growth, together with the six subsequent years of continued development until her death, coincided with and can to a considerable extent be attributed to the most significant literary event of her lifetime: the flowering of the poetic movement that later became known as British Romanticism. It was not known as such until many years later, nor were the poets eventually grouped under that rubric classed together at the time.5 But by the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century—1807, at the latest—it had become clear to literate Britain that something very important was happening in English poetry: that Wordsworth and his fellow “Lake Poets” were leading a revolution in poetic form, diction, and subject matter, as well as in the very idea of what it meant to be a poet.6 Lyrical Ballads appeared in September 1798, just after Austen had begun work on Susan.7 By 1816, the year she finished Persuasion, nearly all of Wordsworth’s significant work (excluding, of course, the Prelude) had seen print. Nor were Wordsworth and Coleridge the only important new voices. All but one of Scott’s verse romances, as well as the first three of his novels, appeared during the period, all of them to tremendous acclaim. And while Blake would have been unknown to Austen and the careers of Shelley and Keats not yet sufficiently underway by 1816 to have attracted attention, in 1812 Byron burst onto the scene with Childe Harold I–II and, within two years, his four Turkish Tales.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron: Austen responded not to a movement, but to four powerful individual talents, just as she had earlier responded to some of the leading talents of the mid- to late 18th century—Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, Burney. That Austen was profoundly shaped by the literature she read as a youth—that hers is an art that begins in imitation, parody, and creative adaptation—has been a matter of critical consensus and intensive scholarly investigation for as long as critics have been writing about her work.8 It is striking, then, how little thought has been given to what she read as an adult and how it shaped the very different kinds of novels she wrote as an adult.9
Criticism liberated itself from the notion of Austen as exclusively a figure of the eighteenth century several decades ago, but it has yet adequately to consider in what form and in what ways she absorbed the ideas and perspectives of the new century.10 Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, and Burney first incited her to fiction, gave her narrative and linguistic forms, models of consciousness, themes and attitudes to play with and react against. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron pushed her to the new recognitions for which her longer experience of life had stored her. However magnificent the achievements of her early phase, Austen’s encounter with the Romantics deepened her art, darkened it, made it more intuitive, ambiguous, and unsettled, but also more bold and mature.
That Austen has affinities with, and was even influenced by, the Romantic poets, is not as strange an idea as it once would have seemed. For a long time, Austen and the Romantics occupied two different critical worlds: prose versus poetry, eighteenth century versus nineteenth century, conservative versus radical, female versus male.11 More recently, especially with the rise of feminist criticism, connections between Austen and Romanticism have been traced in a number of ways. But attempts to expand the British Romantic canon, as well as related attempts to define a specifically female Romanticism, however valuable in themselves, while they do usually relabel Austen as Romantic, do not bring her any closer to the poets in question.12 The same may be said of attempts to define a Romantic form of the novel.13 A number of studies have identified Romantic characteristics in Austen’s work as a whole and/or general thematic similarities between the novelist and the canonical, or formerly canonical, poets, especially Wordsworth.14 Others have pointed to specific novels, or more commonly, specific characters, scenes, or elements, as displaying typically Romantic attributes.15 But while these lines of investigation have yielded valuable insights, they imply no more than a Zeitgeist kind of affinity. A few studies do begin with specific allusions to argue for a more direct appropriation of Romantic materials on Austen’s part, but only a very few, and only with respect to Persuasion, the sole novel of hers in which such allusions are obvious.16 No study yet exists that argues for a sustained, major influence, one that structures whole novels and pervades an entire phase of her career.
In making such an argument, I will not be seeking to answer the question of whether Austen is a Romantic, still less that of what “a Romantic” or Romanticism is.17 Nor will I be scoring the novels of the major phase against some checklist of Romantic attributes.18 I will not be seeking to discover Austen’s ideas about the Imagination, or Nature, or freedom, or the self as creator of values. Nor, as I indicated above, will I be discussing her work in relation to the whole of British Romantic literature, so much of which was unknown to her. There will be no consideration of Blake, Shelley, or Keats; Mary Shelley, Peacock, Hazlitt, or Lamb. The Wordsworth Austen knew had written no Prelude or Peter Bell, the Coleridge had published no Sibylline Leaves or Biographia Literaria. Austen’s Byron wrote romances, not comic epics, her Scott mainly verse romances and as yet only three novels. Instead, I will trace the specific impact the works available to her had on the novels she wrote after they became available. My second chapter will argue not only that there is a systematic set of differences that distinguish the novels of the major from that of the early phase, but that this system of new perceptions, attitudes, and concerns bears unmistakable witness to an encounter with the four poets in question, and in particular, with Wordsworth.
My chapters on Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion will each discuss her exploration of a specific concern that she can be seen to have drawn from the poets. These concerns each relate to some question of feeling and relatedness; each novel can be seen as an investigation into a hidden mechanism of psychic and affective life: “substitution” in Mansfield Park, “ambiguous relationships” in Emma, “widowhood” in Persuasion. But if Austen began with what she drew from the poets, she proceeded in her own directions, by her own means, and within the armature of the literary form she had already brought to perfection, the novel of courtship and education, the female Bildungsroman. In retracing these explorations, then, I will begin where the influence of the poets is most openly gestured to, with specific allusions and echoes, but as each chapter progresses, the poet or poets in question will gradually fall out of the discussion as I follow Austen across the new ground she charted for herself. Such is the nature of influence: not a shackling of consciousness into imitative postures, but a startling of the imagination into the pursuit of new possibilities.19
Several preliminary questions remain, however. First, couldn’t those aspects of Austen’s later work that suggest the influence of the British Romantic poets be attributable to such “proto-Romantics” as Thomson and Cowper, poets with whom she had been intimately familiar from an early age? Alternatively, weren’t certain ideas and aesthetic impulses simply in the air in the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century? Next, whatever these poets’ fame, what evidence is there that Austen read Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron, and more important, what evidence is there for what she thought of them?20 Finally, given that each of her first three novels underwent some revision during the last years of her life, how legitimate is it to consider them as products of Austen’s youth in the first place, and thus to divide her career into two distinct phases?
The first two questions are quickly answered. The very fact that the attributes in question show up only in the later novels indicates that they are not the result of the influence of the authors she already knew as a youth. Whatever was done for her by Thompson and Cowper—and Richardson and Johnson and Burney—was done by the time she began the first of her three early manuscripts. As for certain ideas and aesthetic impulses being “in the air” in the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century—yes, they were, but what was the “air” of that period composed of, with respect to the issues most important to the work of those four poets, if not that work itself? Those ideas and impulses were in the air because they put them there.21
Which brings us to the third question: how familiar was Austen with the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron, and what did she think of it? The standard view holds that she probably did not read the first pair, or if she did, thought no more of them than of the second—which is to say, not very much at all.22 None of the four is among the authors her family mentions as her favorites. Her brother Henry, in the biographical notice affixed to the posthumously published Northanger Abbey/Persuasion, tells us that “[a]t a very early age she was enamored of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men … Her favorite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse.”23 He also makes it clear that her admiration of Richardson, particularly Sir Charles Grandison, was very strong. Austen-Leigh offers a similar enumeration: “[a]mongst her favorite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high.”24 There is no explicit mention of Wordsworth in her novels or unfinished manuscripts until we find him in Sanditon among the favorite authors—along with Scott, Burns, and others—of the absurd Sir Edward Denham, that Don Quixote of Don Juans.25 Coleridge is not mentioned at all in her novels or manuscripts, nor is either poet referred to in her letters. Scott and Byron, of course, are alluded to prominently in Persuasion; Scott is mentioned—along with Cowper and Thomson—as among the favorite authors of Marianne Dashwood and is quoted admiringly by Fanny Price; and both poets are referred to in the letters, Scott several times, Byron once.
To begin with Scott and Byron, the traditional critical assumption is that, because they are the authors Persuasion’s Captain Benwick reads as a way of wallowing in his grief, and because the novel seems to ask us to see Captain Benwick as overemotional and even perhaps, at the deepest level, insincere, Austen must have regarded them with derision.26 To this are added two pieces of evidence from the letters. On Scott: “Ought I to be very much pleased with Marmion?—as yet I am not.”27 On Byron, with supposedly damning irony: “I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.”28
There is good reason to question the standard reading of this evidence, however, in part because it is far from the only evidence that bears on the question. To begin with, we have Anne and Benwick’s agreement, in their conversation about poetry in Persuasion, as to the “richness of the present age,” a characterization that clearly refers primarily to Scott and Byron (“the first-rate poets”) and that Austen gives us no reason to take with anything but complete seriousness (121). As for Scott in particular, the remark about Marmion is hardly the letters’ only mention of him, or even of that work. Less than seven months later, we find Austen sending a copy of Marmion to her brother Charles, and over four years later, we find her quoting it from memory.29 Apparently, despite what her brother Henry would later say about the tenacity of her opinions, she did learn to be “very much pleased” with it. That this was her reaction to Scott’s verse in general may be deduced from her comment on the publication of his first work of fiction: “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair … [I] do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it—but fear I must.”30 Finally, in later letters we find her casually alluding to a circumstance in The Antiquary, his third novel, and eagerly anticipating his two works on Waterloo, The Field of Waterloo and Paul’s Letter to His Kinfolk.31
As for Byron, that remark about The Corsair tells us, in my view, precisely nothing—except that Austen was interested enough in Byron’s work to have read his latest effort within five weeks of its publication. The letters are full of that kind of irony, directed at things Austen admired and took seriously as well as things she did not. What is more, as the fuller context makes clear, the remark is not aimed at Byron at all, but at the fact that she finds herself writing to her sister—something she took very seriously indeed—yet again. Having just posted a letter two days before, she begins the new one with, “Do not be angry with me for beginning another Letter to you. I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.” It is the “triviality” of writing to Cassandra, not of The Corsair, that is being sent up. Far more relevant to an assessment of Austen’s opinion of the poet is the fact that she took the trouble to transcribe his poem “Napoleon’s Farewell” from the periodical in which it appeared, one of only five known occasions on which she copied out someone else’s verse. Nor did she transcribe it verbatim, but rather made some half-dozen alterations that signify a high degree of involvement with its sentiments.32
Far more important than this interesting but incidental evidence, that Austen put Scott and Byron in Persuasion and Scott in Sense and Sensibility to satiric use is the highest evidence not that she scorned their work, but that it deeply stirred her. To see Austen’s satire as a mark of disdain is fundamentally to misunderstand it. Who else, after all, does she satirize? More than anyone, Cowper and Gilpin.33 For Austen, satire was the sincerest form of flattery. Nothing could be more obvious from the juvenilia than that the fiction she ridicules with such merciless glee she also passionately, guiltily adored. For one thing, she could never have known such books well enough to lampoon them as brilliantly as she does if she had not been reading them by the bucketful—and no one keeps reading what they simply despise. Parody, at that point, was an indirect way of handling her own divided response, her feelings of guilty pleasure.
In the novels—Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—she confronts that response directly. Cowper, Gilpin, Scott, Byron: what, after all, does she satirize about them? Not their work itself, but—and this is substantially true of Radcliffe and Burney in Northanger Abbey, as well—the way their work was read, or misread. And yet she was not trying to protect her favorite authors from bad readers; she was one of those bad readers, as the juvenilia tell us, and she knew it. She was trying to protect bad readers—which is to say, all readers—from being carried away by their emotions. It is the central insight of Marvin Mudrick’s celebrated study that Austen feared what she most loved, and that what she most feared were exactly the kinds of extreme passions those authors inspired.34 She recognized the claims of sense, of course—of reason, of prudence—but the claims of sensibility—of energy, of desire—she did not have to recognize; they thrust themselves upon her. She esteemed “Elinor,” but she loved “Marianne.” She esteemed Pope, of the poets she encountered in her youth, but she loved Cowper;35 of the poets she encountered in her maturity, she esteemed Crabbe, but it is to Scott and Byron that she paid the supreme compliment of creating a character who loves them not wisely, but too well.
As for Wordsworth and Coleridge, given their great prominence, it is virtually certain that by 1811 a reader such as Austen would have long known their work very well.36 A reader whose reading was, as her brother tells us, “very extensive in history and belles lettres” and whose memory was “extremely tenacious”;37 a reader carefully attuned and exquisitely responsive to the latest developments in the fiction, poetry, and drama of her day; a reader who, as a writer, is always very careful to show us what her characters read, and that the most avid readers among them read what is most up-to-date38—that such a reader would have neglected to read just those two poets, two of the half-dozen most important new poets of her adulthood, is improbable to the point of being incredible.39 As for what impact they had on her, the evidence, admittedly, can only be indirect. Coleridge does not seem to have been a major influence in his own right, though his contributions to Lyrical Ballads, as well as individual poems she may have encountered elsewhere, surely contributed to her reception of the great complex of Wordsworthian-Coleridgian ideas and themes I discuss in my next chapter.40 But Wordsworth is a different matter. Although this has seldom or never been recognized, Austen makes allusions to his work in both Mansfield Park and Emma. In both cases, however, these allusions are also and more obviously allusions to other authors. In both cases, in other words, Austen, in making her Wordsworthian reference, plays a complex and sophisticated double game.
The source of the allusion in Mansfield Park is less controversial. A number of critics have seen the representations hanging in Fanny Price’s East room as pointing, at least two of them, to Wordsworth: “three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland.”41 The more obvious reference here is to Gilpin, whose immensely popular series of books on the picturesque beauties of the British landscape included one devoted to the region of the River Wye—the book that made Tintern Abbey famous in the first place—and another on the Lake District of Cumberland and Westmoreland. Indeed, the presence of the transparencies argues that Fanny, like her creator, was “at a very early age … enamored of Gilpin on the Picturesque.” But while Fanny may look at them and think of Gilpin, Austen expects us to think of both him and Wordsworth.
I will discuss this double reference more extensively in my chapter on Mansfield Park, but suffice it to say for now that Austen is suggesting not simply that the kind of looking Fanny does in that scene is Wordsworthian, but that it is Wordsworthian as opposed to Gilpinesque. In other words, Austen is doing exactly what Wordsworth himself was doing by setting his poem “a few miles above Tintern Abbey”: alluding to Gilpin as a way of marking his or her distance from him—and in Austen’s case, her closeness also to Wordsworth. Is it credible that Austen would have expected her readers to recognize “Tintern Abbey” as a reference primarily to Wordsworth? Gilpin’s volumes remained quite popular, but by the time Mansfield Park appeared in 1814, their initial publication lay some two or three decades in the past. Wordsworth, meanwhile, as we have seen, had become one of the most prominent figures in contemporary English poetry.42
By the time Emma appeared at the end of 1815—with the publication the previous year of The Excursion and, earlier in 1815, of the first collected Poems—he had become more prominent still.43 Austen could have felt even more confident that her readers would recognize a reference to his work, and she capitalizes on this familiarity to play the same kind of game she did in Mansfield Park. This time the double allusion sets Wordsworth against Cowper, again precisely as Wordsworth himself does in the passage to which the allusion points. Knightley, “however he might wish to escape any of Emma’s errors of the imagination,” cannot help but observe “symptoms of intelligence … symptoms of admiration … a look, more than a single look” that give him suspicions of a private understanding between Frank and Jane. Still, he worries that he might be mistaken, might be acting “like Cowper and his fire at twilight, ‘Myself creating what I saw.’” 44 But while Knightley is thinking of Cowper, Austen knew that her readers would be thinking of Wordsworth, of the use he makes of Cowper’s famous line in “Tintern Abbey”: “… eye, and ear,—both what they half create,/And what perceive” (106–107).45 For what Knightley is doing at that moment, after all, is precisely “half-perceiving, half-creating”—observing signs and imagining, correctly, what lies behind them.
This is not quite the kind of imaginative half-creation Wordsworth has in mind, but it does offer the same contrast to Cowper’s (and Emma’s) creation-from-whole-cloth—a responsible use of the imagination, grounded in careful observation, to discover hidden truths. And this is exactly the use of the imagination Austen demands of her readers throughout the novel, both through the many puzzles and riddles she has us play along with her characters and, more important, through the very structure of the novel itself, a grand mystery story or puzzle-text that continually forces us to read clues and guess at the hidden truths that lie behind them.
Again, Austen is taking a text that Wordsworth had already played a variation on—a text a generation old, but still very well known—and playing her own variation on both the author of her youth and that of her maturity. In so doing, she is also measuring the distance between the work of her youth and that of her maturity. If Northanger Abbey, with only Gilpin at its disposal, could only ridicule too “picturesque” a way of seeing, and if Sense and Sensibility, with only Cowper at its disposal, could only ridicule too “poetry-of-sensibility” a way of seeing, now Austen has Wordsworth to help her envision the positive converse of these negatives, uses of vision and imagination that deepen rather than distort the perceptible surface of things. That the allusions in both novels refer to the same poem strikes me as giving more weight to this reading rather than less. “Tintern Abbey” seems to have been a poem that laid hold of Austen’s imagination very strongly indeed, as it did of the imaginations of so many readers after her.
Finally, the last of the preliminary questions I enumerated above: is it legitimate to consider Austen’s first three novels as products of her youth? We know, after all, that Austen-Leigh’s chronology is misleading in more than just the small matter of the completion date of Austen’s first attempt at Northanger Abbey. That manuscript was worked on again in 1803 and possibly yet again in 1816, though in both cases the changes were probably quite minor, as I will discuss below.
Far more significant are the revisions she is thought to have made to the manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in the years just prior to their publication in 1811 and 1813, respectively. If either of these revisions was extensive—and it has long been common wisdom that the revisions to Pride and Prejudice, at least, were very extensive—then we are far less justified in regarding the novel or novels in question as creations of her early twenties and therefore far less justified in seeing the differences between her first and last three novels as resulting from whatever may have happened after 1799, whether in Austen’s outward experience or in her inner life as a reader. Indeed, at least one critic enumerates her major novels not as Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, but as Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma.46 This common wisdom, however—the standard account of the evolution of Austen’s manuscripts—is, as I hope to show, seriously flawed: based on circular logic, doubtful premises, and unwarranted inferences. There is no hard evidence to refute the claim that Pride and Prejudice is—in all its essentials of conception, design, and execution—the work of an astonishingly gifted young woman, but of a young woman nevertheless.
Nearly all the information we have about the evolution of Austen’s manuscripts comes from the testimonies of three members of her family, each writing at an increasingly greater distance of time.47 By far the most extensive and reliable of these is the memorandum made by her sister Cassandra, presumably shortly after the novelist’s death. Omitting the information she provides about the three later novels, the chronology of whose composition has never been in serious dispute, the memorandum reads as follows:48
First Impressions begun in Oct 1796
Finished in Augt 1797. Published afterwards, with alterations & contractions under the Title of Pride & Prejudice.
Sense & Sensibility begun Nov. 1797
I am sure that something of the same story & characters had been written earlier & called Elinor & Marianne[ … ]
North-hanger Abbey was written about the years 98 & 9949
To begin with the most contentious issue, that of the transformation of First Impressions into Pride and Prejudice, Cassandra does not say when those “alterations & contractions” were made or how extensive they were. Austen-Leigh, however, writing fifty-two years after his aunt’s death, adds that “The first year of her residence at Chawton [1809–1810] seems to have been devoted to revising and preparing for the press ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice.’” 50 We also have testimony from Austen’s own hand on this point, though it is very brief and raises more questions than it answers. Fretting to Cassandra about the shortness of the finished novel, she writes, “I have lopt and cropt so successfully however that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S. & S. altogether.”51 There are two things to note about this much-pondered statement. First, it gives no indication when the lopping and cropping took place; as the letter was written the day after the novel’s publication (on January 28, 1813), Austen couldn’t have been referring to something that had happened very recently. It could have happened in 1812, as most critics now believe, or it could have happened two years earlier, during “the first year of her residence at Chawton.” The significance of this uncertainty will become clear below. Far more important for the matter at hand, whenever this revision occurred, Austen’s statement gives no support to the theory that it involved anything other than shortening and tightening, “lopping and cropping.”
As for the evolution of Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility, additional testimony comes from Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913), published ninety-six years after the novelist’s death by William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, the son and grandson of J. E. Austen-Leigh. Relying on the unpublished memoir of J. E. Austen-Leigh’s sister Caroline (written in 1867 and consulted by her brother during the preparation of his own Memoir two years later), the authors of the Life claim that Elinor and Marianne had been an epistolary novel and was read out to the family before 1796.52 This may or may not be true,53 but in fact the question has no bearing on the present discussion, since it leaves undisturbed Cassandra’s claim that Sense and Sensibility assumed its present title, and began to assume its next form, in November 1797. When it finished assuming its next form—that is, when the work begun in that month was completed—Cassandra does not say, though presumably it was sometime in 1798, before the start of work on Susan. It must surely be seen as significant, however, that Cassandra’s memorandum mentions no later revision, so that the changes made to it during “the first year of her residence at Chawton,” if any, were surely not very extensive.
As for Susan/Northanger Abbey, in 1816 Austen finally bought the copyright back from the publisher who had purchased it in 1803. She then altered the title to Catherine and composed a short advertisement that begins by noting that “[t]his little work was finished in the year 1803.”54 There is no saying exactly what “finished” means—whether the production of 1798–1799 was altered only in some small way or more extensively revised. Nor can we say what else may have happened to the manuscript in 1816–1817 other than the change of name. In March 1817 we find Austen writing that “Miss Catherine is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out.”55 The letter is dated five days before Austen is believed to have broken off work on Sanditon, the novel she had begun some seven weeks earlier.56 Illness clearly forced the cessation of the new project; whether she had actually done any work on Catherine or only contemplated doing so we do not know.57 The critical consensus, however—which in this case I see no reason to question—is that neither in 1803 nor in 1816–1817 was the earlier work significantly altered.58
And that is all we can say about the evolution of Austen’s manuscripts based on these direct and indirect testimonies.59 The very sparseness of these testimonies, however, has encouraged scholarship to say a great deal more, especially with regard to Pride and Prejudice. Why? I spoke above about circular logic. Many critics profess themselves unable to believe that so accomplished a work of art could have been written by so young a person (or perhaps, given what Keats and others achieved at comparable ages, so young a woman). Pride and Prejudice as we have it could not have been written by a twenty-one-year-old—so the reasoning goes—therefore the revisions at Chawton must have been extensive; the novel is investigated, the revisions at Chawton are found to have been extensive, and the conclusion is drawn that the novel was not written by a twenty-one-year-old. In fact, that is precisely the logic that motivated the investigation that originally established the idea of an extensive revision in 1812.
The theory was first proposed by R. W. Chapman in his still-standard edition of the novels. At the end of the appendix in which he puts the theory forward, Chapman writes that “Pride and Prejudice has always seemed to me a book of greater maturity than is credible if we suppose it to have been written, much as we know it, when its author was only one-and-twenty.”60 “Has always seemed to me”: a conviction in search of a proof. But is it really not credible that Pride and Prejudice was written by a twenty-one-year-old? For one thing, its relative immaturity is precisely what Austen-Leigh has in mind in the epigraph that heads this chapter; it is also implicitly what I will be discussing throughout the next chapter. Relative immaturity—we would do well to keep in mind what Virginia Woolf says about the astonishing artistic maturity Austen already displayed at fifteen.61
More important, who are we to say what Jane Austen—what a mind like Jane Austen’s—was or was not capable of at any given moment in her development? Personally, I don’t find it credible that Pride and Prejudice was written by anyone, at any age. The human quality represented by the creation of a Pride and Prejudice—call it genius, or talent, or creativity; a gift from the gods or genetic good luck—is never easy to understand, or perhaps even accept, by those of us who do not possess it (and often even by those who do). A writer like Austen, and especially the early Austen, only makes the matter worse, for as with Shakespeare, the magnitude of the achievement seems utterly incommensurate with what is known of the life that produced it. We know what feats of preposterousness this has led to in Shakespeare’s case. In Austen’s it has led only to the doubtful premises and unwarranted inferences I spoke of before.
Chapman’s work on Pride and Prejudice was based on that of Sir Frank MacKinnon, who sought to ascertain the internal chronology or “dramatic date” of Mansfield Park by comparing the few full dates given in the text with the calendars of the twenty years or so in which Austen is likely to have set it.62 MacKinnon’s method is based on the premise—a very doubtful one, in my view, for reasons I will explain below—that Austen consulted almanacs in constructing the chronologies of her novels in order to ensure that those chronologies would be internally consistent. MacKinnon concluded, to both his satisfaction and Chapman’s, that Mansfield Park takes place in 1808–1809 (from July to May).63 This has since become the accepted dating of the novel’s internal chronology.64
There are two problems, however. The first, which MacKinnon himself recognized, is that while Easter is said in the novel to be “particularly late this year,” Easter 1809 fell on April 2—a very early date indeed.65 The other problem is that in the autumn of the period in question—that is, putatively, the autumn of 1808—we find Fanny Price reading George Crabbe’s Tales. Crabbe’s Tales, which were very well known, were not published until September 1812.66 It seems to me that one can only conclude that the main part of the novel takes place in 1812–1813, at the earliest. In fact, as Mansfield Park was published in May 1814, and as the novel’s action is continued somewhat beyond the May of the principal events, the novel must be regarded as occurring in 1812–1813. To suppose otherwise is to suppose that Austen believed that her readers would recognize “Thursday, December 22” as a date in 1808 more readily than they recognized Crabbe’s Tales, and that an author supposedly so scrupulous about keeping her chronologies consistent would have had no qualms about committing so egregious an anachronism as inserting the name of a work into a novel that takes place four years before that work was published. (Nor is this the only anachronism she would have been guilty of if MacKinnon’s theory is right.67) Indeed, the presence of Crabbe’s Tales argues that Austen herself was unaware of the calendrical significance of “Thursday, December 22,” or indeed of any full date; that she did not use almanacs in the composition of her novels; and that she was unconcerned with the internal consistency of her chronologies.
Chapman clearly felt otherwise. Using MacKinnon’s methodology, he concluded that the full dates mentioned in Pride and Prejudice agree with the calendar of 1811–1812. This in turn led him to conclude that Austen had consulted the almanacs of those years in revising the novel and that she must therefore have revised the novel during those years. Chapman concluded, in a much-quoted judgment, that “we must infer that the book as we know it was substantially written in 1812; for it is certain that so intricate a chronological scheme cannot have been patched on to an existing work without extensive revision.”68 Chapman presumably means that Austen revised the novel during this period for different reasons and naturally used the contemporaneous calendars to keep her internal chronology consistent.
Like MacKinnon’s conclusions with regard to Mansfield Park, however, Chapman’s redating of Pride and Prejudice is not without its problems. For one thing, at least one of the novel’s full dates does not fit. Chapman’s explanation is that Austen confused the date of one event with that of a similar event that occurs fifteen days earlier.69 This is plausible, though not entirely convincing: why would a novelist who took such pains to keep her chronologies consistent make such a mistake at all? More important, though, why would she take such pains to keep her chronologies consistent? This is a question Chapman brings upon himself, for at the end of the painstaking explication of his theory he writes, astonishingly, that “Miss Austen’s punctilious observance of the calendars of 1811 and 1812 … was for her own satisfaction; she did not expect her readers to play the detective. We are still free, therefore, to suppose, if we choose, that she at all times conceived the events as belonging to the closing decade of the 18th century.”70 For one thing, this admission makes nonsense of MacKinnon’s argument for the dramatic date of Mansfield Park, since that argument is premised on an identity of the calendrical and dramatic dates (as well as on the assumption that Austen did indeed “expect her readers to play the detective”). For another, Chapman’s admission redoubles the question of why Austen would bother paying attention to her internal chronologies, because now it appears, bizarrely, that she did not even care whether those chronologies matched the years in which the novels’ actions supposedly take place.
In fact, a cogent argument was made a long time ago—in reference to Pride and Prejudice in particular—that Austen did not care about the consistency of her internal chronologies. In an analysis that deserves to be much better known, P. R. S. Andrews, minutely sifting the evidence once again, finds that not one, but two full dates mentioned in the novel are incompatible with the calendar for 1811–1812, and that fully four major anomalies must be taken into account by any attempt to make sense of the novel’s internal chronology.71 Andrews’s own conclusion is that some of the dates correspond to the calendar of 1802, and that Austen therefore undertook a revision of the novel around that time. He does not seek to reconcile these dates with others in the novel; dates taken from different calendars, during different revisions, were used, he says “[w]ithout any regard for overall consistency.”72 I am not persuaded by Andrews’s theory of an 1802 revision any more than I am by Chapman’s of one in 1812 (among other things, Andrews’s also seems motivated by the kind of circular logic I discussed above).73 Rather, I believe that the overall thrust of his analysis demonstrates that, as he says, Austen had no regard for overall consistency, and that any argument about the dates of revisions based on dates given in the novels—any of the novels—is without foundation.74
In short, there is no good evidence to conclude that the Pride and Prejudice we have is not substantially the same work as the First Impressions of 1796–1797. In fact, Austen’s recent biographers agree with this judgment.75 In terms of its plot structure, thematic concerns, image patterns, significant allusions, even its characteristic diction and syntax, Pride and Prejudice remained, like Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, what it had originally been: the work of a writer in her early twenties.76 If that strains our credulity, the problem, as I have suggested, is with our credulity. But I do not believe it should strain our credulity, not if we accept, as nearly everyone does, that Northanger Abbey, at least, is the work of Austen’s early twenties. This is not the place for a detailed explication, but that “little work” is far more sophisticated than it is usually given credit for being. Its satirical program, along with the fact that it is always enumerated as the first of Austen’s novels, makes it all too easily seen as continuous with the juvenilia.77 But it did not come right after the juvenilia, and its satire has very little in common with theirs.78 It came after Austen had already written two full-length novels (and revised one of them), two works in which, whatever one thinks they looked like then, she was giving herself a thorough education in how to shape and manipulate her readers’ responses, how to anticipate and defeat their expectations. And that is exactly the knowledge she puts to use in Northanger Abbey.
The juvenilia are mainly burlesques; author and reader laugh together at the kind of fiction being parodied. But in Northanger Abbey, it is the reader who is being put to the test. Austen puts us to the test, in part, by putting us—in an almost Escher-like tangling of representational levels—inside the novel, in the person of its heroine. The very first sentence, which encapsulates the game Austen is playing, induces an ontological vertigo from which we never recover: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine” (13). The more you think about that sentence, the harder it gets to understand—the more its layers of irony unfold like the petals of a Venus flytrap. There is no other sentence in Austen’s work comparable to it in the imperturbability of its surface and the cunning of its designs upon the reader. No other sentence but one, of course: the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. I don’t suppose there is anyone who doesn’t think that, if any part of Pride and Prejudice was written in Austen’s maturity, it is that sentence. But if Austen could have written the first sentence of Northanger Abbey when she was twenty-two (and the novel so depends on it that it could not have been tossed in later), then she could have written the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice—and every other sentence, too—when she was twenty-one. And not only is there no solid reason to believe that by about 1800 the first three novels were not “substantially the books we know,”79 there is a very good reason to believe the reverse: the systematic set of differences between those novels and the novels of the major phase, to which I now turn.
