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3. Mothers and Daughters in Jane Austen JANE AUSTEN NORA BARTLETT EDITED BY JANE STABLER B Reflections of a Reader ARTLETT NORA BARTLETT EDITED BY JANE STABLER All lovers of Jane Austen, the most knowledgeable as well as those who have just discovered her, will have much to learn from these modest, searching, and wonderfully perceptive essays. Prof. Richard Cronin, University of Glasgow This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane JANE AUSTEN Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction. Full of astute connections, these lively discussions hinge on the study of human behaviour – from family relationships to sickness and hypochondria – highlighting Austen’s artful literary techniques and her powers of human observation. Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by (the late) Nora Bartlett is a brilliant contribution to the field of Jane Austen studies, both in its accessible style (which preserves the oral register of the original lectures), and in its foregrounding of the reader in a warm, compelling and incisive conversation about Austen’s works. As such, it will appeal widely to all lovers of Jane Austen, whether first-time readers, students or scholars. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Woman Reading, Portrait of Sofia Kramskaya by Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887). Cover design: Anna Gatti. book eebook and OA editions also available JANE AUSTEN Reflections of a Reader OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Nora Bartlett. Jane Stabler (editor) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Nora Bartlett. Edited by Jane Stabler, Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 9781783749751 ISBN Hardback: 9781783749768 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783749775 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783749782 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783749799 ISBN XML: 9781783749805 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0216 Cover image: Ivan Kramskoy, Woman Reading. Portrait of Sofia Kramskaya (after 1866), Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Kramskoy_-_Reading_ woman_(portrait_of_artist%27s_wife).jpg Cover design: Anna Gatti. 3. Mothers and Daughters in Jane Austen None of Jane Austen’s heroines becomes a mother in the course of the novels, which take them, usually, only to the altar and not beyond, but all are daughters, with at least one parent. And all of them, even Anne Elliot of Persuasion, at twenty-seven the eldest heroine, are, at the beginning of the novels, living at home with their families, though families of very different shapes. Jane Austen does not write, as theGothic novelists did and as many novelists of the later nineteenth century did, about orphans or foundlings who did not know who their parents were. She was interested in how families operated,1 and though sometimes it seems as if her heroines exist only to show how unlike parents a child can be, all are affected by their relationship with theirmothers, even when, as happens more than once, those mothers are absent, or dead.2 I thought in the first half of my talk I would go quickly through all the novels to outline the mother-daughter situation that is central to each one, and then, because I can’t do justice to all six, concentrate on two in particular: the two most popular and widely read, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. These are both, alas, novels in which mothers fail their daughters but they do so in different ways, and it will be interesting to examine the differences. What they also have in common—and I think this is relevant to the topic—is that Jane Austen 1 For previous discussion of this topic, see Juliet McMaster, ‘Jane Austen’s Children’, Persuasions On-line, 31.1 (2012), jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/mcmaster. html? and Christopher Ricks, ‘Jane Austen and the Business of Mothering’, in Essays in Appreciation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 90–113. 2 For a full-length study of absent mothers in the fiction of Austen’s time, see Susan C. Greenfield, Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). © Nora Bartlett, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216.03 42 Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader wrote the earliest versions of them when she was very young and very close to the age of her heroines, and perhaps at a time when her view of mothers was that of a girl in her late teens and early twenties. When she revised and published the novels she was in her late thirties, but as you probably know she had continued to live with her parents, and after her father’s sudden death, continued to live with her mother, and did so until the end of her life—and I will say just a little before I close about her mother, about Mrs. Austen. First, though, let us go through the six major novels in order of publication. These novels were written over a long period, and rewritten, and in some cases published long after they were written, and the last novel published was actually one of the first written, but since that novel, Northanger Abbey, is the only novel to feature a sensible and successful mother, I thought it would be nice to build up toward that cheerful apex of good parenting, before we look at the sorry spectacle of mothering in the two novels in the second half of this talk. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, begins, uniquely for Jane Austen, with a death, the death of the father of the three Dashwood girls, who are by that death made poor, dowryless, and homeless all at a single stroke. Because their family was a close and loving one, they are also made wretchedly unhappy. Deaths don’t always have that effect in Jane Austen, and she is at times almost scandalously honest about how the death of a parent or other elderly relative might be very much wished for. But the Dashwood girls, Elinor, Marianne, and the very much younger girl Margaret, have a mother who is affectionate, intelligent, loyal and charming. But all these qualities do not, as we’ll see, make her altogether a good mother: one of the tensions in this novel is between being a fond mother and a good mother. Mrs. Dashwood is always the former, always loving and affectionate, and good company, too; she has so many attractive qualities! But while she neither—intentionally— neglects her daughters, nor spoils them, her ideas about how the world works, her belief in sensibility over sense, endangers both of them. Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, has in Mrs. Bennet probably the most famous mother in Jane Austen, perhaps in all fiction: Her mind was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was 3. Mothers and Daughters in Jane Austen 43 discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news. (I i 5) That character assassination in Chapter i is never really countered by anything else we learn about her, and yet, as Mrs. Bennet anxiously hovers over the marital prospects of her fivedaughters, who, should their father die as the Dashwoods’ does, in this era of high mortality, would be much poorer than the Dashwoods, as she struggles with that situation we might want to spare her a sympathetic thought. One of the very few good additions to the dialogue made by the film of 2005 in which Keira Knightley was so miscast as Elizabeth Bennet, was an exchange between the scornful Elizabeth and her mother in which Elizabeth storms, ‘why do you think so much about marriage!’ and the mother snaps back, ‘so will you, when you have five daughters!’.3 The fact that the exchange would not happen in Jane Austen’s world and is out of character for both speakers seems less important here than that this is the fundamental dilemma: as another impoverished unmarried daughter says in one of Jane Austen’s unfinished novels, ‘“you know we must marry…”’.4 All of Jane Austen’s heroines are husband-hunters, though none would like to admit it, even to themselves: it is only by the Mrs.
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