JANE AUSTEN AND THE WOMAN QUESTION
Jane Austen. By Elizabeth Jenkins. (Gollancz. i5s.) Jane Austen and Some Contemporaries. By Mona Wilson. (The Cresset Press. los. 6d.) Jane Austen : Study for a Portrait. By Beatrice Kean-Seymour. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.)
Miss WILSON'S book, a series of sketches in the manner of Mrs. Woolf's Lives of the Obscure, seems designed to show the rise of female education in the nineteenth century. It begins with Jane Austen at the Andover Ball and ends with Mrs. Grote playing the cello on the lawn at Burnham Beechcs, dressed in a man's hat and cape. It is easy, if idle, to imagine what Jane Austen would have thought of " Trelawney in petticoats," and I doubt if her opinion would have justified anyone in connecting her, even remotely, with the Woman's Movement. She obviously desiderated intelligence in women (and in men) : when she found it she admired it; when she did not, she laughed quietly and passed on, with the minimum of fuss. As Miss Jenkins puts it : " At its worst the society of eighteenth-century England was gross and disgusting ; at its best, it embodied a beautiful frankness, an honest acceptance of the facts of existence, and it differed from the unhealthy period of the mid and late nineteenth century in that the innocence and elegance of its women were not based on ignorance."
That is probably as fir as one is justified in going ; most of Miss Wilson's heroines would no doubt have thought it going too far. But she does not really attempt to make a feminist out of Jane Austen ; she leaves that battle to the others who, in so far as they wielded a pen, certainly did so with a moral intention. When Mrs. Grote asked George Sand why she did not write to elevate the moral nature, the latter " took a pipe out of her mouth and said : Voyez, tres there Mine. Grote, je suis rcmanciere, pas moraliste.'" This would surely have been Jane Austen's answer to a kindred question. The answer would not have satisfied the more militant members of Miss Wilson's Women's Institute : Mrs. Woodrooffe, for instance, an early " finisher " of girls who, though she seems to have interfered less in the village than Lady Catherine de Bourgh, wrote an incredibly starchy novel of which Miss Wilson's account makes one laugh aloud. In fact, there is hardly a page of this book which does not contain something grotesquely amusing, from Eliza Fletcher's pocket guillotine to Mr. Butt reading on the bottom step of the stairs, while his two children moved up a step whenever he turned over a page. Not all these characters are obscure : the Lichfield circle wind through the life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck ; Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna opposed the views of Harriet Martineau ; Mary Somerville has her own fame, surpaising even that of another woman mathematician of genius, almost contemporary with herself—Sonia Kovalev- sky ; and the life of the Grotes fairly teems with famous names. The combination results in something uniquely entertaining and instructive.
Writers on Jane Austen are apt to be clever (one thinks of Mr. E. M. Forster, Miss Elizabeth Bowen, Lord David Cecil), and Miss Jenkins is no exception to the rule ; that is to say that her points are not only interesting and subtle, but are made with wit and economy. Moreover a full-length life, supplying a detailed account of the all-important social back- ground, was badly needed, to offset the discussion of her novels purely as works of art. The jewel needed setting, and Miss Jenkins has set it, in a very elegant and durable manner. Durable, because of the balance and good sense of her judge- ments, whether applied to the authoress herself or to her characters. The usual cases against Jane Austen—that she was out of touch with to 3 much in the life of her day, and that she lacked fundamental magnanimity—are here, I think, disposed of once and for all. Although it seems probable that she was rather more tart, where mere acquaintances were con- cerned, than Miss Jenkins will allow, this does not argue more than that she was essentially devoted to her family, which always claimed seven-tenths of her time. Perfect integrity has often to support the unjust charge of coldness : lack of emotional control is generally considered more " human " ; and Jane Austen's treatment of Harrison Bigg-Wither is held up against her as a piece of heartlessness. Miss Jenkins, however, solves the question when she posits instead " an absolute rectitude of soul, the inescapable tyranny of a mind formed by nature and by training to seek first things first." Here it is worth remarking that Jane Austen is among the very few novelists who have the
suffrage of intelligent men ; the reason for this being that whereas most men are romantics in life, they are realists in literary taste ; while the opposite holds good for most women. It is the asprous truth of her writing that endears Miss Austen to men—that truth which forced her to refuse a good man because she knew she did not love him enough.
Perhaps it is that same integrity which makes her one of the few great novelists whose work does not seem to represent a personal catharsis. Miss Jenkins again hits the nail on the
head :
".The importance of what happened to her as it regarded the development of her sensibilities and powers is great, but it lies in the fact that it acted as a pointer towards realms of undiscovered country ; and the exquisite speech on woman's constancy written fifteen years afterwards is not uttered by Jane Austen in her own person, but by Ann Elliott, whom Jane Austen's experience enabled her to understand."
In other words, she saw life steadily and whole : no more than Balzac can she really be accused of neglecting or denying the fact that it takes all sorts to make a world ; and in so far as this axiom is the word of a conservative, Jane Austen may be said (pace Miss Wilson) to have been one. The point surely is that, unlike Balzac and others, she preferred to suggest the underworlds of emotion and action, rather than to enter them. Miss Jenkins indeed makes out a very good case in favour of Jane Austen's potentialities as a realist of the Flaubertian order, by pointing to the depths of horror implicit in the character of Lady Susan, and to the various types of squalor lurking in the Watsons and the Price interior. That this quality in her work is not more widely realised is no doubt attributable to the fact that, from first to last, she preferred understatement to emphasis, as being in the long run more effective.
This brings us to a kindred accusation against Jane Austen's art : that it is essentially incapable of including violent action. Again this seems to me (Miss Jenkins neglects the point) mistaken. I cannot feel that, for instance, Louisa Musgrove's accident would have gained anything by -being more " graphically " described. Jane Austen clearly did not rate violent action very high ; to her the blows delivered by words were both more terrible and more lasting. This is, after all, a point of view, though not the only one ; and it is perhaps worth noting that it was shared, at the other end of the century, by another writer who aspired equally to formal perfection, and along the same lines as Jane .Austen, though with a probably far more conscious art : Henry James, This consideration makes it impossible to agree with Miss Kean-Seymour's contention that her subject worked " in miniature." Such a view seems to me to vitiate the whole issue : the characters in the novels are either full-size portraits of astounding penetration and completeness, or else they are nothing—merely quaint—the elaborate furniture of a costume piece. Miss Kean-Seymour lacks Miss Jenkins' subtle understanding of her subject ; but, like all books on Jane
Austen, her " sketch " is interesting for the opinions it contains on the characters in the novels. These are often a good deal more severe than Miss Jenkins', but also, I think, more super- ficial. To think Mr. Bennet self-consequent, ill-mannered and snooty, is surely to miss the point of that gentleman's delicious intelligence. To find General Tilney " impossible " seems equally to fail to see that his elaborate politeness was really the mask of a virulent, cold-hearted snob. MiS) Kean- Seymour dismisses the terrifying Lady Susan for the same reason, apparently unaware that to do this involves dismissing one of the admitted masterpieces of sadistic characterisation : Laclos' Mme de Merteuil, to whom her English counterpart yields very little. Finally, to think Henry Crawford's behaviour incredible would seem to point merely to inability, on Miss Kean-Seymour's part, to conceive the levity and capricious vanity of that all too common type.
Opinions so widely opposed testify—as in the case of Hamlet —to the brilliance and vitality of the characters under discussion. This fact alone gives the lie to the notion that Jane Austen was " out of touch " with any potentiality of the human scene. Anything perfect—and Jane Austen's balance of intellect and emotion was that—invokes a poetry of its own, which raises a work of art on to a plane where certain exclusions are neces- sary, and due, not to ignorance, but to deliberation. Meanwhile, we may be sure that no aspect of the Wickhams' married life was concealed from their creator.
EDWARD SACKVILLE WEST.
Previous page
