A Jane Austen Education(15)
Elizabeth and I were young, and like most young people, we didn’t see how young we really were. If anything, people in their twenties have the opposite idea about themselves. When he was Elizabeth’s age, T. S. Eliot wrote poems about how terribly, terribly old he felt. It’s that sense, now that your childhood is over, of being ever so jaded and world-weary and wise. You put on a trench coat or dress in black, to show how over it you are. You say “Whatever” a lot, or “Duh!”—because it’s all just so boring and predictable. If you’re Elizabeth Bennet, you swear you’ll never marry, or you declare, about your very biggest mistake, “I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think.”
The amazing thing is just how serene Austen was about this. When most people think back to the way they behaved when they were young, they want to curl up in a ball, and when they see someone acting the same way now, they want to smack them in the head. But Austen observed it all with perfect humor and understanding. She sympathized with it, even though she recognized how foolish it was. But here’s the really incredible thing. When she started working on Pride and Prejudice, she was still only twenty herself.
In writing about Elizabeth’s situation, in other words, she was also writing about her own. Elizabeth loved to dance, and so did her author. Elizabeth loved to read, and so did her creator. Elizabeth loved to walk, and so did Jane Austen. As Elizabeth had Jane, so did Austen have Cassandra, a milder and properer two-years-older sister—confidante, sounding board, best friend—to adore and admire. (“If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off,” their mother once said, “Jane would insist on sharing her fate.”) Most importantly, Austen gave Elizabeth her own qualities of mind: a piercing wit and a wicked sense of humor. Like Elizabeth’s high-wire conversations with Mr. Darcy, Austen’s letters to Cassandra were an opportunity to show off both. Elizabeth said things like, “I am perfectly convinced . . . that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.” Austen let herself go at greater length. Here she was, dishing the dirt on a ball she’d just attended:There were very few Beauties, & such as there were, were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, & Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, & fat neck.—The two Miss Coxes were there; I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago. . . .—I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys & thought of poor Rosalie [a maid who’d caught his eye some years before]; I looked at his daughter & thought her a queer animal with a white neck.—Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She has got rid of some part of her child, & danced away with great activity, looking by no means very large. Her husband is ugly enough; uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so very old.—The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish; very like Anne; with brown skins, large dark eyes, & a good deal of nose.—The General has got the Gout, & Mrs. Maitland the Jaundice.—Miss Debary, Susan & Sally, all in black, . . . made their appearance, & I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.
Ouch. But however wickedly she may have laughed at her neighbors in private, Austen went out of her way to protect their feelings when it came to her public behavior. In the very same letter—in fact, the very next thought—she talks of visiting a friend the following Thursday, unless she stays for another ball that night. But, she adds, “If I do not stay for the Ball, I would not on any account do so uncivil a thing by the Neighborhood as to set off at that very time for another place, & shall therefore make a point of not being later than Thursday morning.”
Her sense of humor could be savage, but her heart was generous, and she endowed Elizabeth with that very same balance of wit and warmth. No wonder the heroine of Pride and Prejudice remained her author’s favorite for the rest of her life. “I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London,” she wrote Cassandra upon receiving the first copies of the novel, and it’s not entirely clear if she meant the book or its heroine. “I must confess,” she went on, “that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”
A few months later, on a trip to London, she searched the galleries for pictures of Elizabeth and Jane. “I was very well pleased,” she wrote Cassandra, having found a painting that matched her mental image of the latter. “I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister,” she went on, but there was none to be found. “I can only imagine,” she concluded, that Elizabeth’s new husband “prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye.—I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling—that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy.” It’s a lovely conceit, and it tells us two things. Austen was every bit as enraptured by Elizabeth’s marriage as the heroine was herself, and no painting could measure up to Austen’s image of her. The first person to fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet, it seems, was her creator.
All the more telling, then, that Austen didn’t fool herself into thinking that her offspring was perfect. She knew that Elizabeth had a lot of growing up to do—which means that she recognized that she herself did, too. Indeed, as Austen grew older, her letters lost most of their sharpness and snark. Though she began Pride and Prejudice when she was barely out of her teens, it wasn’t published until she was thirty-seven—First Impressions, the original version, was rejected by a publisher sight unseen, and she didn’t return to it for many years—and by that point her letters made a very different sound than that freeswinging tale of the ball.