A Jane Austen Education(49)
Indeed, Anne’s disaffection with her family achieved remarkable heights. Late in the novel, she got wind of an intrigue that severely threatened her father and sister’s peace. Ordinarily that sort of development would have moved to the center of the plot, with the heroine hastening to spread the news and avert disaster. Here she never even got around to passing it along. Her family simply didn’t matter to her anymore.
How could this be, I wondered. How could Austen, the great novelist of romance, the great maker of marriages, be against family? Yet when I thought back to her other books, I realized that there was scarcely a happy family among them—ten unhappy ones, by my count, and no more than one of the other kind (and that was only Emma and her father, as much a kind of marriage as a family). And while she always got her heroines married, she never followed their stories beyond the bliss of couplehood and into the complications that followed, the battle of children and parents. Her own family, by all accounts, was happy, and she clearly enjoyed her nieces and nephews, but when she imagined felicity, she always drew a picture of a bond among adults—couples and friends and the little circles, the miniature communities, they make together.
For once I saw this pattern in Persuasion, I looked and found it everywhere. Yes, Austen made sure to find her heroines a husband, but she also took care to build them a community—a sphere of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters to live their marriages within. Pride and Prejudice ended, not with one wedding but with two, a pair of sisters marrying a pair of friends and gathering additional siblings to them. Emma ended with three, and the heroine’s, we were told, was sped along by “the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony.” It was no surprise that one critic called friendship, for Austen, “the true light of life.”
Friends, Austen taught me, are the family you choose. But while the notion has become a commonplace of late, Austen, I realized, saw a step further. We make our friends our family, but we also make our family—or some of them—our friends. William Price, in Mansfield Park, was Fanny’s “brother and friend.” Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, made friends with Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who were friends with each other but not with their treacherous older brother. Elizabeth Bennet was friends with Jane and her father but couldn’t stand her mother or her other sisters; the community that formed at the end of Pride and Prejudice included some relatives but pointedly excluded others.
Anne herself, Austen told us, found no reason to be jealous of Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove, her sister Mary’s sisters-inlaw—pleasant, pretty girls who didn’t have a whole lot going on upstairs—except for this one thing: “that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters.” The Harvilles, one of the few happy families in Austen’s work, included a friend, Captain Benwick, as part of their household; the circle of nautical friends included a brother and sister, Captain Wentworth and Mrs. Croft. Friendship and family can blur together, Austen was showing me—the groups intersecting, the feelings intermingling.
No one understood this more intimately than Austen herself. Everywhere in her letters, the terms and accents of family and friendship intertwine. What was her impulse to accept the hand of Harris Bigg-Wither, misguided though she soon realized it to be, if not a desire to create a family with his sisters, her friends? Her own sister, Cassandra, of course, was her very best, her lifelong friend, but her favorite niece won entrance to the circle at the early age of fifteen. “I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny,” Jane wrote Cassandra. “I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another Sister, & could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me.”
Later, with Fanny in her twenties, niece and aunt exchanged letters of exquisite intimacy, in one of which the older woman exclaimed, “You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your Heart.” But, she added, fearing that the circle would someday be broken, “Oh! what a loss it will be, when you are married.” Cassandra surely knew that she was speaking for both survivors when, in the wake of Austen’s death, she wrote her niece—“doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost”—“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can be surpassed.”
Jane and Cassandra’s household, the one they shared with their mother for the last twelve years of Austen’s life, was itself a little community of family and friends, just like the Harvilles’. The role of Captain Benwick was assumed by Martha Lloyd, a childhood friend who grew closer to Austen than anyone but her sister. The two had laughed together in bed when Austen was a teenager, and Martha moved in with the Austen women the year that both Jane’s father and Martha’s widowed mother died—an arrangement that was not uncommon at the time. She stayed there until her marriage to Austen’s brother Frank—being dragged by Jane to the theater, listening to the author’s views on politics, royal scandal, and her own career, and generally being, as Jane told Cassandra, “the friend & Sister under every circumstance.”
Friends may be the family you choose, but I was still no closer to being part of such a circle than Anne had been at Lyme. In fact, I was having as much difficulty as she did simply finding individual friends, let alone a whole circle of them. The terrain had shifted when I wasn’t looking. People were not just busier than they used to be, they also weren’t as open. That youthful flexibility, that eagerness for new experiences and new people, that Austen celebrated in Northanger Abbey—it seemed to be draining away as we rounded the corner and headed into our thirties. You could no longer just meet someone and dive right into a friendship, as you’d been able to when you were fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five. The people I met now, potential friends, seemed cagier, less trusting, more defended. Making a friend had become a whole project, like a high-level diplomatic negotiation or a complicated puzzle that you could only fill in a couple of pieces at a time.