Summer's Dangerous Days

In England this week, we’re enjoying something of a heat wave – temperatures in the mid 80s F. Hardly Saharan but hot enough for me.

As well as shortening dresses, the summer sun also shortens tempers. More improprieties too, I would guess, are committed in the summer than any other season.

In two of Jane Austen’s novels it is in summer that we are shown the moral failing which breaks the dam propriety sets on constraint, and sets in train the events that bring their protagonists face to face with their destiny.

In Sense and Sensibility, Colonel Brandon has invited his friends and neighbours to a picnic in the grounds of Whitwell, owned by his brother-in-law. They are all on the point of setting off when mysterious news is brought to Colonel Brandon requiring his immediate departure. He leaves in a hurry. Without his calm and moderating presence the constraints of propriety are loosened. There is speculation and gossip among the women (with some accuracy too) that his hurried leaving relates to ‘his natural daughter'. And, tongues wagging, they all go off for a drive in the country instead. Willoughby and Marianne drive off on their own.

At dinner that evening it emerges that they had been to visit Allenham, the house, and its estate, that Willoughby is to inherit from his relative, Mrs Smith. The house too that, Mrs Jennings mischievously speculates might one day too be Marianne’s.

The impropriety is a double one. It is Marianne’s for allowing herself to be placed in the position of being alone in the house with Willoughby, thereby risking sexual compromise. It is also Willoughby’s, for his presumption. His action results in disinheritance and the tearing apart of their burgeoning attachment. Neither will be happy again.

Mr Knightley has invited his neighbours to his house and grounds, Donwell Abbey, to pick strawberries. Frank Churchill arrives cross and out of sorts, complaining of the heat.

‘No – he should not eat. He was not hungry; it would only make him hotter.’

It’s enough to confirm Emma’s conclusion that he is not the man for him.

‘I am glad I have done being in love with him. I should not like a man who is so discomposed by a hot morning.’

It’s not enough, though, to have him lose all influence over her. The following day, at Box Hill, is even hotter. Nothing works properly. Their conversation and games are forced and childish. The Eltons take offence at their antics. Jane Fairfax is piqued. Mr Knightley is ominously quiet, unable to counter the cascade of their trivial talk - until Frank induces Emma into her gratuitous insult of Miss Bates.

Then, when Mr Knightley chastises Emma for her behaviour, it is like a storm breaking.

‘Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check, extraordinary as they were.’

Here thunderstorms are forecast for the end of the week.

Getting your man

‘A very little trouble on your side secures him. Perhaps just at present he may be undecided; the smallness of your fortune may make him hang back; his friends may all advise against it. But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself.’

‘If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him………In nine cases out of ten a woman had better show more affection than she feels.’

In the first extract, from Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood seeks to advise his sister, Elinor, on how she might set about capturing Colonel Brandon. In the second, from Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas is setting out her philosophy to Elizabeth Bennet on how her sister Jane might go about capturing Mr Bingley.

Although John Dashwood is way off target in trying to push Elinor towards Colonel Brandon (he is secretly in love with her sister Marianne)the substance of his and Charlotte’s advice is the same.

Elinor grits her teeth in silence.

Elizabeth is affronted.

‘Your plan is a good one,…..where nothing is in question but the desire of being well married; and if I were determined to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I would adopt it. But these are not Jane’s feelings; she is not acting by design.’

Of course we’re all on Lizzy’s side, even when the unwelcome advice comes from so sympathetic a friend as Charlotte. The same sentiment uttered by Elinor’s brother merely seals our contempt for him.

In Emma, Mr Knightley informs Emma that her friend Harriet is shortly to receive a proposal of marriage from the sensible farmer, Mr Martin. Emma, however, has already persuaded Harriet to reject him, having puffed her up into thinking she is his superior. There ensues a bitter quarrel, in which the conflict between marrying for love or security, on the competing claims of beauty and intelligence, is given it’s longest and subtlest airing. It is no longer so clear cut.

‘Her friends evidently thought this good enough for her; and it was good enough. She desired nothing better herself. Till you chose to turn her into a friend, her mind had no distaste for her own set, nor any ambition beyond it. She was as happy as possible with the Martins in the summer. She had no sense of superiority then.’

There is too much truth in Mr Knightley’s criticism of her meddling for Emma not to be on the losing end of this encounter. She knows he is right about her turning Harriet’s head. But she does manage this repost.

‘[A]nd till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are generally supposed; till they do fall in love with well informed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness as Harriet, has a certainty of being admired and sought after, of having the power of choosing from among many…..I am very much mistaken if your sex in general would not think such beauty, and such temper, the highest claims a woman could possess.’

Mr Knightley is momentarily checked. But last word with him.

‘Men of sense, whatever you may chuse to say, do not want silly wives.’

With sense, perhaps, rarer in men than beauty in women.

Prudence and Duty

Persuasion, the title of Jane Austen’s last finished novel, pays reference to one of the themes of the novel – the influence of Lady Russell in deflecting the heroine, Anne Elliott, from following her heart in accepting Captain Wentworth’s proposal of marriage, nine years earlier. This allusion carries with it the implication that Anne, in some way, was not being true to herself in following her advice.

But it is misleading. For two reasons: first, because the theme of ‘persuasion’ is only a secondary, not the primary, theme of the book; and second the implication that Anne acted against her character in rejecting Wentworth is just wrong.

Anne Elliott is such a quiet and subdued heroine that one tends to see her qualities not in her own light, but only when brought into clear relief in contrast with others.

After Kellynch Hall is quit, she goes to stay with her sister, Mary, at Uppercross. Here we are brought into contact with the Musgroves, the family of Mary’s husband Charles. We are introduced to Henrietta and Louisa, Charles’s sisters, who after a sort of education in Exeter ‘were now, like thousands of other young ladies, living to be fashionable, happy and merry.’ Anne likes them but feels apart from them - ‘saved as we all are, by some comfortable feeling of superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she would not have given up her own more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments.’ Austen’s superior characters are rarely portrayed untouched by snobbery.

While at Uppercross we are introduced to cousin Charles Hayter, a local curate to whom Henrietta is supposed to have an attachment. The point of Cousin Charles, though, is only to show up the inconstancy of these ‘fashionable, happy and merry’ girls, whose heads are now turned by the new handsome young man on the block – Captain Wentworth.

‘Henrietta did seem to like him…..before Captain Wentworth came, but from that time Cousin Charles had been very much forgotten.’

See how quickly too, Louisa Musgrove’s affections shift (after her fall at Lyme) from Wentworth to Captain Benwick.

Louisa and Henrietta both have ‘modern minds and manners’ - and affections lightly given and lightly changed.

Contrast this with Anne’s constancy, ‘of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.’ Her decision, nine years earlier, not to accept Wentworth’s proposal signaled no change of affection, of love. Nor was it a sign of weakness in submitting to Lady Russell’s opinion. Rather it was prompted by higher sentiments – those of prudence and duty.

The important point here lies not merely in the fact that she allowed herself to be influenced by Lady Russell in rejecting Wentworth, but that she did so first, in deference to the person who, for her, stood in place of her own mother, and second, because Anne herself was sure that it was the right thing to do. Hers was an act of submission, not weakness.

‘I was right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no band part of a woman’s portion.’

Anne now is all the more valuable to Wentworth, and to us, for the very reasons she turned him down in the first place. She commands his love, and our esteem, all the more because she was right. She was constant and true to herself all along. Wentworth is now persuaded that she is worthy of the love he once felt for her, which now, through her constancy - not his - he has now recovered.

In this regard she stands in stark contrast to the frailty and frivolousness of Louisa and Henrietta, in the same way as Fanny Price does to Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park – and for the same reasons - as the embodiment of the transcending values of honour, duty, constancy and prudence that were at the heart of everything that Jane Austen valued.

And, of course, she got lucky. Wentworth came back.

Ginger Beer

In her comment on my post Austen’s Hangover, Vic lists the various beverages drunk in Regency times to avoid contaminated drinking water. She mentions ‘small beer’, which is what I know as ginger beer.

This is my mother’s recipe.

Plant
Take ½ oz of Brewer’s Yeast, 1 teaspoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon of ground ginger and 1 cup of cold water. Place all in a jam jar. This is the plant. Feed it for seven days with one teaspoon of ginger and one of sugar.

To make ginger beer
Place the juice of 4 lemons and 3 cups of sugar into a large bowl and stir well. Pour 4 cups of boiling water in and stir well until sugar has dissolved. Then add 12 cups of cold water and stir once more.
The juice of the plant must be strained through muslin and placed into the bowl. The ginger beer is now ready for bottling but not to be corked for two hours. Do not stand on cold floor. The plant or sediment left must be divided into two parts. Place on part each into two jars with a cup of cold water and feed again.

My memory is that she would not make beer from the same plant for more than four weeks by which time the alcohol content would start to rise.

There is mention of small beer (and a touch of snobbery) in a letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra on 18 September 1796.

‘I had once determined to go with Frank tomorrow and take my chance &c. ; but they dissuaded me from so rash a step – as I really think on consideration it would have been; for if the Pearsons were not at home, I should inevitably fall a Sacrifice to the arts of some fat Woman who would make me drunk with Small Beer.-‘

Austen's Hangover

It’s only men whom the demon drink affects in Austen, testimony to the characteristic weakness of our sex, to which we all seem susceptible from an early age.

‘If I were as rich as Mr Darcy,’ cried a young Lucas, who came with his sisters, ‘I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine every day.’

‘Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought,’ said Mrs Bennet; ‘and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle directly.’

Having been solely created to make the point the young Lucas then hops it, never to return.

Mr Hurst’s walk on part is longer; to remind us of the evils of indolence, he ‘lived only to eat, drink and play at cards.’ When he is not doing that he asleep – no doubt from the bottle of wine or more he has drunk.

Drink affects Willoughby differently. Hearing of Marianne’s fever he rushes off to Cleveland, and, catching the censure in Elinor’s eye,

‘I understand you,’ he replied with an expressive smile and a voice perfectly calm. ‘Yes, I am very drunk. A pint of porter with my cold beef at Marlborough was enough to overset me.’

A pint of porter (stronger than beer) would be the equivalent of a half or two thirds of a bottle of wine. Enough fuel for remorse.

Drink fuels indiscretion. Mr Elton lingers in the hallway at the end of Mr Weston’s Christmas dinner, to make sure he is alone with Emma in the carriage home. She ‘believed he had been drinking too much of Mr Weston’s good wine, and felt sure he would want to be talking nonsense.’ Mr Elton dives headlong into a rash proposal of marriage.

Emma ‘felt that half this folly might be drunkenness, and therefore could hope that it might belong only to the passing hour.' Austen is a bit fairer, saying he ‘had only drunk wine enough to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects.’ As this dawns on her, Emma’s opinion changes from disgust at his drunkenness to contempt for his (supposed) inconstancy to Harriet. She gets it wrong on both counts.

The worst effects of a man’s susceptibility to drink is painted in Mansfield Park. Tom Bertram had ‘gone from London, with a party of young men to Newmarket, where a neglected fall, and a good deal of drinking had brought on a fever,’ and the weak minded Tom to death’s door. Tom’s expected demise helps moves the action forward to its denouement.

No woman in all Austen’s fiction ever drank too much. Only blokes. I wonder whether this wasn’t something more than a convenient narrative device to move the action on. I wonder also whether painting men as the weaker sex where drink was concerned wasn't a means of displacing her own culpability – for the truth is that her best account of the effects of alcohol is of her own hangover – in her letter to Cassandra of 20 November 1800.

‘Your letter took me quite by surprise this morning; you are very welcome however, & and I am very much obliged to you. – I beleive I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today;- You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing by attributing it to this venial Error.’

That shaking hand must be a bottle's worth at least.

Emma in love?

‘Till now that she was threatened with its loss, Emma had never known how much her happiness depended on being first with Mr Knightley.’

The fear of loss is critical. He had always been taken for granted, as a part of the family.

‘She had herself been first with him for many years past. She had not deserved it; she had often been negligent…………..but still from family attachment and habit he had loved her, and watched over her from a girl, with an endeavour to improve her……In spite of all her faults, she knew she was dear to him; might she not say very dear?’

Jane Austen seems to speak with two voices here, ambiguous, shifting her stance from sentence to sentence. At one reading she might seem to be talking to us, over Emma’s head, telling us about Mr Knightley’s true feelings for her. Yet these could be Emma’s own reflections and hopes – ‘she knew she was dear to him’ – seeking to convince herself.

Harriet’s fancy that Mr Knightley might be in love with her is, of course, ridiculous, and Emma, in her right mind and with her natural sense of superiority and self regard intact, would know this. But her confidence has been shot. She got Mr Elton wrong, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax wrong and now Harriet. How can she have any confidence that what she might have thought Mr Knightley’s affection for her being at all true, after such a performance. So, she just wants rewind things back to the way they were, before she started meddling in every one else’s love life. She wants to be a girl again. She wants to be first again. She hopes he might remain single all his life and continue to be the same Mr Knightley to her and all the world.

As for herself ‘She would not marry, even if she were asked by Mr Knightley.’

Emma is acting like a child. At the back of all these doubts and false reasonings we know she loves Mr Knightley. But she is not a full woman yet and this is not yet a woman’s love. All the while she sees him through the prism of her longing, her fear of losing him. She cannot yet see him, or care for him, as he does for her. She has always been first with him, but he, taken for granted, has not been first with her.

Later, when on leaving Randalls she compares him with Frank Churchill, now happily betrothed to Jane Fairfax, ‘she had never been more sensible of Mr Knightley’s high superiority of character.’

That’s a beginning. She’ll learn to love him better when they are married, when she learns not only that she won’t always be getting her own way but that she’ll have to work to be worthy of the love she so long took for granted.

Lizzy's complacency

Mary Bennet is ridiculous, because Austen ridicules her. Yet even when made fun of by her author, she is sometimes made to say sensible things. And here, something more.

‘Pride,’ observed Mary, who piqued herself on the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or the other, real or imaginary.’

This is Austen flagging up a principal theme of P&P, the self-complacency, that soft form of self-deception, without which pride cannot flourish. She has Mary say it so we don’t take it too much to heart too soon. But she’s right, and it is education out of that self-deception that marks her sister’s, Elizabeth’s, spiritual journey through the novel.

Here, early on in the book, Elizabeth is a charming, rather self satisfied young woman, who sees in her own personal qualities and behaviour all the marks of superiority over those around her, her family and her friends. But it’s her spirit, intelligence and charm we admire – we don’t want to notice her failings.

So her too-ready acceptance of Wickham and our willing suspension of disbelief in what he tells her about his treatment by Darcy are unjudged by us. She blinds us from her own faults in placing her faith in him. Even when he takes up with Mary King, rather than of her, we accept the excuses she makes for him as a mark of her quality, rather than lack of judgement or perception on her part.

What shatters Lizzy’s complacency once and for all is Darcy’s letter to her after she has magnificently (and cruelly) thrown back his offer of marriage into his face. Her cruelty is, in part, mitigated by her resentment at his role in separating Bingley from her sister Jane. But it is not at all excused by her falsely based and unreasoned resentment of his ‘treatment’ of Wickham.

The letter, and the knowledge it brings of Wickham’s true character, hits her like a bolt of lightning.

‘How despicably have I acted!…..I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I who have valued myself on my abilities! Who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister and gratified my vanity in useless…distrust……..Till this moment I never knew myself.’

She is brought right down to earth. Her complacency fed her feelingse of superiority over others. Now she feels she isf no better than them. We, of course, know she is – by virtue of the fact that she is able to see herself now for what she truly is. She doesn’t hide from her faults.

There is a small and telling moment of this self-recognition later, when she has returned from Kent. She is talking to Lydia and Jane about Wickham’s failure to marry Mary King.

‘There is no danger of Wickham’s marrying Mary King. [Lydia speaking] There’s for you! She is gone down to her uncle at Liverpool: gone to stay. Wickham is safe.’

‘And Mary King is safe!’ added Elizabeth; ‘safe from a connection imprudent as to fortune.’

‘She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him.’

‘But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side,’ said Jane.

‘I am sure there is not on his. I will answer for it, he never cared three straws about her – who could about such a nasty freckled thing.’

Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of such coarseness of expression herself, the coarseness of the sentiment was little other than her own breast had formerly harboured and fancied liberal!