J A N E T I L I T Y

  Here is a delightful Valentine’s Day poem, published in 1808, from the point of view of a gentleman who was “not handsome enough to tempt” his lady love.

A VALENTINE

 Sent in the name of a Gentleman to a Lady

Who ridiculed his Appearance

By

       Elizabeth Trefusis (1763-1808)

You will wonder, my dearest, how Leonard should dare

Throw his wit and his form at the feet of the fair;

That wit, at whose nod fools and caitiffs all bend,

That form, which love slights, but intenders the friend!

Now, our kind mother Nature no step-mother proves

All her children she chastens, yet all of them loves;

To some, she gives beauty, to some, she gives wealth,

To some, pride of birth, to some, labor and health’

On me, though, health, beauty and riches ne’er smiled

Yet this parent indulgent still gifted her child;

They speak from my lips! Virtue speaks in my heart!

And the world, my dear charmer, full often have said

That the faults of my face were atoned by my head!

Though defective my form, and imperfect my gait

Yet the line from my head to my heart is quite straight,

The line which fair virtue from intellect drew!

The line – O, that line which divides me from you!

From you, the sweet daughter of fashion and whim,

With beautiful bosom and ankle so slim;

With bosom display’d, and with ankle protruded,

With Nature’s allurements too vainly obtruded.

While I, the enchantments of science conceal,

And my soul’s dearest charities shrink to reveal,

Unless by the lash of kind satire I dare

Call the man back to honor, to virtue the fair!

Yet to virtue, my dearest, you never were wanting

Great favors refusing, frivolities granting!

Then check these frivolities, seem what you are,

And the world shall allow that you’re good as you’re fair!

I have heard, and believe it, that opposites prove

The sweetest incitements to friendship and love;

If you then are noble and wealthy and pretty,

Your Leonard is worthy, wise, learned and witty;

Your frolic and sweetness his moments shall cheer

His gentle philippics your conduct shall steer:

Then take him, fair nymph, and let friendship’s warm ray

Greet the sun which enlivens our Valentine’s Day.

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) is mentioned twice in Jane Austen’s letters. In a letter to Cassandra, written in 1813, Austen writes at rather dismissive, “The Clements are at home and are reduced to read. They have got Miss Edgeworth”, but writing to her niece, Anna, the following year, Austen declares that “I have made up my mind to like no novels, really, but Miss Edgeworth’s, yours and my own.”

Had Austen made up her mind to dislike Edgeworth, she would have been in a decided minority. The novels of Maria Edgeworth (who, unlike Austen, did not publish anonymously), were critical, popular and financial successes. Unlike Austen, Edgeworth enjoyed a long career: her first work of fiction (a collection of short stories) was published in 1796, and her last, the novel Orlandino, was published in 1848.

Maria Edgeworth

Edgeworth’s first novel was an immediate success. Castle Rackrent (1800) both satirizes and indicts property neglect and landlord absenteeism, problems that invited the exploitive practice of “rack-renting”, where a middle-man would lease a large tract of estate property from the landlord on reasonable terms and then sub-let it to tenant farmers at exorbitant rates.

Jane Austen

Inspired by the registers of the Edgeworth family’s Irish property, the novel is the narrative of Thady Quirk, the steward of Castle Rackrent for four of its masters. The first master, Sir Patrick is a convivial squanderer who has left his estate in such debt that his creditors seize corpse to hold it hostage until they are paid.

    His successor, the litigious Sir Murtaugh Rackrent, maintains that the insult to Sir Patrick’s body acquits him of the debts, and funds a succession of lawsuits by selling parcels of land and from draconian fines imposed upon his tenants. (The proverbial chicken that crosses the road is guilty of “trespass”). His wife, “…of the family of Skinflints…” provisions her household by claiming “duty fowls and duty turkies and duty geese…eggs – honey – butter …” from by charging a fee to intercede with Sir Murtaugh on behalf of his oppressed tenants.

    Sir Murtaugh is succeeded by his younger brother, the spendthrift Sir Kit, who shows up at the estate only for some hunting and to run up debts, flees to Bath where he carelessly signs off on bills forwarded to him by his agent. Having brought his debts to critical mass, he attempts to remedy the situation by marrying a Jewish heiress, who foils his attempt to get hold of her fortune by converting it, before their marriage, into inalienable property in the form of a diamond necklace. (Edgeworth, received a letter from a Jewish-American reader who rebuked her for her stereotypical treatment of Jews; she attempted to make amends in a later novel, Harrington).

    The last heir, the distant relation, Sir Condy, is a free-spending schemer; having squandered his money, he elopes with an heiress whose family promptly disinherits her. Debts mount to the point of Sir Condy’s arrest, a disgrace postponed by his election to Parliament. At the end of his debt-ridden stint as an MP, Sir Condy returns to a neglected Castle Rackrent that has fallen into disrepair, is abandoned by his wife, swindled out of the remains of his estate by Quirk’s conniving son, Jason, and dies poor and friendless.

    Edgeworth’s observations on the potential for ruin and disgrace brought on by neglect were renewed in her later novel The Absentee (1812), and appear to have been views that Austen shared. Embedded in all of Austen’s novels is some example of the consequence of the interrelated neglect of duty, family and property.

    On an income of two thousand a year, Mr. Bennet might have easily set aside a comfortable provision for his widow and daughters; neglecting to do so potentially consigns six women to poverty upon his death, unless some of the girls marry well. Unfortunately, he does not even do what he can to make them attractive marriage prospects: their education was inconsistent, left to the inclination of “…such of us as wished to learn”, while “Those who chose to be idle certainly might”, and his own antipathy toward London keeps his daughters from the sphere where many good matches were secured. Even Elizabeth’s immediate conclusion that a commotion at Hunsford was the result of the pigs raiding the garden hints at a familiarity with this occurrence that does not speak well for the maintenance of Longbourn’s fences.

    Sir Walter Elliott, while scrupulous about the state of his property, placed himself “dreadfully in debt” because his vanity has determined that his income is “…not equal to…the state required in its possessor”. To his credit, Sir Walter refuses to sell off an alienable portion of Kellynch – he will mortgage it only – out of a commitment to pass an undivided property to the heir. Unfortunately, the heir could not be less deserving of the effort; William Elliot neglects the family connection in favor of immediate gratification. He is both so greedy and so disconnected from obligation (or both) that while he mocks the Elliot name and title, he is willing to elevate a butcher’s granddaughter to the rank of Lady Elliot. One wouldn’t blame Sir Walter if he retaliated by disposing of the saleable tract of land.

    Both Sir Thomas Bertram and General Tilney fall into a similar neglect of their households, Sir Thomas by “teaching [his children] to repress their spirits in his presence”, while General Tilney was “always a check upon his children’s’ spirits”. In the former case, Sir Thomas neglects his duty by providing education without principled example; he “sacrificed the right to the expedient”, and in doing so, allows his children to fall in with associates who lead the heir into debt and near death, the eldest daughter to disgrace, while the younger elopes to avoid the “greater severity and restraint” that Sir Thomas might impose upon her following Maria’s scandalous conduct. It appears that only the prudence of one parent can counteract the faults in the other; one wonders if Henry and Elinor Tilney would have turned out so well if they had been left to the apathetic Lady Bertram and the enabling Mrs. Norris, or whether, under the influence of Mrs. Tilney, Maria and Julia might have turned out better.

    And while one criticizes Darcy at risk, the reader is told, rather than impressed with, his attention to Pemberley. While he “…cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these”, a remark that Caroline endorses with, “I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the beauties of that noble place”, he is pretty much an absentee landlord. A wealthy gentleman might visit somewhere for the shooting in the fall, and pass a couple months in town in the winter; Darcy, on the other hand, comes from London with Bingley’s family in September, stays until the end of November, returns with the Bingleys to town until he visits Rosings in the spring. While, according to Mrs. Reynolds, Darcy spends “half his time” at Pemberley, it doesn’t appear that he finally shows up until he encounters the Gardiners and Elizabeth in July; nearly eleven months pass without his spending any substantial amount of time at “that noble place”.

    Perhaps if Darcy had been more attentive to household matters, he would not have been so “unhappily deceived” in Mrs. Younge’s character, nor would his sister’s honor and happiness been salvaged by his premature arrival at Ramsgate.

“Tomorrow, I shall be just like Camilla in Mr. Dubster’s summer-house; for my Lionel will have taken away the ladder by which I came here, or at least by which I intended to get away and here I must stay till his return.”  So wrote Jane Austen to Cassandra in 1796, when her return to Steventon was delayed because none of her brothers were able to escort her. She describes her predicament by alluding to one of the most popular novels of the day, Fanny Burney’s Camilla. In one chapter, the title character and her sister climb a ladder to examine an elevated summer-house; the ladder is removed by their mischievous brother, Lionel, who rides off and leaves them stranded.

Frances "Fanny" Burney

Exclusive of Austen’s reference to Camilla, it may be inferred that Austen was a reader of Burney. Fanny Burney’s first three novels – Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796)– were  “coming of age” novels, which usually involved the heroine’s departure from home and her introduction to a to a society that requires her to make romantic and moral choices. You see this influence in Austen; in all of her novels, save for Emma, significant episodes occur when the heroine leaves the family home. (And, in the case of Emma, this is true of Jane Fairfax). The two authors’ works share a common element: that the vanity, ignorance, prejudices, but also the morality, which had incubated in the family circle are tested against the failings and merits of a broader environment and a new set of acquaintances.

When  Austen wrote her earliest complete works – the work later titled Lady Susan, and Elinor and Marianne, which became Sense and Sensibility - they were written in the epistolary fashion of Evelina . Moreover, when the Reverend Mr. Austen attempted to interest Burney’s publisher in his daughter’s early work (most reports state that the work was First Impressions; an auction notice offering the signed portion of Mr. Austen’s letter suggests that it was Sense and Sensibility), he makes a comparison, in length, to Evelina.

Austen followed up Elinor and Marianne with First Impressions; however, by the time of its publication, there was already a popular novel titled First Impressions, or The Portrait (by Mrs. Margaret Holford), so Austen drew upon the final chapter of Cecilia for her Plan B title, Pride and Prejudice. Cecilia’s plot revolves around a conditional bequest, wherein a young lady’s inheritance depends upon her suitor’s consent to assume her family surname. (Derived, perhaps, from the actual situation of real-life heiress Mary Eleanor Bowes). In bringing the complications to conclusion, the summation, given by the character Lyster, states: “The whole of this unfortunate business has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE…if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.” (Yes, it is rendered in upper case in the printing).

However, one might wonder whether Austen drew upon the work of another Burney in crafting some of her characters. In 1807, she writes of re-reading the novel Clarentine (1796) by Sarah Burney (Fanny’s step-sister): “We are reading Clarentine and are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a second reading than the first, and it does not bear a third at all.” And yet, there is something very Marianne Dashwood about Clarentine’s assertion that, “It is equally impossible for me to forget, or not to feel”, and something quite Darcy-like in Sir Edgar’s “…reserve, which frequently cast a gloom over his features…appeared to denote an unsocial and contemptuous disposition in himself [which] had often displeased her extremely and led her, very naturally, to suspect him of a degree of arrogance and pride.”

If Austen’s assessment of Sarah Burney’s contrived plotting is that it is “full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties, without striking merits of any kind”, she is good-natured enough to take such criticism to task as well in Northanger Abbey, by citing embarrassed novel-readers who confess that, “’It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’, or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed.”

There is an exchange in the Sherlock Holmes tale The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton that is particularly illustrative of Holmes’s character. Having exhausted all options for recovering his client’s letters from a ruthless blackmailer, Milverton, Holmes announces to Watson: “I mean to burgle Milverton’s house tonight.” Watson protests, but finally concedes that the act, while technically criminal is morally justifiable, and Holmes reasons, “Since it is morally justifiable, I have only to consider the question of personal risk. Surely a gentleman should not lay much stress upon this when a lady is in most desperate need of his help.”

Holmes, in Watson’s words, “disliked and distrusted the [female] sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.”  In reading Austen, Holmes would have discovered a chivalry worth emulating in the conduct of Darcy, who endures the mortification and expense of salvaging Lydia’s reputation, or Brandon’s calling-out of Willoughby to punish the seduction of Eliza. While Holmes declares that the work is his reward and it is art for art’s sake, there is a defining knight errantry associated with cases that involve vulnerable women – Holmes rescues Violet Smith from a forced marriage, Helen Stoner from a murderous stepfather and Grace Dunbar from a wrongful charge of murder. His most dramatic rescue, however, is the from-the-brink-of-death rescue of Lady Frances Carfax.

The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax begins with Holmes concluding, from Watson’s bootlaces, that he has been to the Turkish baths. “It is what we call an alterative in medicine,” replies Watson, admitting that he has been feeling “rheumatic.”

Holmes’s discourse takes another direction. “One of the most dangerous classes in the world,” he muses, “is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless, and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter or crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory…She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed.”

Holmes concludes by saying that he is afraid Lady Frances Carfax has met with foul play, but it may be that the inference of Watson’s therapeutic bath and the thoughtful meditation upon “drifting and friendless” women was influenced by a recent perusal of Jane Austen’s Persuasion; curative baths and the plight of vulnerable women is suggestive of Persuasion’s Mrs. Smith.

The most unfortunate character in all of Austen is Mrs. Smith, formerly Miss Hamilton, the invalid acquaintance of Anne Elliot. Unlike Mrs. and Miss Bates, who have likewise sunk from comfort to poverty, Mrs. Smith has no charitable neighbors to offer relief and stability. Like Lady Frances, she is migratory, relegated to – “obscure pensions and boarding-houses”, though Lady Frances’s spa in Baden is considerably finer than Mrs. Smith’s “noisy parlor and a dark bedroom behind” in Bath.

We meet Mrs. Smith about two-thirds of the way into Persuasion, when the Elliots settle in Bath. Anne Elliot is made aware of Mrs. Smith’s situation by a former governess, as Holmes is alerted to Lady Frances’s disappearance by her old governess when their regular correspondence has abruptly ceased.

Mrs. Smith, like Lady Frances, has been left “with limited means”. She is widowed, rheumatic and poor, her one object of value being some heavily encumbered property in the West Indies. Lady Frances has assets that are more accessible and portable – “some very remarkable old Spanish jewelry” that is always in her possession and that could easily make her “an inciter of crime in others.”

In Lady Frances Carfax, Holmes observes that “When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection.” Mrs. Smith and Lady Frances have been accustomed to society and affluence, and both are inclined toward charity, but they have separate responses toward their plights and their piety: while Mrs. Smith has become cautious about her associations, having “seen too much of the world to expect sudden or disinterested attachment anywhere”, Lady Frances rebuffs a persistent lover and a faithful servant and allows herself to be taken in by a pair of seductive charlatans.

Lady Frances is described as “spiritual”, “religious” and “pious”, but it is a craving for piety, rather than piety itself, which has her fleeing from a coarse but sincere lover, and into the company of a couple who call themselves the Reverend and Mrs. Schlessinger, and whose, “…particular speciality is the beguiling of lonely ladies by playing upon their religious feelings”. Lady Frances whiles away her days fawning over the convalescent “missionary”; Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, takes up knitting needles in her rheumatic fingers and sells her handmade items to help support “one or two very poor families in this neighborhood.”

There is another common thread – a point of intersection – in their immobility.  Mrs. Smith is confined, by her poverty and infirmity, to a pair of rooms, unable to move from one to the other, or to be carried to the baths, without assistance. Lady Frances suffers a somewhat darker fate; the Schlessingers first manipulate her into emotional dependence, and then into physical imprisonment, and finally, drugged and unconscious, into a coffin.

Both women come perilously close to being buried alive – Lady Frances literally and Mrs. Smith, figuratively – or “gobbled up”, as Holmes expressed it, and are rescued by gentlemen who are not put off by difficulty or personal risk when a lady is in need of his help.  Holmes will not wait for a warrant before tearing into the Schlessingers’ custom-ordered coffin to free Lady Frances. Captain Wentworth, “by putting [Mrs. Smith] in the way of recovering her husband’s property in the West Indies, by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man,” restores Mrs. Smith to all that she had been deprived of by Walter Elliot.

(You may read an account of the romance and marriage of Miss Hamilton and Charles Smith in Lady Vernon and Her Daughter).

To comment on this article, click on ‘Comments’ at the top right hand side of the article; as always, Janetility.com welcomes all comments expressed with good manners and good humor.

It piques the imagination to think that Sherlock Holmes, literature’s foremost protagonist was an admirer of  Jane Austen. Certainly, we cannot agree with Watson when, in an early assessment of Holmes’s abilities, ranked his friend’s knowledge of literature as “nil”; after all, in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, it is Watson who, in want of reading material, settles for the hotel’s yellow-backed novel while Holmes travels with his “pocket Petrarch”.

Jane Austen’s romances would have little charm for Sherlock Holmes, who declared that “…love is an emotional thing and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things.” The themes of charity, chivalry, prudence, as well as the pithy insights and the “pawky humor”, however, would have had considerable appeal, as would the tart exchanges – how could Holmes, who looked upon an invitation as “one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie” feel anything but affinity for a Darcy who disparages the entertainment of the evening with his, “Every savage can dance.”

Although Holmes remarks that “…life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent”, as a reader of Austen, he would have occasion to ponder the strange similarity between his professional life and Austen’s invented ones.

There is, for example, an interesting parallel between Lady Susan Vernon, of Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, and Mrs. Isadora Klein, the antagonist in The Adventure of the Three Gables.

Lady Susan was written by Jane Austen more than a century before Sherlock Holmes would encounter Isadora Klein (William Baring-Gould’s ambitious chronology places The Three Gables in the spring of 1903 – the story was first published in 1920). Holmes pronounces Klein “the most lovely widow upon Earth”, though Watson observes that she has “reached the time of life when even the proudest beauty finds the half-light more welcome”. Lady Susan Vernon, likewise, is “the most accomplished coquette in England” is “excessively pretty”, although “a lady no longer young.”

Neither widow appears to be overcome with grief – Lady Susan Vernon, a month after her husband’s death, descends upon the household of the Manwarings, where she shamelessly flirts with her married host; in a letter to a friend, she writes that “the whole family are at war” and “the females of the family are united against me”; yet adds that she has “seldom spent three months more agreeably”.
When she is no longer welcome at the Manwarings’, she invites herself to the home of her in-laws, the Vernons, and is placed in the delicate position of keeping the persistent Manwaring at bay in order to work on the affections of Mrs. Vernon’s wealthy younger brother, Reginald deCourcy.

Similarly, Mrs. Klein mourns her husband’s passing with “an interval of adventure when she pleased her own tastes”, and one indulgence is her short-lived appetite for the passionate, but penniless Douglas Maberley. Maberley is as persistent as Manwaring, but Mrs. Klein does not have Lady Susan’s patience, nor her confidence that she can juggle the current lover with the former one – when Maberley will not give her up, Mrs. Klein has him brutally beaten and driven away, clearing the way for her to latch onto the wealthy Duke of Lomond, “who might almost be her son”, and leading to Maberley’s posthumous retaliation, which draws Holmes into the matter. Not that Lady Susan is any less vicious; when the irrepressible Sir James Martin annoys her, she writes, “I could have poisoned him.”

Both pairings – Mrs. Klein and the Duke, and Lady Susan and Reginald – face parental opposition. The Duke’s mother might overlook Mrs. Klein’s age, but would not tolerate the scandal that would certainly result from the publication of Maberley’s roman a clef; Reginald’s father cautions his son that Lady Susan’s “want of character” is a more serious concern than the difference in their ages.

Mrs. Klein is the more cautious of the two – perhaps she has learned something from reading Lady Susan as well! – she has tested her minions and pronounces them “…good hounds who run silent…They will take what comes to them. That is what they are paid for.” For Lady Susan, however, “…it is impossible to be sure of servants.” Both, however, are linked to a London gossip –Langdale Pike of The Three Gables is the “human book of reference upon all matters of social scandal”, a description that might as easily describe Lady Susan’s Alicia Johnson.

Was Holmes thinking of  Jane Austen’s droll conclusion to Lady Susan when he resolved the Maberley/Klein affair? Lady Susan Vernon does not marry Reginald; ironically, she marries Sir James, the heir she had picked out for her daughter. And while the Granada adaptation of The Three Gables has Holmes extract a promise from Mrs. Klein that she will break her engagement with the young Duke, the tale contains no such promise; Mrs. Klein suffers no significant consequence for her violent and criminal conduct other than the five thousand pounds she is compelled to pay to Maberley’s mother, a small price to attain the title of Duchess.

The next installment will discuss another pair of Austen and Sherlockian ladies.

Janetility welcomes discussion and comments, provided they are carried out with good-humor and good-breeding.