J A N E T I L I T Y

For more than a hundred fifty years after her death, the canon of Jane Austen inspired a memoir, a few works of literary criticism and a a quarter shelf-full of sequels and adaptations of her work, but in the past fifteen years or so, Jane Austen has become a literary star, generating everything from critiques and biographies to annotated editions, sequels, adaptations, character spinoffs, modern takes, graphic novels, and mashups.  Jane Austen has outlasted popular contemporaries like Mary Brunton, Sydney Owenson and Eaton Stannard Barrett, and touched off a market for derivative work comparable only to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and with a considerably smaller canon – talk about the six that keep on giving!

If you are thinking about writing a sequel, adaptation, or new novel featuring a minor Austen character as Austen might have done, it helps to decipher how Austen writes. It is more than a matter of knowing the period – in fact, knowing the period may be least important component. After all, Jane Austen did not write historical novels, she wrote contemporary novels, so it really is not important for an adaptive writer to explain how an entail works or the color of someone’s barouche. Writing like someone else can be tricky; if you have ever seen an impressionist, the good ones do more than getting the voice right – they get the inflection, the cadence, the body language. There is a book called What Jane Austen Ate, and What Charles Dickens Knew; to write like Austen, you have to grasp, not merely what Austen ate or knew, but what Austen did, not only regarding setting and  social order, but what techniques she employed as a narrator and wordsmith.

It helps (that is, it helped us in writing Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, and with our current project), to have a few key volumes on the Austen shelf (or shelves) in your home library. A few may be taken for granted – Deirdre LeFaye’s Jane Austen’s Letters, and perhaps something like LeFaye’s  Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels. You may pick up an annotated book, or James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen or something fun like So You Think You Know Jane Austen?, and of course you have all of Austen’s fiction. Here are a few more that I think would be excellent additions to the Austen writer’s library.

I would consider Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art (Clarendon Press, 1939) to be an essential. Lascelles begins with a brief bio of Austen and the evolution of her literary taste, and then goes into a very clear study of Austen’s narrative style, with wonderful kernels of observation, such as Austen’s suggesting of her characters’ social variants in syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary when they speak, or the pithy observation that a literary strategy – “What a young woman needs if she is to become a heroine of fiction is a little neglect and ill usage” – may have been extracted from experience. Of course some rules are meant to be broken and in Lady Vernon we did depart from two of Lascelles’ observations: that the marriage proposal of a lover is never verbally expressed (Mr. Collins doesn’t count; he cannot be considered an authentic lover); and a conversation exclusively between gentlemen (with a lady participating or at least being in the room), does not occur.

I had once remarked to an editor that Austen’s novels come down to two interconnected issues: marriage and money.  Except for Emma Woodhouse, none of Austen’s heroines are so well off or well connected that they can anticipate “marrying up”; a number of siblings, a neglectful or imprudent father, a reversal of fortune threaten to keep many of Austen’s heroines from that “… pleasantest preservative from want” and “…the only honorable provision” for a gentlewoman of modest means, which marriage certainly was. How a marriage was contracted, how a wife, a widow and children were provided for was as inextricably linked to material assets as to personal ones. It’s helpful to understand what Mrs. Bennet means when she exclaims “What pin money…” Lizzy will have, or how Mrs. Jennings comes by her jointure. Amy Louise Erickson’s Woman and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1993) takes the reader only to the early 18^th century, but otherwise is a very clear, and clearly documented, study of women’s rights to ownership of money and property as unmarried women, as wives and as widows, and the precise meaning of terms like “dower” and “settlement”, with some interesting case studies. As a counterpart, Susan Staves’ Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833, studies four categories of women’s property: dower; jointure; separate property and pin money; allowance for maintenance.

A profession common to Austen’s novels was one with which she was personally familiar: the country clergyman. The church may be the profession of choice for the hero – Edmund Bertram, Henry Tilney – or it may be the comfortable resort of the self-important and the ambitious – Mr. Elton or Mr. Collins – or it may be the prospect of securing nothing better than the lowly curacy, which limits the aspirations of a young man like Charles Hayter or Edward Ferrars. If you are writing Austen, it does help to be somewhat familiar with what livings were (and when they provided enough to live on) as well as what a clergyman’s obligations were to his patron and his parish. Irene Collins’ Jane Austen and the Clergy (Hambledon and London, 2002) takes the reader through the education, obligations and living situations of the country clergyman and links what Austen must have observed: that the English clergy represented a variety of individuals, from those who were genuinely called to the vocation to those who did not have the talent or ambition to distinguish themselves in the military or the law. There is even the suggestion that those clergymen who are particularly animated – Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton – may have been so well-drawn because Austen saw them as a more accurate representation of the clergyman’s covetousness for a good living; even in Persuasion, there are schemes to oust poor Dr. Shirley, who has “zealously” discharged his duties for more than forty years, from his post in order to free up the Uppercross parish.

Among my favorite books about Austen’s work is Peter J. Leithart’s Miniatures and Morals; The Christian Novels of Jane Austen (Canon Press, 2004). (Chapter One is titled: Real Men Read Austen. What’s not to love?) Leithart describes the “miniaturist” nature of Austen’s writing, proclaiming that “…she does more with less than any other writer in English.” Like Lascelles, Leithart observes the relationship between syntax and character in Austen’s dialogue. Unlike Lascelles, Leithart defends the theory that Austen’s Christian morality is the underpinning of her narrative style; he even concludes that Austen is “a humorist because she is a moralist”, noting that, like Elizabeth Bennet, Austen “never mocks what is genuinely good.” After the initial introduction to Leithart’s analysis of Austen’s style, a chapter is devoted to each of her major novels in relation to the moral principles that determine not only the content, but literary style: morals and manners in Pride and Prejudice, charity in Emma, restraint in Sense and Sensibility and so on. Beyond Leithart’s cogent, and good-humored, analysis of Austen’s novels, is a well-organized format with each chapter beginning with a synopsis and ending with both “review questions” and “thought questions”. Not only should this be an essential on every Austen writer’s shelf, it would be an excellent text for an upper high school study of Austen’s work.

So, if you’re writing an Austenesque work, what books do you keep on the Austen section of your shelves?

     I have always thought that the original manuscript of Sense and Sensibility – an epistolary novel called Elinor and Marianne – would be a significant literary “get”. It would have been of particular interest to us in converting the epistolary novella Lady Susan to a narrative novel, Lady Vernon and Her Daughter but beyond that, it would have given readers another view of a transitional work, one that bridged Austen’s juvenilia and her mature work. Did Elinor and Marianne have the same raciness as Lady Susan? Was it as 18th century in its execution? How radically different was it in style, as well as form, from Sense and Sensibility?

     In a letter dated January, 1801, many years after Austen wrote Lady Susan, she wrote to her sister, “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.” Letters, in Austen’s opinion, were conversation; like conversation, these letters deliver information, explanations, news. Moreover, the letters in Austen’s novels always bear the distinct conversational style of the writer. Lydia Bennet’s “Let us talk and laugh all the way home…Have you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any flirting?” conveys the same high spirited tone as her written, “You will laugh when you know where I am gone and I cannot help laughing myself.” Lucy Steele’s parting shot in her farewell letter to Edward, “Please to destroy my scrawls, but the ring with my hair you are very welcome to keep”, delivers the same sort of saccharine jab as her remark to Elinor: “Your regard for me, next to Edward’s love, is the greatest comfort I have.” Mary Musgrove whines in her letters – “I am always out of the way when anything desirable is going on” –  and she whines in her conversation: “So you and I are to be left to shift by ourselves with this poor sick child – this is always my luck.” And when Mrs. Bennet anxiously anticipates being left a widow, Mr. Bennet’s dry, “Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor”, is not unlike his pithy written advice to Mr. Collins, to “…stand by the nephew [Mr. Darcy]; he has more to give.”

    Another conversational quality of the letters in Austen’s novels is that, while personal, they are seldom secretive. Letters are routinely shared: Elizabeth reveals much of Darcy’s letter to Jane; the Westons disclose the contents of Frank Churchill’s letter to Emma; Catherine Morland allows Tilney to read her unhappy letter from James. What is disclosed in the letters inevitably becomes more widely known. There is, in fact, only one letter in Austen’s major novels that conveys secret feelings which the writer would not want shared with the world at large. In Persuasion, Mr. Elliot’s letter to Mr. Smith has been preserved by Smith’s widow. “Give me joy,” writes Elliot, “I have got rid of Sir Walter and Miss [Elizabeth Elliot]…he is worse than last year…I wish I had any name but Elliot, I am sick of it.” Still, it does not vary from his prior conversational style, as we know from Mrs. Smith that “I have often heard him declare that if baronetcies were saleable, anybody should have his for fifty pounds, arms and motto, name and livery included.” Even Mary Crawford, who brazenly imagines the upshot of Tom Bertram’s demise; i.e., that his wealth and consequence could fall into no better hands than that of his younger brother, writes that she would say the same to anyone “..with a fearless face and bold voice.”

      Austen’s gift for creating a distinct conversational style, and extending it to a character’s letters is all the more impressive when you view it in contrast to what passes for correspondence today. A typical “how r u 2day” text could come from any number of senders, without distinction, identity, style or, emoticon notwithstanding, personality.

“We have tried to get Self-Control, but in vain. I should like to know what her Estimate is, but am always afraid of finding a clever novel too clever and of finding my own story and my own people all forestalled.” So wrote Jane Austen to Cassandra on the last day of April, 1811.

“I should like to know what her Estimate is…”

Is Austen’s “I should like to know what her Estimate [i.e., reception and readership] is” disingenuous? Self-Control, the first novel of Scottish author Mary Brunton, had been published in early 1811 and was an immediate success. At the time that Austen wrote her letter, Brunton was correcting proofs for the novel’s second printing; Austen could not have been unaware of Brunton’s very favorable “Estimate”.

Self-Control is a rambling part-romance/part-morality tale. Seventeen-year-old Laura Montreville, raised in rural Scotland, possesses “…an active mind, a strong sense of duty and the habit of meeting and overcoming adverse circumstances.” She has become infatuated with the most eligible of her suitors, the wealthy Colonel Villiers Hargrave. Unfortunately for Laura, the Hargrave she admires “…was a creature of her imagination”. When he attempts to seduce her, she innocently assumes he is proposing marriage. Her disgust and his remorse effect an agreement: if Hargrave will demonstrate his contrition by living a scrupulously honorable life for two years, Laura will marry him at the end of them.

An error that has delayed the payment of the Montrevilles’ annuity requires Laura’s widowed father to meet with agents in London. He is accompanied by Laura, and there they are introduced to the son of a former acquaintance, Montague DeCourcy. DeCourcy becomes Laura’s admirer and her anonymous patron, when she attempts to meet their expenses by selling her paintings. Hargrave pursues Laura to town, but even as Laura’s father encourages her to accept his proposals, she learns that he has not kept to his pledge, but has become involved in a sordid affair with a married woman.

Laura’s father dies, and the scene shifts to the household of the wealthy Lady Pelham, the estranged maternal aunt to whom Laura appeals for help. This lady’s country residence is in the neighborhood of the DeCourcy manor and Laura and DeCourcy become more attached to one another, while evidence of Hargrave’s depravity mounts. Lady Pelham allies herself with Hargrave for the wealth and station that marriage to him would confer upon Laura (and, by extension, herself) and collaborates with him to trick Laura into an elopement.

From here, the plot takes an improbable course. Hargrave has Laura spirited off to North America, and detained in an isolated cabin. Laura escapes, makes her way through the woods, finds a canoe along a riverbank, navigates it down the river, through rapids and over a waterfall, is rescued by settlers who help her arrange passage back to Scotland, where she is reunited with DeCourcy.

When Austen again mentions the novel, about a week before the release of Sense and Sensibility, she is less apprehensive about it’s being “too clever”. While she concedes that it is “…an excellently-meant, elegantly written work”, she adds that it lacks “nature or probability”, and that “I do not know whether Laura’s passage down the American river is not the most natural, possible, every-day thing she ever does.”

It is difficult to detect any relief from Austen’s moderately generous remark, but upon finally getting her hands on a copy of Self-Control, complacency would have been “the most natural, possible, every-day” response. She would have been too modest to boast of her superiority as a novelist, but the differences in style, humor, characterization, plotting were obvious. Self-Control is exposition without “voice”, behavior without insight, contrivance without humor, essentially a 300 page plot squeezed into 500 wordy pages that calls up a remark of Sherlock Holmes: “…he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop.”

Still, Austen may have seen hints of “my own story and my own people” in Brunton’s work. In the incompatible match between Montreville and his wife, there are shades of the Palmers, the Bertrams or the Bennets. The garrulous, well-meaning landlady, Mrs. Dawkins, with her dissimilar daughters calls up Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton and Charlotte Palmer. In the presumption of Montreville’s business associate toward Laura, we see something of John Thorpe or Mr. Elton. Like Mr. Collins, Miss DeCourcy’s placid suitor, Mr. Bolingbroke “…was resolved to marry, for he considered marriage as one of the duties of his station.” When Hargrave confides his intentions to Lady Pelham, her imagination jumps from the wedding announcement, to herself riding around in her married niece’s barouche and four, to public acclaim for her bringing about the match as rapidly as Caroline Bingley’s imagination progresses from admiration to love to marriage; and when Lady Pelham chastises Laura for refusing Hargrave, we hear in her “…you will never have it in your power to throw away such another offer. You need hardly expect to awaken such another passion”, a reproof similar to Mr. Collins’ reaction to Lizzy’s refusal.

“I should like to know what HER estimate is…”

Self-Control certainly forestalls Sense and Sensibility in Laura’s “Team Elinor” conviction that “Her own sensibility she had been taught to consider as a weakness to be subdued, not as an ornament to be gloried in”, and there is a frankness about the inequity of consequence in extra-marital relationships; i.e., that men can retain their social footing, while women are permanently disgraced.

There are a few pioneering plot elements as well: at one point, Laura decides to earn a living as a painter, with some success; later she decides to study the male-dominated field of mathematics, and shows some aptitude for it. A heroine who is intellectually curious and who is able and willing to be self-supporting is noteworthy, but both subplots are undeveloped and short-lived.

Austen’s recollections of Self-Control were not short-lived. Three years later, Mansfield Park was published (and comparisons can certainly be drawn between the Fanny/Henry Crawford and Laura/Hargrave relationships), and Austen tallied the opinions of friends and family; they were generally complimentary, but many expressed a preference for her previous publication, Pride and Prejudice. In a letter to Anna Lefroy, she addresses Brunton’s novel more satirically: “I will redeem my credit…by writing a close imitation of Self-Control as soon as I can. I will improve upon it; my Heroine shall not merely be wafted down an American river in a boat by herself, she shall cross the Atlantic in the same way.”

    “Alphonsine did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure, and we changed it for the “Female Quixotte,” which now makes our evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it.”

So wrote Jane Austen to Cassandra in 1807. Austen evidently had a taste for the lively and burlesque; she had also expressed a liking for E. S. Barrett’s The Heroine, a quixotic novel about a young lady who decides that she has not been told the truth about her parentage, and who resolves to go out into the world in quest of her birthright.

     The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella, published in 1752, was the second novel of poet and novelist Charlotte Lennox, and it is no surprise that Austen liked it enough to re-read it, as her “equal to what I remembered it” suggests. In the words of author and critic Anna Barbauld, who was influential in reviving interest in the work some fifty years after its publication, The Female Quixotewas “…an agreeable and ingenious satire upon the old romances, and I really think it is written in a modern spirit…”.

Charlotte Lennox

The Female Quixote, like Northanger Abbey, satirizes the effects of popular fiction on the reader. In fact, it would not be a stretch to suppose that Lennox’s most popular novel was a direct influence on the Austen work.

The target of Lennox’s novel is romantic fiction. “Romantic” did not refer to love and courtship, but to highly imaginative, usually episodic tales of adventure, heroism and exaggerated sentiment, authored by the likes of Eliza Heywood, Henry Fielding or Mary Davys. Unlike Austen, Lennox offers up a suitable candidate for her heroine; “Nature had given [Arabella] a most charming face, a shape easy and delicate, a sweet and insinuating voice and an air so full of dignity and grace as drew the admirations of all that saw her.” Compare this to Catherine Morland: “[The Morlands] were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin, awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark, lank hair and strong features.”

In accomplishments, as well, Catherine is a direct contrast to Arabella, whose “…naive charms were improved with all the heightenings of art…The best masters of music and dancing were sent for from London to attend her. She soon became the perfect mistress of the French and Italian languages”, whereas Catherine “…was often inattentive and occasionally stupid” and regards one of the happiest days of her life as the day that her music master was dismissed.

Arabella “would have made a great proficiency in all useful knowledge had not her whole time been taken up by another study” (i.e., reading novels of romance). Catherine takes to books, but only when “…nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them…all story and no reflection…such works as heroines must read…”

There are other comparisons, in the two suitors – the self-important one (Arabella’s Sir George, and Catherine’s John Thorpe) and the sensible, tolerant one (Arabella’s Glanville and Catherine’s Tilney) – and in the move from relative seclusion to society where the novels’ vision of the world is tested against the social order. There is, however, a comparison to another of Austen’s early novels: Sense and Sensibility. Unlike Catherine’s mistaken notions that are corrected, at the cost of some embarrassment, by her own innate level-headedness, Arabella judgment is corrupted to the point where her behavior has life-threatening consequences; her determination to see the world in romantic terms is as indulgent as Marianne Dashwood’s emotional excess. Just as Arabella at last owns up to her errors “…my heart yields to the force of truth…I begin to perceive that I have hitherto trifled away my time”, Marianne says that, “My illness has made me think – it has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection….Whenever I looked towards the past, I saw some duty neglected or some failing indulged.”

But back to Alphonsine, or Maternal Affection (1806) the work by prolific author Madame deGenlis, that Austen rejected. The plot presents an interesting spin on a young lady whose understanding has been distorted, not by novels but by the extreme limitations of her physical world. Alphonsine, the illegitimate daughter of a countess is born in a dungeon – the mother’s vengeful husband has imprisoned his wife, and neither he nor her attendants are aware of the child’s birth or existence – and is raised entirely in both sensory and social darkness. When, after thirteen years, they are released, Alphonsine’s introduction to the world becomes not only an expanded social experience, but a more fundamental sensory revelation. Perhaps Austen would have found something more relevant in Alphonsine if she had not succumbed to the “twenty page rule”. Her own view of epistolary integrity – “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth” is not all that different from The Critical Review’s assessment of the rejected novel, that “[Madame deGenlis] has attained the true moral end of novel writing, that which consists not in a few pages of poetical justice, but in the general impression left upon the reader’s mind when he closes the volume.”

“[Tom Lefroy] has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same colored clothes, I imagine which he did when he was wounded.”

This observation, noted in a letter written by 20-year-old Jane Austen to her sister, suggests that Austen, as well as Lefroy, were familiar with Henry Fielding’s novel. It is she, after all, who infers that Lefroy’s morning coat is an homage to the garment worn by a wounded Tom Jones, who had been wounded in a dispute over a lady’s reputation.

There are a few references to Lefroy in Austen’s letters that were written in the early part of 1796. From Steventon, she writes of their “profligate and shocking” flirting, and that she found him to be “gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant”. Several days later, she looks forward “with great impatience to a ball at which “I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him however, unless he promises to give away his white coat.” It is interesting that she writes with the same blithe self-confidence of Lady Susan Vernon, the focus of her recent novella, announcing that she “bequeaths” all of her beaux to a friend, “as I mean to confine my future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I do not care a sixpence” – yet, she cares enough that “my tears flow as I write” at the thought of his imminent departure.

Tom Lefroy

Jane Austen

There is a gap in 1797, before her correspondence resumes the following year; this is the period in which she converted her epistolary Elinor and Marianne to Sense and Sensibility, which provokes some interesting speculation about what may have influenced the character of Willoughby. There are certainly points where Lefroy’s hero and Austen’s most complex scoundrel intersect.

Tom Jones and John Willoughby both have expectations that are kept at bay, to a different degree, by the course of their own conduct. In the end, both are rewarded – again, to a different degree. Jones gets the lady and his claim to fortune; Willoughby gets a lady, who comes with a fortune. Tom Lefroy, who lived in the real world, could not hope for the serendipitous good luck of fiction. It is unlikely that the great-uncle who funded Lefroy’s education would have behaved as Jones’ benefactor who “…threatened [Tom Jones] with the entire loss of his favor”, or that Lefroy would have forfeited his uncle’s good will by the sort of conduct that had Willoughby, “…formally dismissed from [his relative’s] favor”; still, Austen’s poverty would have been viewed as an impediment, by Lefroy’s relations, to their marriage.

Jones and Willoughby have similar encounters with the charming heroine. Marianne Dashwood injures herself in a fall, and winds up in the arms of Willoughby. Sophia Western is tossed from her unruly horse into the arms of Tom Jones. When the ladies receive their farewell letters, Sophia laments that, “I have thrown away my heart on a man who hath forsaken me…He hath taken his leave of me forever in that letter”, while Marianne wails, “Willoughby, where was your heart, when you wrote those words?” In both works there is a somewhat satirical contrast between the natural and the conventional, expressed, to varying degrees, in the manner in which illegitimacy affects the course of romance.

Still, in literature and life, Austen must accept the “mortifying conviction that handsome young men must have something to live on, as well as the plain”, and her novels’ marriages do not take place until that “something to live on” is certain. Yet, in Sense and Sensibility, chronologically closest to the brief Austen/Lefroy relationship, Austen is able to propose an ideal resolution through her fiction: Willougby – as dissolute as Tom Jones and as good-looking and pleasant as Tom Lefroy – is  reinstated by the rich cousin upon whom he is dependent, not by marrying the woman he had wronged, or by marrying a wealthy woman, but by marrying a woman of good character – a rapprochement that, ironically, he might have effected by marrying Marianne.  Did Austen secretly hope that Lefroy might count on the same benevolence?

Certainly, there was no engagement between Austen and Lefroy, and she cannot claim to have been jilted, but he was not forgotten. (Perhaps this was what enabled her to write so feelingly, in her next effort, of the effect of Bingley’s absence on Jane Bennet). Two years after Lefroy’s departure, Austen writes of a visit from his aunt, that, “…of her nephew she said nothing at all…She did not once mention the name of [Lefroy] to me, and I was too proud to make any enquiries.” Only weeks later, in early 1799, Jane writes of a cold and its effect on her eyes, and describes a ball with little enthusiasm. “I do not think I was very much in request. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it. One’s consequence you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason.” Yet, she retained enough consequence to be solicited – and to decline – “Lord Bolton’s eldest son” for a partner. Perhaps her “indifferent” vision is the result of tears, shed upon learning of the engagement of Tom Lefroy, who was married in March of 1799.  When she does go on to write “Whenever I fall into misfortune, how many jokes it ought to furnish my acquaintance in general…” she echoes Marianne Dashwood’s lament upon Willoughby’s desertion: “I must feel – I must be wretched – and they are welcome to enjoy the consciousness of it that can.”

Clive Francis as Willoughby (1971)

Greg Wise as Willoughby (1995)

Peter Woodward as Willoughby (1981)

“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.”