Thank you for your kind words, my dear. They are much appreciated.

Critiquing the snobbery of the upper class finds a more ‘right-on’ expression in Persuasion, doesn’t it? Partly as a sort of recantation for the ‘old money’ snobbery of Emma, the previous novel, to put it crudely. However, the fact that the subject needs some finesse in the handling should emphatically not put us off thinking about Pride and Prejudice, in which rank and class are continually, so to speak, on my mind. How ‘rebellious’ was I in the terms the novel seems to propose?

You obviously need to move towards a title, that’s true. You have a topic area—the novel; and a subject area, which is class. But the trouble with Pride and Prejudice is that it is something of a ‘fairy tale’ in which Elizabeth Bennet’s ascent to the great estate of Pemberley is to be applauded and enjoyed by the reader, and this means I can’t easily be pinpointed as simply a type of the ‘radical democratic artist’ like my contemporary ‘Robbie’ Burns, he of ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’, etc. Not in this novel anyway.

But the discussion can be given finesse by the fact that the novel has its own tensions and ambiguities in relation to the class issue. Its flashpoints involve resistance, specifically feminine, to the arrogance of power, and thus broach issues of class and rank. A minor-key version of this lies in the disappointing of Mr Collins’ insufferable assumption that he can ‘have’ Elizabeth as she is poor, and, thanks to the entail of which he is a beneficiary, has little room for manoeuvre, or so he thinks, whatever she happens to think of him (of course he can have but little idea of just how much she despises him).

Elizabeth rejects him whatever the consequences may be–an act of defiance of the mores of the time which, sadly, her friend Charlotte will not repeat. More significantly, Charlotte herself and Mr Darcy think Elizabeth will succumb to Mr Darcy’s slightly patronising importunities in the Hunsford parsonage simply because he is rich and powerful, whether she ‘likes’ him or not. In fact, although she acknowledges ‘the compliment of this man’s affection’, she hates what she takes to be his arrogance--the arrogance of power, and rank--and consequent insufferable interference in her sister Jane’s destiny, which has just been naively revealed by Colonel Fitzwilliam in Rosings park (little does Darcy know just how ill-chosen the moment of his first proposal is). When she turns him down, this is not merely a love-interest issue, but a class one.

The great irony of my book does involve class: it is precisely because Elizabeth has the magnificent strength of character, integrity, and concern for her much-loved sister she has that she is enabled to reject Darcy. Fortunately as he proves to be unusually intelligent and even good-natured, he comes to appreciate this and finds her even more ‘desirable’ as a result. Refusing the idea of class or rank as an absolute index of worth or basis of life-choices, she will not advance through society in the mating game except on terms and conditions which ensure that true love will be expressed, respect and self-respect preserved. Her traipsing about the countryside, without the status of horses and carriages, is an initial index of her ‘free spirit’ attitude to the social masquerade.

This is not exactly storming-the-barricades stuff, I know, but at least Elizabeth will not show the servility and hypocrisy which others use to chart their way through a snobbish world in which rich people—though hardly Charles Bingley!--may imagine they can have what they want. I allowed the irony of Elizabeth’s being awarded a greater and more secure social position as a result of her integrity, and love. To that extent, finally, I wasn’t challenging the system, but the marital closure also seemed to express the hope that the great estates of my day, on which so many depended, would be in the hands of people of sensitivity, intelligence, and genuine concern for all about them. Again, this is not exactly playing to the tune of the Marxist ‘Internationale’, but it preserves some essential human values in the face of the arrogance of rank and power and seems to express a hope, or wish, that this will be exercised sensitively, with a concern for all, which we assume will be pretty much the case with a Darcy made less grand an unapproachable by his ‘Lizzie’.

Some readers may be disconcerted to find that the theme of the arrogance of power, and the satirising of this arrogance, is embodied mainly in the presentation of a woman, the widowed Lady Catherine of Rosings, almost as if someone as ill-judging and potentially officious as Mrs Bennet, the Inadequate Mother, had been Promoted to Rosings. Was I fudging the issue in making the prime example of the arrogance of rank female? Is it finally possible to resist the idea that snobbery, respect for rank, endures in this particular novel? This again makes for the need for some adroitness in the discussion of the ‘war on (but perhaps also of) snobbery’ the novel conducts.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Lack of wealth affects the status and hence the eligibility of the Dash wood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, the heroines of this book, with whom the reader is expected to identify in a sort of ‘relay’, according as one or other seems more sympathetic. They are virtually disinherited in favour of a small child, the male heir, Harry Dashwood, and the situation is made worse by the weakness of their half-brother John, father of Harry, who fails to honour his father’s death-bed hest to the effect that the already impoverished sisters should be treated generously by him, thanks to the bad influence and rapacity of his wife Fanny, née Ferrars. The bad characters, lots of them, are obsessed by what plump, affectionate but fairly unclever Mrs Jennings calls ‘money and greatness’, with ladies being valued for their fortunes, not their personal qualities (of integrity, sincerity, etc.)

Marianne falls for the dashing Willoughby, but his ‘expensive’ lifestyle and dissipated character make it necessary for him to marry money in the form of the unpleasant Miss Grey, an heiress. His life will be something of a grey area thereafter. Elinor hits it off with Edward Ferrars, but the family plan to marry him off to Lord Morton’s daughter, not knowing that the true enemy of this plan is Lucy Steele, with whom the diffident and irritating Edward has formed a clandestine engagement. Lucy, however, lacks not merely wealth but also scruple, flattering the dreadful children of Lady Middleton and toadying her way to the top. She is an object lesson in how not to react to being under-privileged, and I ironically awarded her the foppish Robert Ferrars, rich in worldly terms but a worthless fellow in terms of his vanity, self-regard and false values. Marianne, whose intensity and indulgence of feeling make her rejection by the ‘Byronic’ John Willoughby almost unbearable, for herself and the reader, is rescued by marriage to the older man, Colonel Brandon.

I worked hard to make the idea that she has married for love (as opposed to merely surrendering herself to someone who has loved her throughout, but without much hope of a return) convincing, though not all readers are entirely assured that she has done so. And Elinor was awarded Edward and the parsonage at Delaford, on the Colonel’s estate, when all hope seemed gone. They are a couple happy in their appreciation of each other and free from the discontent which springs from the constant pursuit of More which we see in Fanny Dashwood, for example. Marianne and Elinor also illustrate something about the (non-) relationship between work and wealth in this context—they are strenuous self-improvers, heavily invested in education and what we have learned to call ‘cultural capital’. But their prospects still depend absolutely on marital terms and conditions.

From the point of view of your interesting question, my most piquantly ironic moment in this early novel was perhaps that of the exchange between Elinor and Marianne in which the younger sister deplores the idea that wealth should be considered relevant to happiness. Elinor, somewhat concessively to what seems to be the ‘bad’ side here, argues that wealth is indeed a factor to consider in weighing even the possibilities of happiness. But it turns out that Marianne’s romanticism, and aestheticism, involves the idea of the possession of a greater income to sustain her notions of happiness than Elinor herself would find necessary. Despite, then, the savage satire directed at those who worship money and property-- like the Dashwoods’ half-brother John, his wife Fanny née Ferrars, and her mother, old Mrs Ferrars, the issue of the relative ‘value’ of wealth is something I didn’t entirely resolve here, perhaps, despite the fact that the novel seems to be bursting with a confident judgmentalism in relation to all such matters.

With best wishes

Jane Austen.

Novels are perhaps always written with mixtures or varieties of style, aren’t they? Certainly in Emma I attended to the variety of voices and expression more than in any of my other novels -- Sense and Sensibility, for example, my first-published, which has a heavily formal narrative voice with highly organised ‘Augustan’ sentences after the manner of my ‘dear Dr. Johnson’, perhaps: the characters themselves can’t get away from it, and talk with a formality of organisation hard to associate with modern ideas of the speaking voice. My narrator in Emma is in touch with this ‘register’.

Indeed the ‘bedrock’ character Mr Knightley sounds a bit like Dr. Johnson himself at times, and even his conversational tone ‘men of sense do not want silly wives’ (wrong, as his sensible protege Robert wants silly Harriet) balances ‘men’ and ‘wives’ and ‘sense’ and ‘silly’ in classical Augustan mode. At other end of the scale is Miss Bates, whose fully represented speech bespeaks randomness and fairly free association(s)-- ‘quite thick shoes’, etc. In the end, terms like ‘voices’ and ‘register’, which catch the sense of individual locution and level of insight and organisation the character is capable of, seems a bit handier here, but perhaps your rubric doesn’t give you much room for maneouvre?

If we can move in that direction, Mr Woodhouse speaks to a brief of feeble-minded valitudinarianism and hypochondria, in gentle monomania mode, and Jane Fairfax answers her aunt’s garrulity with a highly studied silence we can almost hear, given her intelligence and overwhelming need not to be indescreet, to give nothing away about her love for the careless Frank Churchill, whose talk is often ambiguous, insinuating, or implicity unfeeling in giving pain to his secret fiancee Jane and duping the confidenet but naïve and inexperienced Emma.

No doubt the differences in speech and style as between the irritable, but highly intelligent and ‘educated’ lawyer John Knightley and the gossipy Mr Weston would make an interesting study. Does Mr Weston perhaps have a linguistic affinity with his son? Other characters speak in different ways--Harriet’s chatter and Mrs Elton’s pretentious gush are examples. The voice of the narrator merges with Emma’s style of though, sometimes erroneous, or consciousness, sometimes deceived or snobbish. I do hope this helps, at least a little bit.

With best wishes,

Jane Austen