I don’t know if you will feel too happy with this one. Many students push me (Jane Austen) ‘on’ a little, chronologically speaking, partly as many of the best-known novels, especially those adapted for film and TV (I’ve watched them all), belong to the Victorian period, when ‘Marxism’ and a modern and more democratic sense of ‘the political’ were slowly emerging. However, I died, much to my regret, in 1817, at the age of forty-one. I was essentially an eighteenth-century figure, a ‘child of an Anglican rectory’, and one brother became a great gentleman with estates, two brothers became Admirals, one a hunting parson of some literary eminence, and two went to Oxford. Both my background and literary training impelled me in conservative directions.

There is a remorseless satire in my novels of people who care for nothing but ‘money and greatness’, in Mrs Jennings’ idiom in Sense and Sensibility, or all that is, as Edmund Bertram puts it in Mansfield Park, ‘mercenary or ambitious’, and sometimes of snobbery, as in Persuasion; but I did like to see my heroines comfortably settled, though this is usually partly at least as a reward for having been poor and virtuous, acting with integrity and showing ‘grace under pressure’. I also developed as a writer, in the 1790s, when anything like ‘radicalism’ in novels was beginning to be frowned on, thanks to the rather alarming progress of the French Revolution over the water.

But, although you can’t make me politically correct, I did find ways to suspect ‘emerging capitalism’, and I perhaps had a bit more common ground with radical poets of my own time like Blake and Shelley than you would initially expect, if one knows where to look. Shelley in particular anticipates Marx, and there are sort-of-proto-Marxist hints and directions particularly in Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey. One of my nicest heroines, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, is genuinely excited by the idea that a rakish young landowner may be so far converted to right thinking as to have become, potentially, ‘the friend of the poor and oppressed’, though he isn’t that for long. On the whole, though, ‘the poor and oppressed’ aren’t given much of a voice in my novels. But whether they would have been published at all if I had given them ‘a voice’ is an open question.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

I see what you mean, but I am not sure any of them can easily be described that way, tho’this fact makes a large part of the point of Northanger Abbey itself. Northanger Abbey is ‘difficult’ as it seems to function as a spoof-Gothic text but participates in Gothic anyway. Bracketing your other two choices, it seems that Catherine Morland incurs gentle irony for not achieving Gothic heroine status when her reading suggests to Catherine herself her possible ‘inscription’ as one. Gothic, informally put, needs appropriate contexts for its extremes of romantic emotion, frantic scenes, torments and ‘ghastly’ accoutrements.

The point about NA seems to be that there are no such contexts now, and that Catherine’s personality and emotions as an inhabitant of an at once up-country Anglican intellectual and spiritual matrix (Fullerton) and modern, enlightenment, English formation (Henry Tilney’s Bath diagnosis of just where we have got to in terms of civilisation, progress--intellectual, social and moral advancement) render her Gothic assumptions anachronistic. Henry is very much Catherine’s teacher, prattling magisterially by her side, but his complacent diagnosis is not sustained, and Catherine does indeed become a ‘Gothic’ heroine of sorts when Henry’s own father, the General, expels her with ruffianly abruptness from his ancient abbey (ancient tho’modernised, as it were).

She suffers greatly, feels an extremity of emotion, and is unaware of the reasons for her torment, which, for her at least, is suddenly quite ‘Gothic’ enough. The answer the novel seems to be vouchsafing seems to be that ‘Gothic practices’, new style, are secreted by the results of the modern mercenariness so obviously on display at Northanger itself (whole parishes at work in the General’s hot-houses, etc.). The General treated Catherine with consideration only because she was an heiress (John Thorpe told him so). When he found she was relatively poor, he did indeed assume, in his own, modern way, ‘the air of a Montoni’, as Catherine’s reading has caused her to intuit.

Oddly, her bad treatment, which also ensure our deepest sympathies, seems to validate both her judgements and her heroine status. And as her sufferings stemmed from ‘her experience of Northanger Abbey’, perhaps she can assume the role you envisage after all, a real heroine and perhaps even a ‘Gothick’d if not quite Gothic’ one, triumphing even over the narrator’s excessive ironies about, or over, her original naiveté—a charming quality. Isabella reads romances and gothic fictions, but is gothic in that her real motivation is constantly being misread by the unwary. If she does not have hidden depths, she at least has hidden shallows–she is, in her genteel way, a gold-digger. Her language occludes, for the naïve Catherine, what she is ‘really like’; she is, in terms of her and Catherine’s parlance, veiled. But it all comes out in the end—perhaps even the wash, you might say, as Catherine did uncover some laundry bills at one point in her search for Gothic thrills, reasonable enough in an old Abbey.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Your kind remarks about the previous answers were deeply appreciated.

As far as the eyes are concerned, the eyes have it when it comes to attraction and being attracted, I suppose, and Pride and Prejudice is, rather against the initial odds, a great love story. One can be attracted by or through eyes apparently, and this subjective/objective ‘meeting place’ in eyes is registered widely in ‘literature’, no doubt—Romeo and Juliet might be a good place to look for all sorts of eloquent points about the devastating effects of, and on, eyes.

Catching up with my reading in eternity, I must say I liked Old Ezra’s troubadour-style quasi-‘translations’ of the courtly lovers of old: ‘your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly/ I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne’ (Canto LXXXI). After laughing a bit at the spelling, etc., I decided that must have been close to the sort of feeling Darcy had at some point about ‘Lizzie’. As a love story, Pride and Prejudice is of course rather more probing than most, dealing not merely with attractive appearances but what transcends them (Wickham is as handsome as Darcy and we are not referring to land or money here [or are we?]: ‘eyes’ may be important in signalling personal qualities in addition to being physically alluring (and allured).

But Elizabeth’s ‘fine eyes’ are a particular point of controversy, aren’t they? Attracting Darcy when all seemed lost on that particular front (‘she is tolerable’, etc.) while impressing the jealous Miss Bingley only as giving her a sharp, shrewish look, this is perhaps a sign that what makes Elizabeth attract is less the appearance of the eyes themselves than the intelligence at work which they suggest--the ability to judge, assess, and perhaps to mock. As it happens, the ‘sparkle of confident intelligence in young women’ was deprecated by conservative moralists of the time, and Elizabeth seems challenging as well as conventionally pretty, intelligent rather than just insipidly attractive. All this is communicated by, or through, her ‘fine eyes’, an expression for which Darcy was teased. His point about their ‘being brightened by . . . exercise’ with which Darcy twits poor Miss Bingley seems almost modern (a few hours in the gym recommended for ladies?). However, he sees Elizabeth’s soul as well as body through her eyes and likes what he sees, as well he might. You know how very fond of her I was myself.

And, yes, I think men writing to ladies might raise a few eyebrows—but in your day also, I think? In the case of Darcy, I agree his letter to Elizabeth handed over in Rosings Park shares many intimate thoughts and ideas, and its very length, and Darcy’s eagerness to justify and explain himself in detail seem to bespeak his ongoing love, despite his rather cruel rejection in the Hunsford parsonage by an Elizabeth who has just been perusing her sister’s rather hurt letters, themselves crucial.

And, as you point out, Darcy delivered the mail himself, which does seem particularly discreet; but of course he is hardly writing, any more, as a mere acquaintance. He has already completely ‘exposed himself’ as someone cherishing ardent feelings about Elizabeth, made clear that he wished to be ‘intimately connected’ with her; and, on the other hand, his correspondence does remain a secret, so although he is very frank with, and to, Elizabeth, people in general are hardly expected to know about all this.

The absolute need for secrecy in relation to such an intimate communication is signalled by the fact that even Wickham’s reputation is safe with Jane and Elizabeth, as Elizabeth takes as authoritative the fact that Darcy (concerned in particular about the details of Georgiana’s elopement) does not appear to wish knowledge of Wickham’s general louchness to be ‘released into the community’, with somewhat devastating results [Lydia’s elopement and all that followed]. All this also underlines the closeness of the Elizabeth-Jane relationship: Elizabeth would not trust anyone else in the family with these epistolary secrets, and a good deal of the piquancy of the later scenes depends on this concealment.

The most crucial, and paradoxical, epistolary moment in my work is surely in Persuasion , when Wentworth writes one in response to Anne’s very voice and presence (just what letter-writing normally depends on one’s not having) and brings the happy dénouement. That cannot be anything to do with the mores of the time, just everything to do with the impulse of the moment, and the theme of occluded communication throughout. Then again, that Elinor assumed Marianne was engaged when she saw Marianne writing to Willoughby in London was significant, but of course M. had already so compromised herself by (e.g.) going all over the house at Allingham with Willoughby, vanishing into the countryside on curricles, etc., that her engagement was supposedly ‘common knowledge’ (though it didn’t, so to speak, ‘exist’), so perhaps her letters weren’t quite such a crucial marker of intimacy at that point.

I feel this is hardly adequate to the points you raise, my dear, but there is some relevant stuff in some of my other communications—and just look at the time!

With best wishes,

Jane Austen.