Tag: Literature

Jane Austen and the War with France

I recently read Jane Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, and while researching a quote from it, I found this page. It has a lot of interesting quotes, but what really caught my interest was this response from the author of the page to a quote criticizing the sedentary lifestyle of Austen’s characters: “It is true that none of them traveled outside of England, but then there were those inconveniences thrown up by the French Army and the Irish patriots.” Until I read this, I hadn’t seriously considered that Austen — and, accordingly, her characters — lived in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, nor could I recall a specific mention of the wars in either of the other Austen novels I’ve read.

(Some spoilers for Persuasion follow.)

Persuasion, as it turns out, is quite explicit in its references to the war with France, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the fact that it was written after the conclusion of the war. One of its primary characters, Captain Wentworth, has this to say on his service in the British Navy:

“I had the good luck, in my passage home the next autumn, to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted… a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights, and which would have done for [my poor old ship] Asp, in half the time; our touch with the Great Nation not having much improved our condition. Four-and-twenty hours more, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers”

Admiral Croft has a comparatively understated view of the dangers of the war, and says this to his seafaring wife in response to Captain Wentworth’s insistence that “women and children have no right to be comfortable on board” a ship:

“Ah! my dear,” said the Admiral, “when he had got a wife, he will sing a different tune. When he is married, if we have the good luck to live to another war, we shall see him do as you and I, and a great many others, have done.”

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s funny that both of these naval officers reference the “good luck” of having to fight a continental power! Captain Wentworth does so with, to borrow a phrase used elsewhere in the novel, a “playful solemnity” that makes it hard to tell how serious he’s being; the Admiral, who is presumably sheltered from unsupported contact with the enemy, appears to be serious.

A darker cast on war appears in the final lines of the novel. Having married a naval officer, Anne Elliot, the protagonist, has to contend with the specter of war:

His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish [the tenderness of her marriage] less, the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine.

The only really sincere view of war in the novel remains unspoken.

If you want, you can find out what men have said about Jane Austen here. If you’d rather find out what Jane Austen said about the Napoleonic Wars, you can read Persuasion online here. It’s in the public domain, so you can also find it for free on Kindle, Google Play, or other e-book services.

Alfred Tennyson and Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen

Right now I’m reading Jane Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion. The copy I own has this quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson on the back: “Miss Austen… was a great artist, equal in her small sphere to Shakespeare.” When I looked up this quote to find more context for it, I found this later quote from Tennyson on this page:

“I am reported to have said that Jane Austen was equal to Shakespeare. What I really said was that, in the narrow sphere of life which she delineated, she pictured her characters as truthfully as Shakespeare. But Austen is to Shakespeare as asteroid to sun. Miss Austen’s novels are perfect works on small scale — beautiful bits of stippling.”

Source: B.C. Southam [Editor] Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870-1940 Volume 2 [1987]

Undoubtedly, there is a vast difference in scope between the two authors. All of Austen’s protagonists are middle- or upper-class, straight, and English; all of her novels are set in England and focus on particular themes and character types; and in the world she wrote of, marriage was the sole legitimate conclusion to romance, and Christianity the sole legitimate form of spirituality.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, set his plays in nations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean (and ultimately moved west in The Tempest), focused on characters of all class backgrounds, introduced African, Asian, and Jewish characters, crossed genre lines, and used fantastical worlds, battlefields, courtrooms, palaces, and more as backdrops. Most importantly, his characters engage in ventures, relationships, and crimes that could not be acknowledged in Austen’s world.

Tennyson’s clarification of his comparison nonetheless seems unfair to Austen, for a number of reasons. Shakespeare wrote for much larger, more diverse audiences than Austen, and in the world of Elizabethan drama, setting plays in a variety of places and times was not an especially unique trait. Austen wrote in a more restrictive environment and worked from humbler sources than Shakespeare — simple, 18th century morality tales provided the basis for her novels — but still vastly expanded the scope of her genre during her career.

Additionally, Shakespeare’s period of maturity was neither as short nor as abruptly ended as Austen’s. Shakespeare’s plays were already in production by 1592, 24 years before his death. By comparison, Austen’s first published novel was released in 1811, only six years before her death. Shakespeare’s four great tragedies were published between 1599 and 1608 — that is, between seven and 16 years after the beginning of his published career. Jane Austen had just reached this period of her career, and had just started to incorporate characters from beyond the borders of England and themes of industrial modernization in her unfinished novel Sanditon, when she died at the age of 41.

Virginia Woolf, in her essay about Austen, makes a strong case for Austen entering a new, more developed phase of her career at the end of her life:

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived… There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed…

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure… But she would have known more… She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is.

In other words, her scope would have expanded, from the “narrow sphere of life which she delineated” to a world that is “larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed.” Woolf, like Tennyson, believed Shakespeare and Austen to be equals in quality, if not in scale. Unlike Tennyson, she did not imagine that Austen was confined to creating “beautiful bits of stippling”; she saw the full scale of Austen’s creative power and imagined it had it gone unhindered.

And finally, Woolf acknowledged that Austen’s genius, though it was fully displayed in her life, was prematurely dissipated by her death:

She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust — but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.

I highly recommend Woolf’s essay, especially if you’re a fan of Austen’s. I also recommend Persuasion, which can be found online here. It’s in the public domain, so you can also find it for free on Kindle, Google Play, or other e-book services.