Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 25

Mrs. Woodhouse

George Justice is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Austen’s Emma (2011). He specializes in eighteenth-century literature and has written and edited books and essays on the literary marketplace, authorship, and women’s writing. He’s Dean of Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Associate Vice President for Humanities and Arts in the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development at Arizona State University.

When I hosted a party for Mansfield Park a couple of years ago, George contributed a defense of Mrs. Norris. For Emma in the Snow, he’s written a guest post on Emma’s late mother, Mrs. Woodhouse. He’s also sent this beautiful photo of Phoenix, Arizona in winter.

I’m realizing I know quite a few Austen scholars who live in places where it’s warm all winter—or at least not as cold and snowy as it is in my corner of Canada. In case you missed the recent guest posts by Diana Birchall, Elisabeth Lenckos, and Cheryl Kinney, you can find their photos here: winter in Santa Monica, London, and Texas. Meanwhile, we’ve just had two snow days in a row here in Halifax….

I’m thinking of the contrast with Highbury, where “the snow was nowhere above half an inch deep—in many places hardly enough to whiten the ground.” Instead of taking pictures of the snowbanks in front of my house, however, I decided to show you my photo of the view from Point Pleasant Park yesterday afternoon, after the blizzard had ended.

Okay, now that I’ve finished my weather report, let’s move on to more important things. It’s a real pleasure to introduce George’s contribution to the Emma celebrations.

At what age would memories of a mother’s caresses be “indistinct”? For Emma, twenty years old, that must have been a long time ago. The narrator of Emma does not specify exactly when Emma’s mother had died, but from my own experience of losing a mother in childhood, and comparing my own memories with those of my brothers, Emma must have been seven or younger when her mother died.

It has always seemed strange to me that the narrator of Emma proclaims that little had vexed her heroine up until the time of the events of the novel. My own mother died when I was nine, and although I, like Emma, lived a relatively calm and peaceful childhood, with the “place” of my mother taken by a loving, Miss Taylor-like step-mother, I would have to say that my mother’s death from cancer was indeed highly vexing, not only to me but to my entire family.

And so I must project vexation onto Mr. Woodhouse, who never remarried and apparently made a rapid transition from husband to valetudinarian, depending on Miss Taylor and his two daughters for female guidance and upon Mr. Knightley, Miss Taylor, and Emma to keep the business side of Hartfield going.

Most marriages in Jane Austen’s novels are pretty bad, and it’s easy to project a severe level of dysfunction onto the marriage of Emma’s parents. Was Mrs. Woodhouse, like Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bennet, the victim of a certain passion (in this case for money?) that led her into an intellectually unequal match? She seems to have had no connections in Highbury—at least there are no parents or siblings on display, or even mentioned, in the pages of Emma. Perhaps, like one Augusta Hawkins of Maple Grove, Mrs. Woodhouse married a narcissist husband to escape from an unfortunate situation?

Let’s look at the text to glean what we might about Emma’s mother. There is very little: evidence comes directly only from Mr. Knightley’s lament that a lack of her strong mother’s guidance has led Emma astray; instead of an accomplished, disciplined perfect woman of her day, he implies, we have a flawed, headstrong, occasionally self-involved young woman. (Would the novel’s readers want her any other way?)

The less direct evidence I want to consider comes from the case of Emma’s older sister Isabella, who was not presumably too young to forget her mother’s caresses. Most critics and readers look at Isabella as her father’s daughter, whereas Emma might take after her mother. And the comparisons with Mr. Woodhouse and Isabella are too strong to overlook. Obsessions with food, health, and a smothering sense of familial affection; perhaps the character most like Mrs. Woodhouse would be Mr. John Knightley!

In Volume 1, Chapter 5, Mr. Knightley says, “At ten years old, [Emma] had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She was always quick and assured: Isabella slow and diffident. And ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of the house and of you all. In her mother she lost the only person able to cope with her. She inherits her mother’s talents, and must have been under subjection to her.” It’s unclear to me (at least) why inheriting her mother’s talents would have resulted in Emma being under subjection to her—except in the vacuum left by the vapidity of Isabella and Mr. Woodhouse. And, in any case, why should such strong talents require “subjection”?

Mr. Knightley here is wrong: it is no misfortune for Emma to be able, at ten, to answer questions that puzzled her seven-year-older sister. This is an example of the novel’s requiring Mr. Knightley to change as much as Emma must change. Especially since the words “mother” and “motherly” are often used in the novel in relation to gentleness and warmth—overwhelmingly both in direct reference and in qualitative judgment to old Mrs. Bates, Miss Bates’s oft-referred to mother.

Other characters lost their mothers at an early age, including Frank Churchill (for whom Mrs. Weston serves as a surrogate “mother,” just as she had for Emma) and Jane Fairfax, who does not seem to have suffered from want of a mother in the way that Mr. Knightley associates with Emma. And even Mrs. Elton had lost her mother (as well as her father) sometime before marrying her “cara sposo.”

Mrs. Woodhouse’s death was certainly a misfortune to herself, to Mr. Woodhouse, to Isabella, to Emma, and to others in Highbury. But if Mrs. Bates is the ideal of motherhood in the novel, perhaps the strength of character and independence attributed to Mrs. Woodhouse had even less space in her pre-Wollstonecraftian world than Emma will have in post-revolutionary Britain. The inanities of the various mothers in Emma therefore might serve as commentary on the world that threatens to hold Emma down.

There are two moments of hope for mothers at the end of the novel. First, Mrs. Weston, motherly in a positive sense, gives birth to a daughter. But more generally, Emma married to Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax to Frank Churchill provide a sense that future generations will be raised by relatively egalitarian parents in modern marriages. Death may or may not intervene (we wouldn’t wish it for Mrs. Weston, Emma, or Jane Fairfax), but all three women have had a profound and positive impact on their husbands, not to manage them (as Mrs. Woodhouse must have done) but to rationalize them. We don’t believe that little Henry will inherit Donwell Abbey, even if he seems to be the heartier of Isabella’s two boys. Instead, we can’t help but believe that the happy ending of Emma will be as much about what happens in the future to Highbury as what has happened in the past, including the death of Mrs. Woodhouse and others of the novel’s absent mothers.

Fifteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Gillian Dow, Margaret Horwitz, and Kate Scarth.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Mr. Woodhouse and What Matters in the End

Dr. Cheryl Kinney is a gynecologist in Dallas, Texas, and she has given lectures in the United States, Canada, and England on women’s health in the novels of Jane Austen and other eighteenth and nineteenth century British authors. I’m looking forward to hearing her speak at the Jane Austen Society (UK) conference here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June of 2017. (You can find out more about that conference on the JAS website; John Mullan, Peter Sabor, Sheila Kindred, and I are the other speakers.)

Cheryl has also lectured extensively to various groups on issues relating to gynecology including menopause, sexual dysfunction, endometriosis, and pelvic surgery. She received her M.D. from Indiana University, and she serves on the National Advisory Board for the Laura W. Bush Institute of Women’s Health and the Executive Dean’s Advisory Board for the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. She’s been listed in “Best Doctors in America” since 2001, she’s been named by the Consumers’ Research Council as one of “America’s Top Obstetricians and Gynecologists” every year since 2002, and for the past ten years, she’s been named a “Texas Super Doctor” by her peers. She served on the national board of the Jane Austen Society of North America from 2010 to 2015, and she’s secretary of the board of the Jane Bozart Foundation.

When I hosted a party for Mansfield Park a couple of years ago, she wrote about “Why Tom Bertram is right that Dr. Grant will ‘soon pop off.’” I’m delighted to welcome her back to my blog to celebrate Emma. For her contribution to Emma in the Snow, Cheryl has sent this guest post on Mr. Woodhouse, along with a photo of Texas in winter.

Photo by Wallis Kinney

Mr. Woodhouse came in, and very soon led to the subject again, by the recurrence of his very frequent inquiry of “Well, my dears, how does your book go on? Have you got any thing fresh?”

“Yes, papa, we have something to read you, something quite fresh. A piece of paper was found on the table this morning—(dropt, we suppose, by a fairy)—containing a very pretty charade, and we have just copied it in.”

She read it to him, just as he liked to have any thing read, slowly and distinctly, and two or three times over, with explanations of every part as she proceeded—and he was very much pleased, and, as she had foreseen, especially struck with the complimentary conclusion.

“Aye, that’s very just, indeed, that’s very properly said. Very true. ‘Woman, lovely woman.’ It is such a pretty charade, my dear, that I can easily guess what fairy brought it. Nobody could have written so prettily, but you, Emma.”

Emma only nodded, and smiled. After a little thinking, and a very tender sigh, he added—

“Ah! it is no difficulty to see who you take after! Your dear mother was so clever at all those things! If I had but her memory! But I can remember nothing.”

(Volume 1, Chapter 9, from the Cambridge edition of Emma [2005], edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan)

Average human life expectancy at the time of the birth of Jesus was thirty-two years. By the time Jane Austen was writing Emma it was forty-one years. Growing old was not a reasonable expectation for most of the population then. That Jane Austen was aware of this actuality is evidenced by the number of parentless young people in her novels. Modern scientific advances have profoundly altered our lifespan by mitigating the dangers of childbirth, disease, and injury, resulting in a current life expectancy of approximately eighty years. But all of this medical progress has left us vulnerable to the physical and cognitive declines that accompany old age and to the challenges aging presents. In Emma, Jane Austen reveals her remarkable insight into this aspect of human existence with her depiction of Mr. Woodhouse.

Although we are not provided with Mr. Woodhouse’s exact age, he is described by the author as a “kind-hearted, polite old man” (Volume 2, Chapter 16). Yet we soon notice that he is not old in the manner of the hard-of-hearing, blind without her glasses old Mrs. Bates. Mr. Woodhouse has memory lapses, repeats himself, is unable to understand a joke, is unequal to his conversation partners, has to have his business affairs explained to him, and becomes anxious about going out or being left alone. If presented to a doctor today, Mr. Woodhouse would almost certainly be diagnosed with some degree of cognitive impairment.

In order that Mr. Woodhouse will be endeared to readers, Jane Austen constructs his limitations to leave other parts of his personality unblemished—his courtesy, his politeness, his paternal love and devotion. Recent research has shown that memory loss much more profound than Mr. Woodhouse exhibits may leave intact other notable human traits. Doctors have just reached this conclusion within the last decade. Jane Austen obviously understood it 200 years ago.

Despite Mr. Woodhouse’s good qualities, there is little question that we are supposed to understand how difficult it would be to live with him. Mrs. Weston wonders at the end of the novel who besides Mr. Knightley might ever have wanted to marry Emma if a condition for doing so was to move in with Mr. Woodhouse. When Emma accepts Mr. Knightley, she is filled with joyful gratitude and relief. She reveals how acutely aware of her father’s mental and physical decline she is when she considers that Mr. Knightley will be “such a companion for herself in the periods of anxiety and cheerlessness before her!” (Volume 3, Chapter 15) To the 29% of us who provide unpaid caregiving to a relative or friend, no explanation of Emma’s expression is necessary.

For Jane Austen a character’s response to the plight of others often defines their morality. Throughout the novel Emma shelters and soothes her father, entertains him, arranges his social engagements, compensates for his misjudgments and eccentricities, and protects him (with assistance from the author) from becoming an object of pity or ridicule. There are so many instances of Emma manipulating the “environment” for the comfort of her father and they are arranged so cleverly in the story that we barely notice them as claims on Emma.

Other characters in the novel are measured morally by whether they are able to follow Emma’s lead—Frank Churchill obviously is not. Mr. Knightley clearly does. With the relentless demands on Emma, her patience and assiduities are truly remarkable and in this light her imaginings may be better understood as a coping mechanism for her day-to-day stresses. Usually in a Jane Austen novel, the heroine becomes a heroine when she learns from her mistakes, but in this novel we come to understand that it is Emma’s virtuous heart that makes her a heroine, not her recovery from some minor social blunders.

Today, studies show that for most elderly patients a loss of independence is more dreaded than a diagnosis of cancer. In Emma, Jane Austen illustrates how in the pre-modern world a “kind-hearted, polite old man” is allowed to live life as he wants and she shows us the manner in which his dutiful, loving daughter makes it possible. In doing so Jane Austen presents an awareness that though infirmity comes to all, there are lessons to be learned as your loved ones experience such afflictions. The ultimate focus should be a good life for those we love and care for … all the way to the end. A lesson Emma has clearly already mastered.

Cheryl also sent me her daughter Wallis’s photo of bluebonnets, not because they’re in bloom in February, but because they’re the state flower of Texas.

Excellent authors on this aspect of the novel:

Adams, Carol. “Jane Austen’s Guide To Alzheimer’s.” NY Times Op-Ed (12/19/2015).

Basting, Anne Davis. Forget Memory. Johns Hopkins University Press (2009).

Folsom, Marcia McClintock. Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma. MLA (2004).

Lane, Maggie. Growing Old With Jane Austen. Hale (2014).

Selwyn, David. Jane Austen and Leisure. The Hambledon Press (1999).

Weinsheimer, Joel C. “In Praise of Mr. Woodhouse: Duty and Desire in Emma.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 6.1 (1975).

Fourteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by George Justice, Gillian Dow, and Margaret Horwitz.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

The Many Matches of Emma

Sophie Andrews is an ambassador for the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, which was founded by Caroline Jane Knight, Jane Austen’s 5th great-niece. The Foundation works to provide free books, writing materials, and writing programs to communities in need. Sophie discovered Austen at the age of nine, when she first watched the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and she tells me she became “a true Jane Austen fan” a few years later when one of her teachers encouraged her to read the novels. She was immediately drawn to the “elegance and eloquence” of Austen’s world, and she’s immersed herself in that world ever since, studying the novels, film and television adaptations, fan fiction, biographies, and literary criticism, and writing for her blog, Laughing with Lizzie.

I’m happy to introduce her contribution to Emma in the Snow, a guest post on the many matches, both real and hypothetical, in Emma. I’ve also enjoyed looking at the photos she sent to accompany the post, and I hope you will, too. Sophie is passionate about sharing her love of Jane Austen and she says she hopes to “encourage people of all ages everywhere to discover the real pleasure of reading.” If you’re interested in talking with her about Jane Austen and the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, you might want to look her up on Facebook and/or Twitter (@laughingwithliz).

Throughout the novel Emma, many different pairings of people are hinted at or hoped for—the book is centred on Emma and her match-making, after all. Now, you’re probably thinking, “yes, I know that,” but I still chose to write about this because it wasn’t until I sat down and remembered each one that I realised just how many matches there are. So, I hope some of you reading this will be just as surprised as I was when I actually thought about it—you’ll have to read to the end to get the final tally. (Or you could count up for yourself and see if your number matches mine at the end.)

First, we have John Knightley and Isabella Woodhouse. This is the first match, and the one that sets Emma off on her match-making schemes, as she believes she was very instrumental in bringing about the marriage of her sister and Mr. Knightley’s brother. This is one of my favourite matches; I do like relationships in which friendship develops into love (not to mention the way this one is linked to the most important match of the novel).

Quite quickly following this, we have the marriage of Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston, which further assures Emma of her match-making talents. Mr. Knightley disagrees with her regarding her influence in this match: “if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day, ‘I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her,’ and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards,—why do you talk of success?” (Volume 1, Chapter 1) But Emma is determined it she made it happen, as everyone believed that Mr. Weston would never marry again. She thinks it’s a triumph; Mr. Knightley thinks it’s merely a lucky guess—but have you never known the triumph of a lucky guess? For Mr. Woodhouse, however, this match is not a triumph at all, for it has taken “poor Miss Taylor” half a mile away from Hartfield.

Although she would never admit it, Emma’s triumph is rather lessened when she realises that she has lost something very dear to her—the company of her governess, her dear friend. The matchmaking must continue, therefore, as Emma needs a new companion. And she is clearly enjoying demonstrating her new-found “talent” of match-making. Cue Mr. Elton. Emma decides that the local vicar must be in want of a wife. Cue Harriet Smith. She becomes Emma’s companion and Emma decides to find her a husband. Naturally, Emma decides they would make a lovely couple.

One problem: Mr. Robert Martin and his proposal of marriage. Emma undertakes to decline Mr. Martin on Harriet’s behalf, all the while leading Harriet to believe she isn’t being influenced by Emma at all. With Mr. Martin out of the way, the road is clear for Mr. Elton, and Emma is sure that Harriet and Elton will be married by the New Year. But then, to Emma’s utter amazement, Mr. Elton expresses his love for her, not Harriet. What an embarrassment—all this time he was admiring her, and only being civil towards Harriet because she was Emma’s friend. He doesn’t even care whether Harriet lives or dies? What a shocking thing to say! After the embarrassment of that match gone wrong, and after seeing how poor Harriet suffers because of it, Emma decides she will never match-make again. For a little while, she maintains her resolve, and the next matches that follow are not engineered by her.

Jane Fairfax comes on the scene, shortly followed by Mr. Frank Churchill, the prodigal son. Jane decided not to go to Ireland with the Campbells and the Dixons, for a very particular reason, according to Frank. This next match is only hinted at, but Frank suggests the possibility of an “understanding” between Jane and Mr. Dixon after the incident with Mr. Dixon saving her life—how romantic! A pianoforte arrives for Jane and everyone assumes it must be from Colonel Campbell. However, Frank Churchill says he believes it was Mr. Dixon because of the affection he had for Jane, just after marrying Colonel Campbell’s daughter—awkward!

The next suggested match is from Mrs. Weston. She imagines that Jane and Mr. Knightley have formed an attachment. She mentions this to Emma, who rejects it straight away. (Mr. Knightley and Jane? Never!) Mrs. Weston believes Mr. Knightley sent the piano, and thinks the care he is showing for Jane’s welfare is another sign of an attachment.

Next we have the idea of a match between Frank Churchill and Emma. Mr. and Mrs. Weston have long hoped that Emma and Frank will form an attachment, and the two young people do seem very interested in each other, with Frank appearing to pay particular attention to Emma. Then Mr. Elton comes back on the scene—with his new bride.

Emma now decides to restart her match-making schemes, and once again they involve poor Harriet. Emma is convinced that Harriet is beginning to fall for Frank Churchill, and she likes the idea that this match will help ease Harriet’s disappointment about Mr. Elton. Yet Mr. Knightley believes there may be some sort of attachment between Frank Churchill and Jane. This is ludicrous, as far as Emma is concerned. After all, Frank has told her many times how little he thinks of Jane Fairfax. And Emma is never wrong!

Except she is. All of Emma’s hopes for Harriet, and the hopes of the Westons for Emma, are dashed when it is revealed that Frank is indeed engaged to Jane Fairfax. This match shows Emma how blind she has been, and after the revelation, Emma has to break the news to poor Harriet. But Harriet already knows, and is not very affected by the news, either. Emma does not understand this response, until she realises she has been mistaken—yet again. It was not Frank’s heroic rescue which set Harriet’s heart a-flutter, it was Mr. Knightley’s, when he asked her to dance after she was snubbed by Mr. Elton at the ball. This is not what Emma was expecting and the news is, strangely, very unwelcome, especially as Harriet believes Mr. Knightley returns her affections. This shocking turn of events helps Emma to realise her own feelings, as “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” (Volume 3, Chapter 11)

Finally—the most important match of all, Emma and Mr. Knightley. Fortunately for Emma, Mr. Knightley is in love with her, not with Harriet. And, fortunately for Harriet, Robert Martin still loves her and wishes to marry her. I think it’s interesting that the most important match, between Emma and Mr. Knightley, is the only one which is never predicted, suggested or hinted at by any other person before it happens. The union doesn’t take place until Emma herself realises her feelings, and then speaks to Mr. Knightley. I think it’s amusing that the most important match, the one for the heroine—a heroine who spends the entire novel match-making for everyone else—is never thought of by anyone else. I suppose just as it’s a surprise to Emma, the match will be quite a surprise to all their friends, even though they all know the two of them are close to each other, and even though the first match in the novel is between their brother and sister.

There really are many matches in Emma, both real and imagined. So what number did you make it? I make it twelve! Marriages: John Knightley and Isabella Woodhouse, Mr. Weston and Miss Taylor, Mr. Elton and Miss Augusta Hawkins, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley, Harriet Smith and Robert Martin. Hypothetical matches: Harriet Smith and Mr. Elton, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Elton, Jane Fairfax and Mr. Dixon, Emma Woodhouse and Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax and Mr. Knightley, Harriet Smith and Mr. Knightley.

My thanks go to Sarah for inviting me to participate in this celebration. I hope you have enjoyed my contribution!

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Emma, edited by R.W. Chapman (1933).

Thirteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Cheryl Kinney, George Justice, and Gillian Dow.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

A Small Piece of Court Plaster and an Old Pencil

After teaching world literature for thirteen years, Elisabeth Lenckos is writing a novel about an adventuress who lived in the time of Jane Austen. She’s the co-editor, with Natasha Duquette, of Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony (2013), and, with Ellen J. Miller, of “All This Reading”: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003). Her Austen-inspired short stories have been published in Wooing Mr. Wickham (2011) and Beguiling Miss Bennet (2015). Elisabeth currently divides her time between London, Berlin, and Chicago.

When I hosted a celebration of 200 years of Mansfield Park, she contributed a guest post on flattery and charm in the novel, and I’m delighted to welcome her back to the blog with today’s guest post on Harriet Smith’s “Most precious treasures,” E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, and the collector culture of Emma. She’s been posting photos of “flowers from London” on Facebook recently, and so I asked her if we could include one of her photos here (in lieu of more “Canada in the snow” photos from me). This is the display outside Dansk Flowers, near St. Mary’s Church in Islington.

If a small piece of court plaster and an old pencil are not among the things you remember from your perusal of Jane Austen’s Emma, you will be forgiven. Yet they feature prominently, albeit incongruously, in the novel as the “Most precious treasures” of Harriet Smith, who presents them to Emma Woodhouse as evidence of the crush she formerly had on Mr. Elton (Volume 3, Chapter 4). Signaling the death of an old infatuation and the birth of a new, Harriet disposes of the items in a ritual auto-da-fé, while Emma looks on, embarrassed at having to witness not only the pathos of the mementos, but the tragedy of their destruction. Little does she suspect that there is method to Harriet’s madness: “the natural daughter of somebody” (Volume 1, Chapter 1) has set her sights on the most eligible bachelor in Highbury and means to enlist Emma’s goodwill as she aspires to marriage with Mr. George Knightley.

Although Miss Woodhouse cringes at her friend’s sentimentality, Miss Smith’s exhibition betokens her acute understanding of the importance of icons and of the significance an item takes on when it becomes part of a collection. However misguided Harriet’s behavior might appear to Emma because the contents of her “pretty little Tunbridge-ware box” have no intrinsic worth, Harriet’s aspiration to be a collector shows that she is aware of the age’s famous passion for amassing and sheltering not only precious things, but specimens of any kind—animal, inanimate, botanical, and everyday. Given that this is the age of John Hunter, Hans Sloane, and Alexander Humboldt, who can say what might or might not belong in a future museum or cabinet of curiosities?

Harriet’s perspicacity reveals itself further in her specific choice of the Tunbridge-ware box. While inherently modest compared with such treasures as Mr. Woodhouse’s Pembroke table, the box is a product of Regency England’s burgeoning souvenir industry, and therefore a poignant reminder that Miss Smith has traveled more widely than Miss Woodhouse, and at least in this small regard, has the advantage over her. Not that Emma is wise to Harriet’s subtle message; her notion of Miss Smith as a candidate for improvement renders her blind to the possibility that her protégé has an existence other than the one she imagines for her. There are plenty of hints that Harriet leads a secret life, but Emma ignores them—until she discovers that they wish to marry the same man.

Why is Emma so oblivious? Because she, too, aspires to be a collector, not of things, but of charitable causes, which she hopes will further enhance her position in Highbury society. Convinced she has made a beginning with her governess, and enjoying the warm glow that comes from having done a good deed, she is keen to create another happy match and to score a further success. She does not listen to Mr. Knightley, who maintains she only guessed at the attachment between the future Mrs. Weston and her husband and fails to see how any good can come from her association with Harriet Smith.

As he intimates, Emma’s problem is that she has no equal in Highbury—but even if there were such a person, would she care keep her company? Emma’s dislike of Jane Fairfax, whom Mr. Knightley identifies as a likely confidante, reveals that Emma much prefers the role of lady patroness to that of friend; she selects Harriet precisely because she may condescend to her as a social inferior. Her refusal to consider Harriet’s thoughts and feelings as distinct from her own makes Emma appear like a rich girl playing with a doll—one of the famous automatons, perhaps, which fascinated Europe at the turn of the century and were sometimes mistaken as persons, an event recounted in the story The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann, published the same year as Emma.

Like The Sandman, Emma is about objectification—the expectations and fantasies human beings project on the objects of their desire, thus anticipating Freudian psychology. It is also about the perils of patronage, which creates relationships that are innately imbalanced and result in the personal self-aggrandizement of the giving partner at the cost of the supposedly grateful recipient. There is perhaps a good reason why the rising class of philanthropists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries described the disadvantaged members of society—widows, orphans, and the infirm—as the “proper objects of charity.” For while there is no doubt that benevolent individuals and institutions helped to relieve poverty and want, the language they employed resounds with the condescending attitudes that often informed their behavior.

One such institution, with which Jane Austen was almost certainly familiar, is the Foundling Hospital near Brunswick Square, London. Can it be a coincidence that Brunswick Square is the location of John Knightley’s home, where Harriet Smith reunites with Robert Martin at the conclusion of the novel? Although the Foundling Hospital is not explicitly mentioned in Emma, the heroine’s ambition to improve the fate of unfortunate loners reflects her awareness that “collecting orphans” might be an activity a nineteenth-century gentlewoman should engage in, if she wants to be thought virtuous. What Emma doesn’t understand is that unlike the work of the Foundling Hospital, her charity does more harm than good, since it is spurious, executed at little expense, and easily abandoned when it becomes inconvenient.

But Emma is not merely handsome, clever, and rich—she is also fortunate. Given the speed with which Harriet recovers from her attachment to Mr. Knightley, one might perhaps wonder whether the affection in which she held him was really profound. Is it possible that Harriet is not naïve, but rather, disingenuous? That she only pretended to be in love in order to please, and deceive, her overpowering patron? This is a very real possibility, but one at which Austen wisely only hints.

And why be hard on Harriet? She is (almost) the only woman in a novel about the boundlessness of female ambition—think Mrs. Elton, Mrs. Coles, Mrs. Suckling, and yes, Jane Fairfax—who is contented with being a farmer’s wife. Mr. Knightley feels strongly that in marrying Robert Martin, Harriet has done well, but I would like to give her more credit. Although Emma lays claim to being an imaginist, it is Harriet, in my opinion, who is the true visionary. She, who attaches importance to a piece of plaster and a discarded pencil, is able to see the beauty in a man who, to others, seems dull and awkward. More importantly, Harriet’s change of heart provides Emma with an insight into her own snobbery, which has kept her from acknowledging the superiority of quiet, temperate Mr. Knightley over the flashy, spendthrift Frank Churchill.

How does a man of moderate, even traditional, tastes deport himself in the culture of ostentation that pervades Regency England? In contrast to Mr. Elton and Mr. Churchill, who try to impress Highbury with their imported extravagance, Mr. Knightley invites his circle to a strawberry-picking party at his home, Donwell Abbey. Although the day is one of simple pleasures—tours of the house, strolls around the property, a cold repast—Emma enjoys herself, and more importantly, realizes how much she admires this old-fashioned estate. She is particularly struck by “its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up” (Volume 3, Chapter 6), an interesting description, given the startling contrast the fine, unspoiled trees make to Mr. Elton’s sad, empty shell of a pencil.

Perhaps not surprisingly in a novel whose heroine is called Miss Woodhouse, Emma abounds with references to the symbolic significance of wood. Although her father prefers his old Pembroke, she buys a modern table for Hartfield, envies Jane’s pianoforte, and does nothing to prevent Harriet from throwing the pencil on the fire—only to revel in the survival of Mr. Knightley’s arboretum. In this respect, Emma appears like the quintessential modern consumer, who has become estranged from nature and reexamines her attitude when faced with its beauty and productivity. What a fascinating ending! Emma, who was only interested in the artifacts she could purchase at Ford’s, intuits the beauty of agriculture and longs to live in the world it creates. Like Harriet, she marries its custodian, a farmer—even if he is gentleman farmer—and a man for whom collecting is not an indulgent pastime, but a sacred vocation.

I would like to imagine that as a married woman and a mother, Emma might perhaps be tempted to start her own collection of memorabilia. Who knows, she might even keep it in a Tunbridge-ware box her son or daughter buys with their pin money, a box that might contain another piece of court plaster and a bit of pencil? I can see Emma sitting at her desk, gazing lovingly at these banal-seeming keepsakes, thinking back to the time when she knew nothing about the value an object acquires when one knows it belonged to a loved one. She tenderly places the plaster and the pencil back in the box and wraps her Indian shawl around her shoulders. It is time she visited Harriet Martin and offered her an apology.

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Emma, edited by R.W. Chapman (1933).

Twelfth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Carol Chernega, Sophie Andrews, and Cheryl Kinney.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

“English verdure”

Janet Todd has recently retired after half a century of full-time teaching and administering mainly in Britain and America, and she has, she says, “turned with relief to reading and writing novels.” Lady Susan Plays the Game, an Austen spin-off, was published in 2013. Her first original fiction, A Man of Genius, set in Venice and Regency London, will be published in March by Bitter Lemon Press. I looked up some of the advance praise for the novel and found that Philippa Gregory calls A Man of Genius “Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness.” Sounds irresistible, doesn’t it?

Janet is the author and editor of many books on Austen and other writers, including Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels; The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice; and biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn. She is General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. It’s my pleasure to introduce her guest post for Emma in the Snow, on “English verdure.”

A recent conference at Chawton House to honour Marilyn Butler reminded us all of her influential Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Written 40 years ago, it placed Austen within her literary-political context, arguing for an ideologically conservative and patriotic author committed to the Anglican Tory values of her family. Since then it has provoked critics seeking to fit Austen into present orthodoxies, relieving her of possible taints of classism, sexism and racism. Also nationalism: the Englishness of Emma as she stands in the grounds of George Knightley’s ancient Donwell Abbey.

It’s near midsummer. Emma regards the unimproved estate:

she viewed the respectable size and style of the building, its suitable, becoming characteristic situation, low and sheltered—its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up. … The house … was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was.

She strays further.

It was hot; and … they insensibly followed one another to the delicious shade of a broad short avenue of limes, which stretching beyond the garden at an equal distance from the river, seemed the finish of the pleasure grounds.—It led to nothing; nothing but a view at the end over a low stone wall with high pillars, which seemed intended, in their erection, to give the appearance of an approach to the house, which never had been there.

She sees woods, slopes and

Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.

It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive. (Volume 3, Chapter 6)

Hidcote Bartrim (Janet’s photo)

All moderation, ease, and balance—without the violent sun of southern countries. The grounds Emma contemplates are not formal, contrived and abstract, not planned in the way of French and British reformers of land, people or states, its avenues of old established lime trees, its views of a satisfying “nothing.”

It’s well that she likes it. In contrast not only to the cosmopolitan naval men of Persuasion and Mansfield Park, but also to Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, who experience different scenes and cultures, the wealthier, more privileged Emma is almost stationary, contained in her small community of Highbury. Though the most imaginative and dominant, she is the most controlled of the heroines. She’s almost imprisoned at home, where she pays for her significance by thraldom to a selfish, demanding and adoring father whom she pretty well infantilizes. The sense of claustrophobia is real—at the end as well as at the beginning. She has realised her love for Mr. Knightley in part through snobbish distaste at the horror of a Jane or Harriet as mistress of Donwell Abbey. When her father dies, she herself will be fixed there for life.

Nationalism was a conflicted notion in Austen’s time. Liberal thinkers of the 1790s yearned for an internationalism of spirit, comically vanquished here as George of England defeats Frank for an Emma—whom the latter never actually wanted. In the early 19th century national stories were all the rage, bardic tales of the “Celtic fringe”: Sydney Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl, many Irish and Welsh works of Maria Edgeworth, Iolo Morganwg, and Walter Scott. There was no equivalent for England.

Or was there in Austen’s Emma?

Cambridge in the snow (Janet’s photo)

In the other two novels begun in Chawton, Persuasion and Mansfield Park, the navy stands for the nation, defined through men employed to guard it. This nationalism is tied to growth in state administration: Anne Frey therefore sees a new bureaucratic identify for Britishness. This identity develops against the Englishness of the landed gentry, an aristocratic sense of place, ownership and evolving organic community. (See Anne Frey, “A Nation without Nationalism: the Reorganization of Feeling in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” in Novel [March 2005].) If this is so, unlike the other two novels, Emma is about Englishness.

In which case, in its insistence on the value of small things and emphasis on “nothing” it may gently mock the fashionable fictions that made their nationalisms exotic, full and a little simplified. But it may also—just a little—ironise Emma and her provincial vision.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume had commented on parochial attitudes of English gentlemen: devoted to “domestic affairs” and everyday objects. Irish and Scottish nationalist writers of Austen’s time would have made poverty clearly part of a story and openly addressed the politics underpinning their vision. Just before her musing on England, Emma had complacently considered the established gentry family that owns the estate. But here, looking across Donwell grounds, she makes no class assumptions, not even registering the tenancy of Robert Martin whom she’d so despised as Harriet’s suitor. Her looking, though containing agriculture, is primarily aesthetic.

And she sees a pastoral England—just before she marries a magistrate and working farmer who will be helped by the capital she brings. Jane Fairfax, who knows a world beyond Highbury, leaves with the man who yearns for continental travel. Emma may well see the sea but fleetingly: she will live yoked physically to her father and socially to two women who irritate her: Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton. She will have to stay longer in the homes of the poor and put up with the irritation of adjacent lives in her patch of gentle “English verdure.”

Quotations are from the Cambridge edition of Emma, edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (2005).

Eleventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Elisabeth Lenckos, Carol Chernega, and Cheryl Kinney.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

The Gypsies in Emma

Susannah Fullerton is President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia and the author of Jane Austen and Crime (2004), A Dance with Jane Austen: How a Novelist and her Characters went to the Ball (2012), and Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (2013). She writes about her wide-ranging literary interests for her Google Classic Novels site and in her newsletter, “Notes from a Book Addict,” and she leads literary tours to Jane Austen country, and to France, USA, Ireland, and Italy for Australians Studying Abroad. Sometimes, she takes her tour groups to one of my own favourite places, Prince Edward Island, to visit Green Gables and other literary sites. Susannah is Patron of the Kipling Society of Australia, and she’s the author and presenter of the audio CD Finding Katherine Mansfield (2009). I’m pleased to introduce her guest post for Emma in the Snow.

The encounter with the gypsies—such a small incident in the novel, and yet it achieves so much. The day after the Crown Inn Ball Harriet Smith and her school friend Miss Bickerton go out for a walk and encounter a group of gypsies: “half a dozen children, headed by a stout woman and a great boy, all clamorous and impertinent” (Volume 3, Chapter 3). The gypsies want money from the two girls and seem prepared to use violence to get it. Miss Bickerton runs away as fast as her legs will carry her, but Harriet suffers cramp as a result of all her energetic dancing the night before, and is left to the mercies of these gypsies. She gives them a shilling, but they demand more and poor Harriet is terrified. She begs the group not “to use her ill.” Of course, as every reader of Emma knows, she is then rescued by Frank Churchill, who gets her safely to Hartfield where she faints dead away.

A modern reader might condemn Harriet for her timidity and her fainting, but Jane Austen’s contemporary readers would all have known just why Harriet faints. Gypsies were seen as a major problem in England in Austen’s time. There had been an attempt in 1563 to expel every gypsy from the country, but that failed and for the next centuries gypsies eked out an existence on the margins of society—pilfering and moving on, raiding hen-houses and moving on, avoiding the authorities as much as possible. In Jane Austen’s juvenile work Evelyn, the not very heroic hero Mr. Gower is terrified as he rides home at night and closes his eyes “to prevent his seeing either Gypsies or Ghosts.” Such was society’s hatred of gypsies that it actually became a hanging offence to be found “conversing with gypsies.” The legal authorities of England took it for granted that if you were in conversation with a gypsy, then it must be for no good purpose. In 1782 a fourteen-year-old girl, desperately protesting her innocence, was hanged for being found in the company of gypsies. Of course any humane judge would be most unlikely to put poor Harriet to death for her misadventure, but technically Harriet Smith commits a serious crime that could result in her life being terminated. No wonder she faints! Contemporary readers would have been far more sympathetic to her peril and would have totally understood her reaction.

“The Gypsies did not wait for the operations of justice: they took themselves off in a hurry.” Emma promises Frank that she will give “notice of there being such a set of people in the neighbourhood to Mr Knightley.” He is, of course, the local magistrate, and knows how to deal with such a gang. Emma’s nephews then regularly demand the exciting tale of Harriet and the gypsies, “tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital” and that seems to be the end of the business. But of course it is these very gypsies and their attack which start Emma linking Harriet and her rescuer romantically in her own mind—and we all know into what trouble that leads her.

“The terror … was then their own portion.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (Source: Mollands.net).

But do those gypsies make a second appearance in the novel? In the final chapter “Mrs Weston’s poultry-house was robbed one night of all her turkies—evidently by the ingenuity of man. Other poultry-yards in the neighbourhood also suffered.—Pilfering was housebreaking to Mr Woodhouse’s fears.—He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son-in-law’s protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life” (Volume 3, Chapter 19). It is for this reason that he agrees, far more willingly than anyone expected, to Emma’s marriage, so that Mr Knightley can live at Hartfield and protect them all. We do not know for certain that the poultry is stolen by gypsies, but they must be the first suspects—they surely scouted out the neighbourhood when there previously, and a quick raid back to grab some chickens and turkeys is highly likely. If so, they are responsible for bringing about the marriage of the hero and heroine of the novel—no mean accomplishment by the novel’s most unsavoury characters.

The gypsies in Emma give us a glimpse of the crime that was so prevalent in Georgian society. This may not be an obvious feature of Jane Austen’s novels, but it is an important one, as I discovered when I wrote my book Jane Austen and Crime. Jane Austen does have her darker side—duels, thefts, elopement, hangings, adultery, gaols, and even murder all have a place in her writings, and learning more about the crimes she depicts adds much to contemporary understanding of her novels.

Tenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Janet Todd, Carol Chernega, and Elisabeth Lenckos.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).

Mrs. Elton’s Donkey

Diana Birchall has imagined a conversation between Mrs. Elton and her husband for Emma in the Snow, and I’m delighted to share her story with you here. One of the things I like best about hosting this celebration for Emma is the range of different approaches to the novel. Contributors to this series and to the celebration I hosted for Mansfield Park in 2014 include novelists, journalists, bloggers, booksellers, librarians, lawyers, and doctors, along with graduate students, postdocs, professors, and independent scholars. I’m always interested to see each contributor’s perspective on Jane Austen’s novels, and I like that sometimes the guest posts include recipes, for example, or fiction, along with literary analysis.

Diana recently retired from her career as a story analyst at Warner Bros., where she read novels to see if they would make movies. The author of a scholarly biography of her grandmother, the first Asian American novelist, Onoto Watanna (University of Illinois Press), and several “Austenesque” novels, including Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma and Mrs. Elton in America (Sourcebooks), she has also written several plays performed at JASNA AGMs. In Defense of Mrs. Elton, written by Diana and illustrated by Juliet McMaster, can be read on the JASNA website. Diana’s guest post for my Mansfield Park series was a short story entitled “The Scene-Painter.” She tells me she plans to write more novels now that she no longer has to spend her days reading about dragons and robots.

She also tells me that she “apologizes for this ‘Emma in the Snow’ post having nothing whatever to do with winter, and even taking place in midsummer.” Her excuse, she says, is that she is not writing from Halifax, but from Santa Monica.

Diana’s photo of a recent Santa Monica sunset

“I wish we had a donkey. The thing would be for us all to come on donkies, Jane, Miss Bates, and me—and my caro sposo walking by. I really must talk to him about purchasing a donkey. In a country life I conceive it to be a sort of necessary; for, let a woman have ever so many resources, it is not possible for her to be always shut up at home;—and very long walks, you know—in summer there is dust, and in winter there is dirt.”

— Mrs. Elton, Emma, Volume 3, Chapter 6 (Oxford University Press, 1933).

Mrs. Elton is a very old friend of mine. As a young woman, on my first reading of Emma, I had the perhaps somewhat abnormal reaction of identifying with Mrs. Elton (surely a heroine whom no one but myself could much like). I saw in her not the obnoxious embodiment of vulgarity, but someone over-compensating for her uneasy status as an outsider. Even Emma acknowledges her as “a stranger—a bride,” but is critical because she has too much “ease” (Volume 2, Chapter 14). I saw that ease as hard won bravado, and admired rather than disliked her, as Jane Austen skilfully prompts us to do. In her unwise, forward and unsuccessful approaches to Emma, her clumsy attempts to latch onto and even control the elegant Jane Fairfax, her obtuse and blundering ways, I saw a pitiable brashness to cover social insecurity. Emma’s snobbish and almost instantaneous rejection of her seemed more reprehensible than Mrs. Elton’s ill-judging attempts to make friends; more of Emma’s “little faults” which were just as great as Mrs. Elton’s (Volume 1, Chapter 5). Such meditations led to my writing “In Defense of Mrs. Elton,” most likely the first internet serial Janeite story, which was published as the conference gift of the 1999 JASNA AGM, and led to more Mrs. Elton stories and plays.

Mrs. Elton, “the most indefatigable, true friend” (Volume 3, Chapter 8), has never let me down, but I confess I was hard pressed to find anything new to say about her on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of Emma’s publication. (And of course the subject had to be Mrs. Elton, as in my mind the novel ought to be retitled “Augusta.”) The image that popped into my mind, and stubbornly balked against going away, was a detail in a single scene: Mrs. Elton’s imaginary donkey. Mrs. Elton in fact has no donkey; she and her husband are provided with an unexceptionable carriage and horses that suffice for their needs, though of course they cannot be compared with her wealthy sister’s equipage, a barouche-landau. But on one occasion, the Eltons’ horses fail them. One falls ill, and is the reason why the exploring-party to Box Hill cannot take place, and the more local strawberry party at Donwell Abbey is substituted. Therefore, it is when Mrs. Elton is temporarily steedless that she fantasizes about a donkey. Of course Jane Austen intended this detail—another tiny instance of how rich her details always are!

Mrs. Elton’s desire is a bit mixed, however. “I wish we had a donkey,” she declares, and it is one of her socially aspirational wishes, for although donkeys are not expensive (far less so than horses), the nouveau riche Mrs. Cole possesses one, and Mrs. Elton does not. The humble donkey can be seen as an aspirational object in another way, for by forming part of a Marie-Antoinette style of play on rusticity, Mrs. Elton can be the simple maid in a Highbury Petit Trianon of her own—i.e., an aristocrat.

Fanciful as it sounds, with its playful suggestion of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” there is actuality nothing outlandish or impractical in Mrs. Elton having a donkey, funny though Jane Austen makes the expressed wish sound in her mouth. Despite Mr. Knightley’s calm reassurance that there is no dirt in the roads between Donwell and Highbury in high summer, Mrs. Elton is very conscious of the mile-long walk before her, from Highbury to Donwell. Jane Fairfax, who claims to “walk fast,” later says she can do the walk in twenty minutes, which indicates a mile (Volume 3, Chapter 6). Though Jane makes little of this walk, Mrs. Elton is evidently not as fond of walking. “Very long walks, you know—in summer there is dust, and in winter there is dirt,” she protests to Mr. Knightley. And we may remember the evidence of her sister Selina who is quoted as saying about her: “I really cannot get this girl to move from the house … Augusta, I believe, with her own good will, would never stir beyond the park paling” (Volume 2, Chapter 14). Emma seems to share Mrs. Elton’s views on walking, if nothing else; even before the incident of the party of gipsies that confronted Harriet and her friend on a road half a mile out of Highbury, Emma felt that “solitary female walking” was “not pleasant,” and she saw having a walking companion in Harriet Smith as “one of her privileges” (Volume 1, Chapters 2 and 4). If Emma might have a Harriet, Mrs. Elton might have a donkey. A donkey was an inexpensive way for a lady to travel about her neighborhood, and Jane Austen knew all about this mode of travel, because her own mother, professedly subject to indifferent health, had both a donkey and donkey carriage. Sadly and ironically, only a few years after the donkey’s mention in Emma, Jane Austen herself became too weak to walk to the neighboring village, and resorted to her mother’s donkey carriage. (The carriage itself is still on display at Chawton.)

Mrs. Elton may have had yet another motive for wanting a donkey. Providing asses’ milk for Jane Fairfax would have been considered healthful for the fragile Jane, whose family was constantly apprehensive that she might have a pulmonary complaint. Asses’ milk was considered the best medicine for such complaints. More to the point for Mrs. Elton, she would have appeared even more of a Lady Bountiful, if she could have dispensed such to poor Jane. Still, she is unlikely to have thought this far, as she has not yet even considered the donkey request in practical terms. “We should all go on donkies—Jane, Miss Bates, and I,” she says. That would mean not one but three “donkies,” more than Mr. Elton would ever wish to purchase and keep, and more than Mrs. Cole could lend (as Mr. Knightley suggests). No doubt three donkeys might have been borrowed from the stable at the Crown, but it seems unnecessary trouble for what would be a primarily ornamental purpose, as the ladies, even the heavily pregnant Mrs. Weston, are perfectly able to walk to Donwell Abbey on a bright midsummer day. But Mrs. Elton, we notice, is not conceiving of a donkey-carriage to convey herself and her friends. No, she is picturing a parade of the three ladies on donkeys, a ridiculous spectacle, though the precise number to form “the picturesque.”

We may retreat from this glorious imaginary image to reflect on one of Jane Austen’s rather rare but sly word usages that associates a special animal with a character. This is done not by direct linkage, but by an airy mention in fairly near context: for example, elsewhere in this very novel, there is the “beautiful goose” Mrs. Martin (Harriet’s future mother-in-law) sends to the teacher Mrs. Goddard (Volume 1, Chapter 4); and what is Harriet herself but a beautiful goose? This may lead us to ponder on who, pray, is Mrs. Elton’s donkey? Could it be, perchance, her own servile husband? (To say nothing of the folly of an entranced and bedazzled writer, two centuries later, doing donkey duty to Mrs. Elton.)

Let us consider this aspect of donkey symbolism by daringly listening in on a connubial conversation between Mrs. and Mr. Elton.

Illustration by Juliet McMaster, from In Defense of Mrs. Elton

“My dear,” Mrs. Elton said to her lord and master that night, as they mounted the stairs to their bedroom, “I really was sincere in my request for a donkey.”

“Were you indeed?” he replied. “I had no idea of it. I thought it was only your bewitching playfulness. Oh! the picture of a country scene you evoked, was there ever any thing so charming!”

“I knew you would appreciate it,” she said complacently, “but I doubt if any one else did. They were all too absorbed in their own concerns, as ever.  Knightley so lost in his eccentricity—poor Jane desponding in her sad plight—and Miss Woodhouse, well! I would do better not to even mention her.”

“So you would. Exactly so. Such self-satisfaction, such conceit! Thinking all the world should worship at her feet. I pity who ever gets Miss High and Mighty. I know when I am well suited,” her husband agreed.

“I think,” Mrs. Elton said shrewdly, “our friends the Westons are rather angling for it to be Frank Churchill.”

“Oh!  No surprise there. Money always marries money, you know. Poor Churchill, to be wed to such a headstrong young lady. One could pity him.”

Mrs. Elton was pleased with her husband’s correct sentiment, and continued, “Do not you think she was more abominably rude today even than usual?”

Mr. Elton was patting the bed-covers. “My dear, I cannot find my night-shirt. They forgot to lay it out. Do not trouble yourself about that woman’s rudeness. Every one knows what is due to you as a real lady.”

“Here is your shirt, upon the chair. Hold up the candle. But did not you hear what she said to poor Miss Bates? I was shocked. Insufferable woman. Three things, very dull indeed! I positively had to move away from her, or I should have given her quite a set down.”

“Never mind, my love. Your restraint was perfection. She could learn a good deal from your example, but I suppose she never will.”

“I dare say not; but Mr. Elton, now, what about the donkey?”

They had both climbed into their four-poster, and he yawned.

“Why, I will speak to the Crown ostler, if you wish it, my dear, and see what he has available. Though I hardly think a donkey a necessity. Our horse is well enough for Box Hill tomorrow, and you will not be so inconvenienced again.”

“Well, that is good news. It is monstrous to have no carriage available when one wants one.”

“And you know, you have only to send the boy to the Crown any day to bespeak any number of donkeys you like, on a moment’s notice.”

“Very true, Philip. Never mind then, I do not want a donkey after all. A lady does not appear elegant on a donkey.”

“To be sure not.”

“Mrs. Cole finds hers useful I believe, but she looks perfectly absurd, that stout little woman going along on an ass! I should not like to make such a figure.”

“You, my dear!” he sighed in a half-sentence, as if words could not express how little her elegant slenderness could be compared to Mrs. Cole.

“I will tell you what I do want,” Mrs. Elton said suddenly, from the depths of the feather pillows.

“What is that, my love?” he asked somewhat apprehensively.

“Only a complete set of new curtains—those yellows have let the summer sun in so strongly that our valuable carpet is sadly faded.”

“But they are only three months old,” he protested feebly, “they were new upon our marriage, purchased when I was preparing the house for you, my dear.”

“Oh, Philip, that is why you cannot depend on a man to new-furnish a house. They have no eye for the sort of thing. And we can afford new curtains, I hope. I have made so many economies in the kitchen, you know, not letting the second table have meat more than twice a week. And as we are not to have a donkey, there is the cost of its feed, all saved. I must have curtains that are in the fashion. Miss Woodhouse has a new chintz that is the prettiest thing. I would not have thought she had so much taste….”

After the subjects of Miss Woodhouse and the curtains had been canvassed and exhausted for another quarter of an hour, Mr. Elton, exhausted, agreed to every thing. The light was blown out, good night kisses exchanged, and in a little while there was quiet as the pair slept. If the vicar had the nightmare, we shall not enquire if he dreamed that he had turned into a species of jack-ass.

Ninth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Carol Chernega, Janet Todd, and Susannah Fullerton.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

 

The Blinding Power of Pride

Mary C.M. Phillips’s guest post for Emma in the Snow explores connections between Emma and Persuasion, focusing on the dangers of pride. Mary writes about Jane Austen and Edith Wharton at CaffeineEpiphanies.com, and her stories and essays have been published in Chicken Soup for the Soul, A Cup of Comfort, Bad Austen: The Worst Stories Jane Never Wrote, and other anthologies.

She’s a member of JASNA’s New York Metropolitan Region, and as a musician she has toured nationally with Matthew Sweet, Rob Bartlett, and Barry Mitchell. For my Mansfield Park series last year, she contributed a guest post on Mary Crawford’s famous question about Fanny Price, “Pray, is she out, or is she not?” I hope you’ll enjoy reading what she has to say about pride in Emma.

Halifax in the snow. From the first major snowstorm of the year, which hit Nova Scotia earlier this week.

The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee. — Obadiah 3 (KJV)

Pride refers to an inflated sense of self and it’s a major theme in Jane Austen’s novels. It can blind characters to the truth and make them less likeable. In Chapter 7 of Emma, Emma Woodhouse’s interpretation of Robert Martin’s letter to Harriet Smith and her poor judgement of character are strongly influenced by the blinding power of pride.

After Mr. Martin sends a fine, well-crafted proposal of marriage to Harriet, Emma’s “disposition to think a little too well of herself” (Chapter 1) takes over. She is suddenly unable to see clearly. She does see that the letter is one of quality, but she cannot see that the writer of the letter is a person of quality. She persuades Harriet to refuse Mr. Martin’s proposal.

This is the first time I truly dislike Emma. I cannot help but dislike her as she blatantly takes someone’s future into her own hands and handles it badly. She treats both Harriet and Mr. Martin as pawns, without the slightest concern as to the consequences of her misguided advice. Emma believes she cannot make a mistake, and in this belief she reminds me very much of Lady Russell in Persuasion, who persuades a young Anne Elliot to give up Frederick Wentworth. Like Emma, Lady Russell is a woman of good taste, but she is blinded by pride:

She was a benevolent, charitable, good woman, and capable of strong attachments; most correct in her conduct, strict in her notions of decorum, and with manners that were held a standard of good-breeding. She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent—but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry; she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them. (Chapter 2)

Emma, like Lady Russell, goes through life seeing (and judging) people as she chooses to see (and judge) them. The scene in which Emma attempts to draw a portrait of Harriet offers a good example of the difficulty she has in seeing and accepting things as they are. “You have made her too tall, Emma,” says Mr. Knightley (Chapter 6). Mr. Knightley, aptly named, is the only person who speaks truth without distorted perception.

Over and over again, we see examples of Emma’s blindness. She’s unable to see Mr. Martin’s good qualities or Harriet’s faults; she’s unable to see Mr. Elton’s infatuation with her and lack of infatuation with Harriet. She is also completely blind to the romance between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill—granted, so are most readers—and even blind to the fact that she is in love with Mr. Knightley. Shouldn’t a young woman who is “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition” be able to see things more clearly?

On the very first page of Emma, Austen finishes her initial description of Emma with a hint that—for Emma—things are never what they seem. “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her” (emphasis added).

Austen tells us right from the beginning that Emma is a heroine with faults that she is unaware of: “The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself…. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her” (Chapter 1).

Mr. Knightley tries to reason with Emma. He sees people for who they are and is frustrated when Emma becomes delusional. When Emma announces that Harriet has refused his good friend Mr. Martin, he objects strongly.

“Not Harriet’s equal!” exclaimed Mr. Knightley loudly and warmly; and with calmer asperity, added, a few moments afterwards, “No, he is not her equal indeed, for he is as much her superior in sense as in situation. Emma, your infatuation about that girl blinds you. What are Harriet Smith’s claims, either of birth, nature or education, to any connection higher than Robert Martin?” (Chapter 8)

I must add that I have wondered if it was actually Mr. Knightley who wrote the letter to Harriet for Mr. Martin (just as Emma dictates a response for Harriet). But then, I wonder if I am being a bit Emma-like in doubting Mr. Martin’s capabilities.

Thankfully, all turns out for the best. Harriet does not seek Emma’s advice when Mr. Martin proposes a second time (just as Anne Elliot does not seek Lady Russell’s advice the second time around). They have all learned from their mistakes. Emma, reluctant to admit her mistakes, finally realizes how dangerous pride can be:

Emma was quite relieved, and could presently say, with a little more composure, “You probably have been less surprized than any of us, for you have had your suspicions.—I have not forgotten that you once tried to give me a caution.—I wish I had attended to it—but—” (with a sinking voice and a heavy sigh) “I seem to have been doomed to blindness.” (Chapter 49)

Emma’s feelings are similar to Lady Russell’s at the end of Persuasion, in a passage where Captain Wentworth’s name could easily be replaced with that of Mr. Martin (and Mr. Elliot’s with that of Mr. Elton):

She must learn to feel that she had been mistaken with regard to both; that she had been unfairly influenced by appearances in each; that because Captain Wentworth’s manners had not suited her own ideas, she had been too quick in suspecting them to indicate a character of dangerous impetuosity; and that because Mr. Elliot’s manners had precisely pleased her in their propriety and correctness, their general politeness and suavity, she had been too quick in receiving them as the certain result of the most correct opinions and well-regulated mind. (Chapter 24)

The blinding power of pride is an essential ingredient in Austen’s novels. It causes characters in books—as in real life—to make poor decisions, many of which have severe consequences for others. In Austen’s novels I am grateful for second chances and the opportunity for characters to come to a greater understanding of their mistakes. I only wish that, in this regard, life could be more like an Austen novel.

Quotations are from the Everyman’s Library edition of Emma (1991) and the Dover edition of Persuasion (1997).

Eighth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Diana Birchall, Carol Chernega, and Janet Todd.

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Emma Woodhouse as a Spiritual Director

Maggie Arnold is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Massachusetts, currently serving as Assistant Rector at Grace Church, Medford. She wrote about the process of discerning a religious vocation in Mansfield Park for the celebration I hosted in 2014 in honour of the novel’s 200th anniversary, and for today’s Emma in the Snow guest post, she’s written about Emma’s efforts at guiding and shaping Harriet Smith’s character and actions.

Maggie holds a Ph.D. in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University and she’s currently revising her dissertation, “Mary Magdalene in the Era of Reformation,” for publication. Her research interests include early modern women and religion, and the intersection of religion and art. She also has an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, specializing in the art and history of the book form. Maggie grew up in Halifax—she and I read Pride and Prejudice together in our high school English class—and she currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

I didn’t add any photos of snow to last week’s guest posts on food, although my husband, after he read Dan Macey’s post on “Discovering Mutton in Emma,” very thoughtfully sent me a photo of a cover for Sheep Industry News featuring sheep in the snow— with “Mutton in the Snow” as the email subject line. Since we’re setting mutton and gruel aside for the moment (we’ll come back to the strawberry-picking scene and other food-related topics in Emma later in the series), for Maggie’s guest post on spiritual direction I thought I’d choose a photo that includes some snow. It’s hard to photograph “spiritual direction”—and I don’t have any photos of “Spiritual Directors in the Snow”—so I decided on a picture I took when I was in Calgary last month, of the view from the Peace Bridge, because I liked the connection between the themes of spiritual guidance and peace.

First, here’s the bridge itself:

Here’s the view of the ice and snow on the Bow River:

And here’s what Maggie says about Emma as a spiritual director:

Emma Woodhouse makes a series of experiments in directing the development and conduct of her protégé, Harriet Smith, all of which end disastrously. Her inclination for these projects may have been formed through a youth in which she had to manage her father’s many anxieties in order to achieve domestic harmony and a measure of freedom for herself. And, as she herself admits, she takes credit for the successful match between her governess, Miss Taylor, and Mr. Weston. So both long habit and recent encouragement have prepared Emma to try her skills with a new subject.

The formation and guidance of another’s character and actions have a long history in the Christian tradition, as the practice of spiritual direction. This kind of pastoral care began with the Desert Fathers and Mothers of fourth-century Egypt, and evolved through medieval Benedictine and Cistercian monastic culture, and the Jesuit confessors of the Catholic Reformation. The practice also continued in Protestant communities, in which the laity were empowered to offer one another counsel through mutual study of the Bible and other devotional works. Spiritual direction today draws on this heritage and incorporates insights from contemporary psychology. Typically, a person contemplating a decision or seeking a mentor will approach an authoritative figure, someone known for wisdom and experience in prayer and discernment. (For one such process, see the first chapter in The Lived Experience of Spiritual Direction, edited by Rose Mary Dougherty.) The counseling relationship usually consists of conversations, with assignments of particular tasks in between these, perhaps reading and different kinds of work, self-discipline, prayer, or imaginative contemplation.

Emma’s failures with Harriet serve as a comic illustration, by counter-example, of many of the ideals of spiritual direction. The irony is that Emma claims, to herself and others, to be following traditional principles of spiritual direction: the formation of another for making good decisions, elucidating the directee’s own God-given gifts. As she selects Harriet for improvement, Emma’s professed goal is “decision of character” (Chapter 6). Her intention is to educate Harriet by conversation and instructive reading. Emma maintains that she will merely draw out what is naturally good in Harriet, rather than influencing or altering her behaviour unduly. Both Emma and Harriet herself acknowledge that it is Harriet’s own decisiveness that is desirable. When Harriet is desperate for advice on how to reply to Robert Martin’s first proposal, Emma ostensibly refuses, “Oh, no, no; the letter had much better be all your own,” and Harriet eventually admits that “one’s mind ought to be quite made up” (Chapter 7). Of course, as the reader observes in their exchange, Emma actually manipulates Harriet into crafting the response of Emma’s choice.

After the initial mistake over Mr. Elton’s feelings, Emma gradually learns to become more impartial and attentive to Harriet’s own needs. She realizes that she has been too “active” (Chapter 16) in trying to bring Mr. Elton and Harriet together. The next time Harriet has a crisis, Emma attempts to be supportive, rather than directive: “Emma felt that she could not now show greater kindness than in listening” (Chapter 21). As Kathleen Fischer claims in Women at the Well: Feminist Perspectives on Spiritual Direction, “the skill of listening is the basis for spiritual companionship.” Listening is Emma’s counsel to Harriet when Harriet is again in love; Harriet should watch and interpret others with sensitivity and caution (Chapter 40). As Emma becomes less confident of her own powers, she also comes to appreciate Harriet’s own character, asserting that Harriet’s open and affectionate nature is more to be prized than a readily judging intellect (Chapter 31). This shift from a directive to a companionate model agrees with the arc described by Carolyn Gratton in The Art of Spiritual Guidance: “we need meditative hearts, and hearts do not get that way by conceptualizing or analyzing.”

In addition to the effect of painful mistakes, Emma learns about spiritual direction from two examples, one positive and one negative. Mr. Knightley presents several ideals for offering good guidance. He speaks clearly in determining the needs of others, and helps Emma to do so, as when their simple communication prepares for Mr. Woodhouse’s quick departure from a dinner party on a snowy night. (Nora Bartlett and Deborah Knuth Klenck have also discussed this brief conversation in their guest posts for “Emma in the Snow.”) When he criticizes Frank Churchill’s confusing behaviour, Mr. Knightley confirms that consistency and honesty are his own principles, noting their power to impress and persuade others (Chapter 18). Mr. Knightley is true to himself, and knows that is the only way to engage others with integrity. Mrs. Elton, by contrast, shows Emma a repugnant example of someone who is overbearing and insensitive, with her tone-deaf meddling in Jane Fairfax’s affairs. Mrs. Elton ignores Jane’s expressed preferences—to collect her own mail and to choose her time to apply for employment—and instead decides what is best for her (Chapters 34 and 35).

Not only does Emma turn from her previous approach to managing Harriet’s romantic hopes, she gains self-awareness by applying the principles of spiritual direction and discernment to her own life. She begins haltingly, trying to assess her emotions about Frank Churchill. Reflection on one’s desires as a means of deliberation is a legacy of the Ignatian examen, the Jesuit practice of daily self-interrogation. Emma ultimately decides that Frank’s character, unlike her own, is not really worth a serious attempt at understanding and judgment. Because she does not intend to marry Frank, she need not evaluate his character, but she recognizes that an accurate self-knowledge is crucial for right action.

By the conclusion of the story, Emma has arrived at a true and humble self-assessment. She agrees with Mr. John Knightley, that “the good fortune of the engagement” between her and Mr. Knightley is all on her side, though she hopes to become better by further study (Chapter 53). The prospect bodes well, for her new insight has already prompted kinder treatment of Miss Bates, a growing friendship with Jane Fairfax, and a marriage of, as Mr. Knightley proclaims, equal worth and happiness.

Sources

Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Bantam Classics, 1981.

Dougherty, Rose Mary, ed. The Lived Experience of Spiritual Direction. New York: Paulist Press, 2003.

Fischer, Kathleen. Women at the Well: Feminist Perspectives on Spiritual Direction. New York: Paulist Press, 1988.

Gratton, Carolyn. The Art of Spiritual Guidance: A Contemporary Approach to Growing in the Spirit. New York: Crossroad, 1993.

Ignatius of Loyola. Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. Edited by George E. Ganss, S.J. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1991.

Seventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Mary C.M. Phillips, Diana Birchall, and Janet Todd.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).

Why Mr. Woodhouse Takes Care About What His Guests Eat

Catherine Morley describes her research as the study of “people and their relationships with and through food.” Like Dan Macey, who wrote about “Discovering Mutton” for my Emma in the Snow series earlier this week, she’s interested in what Jane Austen says about food in her novels. Ever since Catherine read Emma for the first time, she has, she says, “been intrigued with Mr. Woodhouse’s beliefs about food, beliefs so strong that he tries to influence the food intakes of others.” It’s a pleasure to introduce her guest post on the way Mr. Woodhouse understands food in relation to the four humours.

Catherine is registered as a Professional Dietitian in Nova Scotia and she holds the Fellow of Dietitians of Canada designation. She’s an Assistant Professor in the School of Nutrition and Dietetics at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and  an  Adjunct Professor in Applied Human Nutrition at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax.  Before moving to Nova Scotia in 2011 and joining our local JASNA group, she was a member of JASNA Vancouver for several years. Prior to that, she was a founding member of the JASNA Calgary Region.

Catherine’s photo of apple cake

I have heard Mr. Woodhouse described as a hypochondriac, and have on several occasions been asked by JASNA members about what sort of digestive disorder I thought Jane Austen might have attributed to Mr. Woodhouse (such as, did he have an ulcer or irritable bowel syndrome?). I do not think of Mr. Woodhouse as hypochondriacal; rather, I think that it is through his character that Jane Austen conveyed what would have been common beliefs about diet and the potential of diet to influence health, and that she was poking fun at a type of person that most everyone would have known.

Exploring the invalid’s dietary

As a Visiting Fellow (2010) and Visiting Researcher (2012) at Chawton House Library I studied the collection of cookery books and books related to medicine and health for insights into feeding the sick in the time of Jane Austen. I furthered this research by collecting and studying early dietetics reference texts (1875 to 1910) that preceded the origins of the profession of dietetics. Through to 1910-1920 or so, dieticians were physicians who specialized in diet therapy (hence the spelling variant using a “c”  in the final syllable—as in the spelling of physician—that is carried over in the UK spelling today). Dietetics as a profession separate from medicine developed in Canada in the late 1910s; university programs were established in the 1920s and 1930s in each province. This history is important when one considers that therapies for ailments during Austen’s time (and more or less through to the 1940s) generally consisted of the administration of alcohol, opioids, herbs, and food.

Mr. Woodhouse (as with Jane Austen and her contemporary readers) would have been familiar with beliefs about food choices to balance the humours. Foods were considered cooling or heating, and drying or moistening (see the table below). Thus, there were four categories of food: cool/dry; cool/moist; hot/dry; and hot/moist. This categorization (hot/cool/dry/moist) had nothing to do with the physical properties of foods, but rather with effects they were believed to have on the humours.

The four humours (simplified) (adapted from Keirsey D. [1998])

Recipes contained descriptors of foods, ingredients, or the dish overall (e.g., “this is cooling” or “this is dessicating [drying]”). The use of these descriptors without providing definitions of the terms implies that this knowledge was commonly held and needed no explanation.

The food Mr. Woodhouse offers his guests

In Volume 1, Chapter 3 of Emma, the Woodhouses are entertaining guests including Mrs. Bates, Miss Bates, and Mrs. Goddard. Mr. Woodhouse demonstrates concern for the health of his guests through the attention he pays to the foods he offers and to whom. There is much more meant by these offers than merely being hospitable. We no longer hold the same beliefs about foods or about how to balance the humours (or even believe that there are such things as humours), which makes it harder to understand what Mr. Woodhouse means by his offers of food and drink for his guests.

The passage reads,

Upon such occasions poor Mr. Woodhouse’s feelings were in sad warfare. He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth, but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see any thing put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visitors to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.

Such another small basin of thin gruel as his own was all that he could, with thorough self-approbation, recommend; though he might constrain himself, while the ladies were comfortably clearing the nicer things, to say: “Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else; but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see—one of our small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart—a very little bit. Ours are all apple-tarts. You need not be afraid of unwholesome preserves here. I do not advise the custard. Mrs. Goddard, what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half-glass, put into a tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you.”

The foods that Jane Austen selected for Mr. Woodhouse’s offers were not random—she carefully chose them based on well-understood beliefs about ordering the humours. Here are some excerpts from The Family Magazine (1792) related to the foods Mr. Woodhouse mentions, and my thoughts on what he might have meant by offering the foods he did.

Food item: Gruel (I presume this is oatmeal gruel, though it can be made from any grain)

For whom: Himself (an elderly man with a fear of illness)

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): “Oatmeal is the wholesomest of all grain. It is a light opening diet, and passes thro’ all the capillaries or small vessels without stopping ’em up. ’Tis good for asthmatical and phthisical [wasting] people because it brings up their phlegm. ’Tis also good in vaporous constitutions, because it smooths and licks up the sharp humour in the bowels of such. Oatmeal and butter dry the scab on the head. Outwardly applied” (II, 6).

My comment: Oatmeal was considered to have valuable qualities and was seen as useful in balancing the humours for those with lung conditions, gut disorders (“vaporous” refers to gas producing), and wasting or consumptive disorders. Consumption was any condition where there was fast and extreme weight loss, not limited to pulmonary tuberculosis, and might have included cancers, diabetes, renal failure, liver failure, and lung disorders. Given this inventory of benefits, it is no wonder Mr. Woodhouse places such value on gruel.

Food item: Eggs (one egg, actually)

For whom: Mrs. Bates (an elderly woman)

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): “Eggs are said to be the most nourishing and exalted of all animal food” (II, 4).

My comment: Eggs were considered neutral; not heating. A risk-free, sensible choice for an elderly woman.

Food item: Apple

For whom: Miss Bates (a middle-aged woman)

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): “Apples cool and loosen, and help the appetite, but are not good for cold stomachs. They have given more help to scorbutick or splenetick patients (especially such that were of a hot, dry constitution, and apt to be costive), than anything else the shops or field could furnish out” (II, 9).

My comment: Perhaps Mr. Woodhouse thinks she is costive (constipated) and that consuming some apple would be of benefit? Perhaps he thinks her humours are too hot and need cooling. Likely the apples come from Donwell Abbey and are highly trusted.

Scorbutick means: scurvy/vitamin C deficiency (although vitamins were not yet known in the 1800s).

Spenetick means: might mean to have a disorder of the spleen (see the table above), or to be spiteful, irritable, or bad tempered. If the former, this explains why apples would “not be good for cold stomachs” (a humoural reference, not a physical state).

Food item: Pye (pie or tart)

For whom: Miss Bates

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): “Greasy and doughy pye crust seems to be no very digestible food, especially to weak stomachs” (II, 6).

“Pyes made of any kind of Flesh-meats are strong food; and by reason of the seasoning, generally too pernicious to health to be indulged to valetudinary constitutions” (II, 3).

My comment: Pastry was dangerous—made moreso when filled with meat. Mr. Woodhouse perhaps balances the benefits of apples with the potential harm from pastry such that he can safely recommend a little bit of apple tart to Miss Bates (not too much as that would not be safe), her constitution being strong enough to deal with the potential harm from piecrust.

Food item: Wine

For whom: Mrs. Goddard

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): “The usual draught for ailing people, when the case forbids it not, may be ripe red French-wine, thrice or four times a day, to the quantity of half an ounce” (II, 4).

“Wine of all sorts will heat and inflame, some are pectoral, some heady, some griping. All new wines are laxative and windy. White wines are generally more inflaming than red. Old wines are warmest and most comforting. Rhenish wine is the least heating, but most dangerous with us, being adulterated by drugs of pernicious qualities, to restore it when eager. Sweet wines nourish most, but affect the head and stomach, and occasion viscosities. Small wines hurt the membranous parts and nerves. But after all, good wine, moderately taken, and used discreetly as to its relative qualities with the subjects taking it, is a cordial. But it is so difficult to meet with it unadulterated, that the less generally it is drank, the better” (II, 4).

My comment: What sort of wine is Mr. Woodhouse offering? Regardless of the type, it would be heating and perhaps dangerous to the balance of Mrs. Goddard’s humours, unless he thinks she is too cool and would benefit from more balance. Perhaps he suggests diluting the wine with water so he won’t alarm Mrs. Goddard or anyone else listening in—so they won’t think he is worried about her humours being out of balance. He definitely thinks she could benefit from the stimulating effects of the wine.

“I do not think it would disagree with you” would refer to the wine producing too much heat and therefore presenting a different kind of danger.

Food item: Custard

For whom: Not recommended for any of the guests

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): No description of the benefits or risk of custard are given. Here, though, is a recipe:

“A quart of cream or new milk, and a stick of cinnamon, four laurel leaves, and some large mace, boil them altogether, take twelve eggs, beat them well together, and mix them with sugar and canary, till a white scum arises, skim it off. Then, the coffins [pastry shells] being first dried in the oven, fill them” (I, 63).

My comment: The value Mr. Woodhouse puts on eggs and the warning about custard have always puzzled me, given that eggs were considered “an exalted animal food.” Why would he not recommend the custard? None of the custard ingredients were risky, according to The Family Magazine. Perhaps he knows something about the milk used to make it; that is, it is not from his or Mr. Knightley’s dairy and therefore cannot be trusted. Perhaps the custard has not been made by Serle. Or perhaps the custard is leftover and no longer considered safe. As an egg-based dish, it would normally be considered “wholesome” (that is, something that contributes to balancing the humours).

Food item: Cream, butter, and marrow (the first two, as custard ingredients. It’s curious that marrow is grouped with cream and butter)

For whom: Not recommended

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): “Are all lenient and nourishing” (II, 4).

My comment: There is nothing worrisome here about these ingredients. Cream or butter might have been ingredients in the custard Mr. Woodhouse does not recommend. Also, perhaps, in the tart? So it seems not to have been the eggs, cream, or butter that Mr. Woodhouse did not trust—perhaps, then, it is something about who has made it. Concern about how long it has been in the house seems unlikely since food safety, as we think of it today, was of little concern, given the practice of painting old meat with fresh blood in markets or of adding chalk to flour to make bread appear whiter, or to watered-down milk to make it go further, and so on.

“Lenient” refers to adding moisture, so recommended where dry humours were concerned.

Food item: Milk (as an ingredient in custard)

For whom: No one; the custard is not recommended

Information taken from The Family Magazine (1792): Aliment categories listed in order are Meats, Drinks (waters, whey, coffee, tea, chocolate, wine, cyder, perry, brandy), Grain, Pulse, Nuts, Roots, Herbs, Fruits, Aromatrick Herbs, Plants, and Spices (II).

My comment: Milk is not included in the section on aliments (food) in The Family Magazine. I wonder if this means that milk was not considered a food or thought of as offering any nourishment. It is curious that it is absent, and equally curious that cream, with its origins from milk, is grouped with butter and marrow (which were considered cooking fats or spreads).

Given what people thought at the end of the 18th century about food and its effects on the humours, two observations can be made:

When reading the novels, we can’t connect the foods that Jane Austen included in her novels with anything we know or believe about foods today. There was, at the time, no knowledge of nutrients, of humans’ nutrient needs, or of the nutrient composition of foods (how much of what food is sufficient to meet nutritional requirements).


Jane Austen may have been poking fun at people who had “old-fashioned” ideas about the effect of food on the humours. My rationale for this statement relates to newer ideas emerging in the late 18th century about applying scientific thought to considerations of health. One of these new ideas was that of “rational cookery” or “the rational diet.”

What Jane Austen might have known about the rational diet

The Cook Not Mad; or Rational Cookery, published by James Macfarlane in 1831 in Kingston, Upper Canada, was the first cookbook published in Canada, a “Canadianized” version of an American book by the same name. The entire title was:

The Cook Not Mad; or Rational Cookery: Being A Collection of Original and Selected Receipts, Embracing not only the art of curing various kinds of Meats and Vegetables for future use, but of Cooking in its general acceptation, to the taste, habits, and degrees of luxury, prevalent with the Canadian Public, To Which Are Added, Directions for preparing comforts for the SICK ROOM—together with sundry miscellaneous kinds of information of importance to housekeepers in general, nearly all tested by experience.

The Canadian version was a near reprint of the American version, which itself was likely composed of material from cookery books originating in England. Roy Abrahamson, the editor of the 1972 reprint of the 1831 version, claims that “While most cook or household books of the period were derived from English works, The Cook Not Mad breaks with this tradition and is definitely a North American cookbook.” Abrahamson’s assertion was owing to the use of what he refers to as “indigenous ingredients” (turkey, oysters, cod, pidgeons, cranberries, corn, pumpkin, molasses, watermelon). However, given that plants, seeds, food, drink, and livestock had been crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean for over 300 years when the book was published in 1831, these “indigenous foods” would have been known in England. In addition, cod, oysters, pidgeons, and molasses did not have to be introduced to Europe. While the fish, shellfish, and bird were native to Northern Europe, including England, molasses had been available in Europe since 1582. The second point to refute this claim is that the receipts (recipes) contained in The Cook Not Mad, especially those relating to care of the sick, are consistent with those in English cookery books dating from 1641 that I studied at Chawton House Library. Thus, the idea of “rational cookery” likely had its origin in Europe or England, and it was an idea that I think was familiar to Jane Austen. Here’s why.

Jane Austen and the rational diet  

In The Cook Not Mad, the intent of rational cookery is described as:

… a system of Cookery which has for its main object the health of its friends. Temperance in the quality and quantity of our diet contributes more to our health and comfort than we are aware of. It was the remark of an eminent physician upon the inquiries of a patient, “that it was of less importance what kind of food we ate, than the quantity and the mode of its preparation, for the stomach.” … The health of a family, in fact, greatly depends upon its cookery. The most wholesome viands may be converted into corroding poisons. (Preface)

Important here is the use of the word “health,” with no mention of the humours or efforts to bring them into balance. This was the beginning of what has become known as the science of nutrition (where the nutritional properties of foodstuffs are known and these are recommended relative to the nutrient needs of a person or population defined by age and, for some nutrients, by sex, and these are considered in terms of the composition of and amount of foodstuffs taken). I believe Jane Austen was aware of and attended to the precepts of rational cookery owing to three sentences written in her letters between January and May of 1817, the latter written less than two months before her death. It seems that while she may have viewed dietary manipulations in a more scientific way, she retained some belief in the categorization of diseases relative to the humours. Her diagnostics appear to be rooted in traditional thinking about disease while she looked to new ways of thinking about diet in composing her treatment plans.

The first of these excerpts is from 24 January 1817 to her friend, Alethea Bigg:

I have certainly gained strength through the Winter & am not far from being well; & I think I understand my own case now so much better than I did, as to be able by care to keep off any serious return of illness. I am more and more convinced that Bile is at the bottom of all I have suffered, which makes it easy to know how to treat myself. (Italics added)

In this letter, Austen identifies problems with bile at the root of her problems. Which did she mean, yellow bile or black bile? (See the table above.) I think she meant yellow bile, owing to her letter of 6 April 1817 to her brother, Charles Austen: “I have been suffering from a Bilious attack, attended with a good deal of fever.”

In the Glossary of Medical Terms Used in the 18th and 19th Centuries, biliousness is defined as “nausea, abdominal pains, headache, and constipation.  Also jaundice associated with liver disease.”

An imbalance of yellow bile made a person choleric; a person with this condition was considered to be hot and dry, and their illness involved the gall bladder. (This is not the way we think of the gall bladder and its function in 2016.) Black bile imbalance was considered to be melancholia with problems with the spleen (cool and dry). Since Austen refers to fever (therefore “hot”), of the two types of bile, I conclude hers was a problem of yellow bile (black bile does not actually exist). These two ideas together would indicate Jane Austen had digestive complaints. What we do not know is whether by fever she meant elevated body temperature, that she thought her humours were too hot, or something else. Fever was a catch-all term for a variety of complaints, and meant that the humours were too hot. About fever:

And as it is a distemper of the utmost consequence, and such as ought to be critically attended to, we shall trace it as briefly as possible from its beginning, whether it proceeds from cold (as is generally the case), or from heat, and incautious drinking to quench the thirst occasion’d thereby, whereby dangerous inflammations, etc. proceed. And, above all, shall be careful to give no direction, but what is the result of experience practice in so hazardous a case, that so such as have not an opportunity to consult a skilful physician, may not be lead into mistakes, where the consequence may be so fatal. (Family Magazine, Part II)

Interesting in the letter from 24 January 1817 is the phrase, “which makes it easy to know how to treat myself.” This idea indicates either that Austen had knowledge of foods to eat to balance humours and to treat or prevent biliousness, or that she was applying emerging scientific principles about diet to treat her condition. It is in her letter of 27 May 1817 to her nephew, James Edward Austen, where she reveals her familiarity with the idea of rational cookery; that is, that she was applying early ideas about the science of nutrition to what and how she ate. She writes,

I will not boast of my handwriting; neither that, nor my face have yet recovered their proper beauty, but in other respects I am gaining strength very fast. I am now out of bed from 9 in the morng to 10 at night—Upon the Sopha ’tis true—but I eat my meals with Aunt Cass; in a rational way, & can employ myself, & walk from one room to another. (Italics added)

In using the phrase, “in a rational way,” Austen reveals that she and her nephew (and presumably her sister, Cassandra) were familiar with the ideas of the rational diet or rational cookery. Curiously, the receipts given in The Cook Not Mad (1831) are exactly those given in cookery books that predate it. Even more curiously, these same recipes were included in The American Woman’s Cookbook (1956). My interpretation is that the language used to describe ideas about diet changed but the foods actually recommended and consumed did not.

Returning to Mr. Woodhouse

To return to Jane Austen’s use of Mr. Woodhouse’s food suggestions for his guests: when I read the novels, I do so with the idea that the author was very familiar with traditional humour-based ideas about diet, as she was aware of emerging ideas about the science of nutrition. Further, I think she would have known that many of her readers would likewise feel caught between older and newer ways of thinking about food and diet, and could relate to the confusion about what to believe about diet—something we continue to experience (which has been termed “dietary cacophony” by food sociologist Claude Fischler). Lastly, I think her inclusion of this passage was for comedic effect. I suspect she recognized that many of her readers would recognize themselves and their own worries about how food intakes affected the balance of the humours, as well as this concern in others among their friends and family. Perhaps she was even thinking of her own health.

Two important considerations related to food, diet, nutrition, and health when reading Austen’s novels (or any novels written before about 1920): we need to keep the idea of “balancing the humours” in mind, recalling that illness was ever-present during Austen’s time and remembering not to think about food and nutrition using today’s notions of diet and health, and we need to remember that people did not yet know how to treat even simple maladies according to today’s standards. Thus, a common cold, the measles, or food poisoning could have been fatal. People had good reason to think constantly about minimizing any harm that might arise from food consumption that could disorder the harmony of the humours, and about how to bring the humours back into balance.

Sources

Austen, Jane. (1995). Emma. New York: Oxford.

Anonymous. (1831). The Cook Not Mad, or Rational Cookery; Being A Collection of Original and Selected Receipts, Embracing Not Only the Art of Curing Various Kinds of Meats and Vegetables for Future Use, but of Cooking in its General Acceptation, to the Taste, Habits, and Degrees of Luxury, Prevalent with the American Publick, in Town and Country. To Which are Added, Directions for Preparing Comforts for the SICKROOM; Together with Sundry Miscellaneous Kinds of Information, of Importance to Housekeepers in General, Nearly All Tested by Experience. Watertown, NY: Knowlton & Rice.

Berolzheimer, R. (1956). The American woman’s cook book. Chicago, IL: Culinary Arts Institute.

Kiersey, D. (1998). Please understand me ii: temperament, character, intelligence. Toronto, ON: Prometheus Nemesis Book Co. and the University of Toronto Press.

Le Faye, D. (Ed.) (1995). Jane Austen’s Letters (3rd edition). New York: Oxford University Press.

Macfarlane, J. (1831). The cook not mad; or rational cookery. Kingston, Upper Canada.

The Family Magazine: in two parts. I. Containing useful directions in all the branches of house-keeping and cookery. II. Containing a compendious body of physic; explaining the virtues of all sorts of meats. The second edition. (1792). London: J Osborn at the Golden-Ball in Pater-noster Row.

Sixth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Maggie Arnold, Mary C.M. Phillips, and Diana Birchall.

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