A Calendar for Sense and Sensibility, by Ellen Moody
More years ago than I care to remember, I set about drawing from the version of Sense and Sensibility that Jane Austen published in 1811 the underlying calendar (as I called it) that I still believe helped Austen to structure her written manuscript letters for an epistolary novel at first called Elinor and Marianne. In his 1924 first scholarly edition of Jane Austen’s novels, R. W. Chapman had worked out “chronologies,” some in the form of downright calendars, for five of the six seemingly finished novels (all but Sense and Sensibility), and placed them in the back of each book as appendices. He was among the first to be aware of or assert in print that she had used almanacs to give an illusion of calendar and psychological time by careful explicit pacing to readers as they read which felt comparable or proportionate to their own experiences of time in their objectified and subjective experiences of life.
(From Sarah: This is the twenty-ninth, and last, guest post in “A Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility,” which began on June 20th. And here we are, at the end of summer, at least in this part of the world. You can find all the contributions to the blog series here . Many thanks to all who contributed to the series by writing guest posts, reading, and joining the conversations in the comments on the website and on social media! I hope you’ll join me for a celebration of L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday in November.)
I conjectured that if I did this in detail, noting carefully the day by day, sometimes hour by hour, and weekly and monthly tracking Austen keeps up (it might seem obsessively), I would find these calendars to be more or less internally consistent and discover truths about the novels no one else had noticed because they had not drilled down (or geologized) the seemingly unimportant minutiae of these books. I did discover new truths and confirmed suppositions about the books that other readers had long asserted as felt truth. I began with Sense and Sensibility because Elinor Dashwood had long been my favorite of Austen’s heroines, and it is her consciousness which is the fundamental basis of the book. In addition, Chapman had neglected to do any chronology. My preconceptions included five years of study for a dissertation on the art of epistolary narrative and allusion as practiced by Samuel Richardson in his transformative influential Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, and (much less intensively) as practiced by a few of his French and English followers (Rousseau, LaClos, Diderot; Francis Sheridan, Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith). Among my aims was a publishable paper which I succeeded in achieving in Philological Quarterly 79 ([2000], 233-66).
Readers can read this first calendar here (as it appeared in print, but with some changes, e.g. added explanations).
It’s included in the area of my website that I came to call Time in Jane Austen: A Study of her Uses of the Almanac.
As you will see (if you have clicked on the second link), eventually I studied in the same minute detail the other five seemingly finished novels, and three of the four more mature unfinished novels, The Watsons, Lady Susan, and Sanditon.
Among my discoveries was that both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were originally written as epistolary narratives; that Mansfield Park is the product of two related stories about the same characters written at disparate times (it melds, somewhat awkwardly, two almanacs a few years apart in time), one section of which was semi-epistolary; and that Persuasion was intended to have a third volume. For me unexpectedly, and then increasingly astonishingly, I also discovered a phenomenon across all these seven texts (omitting Northanger Abbey and Sanditon) a repeated phenomenon I’ve never had the nerve to try to publish an essay about in an academic journal—because online I quickly encountered dismissive laughter. All seven explicitly make days or evenings where humiliating public events or overt losses happen or were to happen (in the case of Persuasion’s third volume) a Tuesday.
I have room to specify and link to one of my blogs demonstrating this phenomenon just for Sense and Sensibility. Here it is spelt out, and the reader may also observe how carefully Austen kept probable time in her novels: “Tick Tock Tick Tock: important Tuesdays or Austen and epistolary obsessions.”
If you have gone over to look you will have seen that Sense and Sensibility has three such Tuesdays, and in two cases the day of the week is cited specifically. The day Willoughby left his card is referred to by him as “last Tuesday” on the night he snubs Marianne at the assembly ball. The important statement for the chronologist is Willoughby’s “I did myself the honour of calling in Berkeley-street last Tuesday . . . My card was not lost, I hope” (italics added), and my calendar bears out that the morning after of the terrible letter (again specified by Austen) is a Wednesday at dawn (“The next day . . . a cold, gloomy morning in January” (Volume 2, Chapters 6 & 7). So the harrowing scene in front of a large public is a second Tuesday. Then the day Elinor is humiliated and mortified by Mrs. Ferrars in front of the Steeles, Dashwoods, Brandon, Mrs. Jennings and whoever else was at Mrs. Dennison’s dinner party is called “the important Tuesday” (Volume 2, Chapter 14).
The year these dates are all possible in is 1797-98, the year Cassandra cited as the one Austen completed Sense and Sensibility in.
A slight digression may be needed to respond to incredulity: I am now confining myself to just those dramatic and linchpin Tuesdays (sometimes again labelled by the narrator as “the important Tuesday”), which most readers of Austen will remember and I will be briefer (just general references, no longer quotations). The first I’ll call attention to is Tuesday, November 26th (so specified by Austen), the evening of the Netherfield ball where Elizabeth feels humiliated by her family members’ behavior, which behavior Darcy singles out as objectionable to him when he first proposes marriage (Pride and Prejudice). In Mansfield Park: we are told that Fanny and William arrive in Portsmouth on a Tuesday night which I make out to be February 7th (the year is either 1809 or 1797, the latter being Walton Litz’s choice, the former Chapman’s); that night begins the long pivotal and medicinal lesson Sir Thomas meant Fanny to have; she is mortified, snubbed by her family (as after all she is not “theirs” any more). We are told that the night of Mrs. Frazer’s party, which is so fatal to Henry Crawford and Maria Rushworth, is a Tuesday (which I worked out to be March 14th). We do not see the scene; we must piece it out from the letters, but when Maria snubbed Henry and he was humiliated, he determined to make her yield to him once again. This precipitates the final crisis and denouement of the novel.
For Emma I’ll cite only the night of the Coles’ party which is said to be a Tuesday more than once: Emma makes a fool of herself and could have hurt Jane’s reputation profoundly by telling Frank a piano which has arrived without explanation is a gift from Mr. Dixon, Jane’s friend and benefactor’s husband; Emma is herself mortified by a comparison she feels will be made by the assembly of Jane’s superior piano-playing to her own. Jo Modert has explained “a hidden calendar game” in Emma and found the piano arrived on Valentine’s Day (the novel uses the almanac for 1814-15). Last citation: the opening sentence of The Watsons tells the reader the ball at which Emma sees Mr. Howard for the first time and dances with little Charles was a Tuesday, October 13th: the year may be either 1801 or 1803 or 1807; it matters not from the point of view of Tuesday. Emma asks young Charles Black to dance, rescuing him from humiliation in the way Mr. Knightley rescues Harriet Smith on the night of the Crown Inn Ball (Emma).
If you would like to check volume, chapter or page reference, return to my paper or see “A Pattern: A preliminary sketch: notes towards a paper on Tuesdays.”
I have been asked why no one has found this pattern of Tuesdays but me. I have asked people reading my timelines since not to take credit for it, though they may use the calendars and many have and thanked me in print. My response is until the 20th century no one was looking for this, i.e., no one was studying these novels in this kind of granular detail, and that since the mid-20th century various scholars and readers have uncovered more or less consistent timelines, cited the years a novel’s events occur in, and argued for other perhaps more socially acceptable features than a persistent remembered trauma turned into a secret joke in the different books. When I’ve been asked to explain it, people seem to want me to cite a source text; I have come up with a couple; for example, Richardson’s heroine Clarissa was raped between a Monday night and early Tuesday morning (“And now Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives” is dated “Tuesday morn”), but I resist this explanation and other textual instances because in all of them the whole feel and tone of these texts is so different from any of the Austen uses which have an idiosyncratic or characteristic likeness.
To return to Sense and Sensibility I believe that it was Austen herself who in her life had an experience of public social humiliation and private loss like those we see in Sense and Sensibility and her later published fiction. I am convinced that one of many features central to the power of her texts is she uses her creative and artistic gifts to deal with her life’s traumas through laughter (she does this in her letters too). She followed a disciplined routine (often repetitive) of writing and rewriting these exquisitely precise texts, in which (say the proverbial ninth draft) she found curative release. One of my conference papers argues explicitly for this in the case of her wildly antipathetic joking over women’s aging, agons and deaths in childbirth (“The Depiction of Widows and Widowers in the Austen Canon” at the University of Delaware, November 16-18, 2014).
Why did she choose Elinor and Marianne or Sense and Sensibility for the one text she was determined to publish? Why begin there? She had other manuscripts ready for revision. I suggest because the characters of Elinor and Marianne were both close to her heart (as was recognized by family members in verse). Elinor’s many internal soliloquies, especially after Lucy tells her that she, Lucy, and Edward have been engaged for four years and produces concrete evidence of a relationship mirror closely an early traumatic experience of emotional sexual awakening and some public social shock or humiliation. The private trauma is re-enacted outwardly by Marianne at Cleveland Park. The social loss or degradation or deprivation need not have been limited to a single day. When the Dashwood family are threatened by homelessness Austen is reconfiguring her experience of sudden powerless dispossession (recorded in her letters) when she was forced to leave Steventon for Bath. The famous second chapter of the novel in which Fanny Dashwood easily persuades her husband not to keep his promise to his father was written later in time, one of the revisions Henry Austen was referring to when he said his sister’s novels were “all gradual performances.”
That these experiences in her twenties mattered strongly to Austen and affected the way she responded to her life ever after may be seen in the similarities and parallels across the novels (often remarked upon by readers, beginning with the unsympathetic caustic Q.D. Leavis [in Scrutiny]) and in Austen’s persistent return to a primal Tuesday turned into a hidden joke as a way of coping with seared memories.
Ellen Moody has a PhD in English Literature, awarded in 1979. She has been teaching since 1972 in senior colleges (Queens and Brooklyn Colleges in NYC, American and George Mason University in Virginia) and (starting age 66-67) college style programs for retired adults attached to the last two colleges. She’s published two books, numerous papers and reviews, and more informal essays in academic and peer-edited journals, books, and newsletters. Her first specialty was the long 18th century, but over the years, she’s concentrated on some individual authors (i.e., Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope), women’s studies and literature, translated poetry, edited French novels (e.g. Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichtfield) and branched out to the 19th and 20th century and film studies. She’s been very active on the Internet since 1995, and maintains an academic website and two literary blogs, moderates two listservs, and joins in with online readers on a couple of social media sites to read and to write about books together. She enjoys virtual as well as in person conferences and classes very much. She is a widow, with two adult daughters, and loves her pet companions. The photos above are from Ellen’s garden.
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As I mentioned above, we’ll be celebrating L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday with another series of guest posts that will run through the month of November: “‘A world of wonderful beauty’: L.M. Montgomery at 150.”
The first post in the new series will provide a link between Austen and Montgomery: Kate Scarth, Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, has written a fun and fabulous guest post called “Anne Shirley and Marianne Dashwood, #KindredSpirits.” Watch for Kate’s post on October 30th, the anniversary of the date Sense and Sensibility was published. I’ll probably write another blog post of my own before that. See you in October!
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
On the Road with Elinor and Marianne, by Cheryl Bell
From the forthcoming book Living with Jane Austen, by Janet Todd
Read more about my books, including Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.
