Reading Jane Austen’s novels or watching any of the films inspired by her work may make some newly smitten Austen fans long to dress in frilly white gowns or brocade waistcoats, fall in love, arrange suitable matrimonial alliances, play the pianoforte, correct one another’s manners—or indulge in any of the other forms of delicately civilized behavior that Austen makes look so attractive. Others, however, may find themselves equally overwhelmed by the desire to phone their accountants and check that their finances are in order, or place hurried calls to their lawyers and double-check that their wills are up to date.
No other writer (with the possible exceptions of Balzac and Dickens) wrote with such a clear eye so coolly focused on matters of income, real estate, and inheritance. No one had a less coy or more accurate sense of what (literally speaking) love can cost, or of the havoc wrought when a tragic or inconvenient death is rendered even more calamitous by the deceased’s negligence, inability, or capricious refusal to provide for his heirs. In short, no other novelist combined such a subtle, delicate moral sensibility with such a firm, no-nonsense grasp of the most material realities—of the fact that money determines one’s opportunity to live in the tranquil and gracious style to which one is (or would like to be) accustomed.
Often, Austen tells us what a character is worth (“Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds . . .”) before she gets around to describing what he or she looks like; or else the physical description is followed shortly—and with notably greater exactitude—by the economic: “Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.” Indeed, the plots of Austen’s novels are more likely to be set in motion by financial crises and reverses than by the promptings of the heart (as in Edith Wharton) or of the soul (as in Dostoyevsky). So Persuasion begins when the spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot admits he must “retrench” and, with his friend Lady Russell’s able help (“She drew up plans of economy, she made exact calculations”), agrees to move to more modest quarters and lease Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft—whose brother-in-law, Captain Wentworth, has already won the heart of Sir Walter’s daughter, Anne. The sufferings, dislocations, and misunderstandings that Sense and Sensibility documents are initially the consequence of Mr. Dashwood’s leaving his fortune to his son (and his son’s shrewish wife), thus essentially disinheriting his own hapless wife and three daughters.
The famously elaborate machinations of Mrs. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, reflect her panic at having to secure the futures of five young women. And when the serpents (disguised as Henry and Mary Crawford) come to disturb the paradise of Mansfield Park, Austen details, with great precision, the fiscal and moral history behind the arrival of this shady pair of orphans:
They were young people of fortune. The son had a good estate in Norfolk, the daughter twenty thousand pounds. . . . In their uncle’s house they had found a kind home. Admiral and Mrs. Crawford, though agreeing in nothing else, were united in affection for these children, or, at least, were no farther adverse in their feelings than that each had their favourite . . . The Admiral delighted in the boy, Mrs. Crawford doated on the girl; and it was the lady’s death which now obliged her protegee, after some months’ further trial at her uncle’s house, to find another home.
Given the critical role that property and income play in their own and their loved ones’ fates, it seems only fair that Austen’s characters are frequently defined (and judged) by the conscientiousness with which they arrange their finances and tend to their estates. (The sympathies of contemporary writers are more likely to be engaged by characters who live fast, die young—and leave only a memory behind.) In Austen’s world, the morally slatternly tumble into debt, the upright stay within their household budgets and consider their family’s future, and the truly dishonest (like the rakish Henry Crawford) only pretend to be concerned with their property and their dependents. (“He had introduced himself to some tenants, whom he had never seen before; he had begun making acquaintance with cottages whose very existence, though on his own estate, had been hitherto unknown to him. This was aimed, and well aimed, at Fanny. It was pleasing to hear him speak so properly; here he had been acting as he ought to do.”)
Austen examines her characters’ account books with the same meticulous care she lavishes on their romantic impulses, so that her novels function like brief, painless—indeed, delightful—courses in the ways that the eighteenth-century gentry put (and kept) food on the family table, staked out their place in society, and provided for (or impoverished) their heirs. One learns, for example, that the “living” awarded to clergymen—of special relevance to the heroes of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park—involved a tax levied on the parish, and that the right to bestow this living belonged to the local landowner rather than the ecclesiastical authorities. We discover that advancement in the military could be procured by the helpful “exertions” of gentlemen like Henry Crawford, and that the purchase of an estate conferred not only financial security but social respectability—an instant pedigree that might partly compensate for having had one’s fortunes acquired by “trade.” (“Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise . . . but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many . . . whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase. His sisters were very anxious for his having an estate of his own.”) Finally, the sad lesson of Sense and Sensibility is that the law of primogeniture was very much alive and well in Jane Austen’s England.
For all the passionate interest she takes in the material welfare of the men and women who populate her novels, Austen disapproves of the vulgarly mercenary. Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte Lucas, who marries exclusively for stability and money, is treated with irritated pity, and the adulterous elopement that ruins Maria Bertram’s life is in part traceable to her decision to wed for overly calculated and insufficiently heartfelt reasons. (“Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as ensure her the house in town . . . it became, by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.”) Nonetheless, Austen has immense sympathy for those who let their heads be turned by the lure of money, as well as for those (even the silly, grating Mrs. Bennet) who see engagement and marriage as a business transaction. For their author knew all too well that the world inhabited by her characters—especially her female characters—offered severely limited opportunities for financial self-improvement. One had better marry a man with an income or at least a respectable clerical living.
The alternatives were perfectly clear and profoundly unattractive. “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor,” wrote Austen. Marriage rescues Emma Woodhouse’s companion Miss Taylor from the cruel fate of Miss Bates, the unfortunate vicar’s daughter who, after her father’s death, “has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more.” When Fanny Price rejects Henry Crawford’s proposal—which, in one of the most disturbing scenes in Austen, Sir Thomas Bertram strongly suggests she accept—she’s packed off to her humble family home in Portsmouth. There she will be reminded of the fate awaiting a woman misguided enough to refuse a wealthy suitor merely because he is a reprehensible human being. In fact, Fanny’s resolve is sorely tested—but not, as it happens, broken—by the appalling contrast between Mansfield Park and Portsmouth:
At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; every body had their due importance; every body’s feelings were consulted. . . . Here, every body was noisy, every voice was loud . . . Whatever was wanted was halloo’d for, and the servants halloo’d out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke.
What’s most interesting about this passage is that the salient difference between Mansfield Park and Portsmouth is not only the gap between wealth and penury, material comfort and privation, but also the disparity between order and disorder, harmony and chaos, between rudeness and good manners. These are the two opposing futures with which Fanny is being presented. What Austen understands is how economic security greatly facilitates—though doesn’t in every case guarantee—kindness, order, and civility. All the frantic concern and convoluted wrangling for incomes and investments, for real estate, livings, and property improvement, are, in essence, means of securing and preserving the higher values of “good sense and good breeding,” the gentle climate in which her favorite characters (and happy couples) thrive. The goal is not the money itself so much as the pleasant life it can arrange, and the moral values that are so much easier to put into practice when one has enough food, warmth—and physical space.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Mansfield Park, the last and arguably the greatest of Austen’s novels. What’s at stake throughout the book—what’s put in jeopardy by the interloping Crawfords—is not simply the family fortune but also the traditions, values, and ideals of Mansfield Park. Though the Crawfords have incomes, they are morally flawed; they are fans of the suspect, erotically disruptive amateur theatricals; they lack respect for the established order; they redecorate and nearly wreck Sir Thomas’s billiard room to construct a theater; they discuss sweeping, unnecessary “improvements” in the landscaping of the estate. In one revealing exchange, the admirable Fanny Price and the shallow Mary Crawford express opposing views on the family chapel. Says Fanny:
“There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one’s ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!”
“Very fine indeed!” said Miss Crawford, laughing. “It must do all the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and say their prayers here twice a day, while they are inventing excuses themselves for staying away.”
It’s this cynical, thoughtless disregard for tradition, politesse, and (in the most elevated sense of the phrase) “family values” that endangers the future of Mansfield Park and its heirs even more than Tom Bertram’s penchant for gambling away the ancestral fortune. Despite their money and facile charm, the selfish, self-indulgent, and decadent Mary and Henry Crawford prove to be highly unsuitable matches for the more innocent, naive—and nobler—Bertrams, and for Fanny. By the novel’s end, even Sir Thomas has come to see that the well-being of his estate will be far better served by Edmund’s marrying the poor but worthy Fanny.
Jane Austen’s novels—and the array of films and television miniseries based upon her fiction—are famous for ending with seemly, neatly arranged, emotionally and artistically satisfying marriages between appealing men and women who have finally managed to remove the complex, maddening (and often self-imposed) obstacles to their union. It’s this tidiness, this reassuring neatness, this lack of disquieting ambiguity and sloppy irresolution that, I think, is—in addition to the grace and wit of her sentences—partly responsible for Austen’s enduring popularity. That satisfying restoration of true harmony and order (and the prudent safeguarding of the income to support it) is the happy future estate that Jane Austen has sensibly, wisely planned for her heroes and heroines, and—if we’re fortunate—for us all.