Jane Austen This article is more than 18 years oldThe trials of youth
This article is more than 18 years oldZoë Heller celebrates the teenage Austen, whose stories and sketches provide an illuminating glimpse of the humour, morality and social comment she would later develop in her novelsThe smallness of Jane Austen's fictional canvas is probably the best-known characteristic of her mature work; even those who have never read her six great novels have heard about her "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory". But as a teenager, Austen had yet to establish her distinctive boundaries. She was still experimenting. One of the pleasures her early stories afford us is a glimpse of a famously "quiet" and domestic writer engaging with melodramatic incident, regal vice and other immoral behaviour in a gleefully direct way.
"Lesley Castle", a rambunctious parody of the epistolary novel, written when Austen was 16, is particularly striking in this respect. On its first page, we find Margaret Lesley lamenting the dissipated ways of her 57-year-old roué father and the adulterous elopement of her sister-in-law. A death in a horse-riding accident, a couple of conversions to Roman Catholicism, and various cynical second marriages will shortly ensue. These outsized events are matched by a comic tone markedly broader and less naturalistic than anything to be found in Austen's later work. The satire keeps lapsing into burlesque. A running joke about the speciousness of the affection that the conceited female correspondents protest for one another is sent extravagantly over the top when Margaret Lesley cooingly informs Charlotte Lutterell, "How often have I wished that I possessed as little personal beauty as you do; that my figure were as inelegant; my face as unlovely; and my appearance as unpleasing as yours!"
There are even moments of physical humour - as when Lady Lesley envisages herself being hoisted up the cliff to Castle Lesley on a rope. A character called Lady Kickabout seems to have strayed out of a play by Congreve. In fact, all the protagonists have something of the cheerful excess of Restoration comedy about them. Charlotte, with her culinary monomania - her insistence on the loss of victuals being of greater import than the loss of a fiancé - is quite surreal in her dottiness. Twenty-five years later, Austen would take Charlotte's eccentricity and loquaciousness and innocence, and transmute these qualities into the comic pathos of Miss Bates; here, she is content to give us a kind of pantomime spinster.
Margaret Lesley, the novel's chief proponent of sensibility, is just as ludicrous as Charlotte in her way. But whereas Charlotte is a likeable idiot - her passion for roast beef has at least the merit of constancy - Margaret is purely awful. She is one of a long line of Austenian sillies whose romantic pretensions and delusions float, like not very effective veils, over the prosaic unpleasantness of their true natures. She fancies herself "secluded from mankind" while, in fact, enjoying a rather busy social life in a suburb of Perth. She peppers her letters with exclamation marks to advertise her feeling heart, but swiftly proves herself utterly insensitive. She boasts of being innocent of her own charms and is, of course, pathologically conceited.
Camilla Stanley in "Catharine" is another one of Margaret's breed. And so, too, is the flibbertigibbet narrator of "The History of England". Overflowing with hyperbolic opinion, but devoid of "taste and information", neither of them has anything to teach us but the lineaments of her own prejudice. Just as Camilla can summarily dismiss the entire Dudley clan on the basis of Miss Dudley's poor taste in headdress, so the sentimental historian can point confidently to Anne Boleyn's personal loveliness as proof of her innocence.
Some commentators, puzzled by Austen's decision to endow her foolish narrator with her own pro-Stuart inclinations, have suggested that the young author is confused about tone. But fools don't always hold the wrong opinions; they are just as likely to hold the right opinions for the wrong reasons. I take it as a sign of Austen's precocious sophistication that she is willing to make light of her own allegiances by having an idiot defend them. The narrator's lines on Austen's heroine, Mary Queen of Scots - "this bewitching Princess, whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk - and whose only ones now Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight and myself" - are some of the funniest in the entire piece.
"The History of England" is a jolly, ludic work, designed to elicit laughter when read aloud in the Austen family's parlour. But there is something vaguely unsettling about the nonchalant way that the narrator proceeds through her catalogue of murder and betrayal as if she were discoursing on bonnets. A few of her more insouciant asides - "Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for" - have a positively Swiftian sting. As always in Austen's work, recklessness with facts and inattention to detail are the rhetorical clues to a deeper-seated, moral carelessness. Think of Lady Lesley blithely forgetting the "long rigmarole story" she is told about the parentage of two-year-old Louisa - and with it the rather crucial fact that she is the child's grandmother. Think of the caddish Mr Stanley's repeated failure to listen when Catharine speaks. Or think of the way Camilla Stanley declares Mrs Smith's novels "the sweetest things in the world" and, in the next breath, blithely confesses to having skipped great chunks of them. Today, these characters might be thought of as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder. Austen's less forgiving diagnosis is rampant egotism.
In "The History" and in "Lesley Castle", the author's commentary is only implied. Austen's ghostly, ironic presence hovers over the text like the Cheshire Cat's smile. In "Catharine", the most ambitious of these three pieces, we get a real heroine - a protagonist, that is, in whom some of Austen's own values and intelligence are made manifest. And what fun it is to read Catharine Percival's wry rejoinders to Camilla Stanley's gush! They go unnoticed by Camilla, of course, but no matter. For Catharine, as for so many Austenian heroines, ironic wit is its own reward - a small but delicious consolation for all the indignities and constraints she is forced to suffer with quiet forbearance.
Catharine's judgment is not entirely trustworthy, of course. She is not yet a deep reader, and her innate kindness and decency have still to be honed by experience. The moral question that Austen sets for her is not dissimilar to that she will pose for Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. What is the appropriate latitude to give to emotion? The novel's official response is clear enough: the conservative values of propriety and reserve must take precedence over romantic self-indulgence. But, as in Sense and Sensibility, this official response has its tensions and ambiguities. We notice, for example, that in Mrs Percival, Austen has chosen a most unattractive spokeswoman for the virtues of caution and modesty. She's a neurotic crab apple. Who can blame Catharine for chafing under her restraints? It is, of course, absolutely wrong for Catharine to take off for the Dudleys' ball alone with a stranger. But the flirtatious conversation between Stanley and Catharine is much the liveliest, sexiest dialogue yet seen in the story, and we, too, are a little seduced by it. We are instructed to disapprove when Catharine ignores etiquette and agrees to lead a dance with Stanley, but we are also invited to detest the snobbery of Camilla's outraged reaction.
It's not that Austen has a secret, subversive agenda. She really does want us to accept that a tradesman's daughter ought not to lead a dance when ladies of more noble birth are present. It's just that her instincts as a writer, as an observer of lived experience, are keener than her ambitions as a moralist. Even at the age of 16, she is incapable of anything diagrammatic.
At some point in the course of reading these works, you are likely to feel the prickings of a baffled envy. Even as you are absorbing the rhythms of Austen's shapely sentences, the pitch-perfect comedy of her dialogue, the sly elegance of her irony, you will stop and ask, "How did a teenager do this?"; "How did she know so much about the particularities and universalities of human folly?"; "Where did she acquire such a wise and confident wit?". "One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born," was Virginia Woolf's suggestion. This may seem a rather twee and unsatisfactory answer. But then, I don't think Woolf meant to offer an explanation so much as to frankly acknowledge a conundrum. Austen, it is safe to say, was some species of genius. To speak of voyages with fairies is just another way of reminding us that the mystery of that genius was, and is, irreducible.
© Zoë Heller 2005. This article appears as the foreword to Lesley Castle, three stories by Jane Austen, published in one volume by Hesperus Press.
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