All for Love? Pride and Prejudice, Hermsprong, and rational attachment

Jane Austen, by Cassandra Austen, uploaded by Winniwuk at German Wikimedia

'whom she regarded herself with an interest, if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just, as what Jane felt for Bingley.'

Thus Elizabeth Bennet on her future husband, Darcy. A lot of people regard Jane Austen as romantic fiction nowadays (maybe because of that episode when Darcy appeared before Elizabeth in a wet shirt). But for all Darcy's 'fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien', Pride and Prejudice is absolutely not about a young woman succumbing to a fit of romantic, overpowering emotion, to say nothing of sexual attraction.

A couple of years ago, I came across a mention of Robert Bage's 'Hermsprong,' a book which Jane Austen had on her shelves. It's an interesting read for many reasons; one, the reiteration of the couplet 'pride and prejudice' on its pages, though for all I know the pairing of the words may well have been common at that time. It was published in 1796, a year before Austen completed the first draft of what was at that time called 'First Impressions.' And if it is a harder read than Pride and Prejudice, when you get into it, and past the rather laboured prologue, it's a fascinating one, particularly because of resonances with Pride and Prejudice.

One theme is the irrationality of revering persons just because of their high rank and how respect must be earned (Bage was known as a democrat, which wasn't a compliment in many circles. He had read Tom Paine and didn't concur in the dogma that the British form of government was the best possible, which in the days of repression following the French Revolution, was dangerous). Pride and Prejudice is not a radical text, but the folly of snobbery is important in the text, as it is in other Austen novels (think silly, feckless Sir Walter Eliot, brown-nosing his noble connections and condescending to those he thinks 'inferior' to himself'). However, what I want to talk about here is the issue of how anyone can achieve lasting happiness in marriage.

Clearly, the 'presenting theme' of Pride and Prejudice, announced in the first paragraph, is the importance of getting a husband (and an establishment) in the first place. Mrs Bennet knows this, and is hot on the scent of profitable husbands; not half as foolish as she's portrayed. Charlotte Lucas makes a cold-eyed choice of Mr Collins; marriage being: 'the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and, however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.' Charlotte's solution to the stupidity of the man she must live with is to forget him as much as possible, and enjoy looking after her parish and her poultry, and, later on no doubt, her children. It's to be hoped they don't take after their father.

However, there was a common preoccupation at that era (and perhaps at any era) with the question of how long-term marital happiness is to be achieved. Eighteenth century people were well aware that 'being in love', assuming a marriage began like that, rather than as a commercial transaction, would not last. Arguing with the Falmouth banker, Sumelin (a man whose teasing of his wife strongly resembles Mr Bennet's teasing of Mrs Bennet, only Sumelin's teasing is less malicious, not to say malevolent) the eponymous hero of Hermsprong quotes Mary Wollstonecraft, saying that the influence of women should be 'diminished on the side of - charms - and let its future increase be on the side of mind.' The reason for this is that it is not common for husbands 'to preserve the ardour of lovers.' What to do when that first ardour has subsided is crucial, if the married couple is not to slide into the matrimonial nastiness that characterises the Bennets' relationship. Their daughter Elizabeth is well aware of this: 'Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort, Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem and confidence, had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.'

Mary Wollstonecraft; engraving by James Heath

Writing in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft observed: 'Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes the place of sensation… This is, must be, the course of nature - friendship or indifference inevitably succeeds love.'

Hermsprong and his Caroline take long walks together and discover how much they have in common as well as falling in love. It has to be said that I much prefer Caroline's less virtuous bosom friend Maria Fluart, a fascinating, independent-minded woman who supports Caroline against her abusive father Lord Grondale and, when Grondale tries to keep her in his house against her will, whips out a pistol and levels it at him and his friends. Did Roald Dahl read Hermsprong, I wonder? Maria Fluart doesn't whip the pistol out of her knickers, as Dahl's Red Riding Hood does, because women didn't wear knickers in those days, but there is a marked similarity.

All the same, Hermsprong and Caroline are ideally suited to each other, and are likely to remain friends all their lives. This is the point of the novel.

Consider, therefore, Elizabeth's feelings about Darcy: ' She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man, who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.' And this would be a marriage which 'could.. teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.'

Compare this with the union of Lydia and Wickham 'a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.' It is not, of course, impossible that Lydia and Wickham might after all become friends, but it is unlikely, and in fact Austen indicates that it doesn't happen.

Radical Austen is not, nor is she a feminist in the way Wollstonecraft is, and yet her novels recommend marriages which are based on the suitability for each other of the heroine and hero; not based on rent-rolls, or snobbery, or the desire to keep estates in the family - and not on a dizzying storm of sexual attraction either.

THE BOOK OF BOSSY GIRLS? By Penny Dolan.

Recently my interest was caught a media discussion: the kind where X says this, so Y spouts up with that, often through tweets and social network sites, and giving both X & Y & also Z material for an article or two.

This controversy was about the use of the word “bossy” to describe girls. It does come across as a word drenched in negativity and rejection. For one thing, “bossy” is what girls aren’t supposed to be, but it is hard to refute without sounding – er, bossy.  

Last year, researching Mary Wollstonecraft for a short story, I read Clare Tomalin’s excellent biography. By the end, I had decided that Mary, though hugely admirable, was probably not a very comfortable person to be around for long. 

Mary had opinions she wanted to share, better beliefs she thought herself- and others - should live by, and much to feel angry about, at both a personal and general level. She organised her family and friends, who were not always grateful or glad, and she spoke and wrote against what she saw as injustice and inequality. In other words, Mary was probably a bit difficult and, yes, sometimes bossy. 

 

 Do women ever get anything done without being accused of being bossy, I wonder?

What about the women in the past who fought alongside men – Boudicca and her daughters, or maybe Alfred’s daughter Aethefled? Or Mary Seacole, caring for her soldiers even if Florence Nightingale’s hospital rejected her?

What about the girls and women who negotiated their roles among the dangerous men of power: Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth Stuart, or the remarkable Eleanor of Aquitaine?  

Or women like anchorite Julian of Norwich, playwright Aphra Ben, or even my Mary – women whose writing explains how they see life and their world? Isn’t writing, as authors and journalists know, a way of raising your voice?

Speaking out has often been seen – or heard – as a problem, the ultimate demonstration of bossiness: the women protestors at Greenham Common became the stereo-types of stridency. In contrast, Emily Davison, facing the king’s horse, used her own body as a way of “speaking“ when people in power wouldn’t listen. 

What about those who persisted in their own paths? There is Mary Anning, the self-taught fossil-hunter whose discoveries were subsumed into the collections and reputations of wealthy and aristocratic palaeontologists? Or what about the persistence needed to be Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia, and who may have been a British spy?  Amazing women, all.

 

As I’m typing this, Woman’s Weekend Hour is airing an item about female “Game Changers” as part of their Power List 2014 campaign:

 

Rachel Short, an organisational psychologist says that the key aspects of “game changers” were their intellectual independence, the fact that they were socially eclectic and that their motivation was guided by initiative, resilience and deep-rooted self-belief. 

Unsurprisingly, the words “difficult” and “bossy” came up again. (Not the word "cranky", though that might fit too.) It seems that bossy girls and women – and you will have your own favourite heroines – are often those who make things happen, however subtly or noticeably they manage it. Perhaps “bossy” is a kind of compliment, after all?

You can read fictional tales about all these historical heroines now in the BOOK OF BOSSY GIRLS - more properly and correctly known as the DAUGHTERS OF TIME anthology, edited by Mary Hoffman. (Templar)

Penny Dolan

Mother of the More Famous Mary – Celia Rees

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 - 1797

I always like women who are ‘vilified’. They have usually lived unconventional lives and have done something, or written something not to the liking of the (male) establishment. That makes them interesting on two counts:  interesting anyway, I like people who break rather than make the rules, and interesting to me as a writer of historical fiction.  When I’m writing in this genre, girls are my main characters. I make no apologies for this. It is a conscious decision. Boys and men have enough coverage. I want to broadcast voices less heard, give life to stories disregarded, unrecorded or forgotten. I search out women who led unusual and often transgressive lives. I’m not looking at the average. I’m looking for what it was possible for women to do.  For Witch Child and Sorceress, it was the ‘Unbridled Spirits’ of the English Revolution, and their sisters in America who settled the land there, or were captured by Native Americans but lived to tell their tale as redeemed, or unredeemed, captives. For Pirates! it was those Female Sailors Bold, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. For Sovay it was Mary Wollstonecraft. It annoys me when critics, as they sometimes do, dismiss my books as ‘rollicking good reads, but not history’. All I can do is give an ironic smile, shrug and mourn their woeful ignorance of the history of their own sex.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was unconventional in the extreme. She had affairs, she lived with men while still unmarried, she bore a child out of wedlock, and perhaps most shocking of all, she wrote pamphlets challenging the views of her male contemporaries. She took on the major thinkers of the day, both conservative and radical. She wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, as a riposte to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Two years later, she answered Tom Paine’s Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of Women, putting the case for the other half of the human race. She even took the sainted Rousseau to task for his dismissal of women. Burke was a pillar of the establishment; Tom Paine the leading radical thinker of the day; Rousseau wrote the Social Contract on which the American and French Revolutions were based, but Mary Wollstonecraft was determined to have her say and did not regard her relative youth, her lack of formal education, or her sex as prohibitions. She demanded to have her opinion heard. She saw it as her right.

‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.’

Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing for equal rights, for men and women alike. She was the first to make such a radical claim and her audacity catapulted her to fame. It earned her the title ‘hyena in petticoats’ but she would not be intimidated or bullied into silence. She was well before her time. It would take close to a hundred years before men gained the right to vote, let alone women, but the call she made for equality would echo down from one century to another, to be taken up by the Pankhursts and the Suffragettes in Britain and by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The National Woman Suffrage Association in America. Her voice would not be, could not be silenced.

Her intellectual daring was matched by her physical courage. At a time when most people were heading in the opposite direction, she went to Paris at the height of the Revolution to witness events for herself. She arrived barely a month before Louis XVI was guillotined and joined a group of expatriates which included the British writer Helen Maria Williams. She fell passionately in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and had a daughter, Fanny, by him.  She stayed in France through the height of the Revolution, even though foreigners were interdit, subject to arrest and the threat of the guillotine. Her An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in 1794.

 

















She returned to England in 1795. She continued to travel and to publish. In March 1797, she married fellow writer and philosopher, William Godwin. She had only a few months left to live. Being a woman got her in the end. She died in September 1797, a few days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. The placenta failed to come away cleanly and she died in hideous agony as her doctor tore it out of her, piece by piece, thereby introducing the septicaemia which would kill her.

She described herself as ‘the first of a new genus’. I’m proud to belong to the same family.