Emma as Sequel

Paul Pickrel

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 40, No. 2. (Sep., 1985), pp. 135-153.

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 Emma as Sequel
PAUL PICKREL

E v E R Y T H I N G about the literary career of

Jane Austen is astonishing, but pos-
sibly the single most astonishing thing about it is that she wrote
both Mansjield Park and Emma in a little more than four years, with
a break of only six months between finishing the one and starting
the other. Such productivity would be a feat in any novelist, but
two circumstances combine to make it almost incredible in Jane
Austen: first, so far as we know she had written little in the more
than a dozen years preceding this great burst of creativity; and
second, the two books are generally regarded as being the most
unlike of any pair among the six novels she lived to complete.
Mansfield Park is the most austere, moralistic, even censorious, with
the poorest and most creepmouse of heroines and the most rep-
rehensible (or at any rate the most reprehended) of wrongdoers.
Emma, on the other hand, is full of fun and high spirits, with the
richest and most self-assured of heroines and no villains at all.
A couple of theories, neither very satisfactory, have been hatched
to account for the stern tone of Mansjield Park, but none whatever
to account for the sudden alleviation of that tone in the novel begun
a few months later. I want to suggest that the place of the two books
in Jane Austen's literary career, with some help from the little we
know about her life in this period, tells us a good deal about them,
singly and as a pair; that the relationship between them is far closer
and more complex than has been recognized; and that at least some
of the ease and joy flooding Emma is an emanation of the writer's

O 1985 by T h e Regents of the University of California

136 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

relief at having succeeded in working her way through the prob-

lems that made the writing of Mansjield Park such a demanding
enterprise. '
I want to go further and suggest that the two books stand in
such a relationship that it is hardly an exaggeration of their close-
ness to call Emma a sequel to Mansjield Park. Near the end of the
earlier novel I think we see Jane Austen discovering the subject of
the later, discovering the story that it would take another book to
tell, and if it also required a new cast of characters, that fails to
cancel the link:

Scarcely had [Edmund Bertram] done regretting Mary Crawford,

and observing to Fanny how impossible it was that he should ever
meet with such another woman, before it began to strike him
whether a very different kind of woman might not dojust as well-
or a great deal better; whether Fanny herself were not growing
as dear, as important to him in all her smiles, and all her ways, as
Mary Crawford had ever been; and whether it might not be a
possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm
and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wed-
ded love.2

The process sketched in this remarkable sentence in the most gen-

eralized way, the process by which someone long taken for granted
is sufficiently defamiliarized by the trials of experience to reenter
the life-plan in a totally new role, is of course the story Emma tells.
The sentence looks ahead to that great moment at Mr. Weston's
ball when Mr. Knightley asks Emma to dance, and she concedes
that they "are not really so much brother and sister as to make it
at all improper." "Brother and sister! no, indeed," he replies.' If
Mansfield Park and Emma were to be joined under a common title,
it could well be Brother and sister! no, indeed.

'There is of course nothing new in the general idea that Mansjeld Park
somehow cleared the way for Emma. A. Walton Litz puts the usual view with
admirable succinctness: "Evidently the writing of Mansfield Park was a necessary
catharsis for Jane Austen, since in her next novel, Emma, she was able to
encompass and extend the themes of all her previous works" (Jane Amten: A
Study of Her Artistic Development [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 19631, p. 131).
'Mansfield Park, ed. John Lucas, Oxford English Novels (London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 428-29; later page references are to this edition.
3Emma, ed. David Lodge, Oxford English Novels (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1971), p. 298; later page references are to this edition.
EMMA AS SEQUEL 137
Jane Austen never dawdles as she nears the end of a book (in
nothing does she resemble less her master Samuel Richardson),
but in the closing pages of Mansfield Park she is visibly impatient,
almost short-tempered. There was reason enough: the book had
taken her considerably longer to write than any other she ever
undertook; its writing seems to have been constricting and de-
manding in ways the writing of no other novel was. Yet I am tempted
to believe that some of the impatience that marks the ending of
Mansjield Park springs from her discovery in its closing pages of
the happy task that lay before her in writing Emma and that she
rushed ahead to revel in the more benign and spacious atmosphere
she sensed ahead.

Let us begin by considering how things stood

with Jane Austen when she sat down to start Mansfield Park one
morning in February of 1811. A spinster in her thirty-sixth year,
for the last two of those years she had been living with her mother,
her beloved older sister, and a female friend in Chawton Cottage,
a residence almost as modest as its name suggests, situated on the
periphery of the splendid estate one of her brothers had inherited.
Since Sir Walter Scott was a Scotsman, she was at that moment the
greatest living English novelist. (Thackeray would be born later
that year and Dickens the year following.) Yet she had so far pub-
lished not a single word.
More than a decade before, between the ages of nineteen and
twenty-two (1795-98), she had written her first trilogy, the three
novels (or the first drafts of them) known to us as Sense and Sensibility,
Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey. Her father had made an
amateurish effort to get one of the first trilogy published and had
been rebuffed; later a publisher had bought one of the others but
for a reason still unknown had failed to bring it out. Yet whatever
disappointment she may have felt at this lack of even the most
elementary recognition for her work (she wanted only anonymity
for herself), it can have been no more than one of the many shadows
that had fallen over the stretch of time since that first brilliant
period of accomplishment had closed thirteen years before. First
her father had retired, uprooting her from the only home she had
138 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

ever known (family . legend

- had it that she fainted when she was
told that they were going to move); then they had gone to live in
Bath, which she heartily disliked. In a few years the father died
and there were further removals. An older woman, probably her
best friend outside the family, was killed in a fall from a horse.
What seems to have been her only serious love affair was cut off
almost before it got started by the sudden death of the young man,
as her sister's engagement had ended with the death of her fiance
in the West Indies a few years earlier. No wonder that by 1811 Jane
Austen affected the dress and manner of a woman older than her
years; no wonder that the book in which she resumed her career
as an unpublished writer comes to the solemn conclusion that hu-
mankind is "born to struggle and endure" (p. 432).
Perhaps the years between the two eras of accomplishment
were a little less gloomy than brief summary makes them sound.
The record is scanty, and the most unpleasant facts in anybody's
life seem to stand the best chance of survival. In the years between
she had certainly done some revising of the first three books, per-
haps a great deal, but the one new novel she had started, The
Watsons, she never finished. To initiate and carry through a major
project she apparently needed a fixed home, and by the time she
started MansfieldPark she had at last found one in Chawton Cottage,
where she was able to complete the second trilogy (Mansfield Park,
Emma, and Persuasion) before her death in 1817 at the age of forty-
one. The first trilogy had been largely continuous in subject and
style with the improvisations Jane Austen had been producing for
the entertainment of the family circle almost from childhood. But
by the time she started Mansfield Park most of that circle was dis-
persed, and its center, her father, was dead. To sit down now and
write a novel as a single woman of thirty-five in a household of
single women, mostly older, was a very different kind of under-
taking, and a far more precarious one.
In Mansfield Park we see Jane Austen cautiously and painstak-
ingly working her way through a considerable range of concerns
that must have seemed to her profoundly problematic as she re-
turned to writing in a literary and social scene that had changed
as much as she had since the days of her first literary efforts. In a
general way she seems to have concluded from this attempt that
the new styles dominant in literature and society both threatened
EMMA AS SEQUEL 139
her less and offered her less (as an artist) than she might have
supposed. Emma is a brilliantly innovative book, but it shows an
easy disregard for fashion and a renewed confidence in the meth-
ods and masters of the first trilogy. Much that is undertaken in a
tentative spirit and examined with the closest scrutiny in Mansfield
Park simply falls in place there, and a good deal of it dissolves in
laughter.
Several matters treated with the utmost seriousness in Mansfield
Park reappear in Emma only or chiefly as comic traits in Mr. Wood-
house. His terror of haste, for instance, is merely part of the quiv-
ering apprehension with which he faces the world, but in Mansfield
Park haste is a serious moral defect, as the Crawfords show. His
comic hypochondria is about all that remains of the cloud of ill
health that hangs over several characters in Mansfield Park. The
sense that place has a magical power for good, which permeates
that novel, reappears only in such absurd self-delusions as Mr.
Woodhouse's conviction that pork grown on his own estate is more
easily digested than pork grown elsewhere; and his concomitant
conviction that London is a baneful place parodies the perfectly
serious notion in Mansfield Park that London is a source of evil, "at
war with all respectable attachments" (p. 394). Nature, particularly
in the earlier part of Mansfield Park, is the subject of rhapsodies
almost Wordsworthian in sentiment, if not in style: "When I look
out on such a night as this," Fanny says at one point, "I feel as if
there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and
there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were
more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves
by contemplating such a scene" (p. 102). In Emma concern with
nature appears chiefly in Mr. Woodhouse's fret about the weather.
The domestication of nature-what Jane Austen called the
improvement of estates and we call landscape design-is an even
more pervasive and important concern in the early part of Mansfield
Park. Just before we meet him Henry Crawford has improved his
estate with the alacrity characteristic of the Crawfords, and he talks
a good deal with Edmund Bertram about improving the parsonage
where Edmund intends to live. One of the most important events
of the first volume of the novel is the expedition to Sotherton, Mr.
Rushworth's estate, undertaken with the nominal aim of discov-
ering its "capability" of improvement. Pretty clearly, under the trope
140 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

of estate improvement Jane Austen is trying to come to terms with

the new spirit that dominated the literary scene when she returned
to it-with romanticism, in short. But she never resolved the conflict
between the old and the new that Fanny expresses; as her old
confidence returned, and with it her confidence in her earlier man-
ner, she apparently lost interest in the whole problem, and it fades
from the pages of the book. The most intense interest in romantic
attitudes occurs in the account of the expedition to Sotherton.
Fanny is deeply disappointed in the chapel they visit: "There is
nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand," she says
(p. 76), twice quoting Scott in support of her views. This occurs in
the first fifth of the novel.
Apparently what most of this landscape improvement amounts
to is that rows are being replaced by clumps; old-fashioned, regular,
symmetrical planting is being torn out and something more irreg-
ular, picturesque, mysterious, and romantic put in its place. Fanny
Price, who obviously expresses Jane Austen's attitudes in the matter,
is torn between the old style and the new. On the one hand, she
laments the cutting down of avenues of fine old trees just because
their style has passed: "Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your
fate unmerited," she quotes from Cowper (p. 50); on the other
hand, on the occasion of the trip to Sotherton the narrator concedes
that "the wilderness . . . [was] laid out with too much regularity"
(p. 82)-which does seem rather a fault in a wilderness.
The only significant reference to landscape design in Emma
occurs in the account of the strawberry party at Donwell Abbey,
and this is the most interesting passage:

It was hot; and after walking some time over the gardens in a
scattered, dispersed way, scarcely any three together, they insen-
sibly 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. Disputable, however, as might be the
taste of such a termination, it was in itself a charming walk, and
the view which closed it extremely pretty. (p. 325)

Here the old-fashioned avenue remains; what is worse, it seems to

have been part of some elaborate scheme of improvement that was
EMMA AS SEQUEL 141
never carried out. The effect is not stylish, but that hardly matters
when the shade is so welcome and the view so pretty. A less doc-
trinaire approach to landscape design could hardly be imagined.
Far and away the most important and complex tangle of con-
cerns that are problematic in Mansfield Park but reach either res-
olution or oblivion in Emma centers on the question of role. In the
course of writing the first of the two novels Jane Austen was chang-
ing roles herself: she was becoming a professional writer. In un-
dertaking the book she was asserting a more serious commitment
to literature than in the novels of her twenties, and, more impor-
tant, in the course of completing it she became for the first time a
published novelist. Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811, about ten
months after she started Mansfield Park, and in January 1813, about
six months before she finished it, Pride and Prejudice appeared. (The
declining interest in romanticism as Mansfield Park advances may
reflect a boost in her confidence gained from the publication of
these earlier books.)
Jane Austen's name of course never appeared on a title page
in her lifetime, but her brother Henry was much too proud of his
sister's accomplishment (and perhaps a bit too much of a busybody)
not to betray the secret of her authorship when the books appeared.
Her reaction is revealing: "I am trying to harden myself," she
wrote.4 "Harden" is a key word in Mansfield Park, like its antithesis
"feel"; and in most of its occurrences it has to do with the individ-
ual's adjustment to a more public role. When, for instance, Sir
Thomas Bertram on his return from Antigua remarks that Fanny
has grown prettier in his absence her cousin Edmund warns her
that she really must "harden" herself to being looked at. Even brash
Mary Crawford thinks that she will have to "harden" herself to say
some of the speeches belonging to her part in the amateur theat-
ricals the young people undertake in the absence of Sir Thomas.
The most telling occurrence of the word comes in the debate
between Edmund and his sister Julia on the appropriateness of
those theatricals. Julia cannot understand her brother's objection;
no one, she says, "can have gone much farther" than he has to see
a play. He replies:

4Jane Austen to Francis Austen, 25 Sept. 1813, Jane Austen's Letters to Her
Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (1932; rpt. with cor-
rections, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 340; hereafter referred to as
Letters.
142 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

"True, [I would go far] to see real acting, good hardened real

acting; but I would hardly walk from this room to the next to look
at the raw efforts of those who have not been bred to the trade,-
a set of gentlemen and ladies, who have all the disadvantages of
education and decorum to struggle through." (p. 112)
Here "hardened" is in no way pejorative. It rather has something
of the sense of "tempered by training and experience"; it is prac-
tically synonymous with "professional."
In the Austen family, for a man to have a profession meant
either the navy (two of the brothers became admirals) or the church
(the father had been a clergyman and two more of the brothers
followed in his footsteps). So it is hardly surprising that in Mansfield
Park Jane Austen should have chosen to dramatize the issue of
professionalism, a new subject for her, in the commissioning of
William Price as a naval officer and in the ordination of Edmund
Bertram. William achieves his commission in the usual way of the
time; Jane Austen accepts without question the traditional means
of advancement in the navy by influence. Edmund's progress not
only occupies far more attention but raises far more problems;
Jane Austen told a correspondent that the "subject" of Mansfield
Park was ordination, and the remark is less misleading than it is
often taken to be.
If landscape design is the trope under which Jane Austen
examines new ideas about what art should be, ordination is the
trope under which she examines new expectations of what a man's
role in society should be. T h e evangelical movement had something
to do with her attitudes, perhaps a good deal; so did the devel-
opment of her own career and her intense interest in her brothers'.
Perhaps an increasing importance was being attached to a man's
work in the early years of the nineteenth century. Certainly Jane
Austen is far more concerned with what men do in the second
trilogy than she had been in the first, and in no book is this concern
more central than in Mansjield Park.
In the first trilogy, and most brilliantly in Pride and Prejudice,
Jane Austen had worked out a definition of a good marriage as
one in which the private and the public, love and convenience,
feeling and prudence are combined in a seamless fabric; and at the
outset of the second trilogy, in Mansfield Park, she works out a similar
way of looking at occupation. All the questions raised about the
EMMA AS SEQUEL 143
clerical career that Edmund is about to embark upon concern the
tension in that career between the worldly and the spiritual; all the
answers are based upon the possibility of their reconciliation. Is it
acceptable for Edmund to follow a spiritual calling when his father
stands ready to aid him in it so materially? Well, it would certainly
be imprudent for him to follow that calling if he had no hope of
a place to practice it; on the other hand, the only justification for
accepting the living his father can give him is the exercise of the
utmost rigor and propriety in the execution of its spiritual duties.
Examination of the clergyman's role is even more forgotten in
Emma than examination of landscape design; Mr. Elton's worldli-
ness is undiluted by any tincture of spirituality. But the new seri-
ousness about work remains. No other landowner in the novels
takes his responsibilities so seriously or works so hard at fulfilling
them as Mr. Knightley; and obviously his younger brother works
equally hard in London at his profession, the law.
The question of role is raised most acutely in Mansfield Park
by the episode of the amateur theatricals; but it is a mistake, I think,
to suppose that the objection to that undertaking is on the grounds
of role-playing, as Lionel Trilling does when he says that what is
"decisive" here is an objection to "dramatic impersonation."' There
is Edmund's approval of professional acting, already quoted, in
apparent contradiction, and such a puzzling detail as the praise
heaped on Mrs. Grant for assuming "with her usual good humour"
(p. 142) the very role that Fanny is praised for refusing to play.
The theatricals must be seen in the social context Jane Austen
provides. It is important that the whole acting scheme is set afoot
while Sir Thomas is abroad and in some danger. T h e way all the
young people in the family drop the enterprise immediately on his
return the night of the dress rehearsal shows their awareness of
its impropriety in the circumstances. It is important, too, that Maria
Bertram's supposedly secret engagement to Mr. Rushworth has put
her in a precarious social position that is exacerbated by her part
in the play.
The device of the secret engagement is repeated in Emma, and
with such skill that it alone provides a perfect objective correlative
for most of the concerns that in Mansfield Park are more diffusely

'See The Opposing Self(New York: Viking Press, 1955), p. 218.

144 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

and less satisfactorily dealt with under the guise of the theatricals.
Emma's censure of Frank Churchill for coming among them, pre-
tending to be an eligible young man when in fact he was already
bespoke, recalls Fanny's censure of Henry Crawford for using the
pretense of the play as a cover for his flirtation with the already-
engaged Maria Bertram. When Jane Fairfax describes the worst of
her own behavior under the constraint of the secret engagement
("So cold and artificial!-I had always a part to act.-It was a life of
deceit!" [p. 418; emphasis added]), we remember Fanny's refusal
to appear in the play: "I really cannot act" (p. 132). Fanny and Jane
Fairfax, both growing up as semiadopted members of families far
richer than themselves yet both unprovided for after girlhood, both
falling in love with young men from among the rich they have
grown up with, dramatize in opposite ways the horror of being in
a false position that underlies both novels and that is certainly
central to their concern with role-playing. Emma herself, as she
approaches the end of her story, looks forward to the time when
the "disguise, equivocation, mystery, so hateful to her to practise,
might soon be over" (p. 432) and the felicity of her marriage is
assured by its being "all right, all open, all equal" (p. 425).
Role-playing is almost an obsession with the Crawfords. In
Henry, even at its worst, it contains a shred of aspiration that he
otherwise lacks: his cynical decision to pretend to an interest in
Fanny leads to the noblest feeling he is ever to know. At its best,
as when he thrills to imagine himself a sailor like William Price, he
becomes thoroughly admirable for the moment, as the considerable
service he performs for William in consequence attests. Mary, on
the other hand, except when she is temporarily elevated by the
true feelings of Mansfield ("You all have so much more heart among
you" [p. 326]), sees life in society as almost entirely role-playing.
Her absorption in the niggling question of whether Fanny Price is
"in" or "out" (has or has not made her debut) is the extreme ex-
ample of her preoccupation with the way society meaninglessly casts
people in roles.

To say that Mansjield Park and Emma bear re-

markable structural resemblances seems not to claim very much,
since, if we leave out Northanger Abbey, the underlying situations in
EMMA AS SEQUEL 145
all of Jane Austen's novels bear a resemblance to one another strong
enough to enable us to construct from them a kind of personal
archetype. Always there is a main family in the big house, with a
minimum of two daughters, of contrasting temperaments. T h e
daughters are a little overexposed to society, a little too much on
their own as they approach marriage, because they are themselves
the products of a marriage that has failed; at least one parent (and
sometimes both) has been lost to death, irony, valetudinarianism,
inertia, vanity, silliness, or some other affliction that hobbles the
practice of parenthood. Various surrogates have stepped into the
parental void, mostly aunts, either by biology or calling; and the
sisters move among a group of neighbors, family connections, and
old friends, who collectively form the insiders. Sooner or later they
will be supplemented by a smaller group of outsiders, including
some young men to enlarge the pool from which the sisters will
ultimately select their husbands, and usually some young women
to sharpen the competition.
Each of the five novels we are considering asks the question:
can the genteel disorder introduced into the social microcosm by
the unsuitable marriage of the parents be restored to order? Can
the heroine, in other words, make a marriage more suitable than
the one that produced her? Since the novels are all comedies, the
answer is always yes. T h e plots work through reversal of figure and
ground: certain characters that seem of marginal value at the outset
emerge as supremely valuable by the end (Fanny and Mr. Knight-
ley); others lose status and recede into the background (the Bertram
sisters, Mr. Elton, and Frank Churchill). Usually a regrouping of
insiders and outsiders takes place, as it does in Mansfield Park, with
the outsider (Fanny) becoming the true heiress of the Mansfield
spirit while the sisters born to it are banished; but there is no
consequential regrouping in Emma.
T h e characters who figure in the successive versions of the
simple archetype repeat as much from book to book, and vary as
much, as the archetype itself. A character may occupy one place
in the archetype and another place in the plot: Emma is the younger
of the requisite two daughters, the most common place for a Jane
Austen heroine to occupy in the archetype; but Fanny is an outsider,
and the only heroine who is. Mother surrogates range from the
unspeakable Mrs. Norris to the gentle, gracious Mrs. Weston. Mrs.
Grant and Mr. Weston are both plot facilitators (they give most of
146 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

the parties that bring the young people together), and they have
a good many traits in common-good-natured, not very profound,
sociable. Lady Bertram and Mr. Woodhouse serve the opposite
function: they sit, massive and immobile, in the stream of plot,
almost damming it; always they must be attended to before any-
thing else can happen. Yet they are very different. Lady Bertram
is almost imperturbable and Mr. Woodhouse is all perturbation;
she uses her immobility to win for herself a life without effort, but
his immobility is the paralysis of anxiety.
A single trait can undergo remarkable transformation. Mrs.
Norris and Miss Bates share the trait of talkativeness, but in Mrs.
Norris talk takes the form of great baroque arias of self-congrat-
ulation, totally unlike the egoless purling of Miss Bates's stream of
consciousness. When Mrs. Norris relates how the housekeeper
forced her to accept certain presents at the end of the Sotherton
expedition, she is entertaining but completely unreliable; when
Miss Bates relates what happened at the breakup of the Donwell
strawberry party she may be tedious but every word is true. Miss
Bates's simple babbling, in the longer speeches hardly achieving
syntax, opens up the texture of a novel almost too witty and highly
structured; Mrs. Norris's speeches are notable excrescences on the
more nearly level plain of Mansfield Park's prose.
Perhaps nothing testifies more tellingly to the recombinative
potentiality of Jane Austen's characterological store or to the way
the destructive element in Mansfield Park brightens into comedy in
Emma than the transmutation of the villainess of the first into the
heroine of the second. Of course there are towering differences
between Mrs. Norris and Emma; yet both are bossy women, using
the inertness of the relative they nominally serve-sister or father-
to get their own way. Both have a high opinion of themselves
sustained by an impressive ignorance of the subject. Both are much
given to aunthood; both congratulate themselves on their gift for
matchmaking but live to see the matches they have tried to make
blow up in their faces. Each sets going the novel in which she figures
by introducing into the big house a girl who is an outsider, and
each comes to regret bitterly the act when the outsider becomes
the rival of a more favored insider for the same man. (In the
instance of Emma the insider is herself.)
Not only do both Mansfield Park and Emma begin with the
introduction of an outsider into the big house, as no other of the
EMMA AS SEQUEL 147
novels does, but in both there are two big houses, as there are in
no other of the novels, at least not in the same relationship. The
first house, where the main family lives, seems to be what Jane
Austen would call a well-built modern house, situated on rising
land amid a suitable complement of "shrubberies" and park. The
second house, where an eligible man lives, lies at a moderate dis-
tance; it is much older; along with its contents it is of some historical
interest; it is situated in a valley and surrounded by extensive plant-
ing now considered seriously out of style but nonetheless charming.
An outing in which the residents of the first house go in a group
to the second is central to both books, and in both books the outing
has nearly the same shape, beginning in high spirits and ending
with the various young people at cross-purposes. There seems to
be a little more information about real estate here than is strictly
necessary, so unlike Jane Austen's usual spareness of detail. Perhaps
some personal reference that can no longer be recovered is in-
volved, as I suspect there may be in the theme of being in a false
position. At any rate, there can be no doubt of the unique impor-
tance of home in these two novels. Mansfield Park is the only book
Jane Austen named for a place (Northanger Abbey was named by
her brother when he prepared it for publication after her death);
tradition has it that the physical setting is based upon the fine
property another brother had inherited and on whose periphery
she had at last found a home where she could resume her writing.
Clearly, among other things, Mansjield Park is the story of Fan-
ny's love affair with her adoptive home, building up from her initial
discomfort there, when as a little girl just arrived she cried herself
to sleep every night, to the passionate homesickness that dominates
the last third of the novel when she is exiled by Sir Thomas to
Portsmouth, her place of birth. It is less generally recognized what
a homebody Emma is. True, when Frank Churchill lavishes his
praise on Highbury, she "began to feel that she had been used to
despise the place rather too much" (p. 198).But she never expresses
a wish to be elsewhere; her farthest outing is a day's trip to Box
Hill, a famous scenic spot. It is only seven miles from her home,
but she had never been there before. She has never been to the
sea, which cannot be far away from wherever she lives in Surrey.
During the period we know her she never visits her sister in Lon-
don, sixteen miles away, and there is no direct reference to her
ever having been there, though she must have been.
148 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

More important: these are the only novels in which the her-
oines marry insiders. To be sure, Elinor Dashwood (in Sense and
Sensibility) ends up marrying the brother of the wife of her step-
brother, whatever kind of connection that may be; but Fanny and
Emma choose as their husbands men from a lot farther inside than
that, men so close to being their brothers that the fraternal tie must
be specifically disacknowledged before the possibility of another
kind of tie can be admitted, men they have grown up with, and
with all the depth and richness of association that meant for Jane
Austen. "Children of the same family, the same blood, with the
same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment
in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply," she
writes in Mansjield Park (p. 212).
Both of the successful suitors also have something of the sur-
rogate father about them; they are markedly older than their brides,
and the age difference would of course have seemed much greater
when the heroines were little girls. Both men have played a central
part in shaping the minds and characters of their brides, as moral
tutors and mentors of taste. Fanny regrets that her younger sister
Susan has no Edmund to guide her as she enters the great world;
there is no more compelling evidence of the strength of Fanny's
character or the modesty of Edmund's than his frank reliance by
the end of the book on the judgment he has played so large a part
in forming. And there can be nothing more painful for Emma
about her mistake in speaking rudely to Miss Bates than that Mr.
Knightley is there when it happens and speaks to her about it later
in gentle reprimand-the very man who by precept and example
has taught her how culpable such behavior is.
One minor characteristic common to the two books is a re-
minder that, though the plots of novels may reach conclusions, the
life of the family-and behind it, the life of the race-is unending.
In the final chapters of Mansjield Park another little girl from Ports-
mouth sits in the great strange drawing room at Mansfield disen-
tangling Lady Bertram's "work," as Fanny once had sat; it is her
~ -

younger sister Susan. At the end of Emma Mrs. Weston, so long

Emma's devoted governess, companion, and friend, has a baby girl
of her own to make Emma wonder what will become of her, as
much earlier Mr. Knightley had wondered so tenderly what would
become of Emma herself. The cycle recommences. None of the
EMMA AS SEQUEL 149
other novels strikes quite the note of continuity or renewal that
these do. Order is restored, but the struggle of the generations is
never over; the poetry of home is never dead.

Most of Jane Austen's novels were published

in three small volumes and in some measure acknowledge their
format in their structure, but none of the others exploits the pos-
sibilities so resourcefully as Mansfield Park and Emma. Each succes-
sive volume of Emma is dominated by the heroine's imagination of
a different man, and each man is closer to her than the one before.
In the first volume she imagines that Mr. Elton is in love with
Harriet Smith, with herself cast only as a helpful bystander; in the
second she imagines that Frank Churchill is in love with her, but
she is still essentially uninvolved, gracious in her condescension. In
the last volume she realizes that she loves Mr. Knightley very much
indeed, and her greatest fear is that he may not return her feeling.
Jane Austen is severe with the "imaginist" in Emma, but the large
pattern her imagination follows in the novel seems entirely right:
it detraumatizes the future by bringing it closer by degrees, until
its terror is lost in desire.
As if to dramatize the novel's greater austerity, in Mansfield
Park each volume is dominated by an absence, and the effect of
each absence is to increase Fanny's felt worth. In the first volume,
while Sir Thomas is away looking after his plantations in Antigua,
Fanny emerges (in Edmund's words) as "the only one who has
judged rightly throughout, who has been consistent" (p. 168). In
the second volume, when Maria's marriage removes the Bertram
sisters from Mansfield, Henry Crawford decides to enliven the quiet
by making Fanny fall in love with him and ends up falling in love
with her instead. In the third volume Fanny herself is absent, sent
back to Portsmouth by Sir Thomas so that she will realize how
advantageous Henry Crawford's offer really is, but with the result
instead that everyone at Mansfield realizes that they cannot get
along without her. The little girl who began her days in the big
house saying "I can never be important to any one" (p. 22) ends
up being important to everyone.
150 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

The two books even follow somewhat the same seasonal scheme.
Though Mansfield Park begins much earlier, the main action of both
corresponds roughly with the academic year, with Christmas falling
near the middle in each. Characteristically, everyone comes to-
gether at Christmas in Emma, but the season is chiefly marked in
Mansfield Park by Edmund's absence-he is away being ordained.
Both books reach their resolution sometime in the following spring
and summer.
Yet for all their similarities there is one great difference in the
novels' unfolding. In Emma what is discovered is not something
new, something to be discovered only by moving on to meet it, like
tomorrow's weather. Rather, it has always been there; what the plot
does is to bring it to consciousness. Emma and Mr. Knightley do
not fall in love; they discover that they have always been in love.
We laugh at Mr. Woodhouse for deploring that people marry, and
marry strangers at that, but in fact no one in Emma does marry a
stranger, except Mr. Elton, and we all know what that tells us about
him. Even fluffy little Harriet Smith marries the man she has been
in love with longest. It is part of the tentativeness of Mansfield Park,
on the other hand, that the story is being discovered as we go along,
that things might have turned out differently. Jane Austen tells us
that if Mrs. Norris had had a large family to bring up on little
money like her sister Mrs. Price, she would have done it better; on
the other hand, if Mrs. Price had married wealth and ease like her
sister Lady Bertram, she would have become them quite as well.
Here life has miscast people, got them in the wrong slot. Things
might have been otherwise. If Henry Crawford had persisted in
reform a little longer, he might have married Fanny, Jane Austen
tells us; but there is nothing Mr. Elton might have persisted in a
little longer that would have led to his marrying Emma. If Emma
is the most Platonic of Jane Austen's novels, Mansfield Park is the
most existential.
Because of this difference between the books, the incidents
that unify them are of a different nature. For instance, when the
young people in Mansfield Park play a childish game of cards at
Mrs. Grant's, it is predictive; it finds the future prefigured in the
present. "There," Mary Crawford says, making her bet, "I will stake
my last like a woman of spirit. No cold prudence for me" (p. 219).
And she wins the hand, though at a price higher than it is worth.
EMMA AS SEQUEL 151
Meanwhile Edmund sees that in the longer run victory is favoring
Fanny. "The game will be yours," he calls out excitedly; "it will
certainly be yours" (p. 220). And in the end it is. The name of the
game is Speculation. But when Frank Churchill plays with the chil-
dren's anagram set at Hartfield he seems to spell out the word
"blunder," which makes sense only as a private message to Jane
Fairfax, a single bubble bursting on the narrative surface in evi-
dence of what lies below.
Another pair of incidents may make the contrast clearer. In
their explorations at Sotherton, when Henry Crawford and Maria
Bertram, who is engaged to Mr. Rushmore, cannot find the key to
a gate they want to go through and are too impatient to wait for
someone to fetch it, they crawl around the gateposts by pushing
their way through the undergrowth, anticipating by some hundreds
of pages their much more serious departure from the conventional
way when they destroy Maria Rushmore's marriage and reputation
by running away together. Compare with this the speech Emma
makes to herself to express her outrage at Mrs. Elton's pretentious
familiarity, at a time that Emma fancies herself interested in Frank
Churchill:

"Insufferable woman! . . . Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely

insufferable! Knightley!-I could not have believed it. Knight-
ley!-never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley!-
and discover that he is a gentleman! . . . I doubt whether he will
return the compliment, and discover her to be a lady. . . . And
Mrs. Weston!-Astonished that the person who had brought me
up should be a gentlewoman! Worse and worse. I never met with
her equal. . . . Oh! what would Frank Churchill say to her, if he
were here? How angry and how diverted he would be! Ah! there
I am-thinking of him directly. Always the first person to be thought
of! How I catch myself out! Frank Churchill comes as regularly
into my mind!" (pp. 250, 251)

The narrative unity of Mansfield Park resembles the narrative unity

of the Bible; early events prefigure later events that complete them.
But the narrative structure of Emma depends upon something more
like the map of the human psyche as drawn by Freud. Surface
events are at the mercy of a largely submerged, timeless reality,
and the object of the narrative structure is to raise that reality to
the surface, to make it knowable. In the speech just quoted Emma
152 NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

with characteristic brilliance grasps the principle and misses the

application. She realizes that she is getting messages from some-
thing beyond her control-we would call it the unconscious. But
she misreads the message; she does not "catch herself out." The
first person to be thought of is not Frank Churchill (his name comes
last in the speech) but Mr. Knightley.

It took Jane Austen longer to write Mansfield

Park than any other novel for which we know the period of com-
position, more than twice as long as it took her to write Emma. Yet
little imperfections remain: the Crawfords threaten to get out of
hand by becoming more attractive than their roles permit; when
narrative convenience demands that Lady Bertram write letters,
she turns out to write them well and plentifully, quite out of keeping
with her otherwise universal lassitude. In a flash of intuition Mr.
Price reconstructs the fate of Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram
from the tiniest hint in the gossip column of a London newspaper,
though elsewhere he exhibits only the most primitive intellectual
powers. Even Lady Bertram's Pug seems to change sex. Early on
Lady Bertram complains about how "sitting and calling to Pug, and
trying to keep him from the flower-beds, was almost too much for
[her]" (p. 66). But much later, after Fanny has risen in everybody's
estimate by winning Henry Crawford's attention, Lady Bertram
assures her: "And I will tell you what, Fanny. . . the next time pug
has a litter you shall have a puppy" (p. 302). (Of course one pug
may have been followed by another, but given the centrality of the
little creatures in Lady Bertram's emotional life, it seems likely that
we would know of the succession.)
There are other marks of uncertainty in Mansfield Park. A
writer unsure of herself uses large contrasts and striking events.
So we find that Fanny is very different from Mary Crawford on
the one hand and from the Bertram sisters on the other. One
Bertram brother is all seriousness and the other all frivolity. Mrs.
Norris is strikingly different from her sister Lady Bertram, and
both are strikingly different from the third sister Mrs. Price. Events
are on a large scale, theatrical: they include the elopement of a
bride with her lover, her sister's scandalous flirtation with a ne'er-
do-well, and the nearly fatal illness of a young man. All this is
EMMA AS SEQUEL 153

changed in Emma; here Jane Austen has the confidence to work

very close. She dares to put Emma and her slightly vulgar copy
Mrs. Elton side by side. Much as he admired her work, Sir Walter
Scott thought she was unwise to put two "characters of folly or
simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Batesm6in the
same novel, but she did it to the delight of generations of readers.
She also dared to put three such ornamental lightweights as Mr.
Elton, Mr. Weston, and Frank Churchill in the same book. Events
are of the slightest-a word spoken in haste, a mistake in the an-
tecedent of a pronoun. It takes great self-confidence to construct
a plot from differences in character so slight and events so mi-
nuscule, and by the time she wrote Emma Jane Austen had that
kind of confidence, as she had not when she wrote Mansfield Park.
Such details would be of little interest if they did not give us some
hint of the kind of doubts about her own powers, the kind of
struggles to find her way in a changing world, that Jane Austen
had to go through in the writing of Mansfield Park, the uncertainties
she had to resolve there to achieve the luminous beauty of Emma.
As the forestudy for a masterpiece, Mansfield Park will always
be of interest to students of English fiction. But for the lover of
Jane Austen it occupies a more important place. I believe that no
other detail in all her fiction brings us as close to her own experience
as the amber cross that William Price sends his sister Fanny from
Sicily. Clearly it had its origin in the topaz crosses her brother
Charles, twenty-two at the time, had sent his sisters Jane and Cas-
sandra from the Mediterranean in 1801.' So it is with the whole
book. Not that it is in most details particularly autobiographical,
but it permits us to come closer to the author than any other book
does, and in doing so wrings from us a new respect for all the
novels. In Emma we admire a writer in easy, triumphant control of
her powers; in Mansfield Park we are privileged to share some of
the uncertainty, hesitation, self-examination, and loneliness that
triumph cost.

Smith College

%view of Emma, Quarterly Review, 14 (1815), 200; quoted by R. W. Chapman,

Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 132.
7Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 26 May 1801, Letters, p. 137; also see
Mawfield Park, p. 230.