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258 The Romantic period 1789–1832
Price in Mansfield Park; Emma in the novel that bears her name; and
Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Sisters are often contrasted, and the closely
worked out plots usually involve the twists and turns of emotion in
the search for love, marriage, happiness and social status.
Where other writers had used the novel to create fictional models,
to give moral examples, to ridicule manners and morals, to describe
real or imagined worlds and ways of life, Jane Austen’s achievement
was to create in each novel a fully realised and populated world,
strictly limited in scope, such that the reader can observe – without
being made to judge – a group of characters whose emotions are
recognisable, whose faults are human, whose traits are familiar. The
‘issues’ may seem small-scale, when compared to the wars being waged
outside the limits of the village; but it is precisely the universality of
the characters’ preoccupations that makes these issues, and their
expression, attractive in a lasting way to a great many readers.
When discussing Jane Austen’s work, critics tend to speak of her
delicacy and irony, her femininity and her lack of ambition and scope.
This is to undervalue her and to prettify a group of novels which are
considerably more than ‘novels . . . about the gentry and addressed to
the gentry’. Neither should she be seen as ‘typical’ of her age: the major
artist is probably the least typical representative of any age. But Austen
shows ‘the form and pressure of the time’ on a society which was
undergoing many radical changes; the questions her characters face,
‘anti-Jacobin’ though their conclusions may be, are just as significant as
the questions of social class and Irish identity examined by Maria
Edgeworth, the pursuit of truth in Godwin, and the anti-aristocratic
satire of Bage. Jane Austen too criticises the ‘gentry’: her characters
stage an ‘anarchic’ play in Mansfield Park (a play, incidentally, by
Elizabeth Inchbald); she portrays an older order of values that is changing,
at a time when the gap between the gentry and the poor is widening.
Her young female characters, in search of the best prospect for marriage,
end up marrying a country clergyman or a landed gentleman. Only
Anne Elliot breaks with this ‘Cinderella’ tradition (which, for example,
is the mainstay of Frances Burney’s novels) by marrying a sailor. But
the choices, the options, are indicative: what Jane Austen emphasises is
community in microcosm, the search for order in a world beset by
chaos, threatened on all sides, not only by war, or class division, but by
such human fears as loneliness, uncertainty and failure.