Mr Collins and Mr Elton – our favourite Jane Austen clergymen?

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clergymen, Jane Austen, Mr Collins, Mr Elton

John Henry Newman – before he left the Church of England to embrace Roman Catholicism – criticised Jane Austen for her failure to understand what being a priest meant. He was not alone. Both in her own time and since, Christians from both high and low church persuasions have found fault with Jane Austen for depicting the clergy in a less than flattering light and thereby bringing the church into disrepute.

A sense of humour failure or missing something? Jane Austen was a devout Anglican all her life. She was private about her faith, and not much given to talking about it or making her characters be any more expressive. But serious Christianity is there in her novels all the time, it’s the air the characters breathe, something understood. Wanting Jane Austen to be more explicit is wanting her to be a very different kind of author.

Her intentions and choices were essentially literary; she was not trying to make a point. The clergymen in her novels are never villains, nor are they based on anyone she knew. She merely invites us to laugh along with Elizabeth Bennet at ‘follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies’ in people of all sorts, clergymen included.

In half of Jane Austen’s six finished novels the hero is a clergyman (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park); in three the heroine is a daughter of a clergyman (Northanger Abbey and the two unfinished novels Sanditon and The Watsons).

Jane Austen certainly knew a vast number of clergymen. Her father was the rector of Stevenage in Hampshire; her brother James was a clergyman; in her letters there are references to over ninety of them. Clergymen were everywhere in society, and at a time of war they were particularly in demand.

But how the profession was viewed, who entered it, and why they did so, was very different to today. Some sixty per cent of graduates from Oxford and Cambridge went into the church, apparently accepting that being a clergyman was a job rather than a vocation. The scholarly range was wide; neither a degree in theology nor any training was required.

Young men of genteel birth but no income had only three available choices of profession: the military, the law, or the church. Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility ‘prefers the church’ but this doesn’t appear to be for especially religious reasons. When his snooty mother thinks this isn’t grand enough for him, idleness seems to be the only alternative.

The livings of almost half the parishes in England and Wales lay in the gift of landowners; this was therefore an ideal way of providing for younger sons – as Sir Thomas Bertram does for Edmund in Mansfield Park. Vicars paid the salaries of their often poverty-stricken curates, sometimes leaving a curate in charge while holding another living elsewhere. As we see with Charles Hayter in Persuasion, without a parish, marriage and a decent standard of living were impossible, and without a patron or connection with a bishop, it was difficult to obtain one. But while pluralism and patronage, together with the way the Church of England was structured, may have opened the way for abuse and worldliness among the clergy, Jane Austen doesn’t criticise the system; she was more interested in illustrating how human beings behave within it.

Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice is a caricature of the greedy clergyman greasing up to his patron, a stock figure of comedy recognisable to Jane Austen’s contemporaries. The clergy in her day were not necessarily expected to be above the ordinary material concerns and weaknesses of other human beings – and it’s in this way that she writes of them. They were food for wit and amusement alongside everyone else in society; as Jane Austen tells us in Northanger Abbey, the novelist must convey ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature’ and ‘the happiest delineation of its varieties.’

That other most repellent clergyman, Mr Elton, is less of a figure of fun than Mr Collins. Becoming a clergyman was a way of social climbing at that time, and Mr Elton’s background is trade. In Highbury he can enter the small circle of gentry and seek to better himself by marriage within it. This would have been seen as natural enough by Jane Austen, if not by Emma. According to Mr Knightley (with whom one cannot possibly disagree) he is ‘a very respectable vicar of Highbury’ and known to perform his clerical duties efficiently and to visit the poor. His only real crime is his cruel behaviour to Harriet.

The formal duties of a parish priest at that time were two services on Sundays, a communion once a month, and baptisms, weddings and funerals. Although there was the extra work of glebe land and the often troublesome business of tithe collecting, in most of the novels there is a sense that the clergy have plenty of time to indulge in pleasurable pursuits the same as other gentlemen. Henry Tilney, whilst clearly a young man of high principle and religious conviction, is able to abandon his parish for weeks on end to attend balls in Bath. Mr Elton takes himself off to secure the appalling Augusta without anyone thinking he is neglecting his calling.

It is not until Mansfield Park, the most overtly religious of her novels, that Jane Austen examines the role of the clergy in any depth. For all Sir Thomas Bertram’s deficiencies as a father, he can think rightly on other matters: ‘a parish has wants and claims which can be known only by a clergyman constantly resident … human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey; and that if he does not live among his parishioners, and prove himself, by constant attention, their well-wisher and their friend, he does very little either for their good or his own.’

The pleasure-seeking, wrong-thinking Mary Crawford considers that the clergy are a self-indulgent waste of space – not altogether surprising given that she is daily witnessing her brother-in-law Dr Grant’s obsession with the food on his plate. It is through the arguments between her and Edmund Bertram that a spiritual dimension enters into the writing and will eventually become essential to the plot. Edmund insists ‘I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally – which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence.’

Edmund is presented as an almost perfect clergyman in spite of his occasional lapses of judgment, though we have to hope he is less obtuse with his parishioners than he was with Fanny at the height of his love for Mary. Jane Austen knew that good men are not always as perceptive as they ought to be. Edward Ferrars, too, will no doubt develop more gumption with the strong-minded Elinor beside him in the parish. The scintillating Henry Tilney, by standing up to his avaricious bully of a father, proves that he is not just extremely attractive and entertaining, but that Christian principles thoroughly govern his conduct.

Yet while we acknowledge the undoubted virtue and excellence of these three clergymen heroes, it has to be admitted that it’s Mr Collins and Mr Elton in whom we take the most enduring delight. It’s 200 years today since Jane Austen died: a good moment to feel endlessly thankful for such delicious and unforgettable characters. 

 

The Grammar Conundrum

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British Library, Churchill, conjunctions, Devyani Sharma, Eleanor Trafford, Geoff Pullum, Jane Austen, John Mullan, Lucy Dipper, Marcello Giovanelli, Oliver Kamm, prepositions, split infinitives

If you no longer think it’s wrong to split an infinitive, or stand a sentence with ‘And’, or end a sentence with a preposition, do you still hold back in your writing because some of your readers might think you’ve made a mistake?

Should you care that they’ll think the worse of you, and stop reading your book or, worse, not buy your next one?

These thoughts were prompted by my attendance at this year’s English Grammar Day at the British Library on 3 July. It has a focus towards teachers, but is an excellent annual occasion for anyone interested in grammar. A message in recent years has been that several of what we thought were rules of grammar simply aren’t – they’re either plain wrong or just preferences of usage.

I never believed in the ‘no preposition at the end of a sentence’ rule, because of Churchill’s famous demolition of that ‘rule’, and also having learned German at school and seeing how in that cousin language it is in fact mandatory to end many sentences with prepositions. But it has taken me till now to accept that it’s wholly acceptable to gaily split an infinitive.   And that starting a sentence with a conjunction is fine if it suits what you want to say.

The problem comes with your less enlightened readers. Will they mark you down?

I recommend the English Grammar Day – it costs only a few pounds, so look it up on the BL website (www.bl.uk). To show you the range of subjects covered, this year the speakers were Devyani Sharma, of Queen Mary University of London, on the development of English across the world, eg in India and Singapore; Lucy Dipper, of City University in London, on ‘Grammar in the speech and language therapy clinic’; Marcello Giovanelli, of Aston University, on ‘Knowing about language: what, why and how?’; Eleanor Trafford, who teaches English at Bradford Grammar School, on ‘Getting your clause into grammar in the secondary classroom’; the splendidly argumentative Geoff Pullum, of Edinburgh University, whose talk was entitled’ ‘If doctors knew medical science like writing critics know grammar, you’d be dead’; and Oliver Kamm (pictured), who writes in the Times on grammar every Saturday , on ‘Grammar guidance in the media: the search for certainty’.

The day finished with an ‘Any Questions’ –style panel discussion chaired by the always entertaining expert on Jane Austen John Mullan.

One of Geoff Pullum’s themes was that many of the so-called rules of grammar are the inventions of ill-informed people. Oliver Kamm argued that the persistence of these rules is largely the fault of ill-informed pundits in the media.

This was all liberating. But it doesn’t answer the question of whether the writer should worry about those less liberated readers …

Reviewing the Situation

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book reviews, British Census from 1801, dog training, Jane Austen, Roger Huchinson, Shelley DeWess, The Beatles, the Brontes

I am a review junkie. Before an anticipated purchase I will be found scouring other people’s opinion. Often the project is then abandoned and money is saved. However, I glean an insight into new characters who produce their praise or venom often sans punctuation, sans capitalisation. I visualise those who say, ‘I loved it so much I bought it in every colour. I haven’t worn it yet,’ with their wardrobes, colour-coordinated, of course, awash with identical outfits.

Then there are book reviews. Reading some, I feel I know the story and so why bother? But recently, for the first time in a long life, I immediately ordered two books, both non-fiction. The Butcher, The Baker, the Candlestick Maker by Roger Hutchinson is an account of the British decennial census since its conception in 1801 by John Rickman. Fascinating for anybody who has dabbled in family history or is interested by the changing demography of society, it is a book of facts and figures amongst which are snippets of interest and amusement.

In the 1841 census in Liverpool, four families gave Ireland as their place of birth: their surnames, McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Starkey.

There are accounts of well-known families, among them Marks, Macmillan, Flora Thompson, and the unknown: the bigamist and those who truthfully gave their occupations as prostitute, brothel keeper, beggar. Later the suffragists would enter “domestic slave” or simply “slave” as a protest at being disenfranchised.

In 1881 when women were recruited as enumerators they were satirised by imaging a conversation between the  female enumerator and the lady of the house. Neither could keep to the point, but discussed the carpet, their clothes and pudding recipes. “I must be getting on. I haven’t done but three families all the forenoon.”

The second book is Not Just Jane by Shelley DeWess who, eagerly, awaiting a dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice, was devastated to find where she had “seen erudition, subtle wit, and quiet country vistas the director had seen flirtation and farce”. This set her on the quest to discover the now, but not in their own time, lesser-known contemporary female writers of Jane, Charlotte and Emily. (Anne, “the forgotten Brontë sister, who refused to wear rose-tinted glasses”, she places in another category.) Invariably the seven authors whose lives and works she describes turned to writing for economic reasons, usually caused by feckless husbands. Denied the cosy corner of a paternal vicarage, they laboured to feed children and to liberate husbands from a debtors’ prison. No longer household names they were once highly-regarded by William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Dr Samuel Johnson. Now “They are not remembered, they are not canonized….What I came to understand was that, first and foremost, the game of lasting fame is an inherently unfair one.”

Skipper, of the canine literati, unprompted, reviewed a dog-training manual. His opinion was entirely subjective.

Reading aloud – pain and pleasure

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Barbara Pym, Eileen Atkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Georgette Heyer, Ian Holm, Jane Austen, John Westbrook, Juliet Stevenson, Prunella Scales

Reading our own work aloud to ourselves is one of the pieces of advice handed out by creative writing tutors. At the proof-reading stage it’s an efficient way of picking up errors because it slows us down and reveals the camouflaged nasties that get missed by the skimming eye. It’s also effective for spotting all those other faults to which we can remain curiously blind – an awkwardly constructed sentence, ungraceful rhythm, accidental rhymes.

But when we read our novel aloud to other people, say in a writing group, we will inevitably include our own choice of intonation and expression to convey what we intend future readers to experience for themselves, what we as authors hear clearly in our own head. But future readers won’t have this add-on. Our written words must do all the work. Which is why it might be a very good idea to get another member to read for us. For only then will we be made aware of possible ambiguities of meaning, unconvincing dialogue, slips in point of view, confusion over who is speaking …

More work, there always is, but it could be sustained by a pleasant daydream about who we might choose should our novel ever be turned into an audiobook …  Unsurprisingly my own wishlist would include Juliet Stevenson and Eileen Atkins (marvellous at Barbara Pym novels and everything else too) and Prunella Scales (I can’t imagine another voice who so perfectly captures the wit and spirit of favourites like Jane Austen’s Emma and Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Wives and Daughters.

And then recent listening reminds me of Ian Holm’s wonderful reading of The Woman in White and for ultimate comfort when feeling tired or ill, John Westbrook provides the perfect restorative with Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy …

Listening to a good novel read aloud by someone in perfect sympathy with the text: one of life’s greatest delights. Does anybody have any recommendations?

 

 

Selfishness and Jane Austen: an irresistible competition

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Hampshire Cultural Trust, Jane Austen, Jane Austen's House Museum, Selfishness

Occasionally a short story competition comes along that gives you a thrill of creative excitement.

The competition set up by Hampshire Cultural Trust in association with Jane Austen’s House Museum is like this. Perfect for all of us who can’t get enough of our idol, even in this 200th anniversary year of her death. Aren’t we so steeped in Jane Austen that we might have a chance this time of writing something which will catch the judge’s eye?

Stories must be no more than 2017 words and respond to the quote from Mansfield Park ‘Selfishness must always be forgiven you know because there is no hope of a cure.’

One snag – the closing date is 28th February. Website: http://janeausten200.co.uk/competitions

 

Dorothy Whipple -a perfect storyteller, not a pudding

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Dorothy Whipple, heroines, Jane Austen, Nicola Beauman, opening sentences, Persephone Books, Someone at a Distance, Virago

Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company. She answered an advertisement in the personal column of The Times.

Old Mrs North’s husband had spoilt her, but now that he was dead and her three children married, no one spoilt her any more. She didn’t come first with anybody and she didn’t like that.

This is the opening of Dorothy Whipple’s last novel Someone at a Distance. Is it the kind of opening that would make agents jump up and down with excitement if they came across it in a submission today? Probably not, which is sad for those of us who love this kind of straightforward honest prose and storytelling.

Dorothy Whipple herself described it as ‘a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage.’ There is the deceived wife, the foolishly weak husband, the envious, greedy French girl who sets out to seduce him to console herself, the traumatised teenaged children. But the way it all happens makes the novel a page turner.

This is not a plot-driven novel; what interested Dorothy Whipple was character, and she writes about people with acute psychological insight, subtly through telling little details and in simple everyday scenes.

The tragedy to come is foreshadowed when Louise, coming as companion to old Mrs North, reads aloud to her from Emma Bovary. She is escaping the humiliation of being rejected by a man above her in the social hierarchy of the French provincial town where her parents tiptoe around her afraid of what they have hatched. To take Avery away from Ellen will give Louise power again and restore her self-confidence. Ellen ‘didn’t deserve what she had if she couldn’t keep it’.

Ellen is what may annoy some modern readers; she is a happy housewife, unselfish and naive by the standards of today. Goodness in heroines is out of fashion in fiction. But she is thoroughly human: “All those books, all those prayers and she had got nothing from them. When everything went well for her she had been able to pray, she couldn’t now. There was such urgency in her present situation that until the pressure was removed she couldn’t think about God. She hadn’t the patience to pray. It was a shock to her. Surely God was for these times?”

The way Ellen deals with what happens to her and makes a new life for herself and her children gives the novel its redemptive drive. There is a sense of people coming together, crossing social barriers, in a common humanity. Among them is an old lady in the retirement hotel where Ellen takes a job: “But Mrs. Brockington, old, alone, almost crippled by rheumatism, had faith and courage. She had more. She had a warm serenity, and when Ellen was with her, she almost had it too. For goodness is catching. Mrs. Brockington was further on the road Ellen wanted to travel, and because Mrs. Brockington had got there, Ellen felt she might get there too.”

It’s fifty years this month since Dorothy Whipple died. Her novels were hugely popular in the 30s and 40s; J. B. Priestley described her as a worthy successor to Jane Austen. But when Someone at a Distance was published in 1953 it attracted no major reviews. She wrote no more novels and died in 1966 believing that her work would be forgotten.

It will always be a mystery (because Virago has rescued so many marvellous forgotten authors) that when Carmen Callil and her colleagues at Virago in the seventies were deciding which books to republish, they claimed that Dorothy Whipples’s ‘prose and content absolutely defeated us’. They invented something which they called the Dorothy Whipple line, below which they would not go – meaning that they considered her too lowbrow. Jane Austen – as usual – hit the nail on the head when she wrote that one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

Thankfully Nicola Beauman founder of Persephone Books didn’t feel the same way and has been vindicated in her championship. She published Someone at a Distance in 1999, the third in Persephone’s list, and subsequently many more of Dorothy Whipple’s novels: They Knew Mr Knight, The Priory, They Were Sisters, Greenbanks, High Wages, Because of the Lockwoods and The Closed Door and Other Stories. Dorothy Whipple is now Persephone’s best-selling author – and all this in spite of her surname which it must be admitted does make one think of a fancy pudding …

Wit, moral seriousness and a seeing eye. There are not many authors whom one can read over and over again with continuing pleasure and gratitude, but Dorothy Whipple is one of them.

 

 

‘Horribly good’ heroines?

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Agents, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, goodness, heroines, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford, moral fiction, Saki, The Story-Teller

A man in a railway carriage, driven to desperation by noisy small children around him being unsuccessfully entertained by their unimaginative and strait-laced aunt, shuts them up  with a story about a little girl called Bertha.

‘Was she pretty?’ asked the bigger of the small girls.

‘Not as pretty as any of you,’ said the bachelor, ‘but she was horribly good.’

There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt’s tales of infant life. (from Saki’s The Story-Teller)

It looks as if adults don’t like heroines who are ‘good’ any more than children do. In modern fiction it’s difficult to think of more than a handful of heroines we might describe using the word. Is this because we no longer look to fiction for moral guidance or inspiration in the way that people once did?

This might help explain why Fanny Price is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine; she hasn’t aged well. Patience and gentleness and a faithful loving heart combined with strong principles were enough in a heroine at the time Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park, but modern readers often find Fanny’s passivity spineless and her virtue irritating. They prefer the amusing and witty Mary Crawford, who takes active steps to get what she wants.

It may be that readers often dislike Fanny because she comes across as naturally good – and therefore difficult to identify with. There might even be a sense in which she shows us up, and we don’t like that either. She doesn’t make mistakes about people or find herself initially attracted to a dodgy man, like Elizabeth Bennet does. Elizabeth is morally upright, but she combines virtue with a sense of fun, dawning self-knowledge and awareness of her own errors of judgment; it’s not surprising that many people say she’s their favourite Jane Austen heroine.

I can’t think of a Fanny type heroine in modern fiction – and if a new author tried having one in a novel, agents would probably advise making them less wet. So is it that we don’t want heroines to be any more ‘good’ than we know ourselves to be?

Or can modern writers get away with a ‘good’ heroine if enough of their moral vacillation is shown? Maybe this is the problem with Fanny. Secret suffering and standing up for principles in silence: what’s the interest in that? But if a heroine is seen to struggle with moral choices, between right and wrong and the muddle between them, and then act on her decisions, her goodness is not the passive quality that we are warned to avoid when writing a novel.

 

 

 

 

Heart v Head

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EU referendum, Head, Heart, Jane Austen, Leave, Remain, Shakespeare

I’ve heard someone answer, when asked about the EU referendum, that their heart says Leave but their head says Remain. Heart v Head? That’s the theme of so many stories. A whole sub-genre of romantic novels, perhaps. Which are your favourites?

I first thought that Persuasion was in this category, but I’m not so sure now. When we get to the end we see that Heart wins, but by then we so much approve of Captain Wentworth that we would put Anne marrying him in the Head category too. Hmm.

In the typical Heart v Head story the presumption is that heart is in fact right.   Of course Jessica should elope with Lorenzo – they are young and attractive and in love. The practical and social downsides of this are simply discounted, or not even considered.

Can you think of a story where Head wins?

Thought not. As a writer, would you compose a story-line in which Head wins over Heart? Would such a novel work? Would people buy it?

(And how does that help decide over the EU …….. ?)

DO SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS…

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Feedback on posts, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, The Gruffalo, Tolstoy, War and Peace

There is a ‘Leave a Comment‘ tab at the top right of these posts for any random – or profound – thoughts you may have on what we’ve written. This isn’t just meant for ninevoices, but for the whole wide world out there.

Please don’t be shy – we’d love to know what you think.

Barbara Pym and Jane Austen

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Alexander McCall Smith, Barbara Pym, Jane Austen, Philip Larkin, Salley Vickers, Virago Modern Classics

Jane Austen is even more revered in America than in the UK – if that is possible. The same might be said of Barbara Pym whom Alexander McCall Smith described as ‘a modern Jane Austen’. Both authors have distinctive instantly recognisable voices; prose which can be savoured over and over again.

Salley Vickers in her introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition of Barbara Pym’s Less Than Angels explains the points of resemblance between the novels of the two authors as being ‘similarly restrained in tone, with that glimmering undersheen of English irony’. It is this perhaps that appeals so much to Americans.

At a recent meeting of the Barbara Pym society in London where members heard an altogether delightful lecture about servants and home help of all kinds in her novels it was noticeable that it was the Americans in the audience who asked the more rigorous questions. Barbara Pym’s work is included alongside Jane Austen in English literature degree syllabuses at American universities.

So-called quiet novels are liable to last longest in the collective consciousness, argues Salley Vickers, and that ‘nothing in Jane Austen’s lifetime compares with her current popularity; her tombstone in Winchester Cathedral makes no mention of her career as a writer.’

A connection between the two novelists that is particularly appealing is when Barbara Pym wrote to Philip Larkin: ‘Here I am sixty-one (it looks worse spelled out in words) and only six novels published – no husband, no children.’ He wrote back: ‘Didn’t Jane Austen write six novels and not have a husband or children?’