The stakes, in those decisions, could not have been higher. For Fanny Price, for Elizabeth Bennet, and most of all, for Austen herself, accepting the man in question would not only have saved them from lives of deprivation and insecurity, it would have gone a long way toward saving their families, too. By marrying Harris, as Austen biographer Claire Tomalin put it, Austen would have been able “to ensure the comfort of her parents to the end of their days, and give a home to Cassandra,” and she would probably also have been in a position to help her brothers in their careers. She would have become a benefactor rather than a dependent, a great lady instead of a poor relation. And yet, despite it all, she didn’t do it. She valued love too much: real love, not storybook love. Valued it enough not to profane it for comfort’s sake, and to devote her career to defending it.
What about sex? Jane Austen the prudish spinster is a figure of legend and nothing more. The author who had Mary Crawford joke in Mansfield Park that “Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough,” a pun about anal sex between men, was no shrinking violet. She could crack a bawdy remark of her own, too. Writing to her sister, Cassandra, about the family’s upcoming move to Bath, she deadpanned that “we plan having a steady Cook, & a young giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former & sweetheart to the latter.—No children of course to be allowed on either side.” Of a woman who had just given birth for the eighteenth time, she told an unmarried niece, “I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms.” Elsewhere she remarked more seriously, of the figure of Don Juan, “I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust.”
If she didn’t put sex in her novels, it wasn’t because she was ignorant of it, or frightened of it, or because people didn’t write such things in those days. In fact, they wrote them all the time. The books that she read as a teenager were ripe with lurid sexuality: abductions, seductions, cries, and caresses; bared bosoms and eager kisses; cads and rakes and libertines; slavering monks and ravished maidens, callous bawds and poxy whores; adultery, voyeurism, incest, and rape. If those kinds of things were missing from her books, it was because she chose to keep them out.
But they weren’t completely missing. In Mansfield Park, a married woman abandoned her husband to throw herself into the arms of a lover. In Pride and Prejudice, a teenage girl was seduced by a smiling deceiver. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen gave us both scenarios: a young woman bore the child of an adulterous affair, then that child, a generation later, was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned in turn. It was enough to fill a novel—but not an Austen novel. That episode, like the two in the other books, occurred offstage; in each case, we heard of it only by report. Austen did not want to tell the kind of story about young women that everyone else was telling. Her heroines weren’t passive, weren’t piteous, weren’t victims, weren’t playthings. They controlled their destinies; they stood as equals.
In her age, that meant controlling their impulses, too. How her ideas about sex might have changed in a world of reliable birth control, no-fault divorce, and women’s economic independence we cannot say. It is certainly by no means clear that she would have denounced the moral standards of today. But that is really beside the point. She didn’t condemn sexual impulsiveness just because it could lead to ruin. She condemned it because she thought it was a stupid reason to get married, too. Her novels were stocked with intelligent men who’d made the mistake of marrying vapid beauties and lived to regret it for the rest of their lives.
Mr. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice—condemned to doing battle with his wife’s eternal “nerves”—was one. Sir Thomas Bertram, in Mansfield Park—the proud possessor of a useless trophy wife—was another. In Sense and Sensibility, a certain Mr. Palmer made a third—having married a silly little dumpling with “a very pretty face” who “came in with a smile, smiled all the time of her visit, except when she laughed, and smiled when she went away,” and whom her husband, only twenty-five or -six, had already made a habit of ignoring.
Somehow, though she died a virgin, Austen understood all this. For her heroes and heroines, sexual attraction was always the last thing, never the first. It didn’t create affection, it flowed from it. Her heroines were usually not paragons of beauty. (If we think otherwise, that is, once again, because of the movies.) Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, was faded. Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, was “not plain-looking.” Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, was “almost pretty.” And Elizabeth Bennet, of course, was “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Other young ladies—Jane Bennet, Isabella Thorpe, Mary Crawford, Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove—often overshadowed them. But their looks grew on you, snuck up on you, as you got to know them, until one day you found yourself considering them, as someone finally said about Elizabeth, “one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.” As for Austen’s heroes, they tended to the quiet, steady, sensitive type. It often took a while to be attracted to them, too. Her villains were the dashing ones, the flashy ones, the talkers and the flirters. She liked the kind of man who let his character speak for itself.
But none of this meant that her lovers—or her stories, or Austen herself—were passionless. If that was less obvious than many readers through the years have wanted it to be—Charlotte Brontë missing “what throbs fast and full,” Mark Twain feeling “like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven”—it wasn’t out of bloodlessness, but tact. Sir Walter Scott himself, in one of the earliest reviews of Austen’s work, had lodged the same complaint. In Emma, he said, “Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn [i.e., lantern], instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire.” The key word there, however, is “discretion.” If Elinor refused to admit that what she felt for Edward was love, that was only because, unlike her histrionic sister, she wanted to preserve her privacy. Such feelings were too precious to violate by talking about.
Her creator felt the same. Of course her lovers were passionate—even Elinor and Edward, as I now saw: more deeply, more truly passionate than a butterfly like Willoughby could ever understand. All the more reason, then, to shield their intimacy from our prying eyes. The most remarkable thing about the love scenes with which her novels culminated, I realized—another thing the movies never stand for—was that she always turned away at the moment of truth. The hero was about to propose, the heroine was about to accept—their passion was about to be revealed at last—and Austen knew we wanted nothing more than to hear the words that sealed their happiness. And yet she always teasingly withheld them. “In what manner he expressed himself,” we read in Sense and Sensibility, “and how he was received, need not be particularly told.” “What did she say?” she asked of Emma. “Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.” It was too private; it was none of our business. And that was the most romantic thing of all.
What did that happiness consist of—the happiness her lovers achieved? The critic who said that friendship was “the true light of life” in Austen’s view was only, I saw, half right. Friendship, he meant, as opposed to love. But for Austen, friendship was the very essence of love. However mad the statement made both Marianne and us, Elinor was onto something after alclass="underline" “I do not attempt to deny that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.” When I went back and looked at the other novels, I found the very same ideas. “She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him,” I read of Elizabeth Bennet, “she felt a real interest in his welfare.” “He is very good natured,” said Emma’s ditzy friend Harriet Smith, getting it wrong for the right reasons, “and I shall always feel much obliged to him, and have a great regard for—but that is quite a different thing from—.” No, I finally saw, it’s exactly the same.