Pride and Prejudice was her first novel; she wrote a version of it before she was twenty. She put it aside to write Sense and Sensibility, her first work to be published; she then rewrote Pride and Prejudice and published it in 1813.
It is magically interesting, astonishingly adult. Elizabeth Bennett, its heroine—no doubt there is a lot of Jane Austen in Elizabeth—is as intelligent as she is beautiful, and as articulate as she is wise about the ways of the world. Nevertheless she makes one enormous, nearly disastrous mistake. She is too proud to accept the advances of Mr. Darcy, partly because he is a step or two above her on the English social ladder, but mainly because he insults her when he first meets them.
Elizabeth is the daughter of a gentleman, but of very modest means. Mr. Darcy is a member of a great family, very rich, with a stately home in the country and a handsome house in town. Elizabeth believes with good reason that Mr. Darcy is prejudiced against her family—particularly against her foolish mother and even more foolish younger sister—and she naturally believes him to be proud, because she is so herself. As it turns out, she is wrong on both counts, but as a result they almost fail to find each other in this most bewitching of genteel love stories.
Mr. Bennett is as intelligent as his wife is silly, and he adores his second-eldest daughter because she is so much like him. Their conversations as they come to understand each other are moving. Elizabeth begins to realize that her father has the highest respect for her: that is, he will not try to stop her from making her own mistakes. Elizabeth is strenuously pursued by a cousin, a clergyman named Collins, and is surprised to find that her father does not seem to want to protect her from his attentions. She must find the strength to do this herself, she finally realizes; she must have the wit to recognize that Mr. Collins is an idiot and the strength to refuse him, even if this means she might never marry. In his cool but loving way Mr. Bennett congratulates Elizabeth on her decision. But harder decisions are still to come. Naturally, they involve Mr. Darcy, a very different proposition from Mr. Collins. Jane Austen ties the young lovers up in knots and then neatly unwinds the plot.
Emma, Jane Austen’s fourth novel and in the opinion of many her best, was published in 1816. Emma Woodhouse, the heroine, is also like Jane Austen—another side of her indeed, but still the same intelligent, interesting, proud girl-woman. Like Elizabeth, Emma also makes serious mistakes, both in her own life and in her meddling in the lives of others. She is incredibly wrong in her judgments about those nearest and dearest to her, most especially about Mr. Knightley, a kindly neighbor whom she believes she only admires but could never, ever love. Her discovery that she has been as foolish about Mr. Knightley as she assumes that he has been about her makes for a touching denouement.
But Emma is both more and less than a mere love story. At bottom it is the story of the growing up of a brilliant, wonderful, proud girl, “handsome, clever, and rich,” as Jane Austen writes, who—like Elizabeth Bennett—must learn her lessons the hard way. There is no one to say her nay; she must learn to say it to herself. This is one of the hardest lessons anyone ever learns.
Her last novel, Persuasion, was written shortly before she died and published posthumously. Again it is a love story with a missing link that must be found. Anne Eliot, the daughter of a gentleman, falls in love with Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer with apparently few prospects. Anne does not care, but her good friend, Lady Russell, persuades her to break off the engagement because she believes Wentworth will be a poor man. Anne does so, although it also breaks her heart, and she remains unmarried for a number of years.
By coincidence, Captain Wentworth, who has had a successful naval career and is now well off, returns to the neighborhood. He is still angry at Lady Russell and Anne, and he pays no attention to Anne when he meets her again, although he realizes he still cares for her. She is timid and unable to reveal her own feelings, which have never changed. The scene in which the two find one another again is one of the most moving in fiction, I think. There are tears in my eyes as I write these words.
For many years Austen’s reputation suffered—perhaps it suffers still—from a belief that she was “merely” a miniaturist, a “domestic novelist,” as she termed herself. But any novelist, as Henry James always insisted, must be allowed his or her donnée (or set of assumptions about time, place, characters, etc.); the question, then, is whether what the novelist does with that donnée is grand or foolish, distinctive or ordinary. The donnée of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion are circumscribed, but the art and the analytical precision with which Austen examines her small world are unsurpassed. She is a searching critic of the social and especially the economic culture in which she moved and which she may have known better than anybody in her time. And she is also a great storyteller.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
1799–1850
Old Goriot
The word “pure” is employed by sports writers to denote a special, almost unique, talent. A “pure” hitter, in baseball, is one who needs no coaching to hit well, who would rather hit than eat, who hits with grace at the same time that he hits hard. Babe Ruth was such a hitter, and Ted Williams, too. Pure tennis players, skiers, and runners are similarly blessed in their own way.
Honoré de Balzac was a pure writer. Born in France in 1799, he devoted his first twenty years to a misguided obedience to his father’s wish that he become a lawyer. Finally he gave that up, retired with the pittance that his father allowed him to a Paris garret, and proceeded to learn to write. He wrote steadily, furiously. In ten years he may have written twenty novels. But he later disavowed these early offspring of his genius and only began to regard his productions as worthy of him with The Chouans, published in 1829 when he was thirty. Thereafter he wrote two, three, or even four books a year until he died—or rather until he exhausted himself and then died.
His manner of working was notorious, even infamous. He dined at five or six in the afternoon, often took a woman to bed, slept for a few hours, until eleven or twelve at night, arose, told the woman to leave him, and set to work. He worked all night and much of the next day, often sitting at his desk for as many as sixteen hours at a stretch, fortified by extremely strong coffee, which he drank continuously. He might finish his day’s work at four o’clock, bathe, take a short stroll through the boulevards of Paris, dine, sleep, make love, and work again.
He could write a novel in a few days, but the manuscript that he sent to the printer was never what was finally published. He left standing orders with the printer that the original text should be set on large sheets of paper, with much space between the lines and with wide margins. On the first proof he often doubled or trebled the length of the original book; he could add as many as one hundred pages to the second proof. This was an expensive way to work, but Balzac didn’t care; all he cared about was writing, not the printer and his problems!