Jane Austen's Heroines

[french frank]

Jane Austen wrote in a letter: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."

and she is talking about Emma Woodhouse, not Fanny Price. Irony?

A timely reminder! I also have on my shelf A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew JE Austen-Leigh, which published a number of her letters. Perhaps that will be next on the reading list (about time I read it )

[JFLL]

Jane Austen wrote in a letter: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."

and she is talking about Emma Woodhouse, not Fanny Price. Irony?

Maybe a bit mischievous, too (if defensive). Her remark about Emma sounds rather in the vein of what Brahms wrote (with heavier tread) to his publisher about his 2nd symphony: ‘[It] is so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it. I have never written anything so sad, and the score must come out in mourning.’

I think Trilling, in vinteuil’s very illuminating quotation, is right in implying that the basic ‘problem’ with Fanny Price that she is so unmodern We like to think of Lizzy Bennet, the Dashwood sisters, Emma Woodhouse and even Anne Elliot (perhaps simplistically) as somehow one of us, but that’s impossible with Fanny. We have to make much more of an imaginative leap to get inside the character, let alone sympathise with her.

[french frank]

As for Fanny, Jane is reported as saying (in JEA-L's Memoir) re the newly written Mansfield Park that her brother (Rev) Henry Austen: "gives great praise to the drawing of the characters. He understands them all, likes Fanny ..."

The Rev Sydney Smith enjoyed Miss Austen's novels and 'Fanny Price was one of his prime favourites.'

On Emma, JEA-L reports in full JA's letter to a friend: ' "I trust you will be as glad to see my Emma as I shall be to see your Jemima [her friend's newly born daughter]." She was very fond of Emma, but did not reckon her being a general favourite; for when commencing that work, she said, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.'

JEA-L does not take the comment as being merely mischievous, apparently.

Perhaps you have to be a clergyman to appreciate Fanny

[vinteuil]

[Didn't the philosopher J L Austin perversely call one of his books Sense and Sensibilia?]

... indeed he did (well, the book was created posthumously, but that's its title.) I was thinking of JL Austin yesterday when I came across the following in Logan Pearsall Smith's 'Afterthoughts' :

"Words aren't always mere words : a few inaudible articulations may fetter two people together for life."

- which would be a classic exemplum of a 'performative utterance'!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance

[aeolium]

"Pride and Prejudice celebrates the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, and associates them with happiness and virtue."

Is that really true of P&P? Often spiritedness, vivacity and lightness are shown to have ill consequences and the characters displaying them to be either reckless, exercising poor judgment or untrustworthy (e.g. Lydia, Wickham, Bingley, Elisabeth in her premature judgments about Bingley and Darcy). And in Sense and Sensibility the moral is taken even further, with the contrast between the restrained Elinor and the impetuous, spirited Marianne: it is the latter's happiness which is wrecked. In Emma the spirited and vivacious heroine is shown through her impetuosity to stumble into comical misapprehensions, jeopardising her own and others' happiness. The equally vivacious Frank Churchill is shown to be a scheming and untrustworthy character (albeit an ultimately forgivable rogue). Mansfield Park may not after all be so dissimilar to those other novels in that respect at least.

Edit: I had absent-mindedly written the name of Willoughby instead of Frank Churchill, though thinking about it the Marianne/Willoughby relationship is not that far removed from the Emma/Frank Churchill one except in the more passionate and unrestrained character of Marianne, but Emma could have committed her affections to FC in the way that Marianne did to W (and Knightley feared that that was exactly what had happened).

[french frank]

Is that really true of P&P?

Amusing though it is on the surface, I always regarded it as the narrowly averted tragedy with the two of them nearly ruining their lives through their faults.

[richardfinegold]

Maybe a bit mischievous, too (if defensive). Her remark about Emma sounds rather in the vein of what Brahms wrote (with heavier tread) to his publisher about his 2nd symphony: ‘[It] is so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it. I have never written anything so sad, and the score must come out in mourning.’

I think Trilling, in vinteuil’s very illuminating quotation, is right in implying that the basic ‘problem’ with Fanny Price that she is so unmodern We like to think of Lizzy Bennet, the Dashwood sisters, Emma Woodhouse and even Anne Elliot (perhaps simplistically) as somehow one of us, but that’s impossible with Fanny. We have to make much more of an imaginative leap to get inside the character, let alone sympathise with her.

Fanny is so passively resigned to her lot in life and uncomplaining that she becomes unrecognizeable as belonging to Homo Sapien Sapiens.

[french frank]

Fanny is so passively resigned to her lot in life and uncomplaining that she becomes unrecognizeable as belonging to Homo Sapien Sapiens.

I think that makes her more realistic as a character. Why should a novelist be restricted to heroines who fit readers' wish for a lively, vivacious, rebellious, amusing, less than perfect, above all - happy and successful - heroine? People aren't all like that even if popular fiction wants to depict them in that way...

[aeolium]

Amusing though it is on the surface, I always regarded it as the narrowly averted tragedy with the two of them nearly ruining their lives through their faults.

Yes, as with Mozart comic operas, tragedy always seems very close to comedy in the Austen novels (e.g. the supposedly comic character of Miss Bates in Emma)

[JFLL]

Fanny is so passively resigned to her lot in life and uncomplaining that she becomes unrecognizeable as belonging to Homo Sapien Sapiens.

But isn’t it true that most people were ‘passively resigned to their lot in life and uncomplaining’ until quite recently, and many are still, outside the western world, and some even in it? In fact patience, humility and fortitude were regarded as virtues (hence perhaps the Rev. Henry Austen’s approval of Fanny, as cited by FF in #33), though some of course might argue that that happened to be very convenient to the powers that be. Perhaps only unrecognizable to ‘Homo Sapiens Sapiens Modernicus’?

[Gordon]

Reading this thread makes me think of the influences on JA in conceiving her heroines. Read Maria Edgeworth of an earlier period and her Helen and Belinda for example. There are interesting prototypes to be found here and elsewhere in Edgeworth.

Quite agree about the comments about P&P, the two protagonists almost coming to grief as a result of their faults! I wonder if there was a real life example that JA had come across?

[vinteuil]

Reading this thread makes me think of the influences on JA in conceiving her heroines.

... and certainly Richardson looms large. I feel that the 'virtues' of Fanny Price which some modern readers find hard to bear come from the same tradition as Pamela and Clarissa - and I believe 'Sir Charles Grandison' was Austen's favourite novel. I much enjoyed 'Pamela' and 'Clarissa' : so far 'Grandison' has defeated me...

[french frank]

Mansfield Park

I found it considerably easier going than rf reported it, and got up early this morning to polish off the last two chapters. As for ‘Jane Austen’s heroines’, the subject is an interesting general one, but especially in relation to MP and Fanny Price.

It’s hard to persuade anyone to like someone they dislike, but in the case of a fictional character there are clues to be followed. If a heroine is ‘disliked’ by readers when self-evidently she is being presented by the author as both liked and admired by other characters and clearly is intended to be admired, is it the author who has failed or the readers?

I’m unequivocally ‘for’ Fanny Price and am interested to know why, precisely (with close reference to the text, of course ) others feel differently.

[richardfinegold]

Mansfield Park

I found it considerably easier going than rf reported it, and got up early this morning to polish off the last two chapters. As for ‘Jane Austen’s heroines’, the subject is an interesting general one, but especially in relation to MP and Fanny Price.

It’s hard to persuade anyone to like someone they dislike, but in the case of a fictional character there are clues to be followed. If a heroine is ‘disliked’ by readers when self-evidently she is being presented by the author as both liked and admired by other characters and clearly is intended to be admired, is it the author who has failed or the readers?

I’m unequivocally ‘for’ Fanny Price and am interested to know why, precisely (with close reference to the text, of course ) others feel differently.

I've also finished Mansfield Park, and I did up my estimation of Fanny a bit in the end. I would have to observe that MP is generally conceded to be the least popular of the author's mature novels. I therefore would conclude that most readers don't find Fanny as sympathetic as other Austen heroines.
I don't know the answers to the questions you pose. Recently my wife and I viewed a production of The Old Curiousity Shop. I am more of a Dickens devotee than Jane Austen. the production reminded me how much I disliked the character of Little Nell, whose undeniable sweetness and goodness and lack of self interest just seems beyond plausability. Fanny Price
shares some of Nell's traits. I guess I have more sympathy with characters who have to struggle to overcome their own faults, and who become wiser for the struggle, such as Emma.

[Sir Velo]

I guess I have more sympathy with characters who have to struggle to overcome their own faults, and who become wiser for the struggle, such as Emma.

Indeed. As Somerset Maugham sagely put it: "'I recognise that its heroine is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass".