Jane Austen's Families

Front matter

June Sturrock

A

ANTHEM PRESS LONDON : NEW YORK : DELHI

Table Of Contents

Acknowledgements

References and Abbreviations

PartI Family Dynamics Introduction

Chapter Six Dandies and Beauties: The Issue of Good Looks in Persuasion Conclusion “Creative Attention”

Notes Select Bibliography Index xl

67 71 85

99 111

119 135 145

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Shorter and less complex versions of Chapters Three and Five appeared in Persuastons: The Jane Austen Journal, “Money, Morals, and Mansfield Park: ‘The West Indies Revisited” appeared in Persuasions 28 (2006): 176-84 and “Dandies, Beauties, and the Issue of Good Looks in Persuasion” appeared in Persuasions 26 (2004): 41-50, while Chapter Four is based on an entry in the 2006 Persuaszons On-Line (“I am Rather a ‘Talker’: Speech and Silence in Emma” 28). I am most grateful to Susan Allen Ford, the editor of the journals, and the Jane Austen Society of North America for permissions and for encouragement. Thanks are due to Jocelyn Harris, Diane McColley, Jack Martin and Alan Rudrum for reading parts of this book at various stages. Alan Rudrum, indeed, has read it all more than once and his comments, encouragement and love have meant more to me than I can readily express. I am grateful to the Jane Austen Society of North America, and to the various local chapters of the society at which I have presented talks and papers over the years. Special thanks are due to Keiko Parker. I have learnt much from the various graduate and undergraduate students in Austen classes over the years. I am especially grateful to Dr Corinna Wagner, now of the University of Exeter. I should thank the staffs of the British Library, the Huntington Library, California and Simon Fraser University Library. Any Austen critic writing in the early twenty-first century is indebted to the wealth of previous scholarship and discussion. Thope I have fully acknowledged all these debts in the text and in notes. While thinking about Jane Austen’s families I have been very conscious of my own great good fortune as daughter, mother, grandmother, sister, niece and aunt.

REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

All references are given in parenthesis after quotations and refer to works cited in the Select Bibliography. Where the author has more than one item in the bibliography an abbreviated form of the title is added to the page number. Abbreviations of Jane Austen’s novels are as follows: MA (Northanger Abbey); SES (Sense and Sensibility); PEP (Pride and Prejudice); MP (Mansfield Park); E (Emma);

P (Persuasion).

Jane Austen’s families are not, for my purpose, the Austens, the Austen-Leighs, the Leigh Perrots, or the Knights — actual historical families. My concern is with the Bennets, the Dashwoods, the Bertrams — with the many fictional families whose dynamics are crucial both to Jane Austen’s plots and to her explorations of ethical complexities. Most Austen criticism tends to direct its attention to the interactions of the lovers in the various novels. Given Austen’s narratives, this concern is inescapable: the relations between Elizabeth and Darcy and between Emma and Mr Knightley, for instance, are crucial to my arguments at various points in this book. Yet my principal interest is the central characters in interaction with their own families and (to a lesser extent) with other family groups, interactions that both foster and retard emotional and moral development.

Significantly, Austen chooses not to write about orphaned heroines,' in this respect contrasting strongly with her contemporaries, Frances Burney (Evelina, Camilla, Cecilia), Ann Radcliffe (Emily St Aubert) and Maria Edgeworth (Belinda), and her successors, Charlotte Bronté (Jane Eyre, Shirley Keeldar, Caroline Helstone, Lucy Snowe), George Eliot (Dorothea Brooke, Dinah Morris, Hetty Sorrel) and so on.? “Orphan” narratives are convenient enough for many novelists, allowing a protagonist to experience the shocks of the world without the usual parental buffers, but for a writer such as Austen, who cares intensely for what is natural, possible and probable in fiction,’ the most common early experience of surviving the pains and pleasures of family life provides far richer material. When Walter Scott writes of her ability to communicate “the current of ordinary life” (59) he is surely referring largely to her treatment of family life.

This study includes discussions of the various family interactions in Austen’s novels, both intergenerational and intragenerational. Jane Austen writes often of the power and complexity of the love between siblings, which, according to the narrator of Mansfield Park, while it is “sometimes almost everything” can also be “worse than nothing” (MP 247). At an early stage in all her novels the capacity for affection that is an essential part of the moral nature of all her protagonists shows itself through the love of a brother or sister,‘ and sibling relations, especially between sisters, are an important element in the moral growth of several of her heroines, Marianne Dashwood being merely the most obvious example. Even more significant are the relations between parent and child, and I discuss the ways, both negative and positive, in which Austen’s heroines are their parents’ daughters — how they respond to and resist their upbringing. Inevitably this concern involves a consideration of the ethics of parenthood and also the ethics these heroines acquire from their parents, through adaptation, imitation and resistance to what they are taught, directly and indirectly. Interactions between parent and child affect both the child in herself and in her active moral life — both what S. L. Goldberg calls “life-morals and conduct morals” (38-9). While Austen’s marriage plots depend on the relations between men and women, she is also deeply interested in intergenerational responsibilities, especially in the obligations of the older generation towards the young.

All the same, Austen’s novels are never precisely ethically prescriptive. She does not share much of her period’s taste for the didactic. In the final words of Northanger Abbey she mocks narratives that provide (and readers who expect) sumplistic morals: “T leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work may be to recommend parental tyranny, or to reward filial disobedience.” As Bharat ‘Tandon says, Austen does not indulge in “the detachable, didactic sententiae of which some of her contemporaries were fond” (Jane Austen 34). Most notable among such contemporaries was Hannah More, whose Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) was the best-selling novel of the early nineteenth century.° Coelebs is structured as a quest for the perfect woman, an unfallen Eve. Coelebs rejects various candidates for his hand for such faults as vanity, coarse manners, over-valuing of accomplishments or wealth, and eventually finds the paragon he has been seeking. The contrast with Austen is clear enough: she does not deal either with paragons or with those who aspire to marry them. While it is certainly possible to provide an itemized list of Austenian virtues (intelligence, charity, self-knowledge), such a list would be both misleading (over-generalized) and less than interesting. In Austen’s fiction moral life is dynamic and not static as it is in Coelebs. It is complex rather than simple; a matter of responding to precisely imagined situations rather than of acting out absolutes.’ The significance of self-examination in these novels — Marianne Dashwood’s, Darcy’s, Elizabeth Bennet’s, Sir Thomas Bertram’s, for instance — indicates Austen’s concept of moral development as an ongoing process. As Alasdair MacIntyre says, “self-knowledge is for Jane Austen both an intellectual and a moral virtue” (241). Itis also a virtue most easily acquired in a family, where people often know each other best and comment on each other most freely.

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Wayne Booth writes that when he began his own work of explicitly ethical criticism, The Company We Keep, which was eventually published in 1988, he thought such criticism was unfashionable, but adds that during the process of writing it, he came to the conclusion that “we can no longer pretend that ethical criticism is passé” (19). The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has also written of a (past) period of literary criticism in which “it was assumed that any work that attempts to ask of a literary text questions about how we might live, treating the work as addressed to the reader’s practical interests and needs, and as being in some sense about our lives, must be hopelessly naive, reactionary, and insensitive to the complexities of literary form and intertextual referentiality” (Love’s Knowledge 21). David Parker comments similarly, noting in 1998 that in “advanced literary circles for most of the 1970s and 1980s, few topics could have been more uninteresting, more depassé, less likely to attract budding young theorists, than the topic “Ethics and Literature” (“Introduction” 1). Now, as Sarah Emsley writes, “literary theory has begun to focus on ethics, and moral philosophy has begun to turn to literature in order to illuminate what has been called ‘virtue ethics” (4). Certainly Austen’s present-day critics include many like myself who, one way or another, follow the long tradition examining what E R. Leavis long ago described as Austen’s “intense moral interest” (7).* Nussbaum describes the novel as “the central morally serious yet popularly engaging fictional form of our culture” (Poetic Justice 6), enlarging on this assertion by arguing that “novels, as a genre, direct us to attend to the concrete; they display before us a wealth of richly realized detail, presented as relevant for choice” (Poetic Justice 5). She presents this concern with the concrete in terms of Aristotelian ethics. Robert Miles comments on the same feature of the novel, that is, its specificity about character and situation, and the relation of the specificity to the presentation of the ethical. Miles, however, places this phenomenon in relation to the thought of Kant rather than that of Aristotle:

The novel imagines the social realities, which ultimately must condition Kant’s ethical suppositions, more thoroughly than philosophical speculation invites. According to [Richard] Rorty, it is in the work of Jane Austen that the novel comes into its own as a form capable of refining upon Kant’s ethics [...] It is not simply the case that Austen imagines more hypothetical situations in greater detail than a Kantian moral philosopher might do. The difference rather is in the quality of the imagining. (22)?

Whether this feature is considered from Kantian or Aristotelian perspectives, it is the ethical implications of such specificity that are relevant here. It is significant that Iris Murdoch, whose literary criticism is nourished by her work both as philosopher and novelist, believes passionately in the importance of the contingent (which implies the concrete, the specific) in the novel: “a respect for the contingent is essential to imagination as opposed to fantasy” (“Against Dryness” 294).!° As Nussbaum, Miles and Murdoch all show, the novel has ethical value because it presents moral actions within precise contexts, just as they occur in individual lives. ‘Tolstoy knows that we will understand Natasha’s destructive infatuation with Anatole Kuragin because he has placed it in two contexts: in the complex human context of Natasha’s own youth and vitality, her mother’s absence and her father’s weakness, her long separation from Prince Andrei, the hostility of his father and sister, Anatole’s unscrupulousness and the machinations of the vicious Hélène Bezuhov; and in the highly artificial cultural context of Moscow’s operas and parties. Similarly, with Austen, we know precisely why Emma succumbs to the temptation to be witty at Miss Bates’s expense — the heat, the general dullness and underlying hostilities at Box Hill, as well as Emma’s habitual over-confidence and lack of respect. We also know precisely why, given the different circumstances of the two women, the witticism is an act of cruelty. As Tobin Siebers writes, “to hear all the particulars is to hear [...] the kind of story that Jane Austen is in the process of writing” (150)."!

For Austen, the potential of the novel as a genre was both ethical and artistic. Mary Waldron argues that Austen treats the novel as “primarily an experiment in new possibilities in fiction rather than the vehicle for any moral or didactic purpose” (60).!* Undoubtedly Austen did recognize and exploit with relish the capacities and conventions of her chosen genre. However, her experiments with the possibilities of fiction, her new standards of “Nature and Probability” (Letters 234), in fact allow her to take a new approach to the exploration of ethics in fiction, to represent people as responding to imaginable and complex situations, to show, for instance, Sir Thomas Bertram acting on an uncomfortable mixture of conflicting urges — his duty to save his daughter from an unhappy marriage, his wish to escape social embarrassment and his desire for arich and powerful new connection. To return to the comparison with Hannah More: More disliked the novel.'’ She saw it as a corrupter of youth, and, like her friend Samuel Johnson, distrusted “mixed characters.”'* Her natural bent was for the didactic poem or essay, for the elegantly balanced generalization and for intelligent moralizing. She neither could nor would exploit what would become the real ethical strength of the novel: its potential for showing morality in action in concrete situations. Austen, relishing the novel, an expert in all its achievements and idiocies from an early age, as her juvenilia show, used all of its potential for entertainment and for ethical explorations. Even Austen’s artistic economy has an ethical bent: nothing is wasted, everything tells, either on the development of her narrative or on its implications.

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As my own understanding of the ethical necessarily affects my reading of Austen, I should attempt to clarify my position briefly. In my ideas of the good I am indebted to Murdoch’s concept of “attention,’ “to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality” — the reality of a person, that is. She goes on: “I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent” (“Idea” 327). For a word she uses

Murdoch, attention involves the attempt “to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection” so that in our relations with other people we perceive people, as far as possible, as they are and not as we imagine them or fantasize about them for the purposes of our own psychological comfort (“Idea” 332). For Murdoch, therefore, the moral life is not a matter of discrete decisions but an unending intellectual process, “something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of specific moral choices” (“Idea” 329).

Murdoch borrows (and adapts) this concept from Simone Weil, who defines attention as the act of “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object” (Waiting on God 72).'° Weil is concerned with attention as what removes the mind from its habitual solipsistic preoccupations and anxieties, and focuses it on the Other — for Weil above all on God: “attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer” (Gravity and Grace 105). But she also believes that “love for our neighbour” is “made of creative attention” (Waiting on God 105). Murdoch, of course, removes Weil’s concept from the religious realm and uses it in relation to secular ethics.

Murdoch’s concept of attention has been applied to the discussion of aesthetics. Elaine Scarry, whose concern in On Beauty and Being Just is the interaction between aesthetics and ethics, uses the related ideas of Murdoch and Weil to explore the idea of the beautiful as compelling “attention” to the significance of what is beyond the self, in what she calls a “radical decentering” (111-14). Scarry’s idea of decentering, though, is a response to an external stimulus rather than an internal habit: it deals, so to speak, with Fanny Price admiring the stars, rather than with Fanny Price trying to be fair to Mary Crawford — though Scarry would perhaps argue that Fanny’s openness to the starry night, to Gowper’s poetry, even to the evergreens in the Parsonage shrubbery, prepares her to be open to the needs of her rival.

More specifically, several writers have applied Murdoch’s idea of “attention” to literary issues; after all, it was Murdoch, “more than any other figure of her generation,” as Martha Nussbaum claims, who “challenged us to think better about the moral significance of the imagination” (“Faint” 137). As Simon Haines shows, Murdoch herself writes of literature “as being something between an ‘analogy’ and a ‘case’ of moral thought. And reading it, taking it seriously, criticizing it, is therefore also a mode of ethical reflection [...]

‘the most educational of all human activities” (30). Nussbaum acknowledges the relation of her own thoughts on the importance of imaginative work to that of Murdoch (Love’s Knowledge 143).'° She also writes, in terms that recall Murdoch’s idea of “attention,” of an ethical ability that I call “perception,” after both Aristotle and [Henry]

James. By this I mean the ability to discern, acutely and responsively, the salient features of one’s particular situation. The Aristotelian conception argues that this ability is at the core of what practical wisdom is, and that it is not only a tool toward achieving the correct action or statement but an ethically valuable activity in its own right. (Love’s Knowledge 37)

Murdoch’s concept of attention speaks of a concentration on the actuality of other people rather than “a particular situation,” but the relation between the two “ethical abilities” is clear. For Nussbaum, as for Murdoch, literature can refine or activate this ability: “By cultivating our ability to see vividly another person’s distress, to picture ourselves in another person’s place [...] we make ourselves more likely to respond with the morally illuminating and appropriate sort of response” (Love’s Knowledge 339).'7

“Attention,” “perception” or a degree of “radical decentering” — all these terms might describe that quality we see in Mr Knightley, who perceives Harriet’s embarrassment and humiliation at the Ball at the Crown Inn and does something about it, who notices that Jane Fairfax is singing herself hoarse and does something about it. As Stuart Tave says, “the effect of Mr Knightley’s imagination is not to make him build a private world of his own feelings but to turn himself outward to a delicate understanding of what lies beyond himself, in the feelings of others” (235). This quality is what develops within Fanny Price at Portsmouth, as she perceives Susan’s distress over her silver knife and, more generally, her own ignorance. Fanny, liberated by a little experience and a little money, acts on both these perceptions despite her extreme diffidence. Anne Elliot’s behaviour throughout Persuasion, to Mary and her children, to all the Musgroves, to Mrs Smith, to Captain Benwick, demonstrates her exceptional capacity for attention. Like Fanny Price, though, Anne has to learn to act on her own desires as well as those of other people. What Emma fails in, as an “imaginist,” is attention to the actuality of most other people. Similarly, Marianne Dashwood has to open her eyes to the claims of those she has formerly dismissed as unthinkably vulgar or unintelligent, and thus not worth consideration. Robert Miles directs his attention to those characters of Austen who do not change:

When we are told that Aunt Norris talks ‘af’ rather than to Fanny, she stands convicted of immorality: the immorality of denying the otherness of others. Mr Woodhouse is similarly immoral, in that he cannot imagine that others see things differently from the way he does, although this failing is treated in a less harsh — in a generally more comic — fashion. (15 — emphasis in the original)'®

In fact, much of Austen’s comedy is based on the failure of attention: the conversation between Mr Weston and Mrs Elton at the Woodhouses’ dinnerparty provides high comedy because neither devotes the least attention to the other. Similarly the interactions between Admiral Croft and Sir Walter Elliot are funny because neither has the slightest idea of the other’s sensations. Emma and Marianne change through a self-examination, which is different from self-absorption. To think beyond the self, then, to “pay attention” is to be “morally active” (Murdoch “Idea” 314).

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The following discussions of Austen’s novels address the ethical implications of various family interactions in the novels through close examination. James Thompson argues that, as critics, we need to see Austen’s work “as explicitly time-bound and historical, not the product of right or truth or nature or even a powerful morality” (6). Thompson’s position comes from a sense of the difficulty that arises both from the familiarity of Austen’s work and from a critical tendency to begin by “sharing their [Austen’s novels] assumptions” (6). The difficulty is real: I am certainly aware that while I tend to read nineteenth-century domestic fiction (Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Oliphant) out of a sense of curiosity as to what it was like, I tend to read Austen from a position that is, critically, equally impracticable, that is, out of a sense of curiosity as to what it as like. The first “it,” I suppose, refers to Victorian social life and assumptions, the second to life in general, whatever that may be. The different temptations in reading these novelists indicate a different understanding of the nature of these texts. There is a tendency to read Austen as universal and general, as writing about life itself: Yet it is possible, perhaps inevitable, for the historical critic both to perceive a text as time-bound and to perceive the ways in which it does and does not reach across time, perhaps towards a moral vision or a moral process that twenty-first century readers can understand as well, though in some ways differently than their predecessors. That is how we read.

Linda Hutcheon claims that all adaptations in whatever genre are “palimpsestuous,” so that the informed audience is conscious of the original work beneath the adaptation (6). In a sense all historically informed readings present a similar palimpsest in that we see the text with double vision, dimly conscious of a possible early nineteenth-century reading under our twenty-first century reading. This kind of historical double vision is perhaps what Karl Kroeber has in mind when he writes of Austen:

Her fiction enables us to discriminate underlying principles of personal relations. This is why, like so many fine novelists, she will appear to some readers “immoral.” Her ethics cannot be comprehended within the prevailing code of conduct of her time. But because she uncovers ideal possibilities of relationship beneath specialized manifestations constituting a particular etiquette, her fiction persists as means for judging all kinds of manners, including those (inconceivable to her) of our time. (151)

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The following discussions of family relations in Austen’s novels are divided into two parts, each of which is prefaced by a brief introduction. Part I, “Family Dynamics,” includes discussions of specific kinds of family interactions in various groups of novels. In Chapter One, Iexamine the role of the dysfunctional family in the three Steventon novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, in terms both of plot and of ethical implications. Chapter 2 discusses a theme repeated throughout Austen’s work, that of the spoilt child, focusing on Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Chapter Three focuses on the role of the mother in Austen’s fiction, examining both how the mother influences the relations between her daughters and how she influences the daughters’ ideas of their traditional domestic responsibilities. In Part II, I focus on the contrast between daughters and fathers or father-figures in the three Chawton novels, commenting on how the contrast between parent and child is displayed in a central trope of each of these novels, money in the case of Mansfield Park, speech in Emma and the question of personal appearance in Persuasion.

Part I FAMILY DYNAMICS

INTRODUCTION

The parents in Miss Austen’s novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le père de famille est capable de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings.

These words of Samuel Butler, writing in The Way of All Flesh,' certainly exaggerate, for none of Austen’s pères de famille approaches Butler’s own Mr Pontifex in savagery. All the same, they are based on the perfectly accurate perception that Austen refuses to idealize her families. Parents and children alike have their own personal preoccupations, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their responsibilities. The ideal is not readily combined with the particular and Austen is concerned as a novelist with the particular. Through particular actions and interactions — through the Eltons laughing together at Mr Elton’s refusal to dance with Harriet or through Fanny Price uncomplainingly cutting roses under a midsummer sun ~ she establishes the moral world of her characters.

Austen’s heroines develop partly because of and partly in spite of the faults and foibles of the families from which they emerge. Moral sense, after all, must involve some knowledge of and contact with evil. Unlike many of her successors and admirers, such as Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch or Penelope Fitzgerald, Austen was not particularly interested in the question of innocence as such. Her only “innocent” heroine is Catherine Morland: all of the others are acutely aware of some of the faults and failings in others. Catherine accordingly must learn about evil from other families as her own fails to provide such experience directly. The first chapter, “The Functions of the Dysfunctional Family,” looks at the three novels written at Steventon and the literary necessity of the family flaws of Morlands, Thorpes, Tilneys, Dashwoods and Bennets, both in terms of plot development and in terms of the various heroines’ maturation. The second chapter, “Spoilt Children,” examines a parental failing common to all Austen’s novels and its varied effects on its victims, looking especially at Mr Darcy, Maria Bertram and Emma Woodhouse. The discussion of the maternal role in “Usefulness and Exertion,” the third chapter, shows the strong influence of the mother, whether living or dead, focusing on Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Relations between siblings, especially between sisters, affect the moral life of Austen’s heroines: this chapter shows how these relations respond to the mother’s character and actions, which also help form the daughters’ sense of their traditional domestic role, a moral concern in the work of a novelist so concerned with the value of exertion.

Austen was evidently fascinated by family dynamics, by the constant negotiation between one’s own claims and those of other people demanded by family life. This fascination interacts with what Claudia Johnson calls Austen’s “scepticism about the family” (Jane Austen 72), her refusal to romanticize an institution that has often, and damagingly, been treated as sacred both in her own times and in ours. In a caustic commentary on her treatment of parentchild relations, Christopher Ricks writes that she was great because she did not minister to the over-estimation of parental and filial love. To which might be added a different, though not contradictory admonition; not that such love is less important than we have got into the way of believing, or pretending to believe, but insofar as such love is truly important, it is far less imaginable — less sharable — than we have allowed ourselves to permit. (94)

So in the same way that she leaves her love scenes almost entirely to the imaginations of her readers, she rarely emphasizes the love between parent and child. The poignancy of such passages as those showing Mr Bennet’s concern that Elizabeth should not experience married unhappiness like his or the exaggerated feeling shown by Emma weeping over the idea of leaving her father as “a sin of thought” (369) are all the more telling. What Austen is more usually concerned with are the common interactions of everyday domestic life.

A common pattern in women’s fiction of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century is that of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda or Ann Radcliffe’s Emily, of the orphaned young woman facing the challenges of the world alone. However, Jane Austen is certainly not alone among her contemporaries in her interest in family relations and the effects of these relations on her heroines. For instance, Amelia Opie’s two best-known novels bear the titles The Father and Daughter (1801) and Adeline Mowbray: or, The Mother and Daughter (1804), and in the latter the theme of the harm done by foolish parenting extends over three generations: the heroine’s unhappiness is a result of her mother’s selfishness and folly, which is in turn the result of parental spoiling. Like Opie,

PART I: INTRODUCTION 13

Austen is well aware of the moral obligations of parents to their children and of the possible damage done by parental failure. However, whereas Opie represents the adverse consequences of faulty parenting as being virtually automatic, Austen’s representations of the family are less pessimistic — and perhaps more realistic. Parental faults or limitations affect every one of Austen’s heroines but Austen shows them as refusing to be determined by the dysfunctionality of others and as developing into happy women.

Chapter One

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY: NORTHANGER ABBEY, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Without Satan, Paradise is not Lost and English poetry loses its great epic. Without malevolence or folly, knaves or fools, no narrative is possible. And in many narratives the encounter with folly or malevolence leads to enlightenment: Nietzsche writes that the wisdom of Oedipus and the understanding of Hamlet are bought by unnatural acts.' In Jane Austen’s fiction virtually every character and situation is affected by the flaws and contradictions on which narrative depends. When she proclaims that “pictures of perfection make me sick & wicked” (Letters 335), she writes, then, both as novelist and critic. Austen’s own critics and admirers have often quoted these words; they provide the epigraph of Mary Waldron’s Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time and the title of Reginald Hill’s clever detective story, Pictures of Perfection.” There is good reason for such reiteration. None of her heroines is a picture of perfection in the mode of Hannah More’s Lucilla,’ though Austen felt at one time that Anne Elliot — “almost too good for me” — came perilously near it (Letters 335) and though some critics have quite mistakenly assumed that she intended poor little Fanny Price as an epitome of the Evangelical virtues.’