Otelia's Umbrella: Jane Austen and Manners in a Small World

I can hardly recall when I did not aspire to be an authentic Janeite—but for a long time I knew better than to claim that enviable status on shaky credentials. As a college sophomore, barely eighteen, I wandered into Harry Russell's celebrated survey at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a course that examined the English novel's development through scores of years and thousands of pages, from Richardson's Clarissa to Eliot's Middlemarch, with pauses for Sterne, Fielding, Dickens, and others. I could follow Tom Jones's naughty romps and laugh at Uncle Toby's bawdy jokes, and of course David Copperfield's vicissitudes were transparent. But then came Pride and Prejudice, with that famous opening sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

That truth might be acknowledged in other circles but certainly not in mine. I underlined that overture with bewilderment. It wasn't a cognitive problem, no. But try to imagine a reader of musical notation perfectly capable of distinguishing a B–flat from an F–sharp on paper who is nevertheless tone deaf, and you begin to see the problem.

I kept my secret to myself, however, with the consequence that no one suggested that I might easily transfer the manners in which I had been drilled by a Georgia mother, grandmother, aunts, and various cousins to early nineteenth-century Hampshire. Under their tutelage I too had been drilled in a code of social behavior of all but mandarin subtlety, a code in which signals were usually understated, where yes, depending on its shaded intonations (for these were cheerfully affirmative folk) might mean yes, maybe, it depends, or no. It was a delicately circumlocutory world in which such universally fascinating matters as death, rank, money, and sex were considered unsuitable for children (even large ones), and divorce or inappropriate religious enthusiasms were scandals too dark to be mentioned.

Mutatis mutandis, I now see a striking affinity between the world in which I half grew up and Jane Austen's world. The differences are epochal and transatlantic; but a recent rereading of her novels persuades me that no other writer rivals her as a novelist of manners. Hence my subject: manners in a small world.

If there is a cliché in the Jane Austen literature, it is that her world is indeed small—that she is a miniaturist, as she herself claimed (disingenuously) when she spoke of "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush." She even enlarged this conceit into a transparent whopper, that she "produces little effect after much labor." Of course she knew better, but great artists have a special confidence in their work that often expresses itself in a modesty that is not merely false but flagrantly so: said Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha, his "little postage stamp of earth." Jane Austen's characters are often provincial and speak of their locale (county or parish) as their country, as incidentally did Thomas Jefferson, who said country when he meant Virginia. It is obvious that Jane Austen's effect would be lost if she painted on the Hudson River scale or essayed the great world of London or the court; it is hard to imagine that an Elizabeth Bennet or an Elinor Dashwood, still less a Fanny Price, would flourish in the world of Tolstoy, say, who is otherwise her peer in his grasp of the connection between manners and destiny. Think, for instance, of that frenetic rail passenger in "The Kreutzer Sonata" and his ranting account of how he came to murder his poor wife in a fit of jealous rage. The colors are too stark. Jane Austen isn't a miniaturist properly speaking. Her principal characters—the ones she doesn't caricature, sometimes cruelly—are large, rounded, and unforgettable, and her themes universal within their range.

As a subtheme, then, I want to suggest that there is a law of inverse proportion between the...