Reading Pride and Prejudice

Reading Pride and PrejudicePatricia Howell Michaelson In his "Biographical Notice" of Jane Austen, her brother Henry wrote, "She read aloud with very great taste and effect. Her own works, probably , were never heard to so much advantage as from her own mouth; for she partook largely in all the best gifts of the comic muse."1 Henry was not the only witness to praise Austen's skill as à reader, and her pleasure in reading aloud is hinted at by die numerous descriptions of readings in her novels and letters. When die first copy of Pride and Prejudice arrived from die printer, tiiough they had a guest, die Austens "set fairly at it, and read half die first vol. to her." Perhaps Jane was reading diat night, for she was certainly happy with the performance. A week later, though, she wrote, "Our second evening's reading to Miss Benn had not pleased me so well, but I believe something must be attributed to my mother's too rapid way of getting on: though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought."2 A fine reader herself, a frequent one, and one widi decided notions of what constitutes excellence, Austen almost certainly wrote her novels anticipating that they would be read aloud. This paper will examine the ways 1 The Novels ofJane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd edition, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), V, 7. References are to this edition. 2 Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R.W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 297, 299. This was not the first family reading of Pride and Prejudice: Jane had read the first draft of the novel, secretly, to Cassandra. See William AustenLeigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), p. 73. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 1, October 1990 66 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION in which the performance practice of reading informs important aspects of Pride and Prejudice? Austen's criticism of her mother's reading reflects concerns that were common in the many contemporary treatises on reading aloud. Since 1748, die publication date of John Mason's Essay on Elocution, or Pronunciation , reading aloud had been widely discussed. The early elocutionists directed dieir remarks at speakers in the senate, the pulpit, and the bar; they argued against the use of artificial "reading tones"—fixed patterns of intonation taught in the schools—and in favour of a more natural reading style that would better express the sense of a text. Other elocutionists devoted attention to the expression not only of sense, but of emotion. An essay by James Burgh, with specific instructions on how to express emotions such as mirth, anger, or denial, was reprinted in many schoolbooks, as were pieces by Mason, James Walker, and Hugh Blair. In fact, most school anthologies were prefaced by instructions for reading aloud.4 By the end of die eighteenth century, the elocution movement had widened its audience to include virtually any reader. Austen may have learned about elocution at home. Her fatiier, also considered an excellent reader, was a clergyman, a member of the elocutionists ' original target audience; to supplement his income he took in students, and may well have used one of the popular andiologies. Austen herself undoubtedly knew of die elocutionists, for she refers to die elocution movement in Mansfield Park (p. 339), in the context of reading in the pulpit. In Northanger Abbey (p. 108), she mentions Hugh Blair, in a passage Chapman believes refers to Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). One of these lectures, "On Pronunciation, or Delivery ," was reprinted as an introduction to Elegant Extracts, the anthology 3 I borrow the term "performance practice" from musicology, where it "encompass[es] everything about performance that is not unambiguously specified in notation," that is, "the gap between what was notated and what was thought necessary for a performance." See Don Michael Randel, ed., 77ie New Harvard Dictionary ofMusic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 624. 4 William Enfield included his own "Essay on Elocution" as die introduction to his widely used anthology...