Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850

• 3. What Is Old in Jane Austen?
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 75-96
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CHAPTER THREE

What Is Old in Jane Austen?

But, alas, I am afraid that every benevolent person, who begins a work to befriend any part of his species, must be surprised, as he advances, with unexpected difficulties.

—William Hayley, A Philosophical, Historical, and
Moral Essay on Old Maids (1785)

Jane Austen (1775–1817) may not seem an obvious candidate for a study of old age, especially because one of the biographical details most remembered about her is that she led a life cut short. Nineteenth-century critics clearly thought of her in relation to her long-lived contemporaries, as they used her in contrast to them; for a time, Austen served as the exception that proved the rule of British women writers living to old age.¹ Though this critical practice did not survive into the twentieth century, other misconceptions just as limiting took its place. Virginia Woolf wrote, as we have seen, that “Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney,” even though Austen died more than twenty years before Burney.² A good number of Austen’s contemporaries lived twice as long as she did. As a result of our neglect of this fact, we have yet to place Austen squarely in relation to them. For this reason alone, Austen is worthy of consideration in a study of British women writers in old age.

There are other, perhaps more compelling, reasons. Chief among them is that Austen, despite her death in middle age, has long been labeled a peculiar kind of old: the “old maid.” Austen is perhaps the most famous British author described so prominently as a spinster. The limiting ways in which Austen has come down to us have been beautifully documented by Emily Auerbach in Searching for Jane Austen (2004). Auerbach has collected two centuries of comments on our obsession with and judgments about Austen’s supposedly narrow life and her status as an “old maid.” Virginia Woolf’s complaints about being annoyed by those who talk about Austen “as if she were a niminy priminy [sic] spinster” “ring true,” according to Auerbach, as “the phrase ‘never married’ appears over and over again” in accounts of the novelist’s life.³

Austen’s reputation as a polite, happy Christian spinster who went to an early grave has provided a restrictive framework through which her works have been interpreted. Through this framework, first established by Henry Austen’s posthumous memoir of his sister, Jane Austen became known to many as the good spinster-author.⁴ When critics have not followed Austen’s brother’s lead in apotheosizing her as a virtuous old maid, they have often used negative stereotypes of spinsters to write her off. For example, D. H. Lawrence famously referred to Jane Austen as “English in the bad, mean snobbish sense of the word,” simultaneously dismissing her as “this old maid” and “thoroughly unpleasant.”⁵ John Halperin’s controversial biography used Austen’s “failure” to marry to explain what he saw as the anger and rage exhibited in her life and writings.⁶ The legend of Austen’s “thwarted love,” as Hermione Lee puts it, “satisfies conventional habits of explaining the life of a spinster or old maid” and “can also fuel a negative view of a resentful, bitter, caustic Jane Austen.”⁷ Whether marshaling stereotypes good or bad, and for better or for worse, Austen as old maid has carried and continues to carry enormous explanatory power.

Although positive and negative stereotypes of spinsterhood have been employed prominently in Austen criticism, studying Austen in concert with the history of old maids has been a relatively recent critical trend. Despite a body of work that considers everything from white soup to gleaning nuts, relatively little Austen scholarship has sought to make sense of old maids, or, more broadly, women and aging in her fiction. In this chapter, I first investigate remarks on old age and aging in Austen’s novels, in order to gauge her explicit and implicit attitudes toward age as they conform to or deviate from dominant representations. Next, I return to the subcategory of old in Austen’s writings that has most resonated with her life—the “old maid,” looking in particular at the controversial characterizations of the type presented in Emma (1816).

We might wish that, as an old maid herself, Austen had become a champion of them in her mature fiction. It is my contention in this chapter that she did not do so in Emma. Austen, I argue, echoed stereotypical treatments of old maidism in this novel, even if she did not accept these limiting views in her own life. Her young heroines may rightly be labeled feminist, in comparison to other representations during her era, but that progressive impulse did not extend to all of her female characters, as Austen appears not to have chosen to overturn dominant representations of old maids. Making sense of her most visible old maid, Emma’s Miss Bates, my argument points to the perhaps all-too-obvious conclusion that there were as many ways to be an old maid writer as to be an old woman writer in the period. Austen’s way, at least as it is presented in Emma, involved a willingness to conform to, rather than to overturn, prevalent stereotypes.

Not Young: The Life Course in Austen’s Fiction

Among Austen’s family members, death in middle age was unusual. “Most of the other members of her family survived well into their 70s or 80s,” as Jan Fergus notes; Austen’s often-ailing mother was 87 when she died, and her sister Cassandra lived to be 72.⁸ Austen did not experience the so-called winter of her life, as they did, but a glance at her novels demonstrates that she did not ignore old women in her fiction. Indeed, Austen demonstrates an awareness of the challenges facing the elderly in her culture and presents these issues in her writings. Her fiction includes characters who display, notice, and are acutely affected by the aging process, and she generally indicts those who engage in the most exaggerated and harmful stereotyping of the old.

Undoubtedly, Austen’s novels center on the young rather than on the old. As Claire Lamont has put it, “What is surprising about Austen’s novels is how few old people there are in them.”⁹ For every use of “old” in Austen’s fiction, there are three uses of the word “young.” According to The Concordance of the Works of Jane Austen, there are 355 uses of the words old, older, and oldest in her writings, and 954 of the words young, younger, and youngest.¹⁰ The phrase “not young” is sometimes preferred to “old.” To pay too close attention to old age and aging is usually a character flaw, as when Northanger Abbey’s hideous suitor, John Thorpe, uses the word old with great frequency. He employs it as an adjective to describe Catherine’s guardian “old Allen,” as well as fellows, songs, and places. In that novel, there are repeated references to “ancient” places and to the “age” in which the characters live, but there are few direct comments on old age.

The elderly most often populate Austen’s fiction in a way structurally similar to the way her servants do—as faceless backdrops, rather than as comic grotesques. Descriptions of the old and the servant class also overlap, as there are references to “old superannuated servants.”¹¹ Many of them, when referred to by name or position, are called “good old,” or sometimes “poor old,” such as Dorothy, the “ancient housekeeper” in Northanger Abbey or the “poor old coachman” in Mansfield Park (158).¹² Austen also wrote wonderful one-liners satirizing her culture’s lack of generosity toward old age, like Sense and Sensibility’s reprehensible Fanny Dashwood’s caustic observation that “people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid to them” (10).

Qualities of youth and age are frequently used as comparisons, jokes, and elements of exposition. In Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Jennings is described as “a good humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman who talked a great deal” (34). Austen here links old age and garrulity, a stereotype discussed in previous chapters, but she does so in a character who largely redeems herself by novel’s end. Mrs. Jennings, as a garrulous old woman, is undoubtedly a mixed character, and largely sympathetic, rather than a one-dimensional comic or annoying stereotype. Other characters are more difficult to place in terms of age. We might think of Pride and Prejudice’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh as “old,” perhaps because of her power and gravitas, but she is not so labeled. Instead, she is described as “a tall, large woman, with strongly-marked features, which might once have been handsome.”¹³ Putting this description in the past tense suggests a character well into middle age. Mrs. Jenkinson, who lives with her, is dubbed an “old lady” (158).

The word old in Austen’s novels is, as these examples demonstrate, a fluid term. This fluidity is in keeping with eighteenth-century conversations about age and aging. Despite this fluidity, Austen’s work simultaneously suggests 55 as an expected age for the end of life, such as when it is supposed that Sense and Sensibility’s Colonel Brandon, at 35, “may live twenty years longer” (37). A short epistolary piece from Austen’s juvenilia, Love and Freindship, also homes in on the significance of age 55. The piece begins by implying that old women are not free from misfortunes. Isabel writes to her friend Laura on her 55th birthday, arguing, “If a woman may ever be said to be in safety from the determined Perseverance of disagreeable Lovers and the cruel Persecutions of obstinate Fathers, surely it must be at such a time of Life.”¹⁴ Laura responds that she “cannot agree with you in supposing that I shall never again be exposed to Misfortunes as unmerited as those I have already experienced” (2). Laura is a melodramatic, exaggerated, and humorous character, typical of the raucous women featured in the juvenilia, but there is alongside the thick irony of this piece an attention to debates about the relative happiness of old women and the continuing variety and color possible in their lives.

Age is shown to be a matter of attitude, as well as number, in other Austen novels. In Mansfield Park, there is a description of a young person acting old. Heroine Fanny Price is asked to play “a very proper, little old woman” in the private theatricals, to be dressed in “a brown gown, and a white apron, and a mob cap,” with “a few wrinkles, and a little of the crowfoot at the corner of your eyes” (146). Fanny does not want to act any part, though the fact that her friends and cousins select her for the least glamorous (and least sexualized) role is central to establishing her character and theirs. Old women were seen by that set as proper, brown, wrinkled, and wearing appropriately dowdy headgear. Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood’s skewed judgments on age are demonstrated through her first impression of Colonel Brandon’s “forlorn condition” as an “exceedingly ancient” “old bachelor” at 35. She makes reference to his complaints of rheumatism as “the commonest infirmity of declining life,” to which her mother replies that Marianne must find it “a miracle that [her mother’s] life has been extended to the advanced age of forty” (37). In Austen’s early epistolary work, Lady Susan, the unscrupulous main character chastises her friend Alicia Johnson for marrying a man “just old enough to be formal, ungovernable & to have the Gout—too old to be agreeable, & too young to die!”¹⁵ Negative and limiting perceptions of the old reveal character flaws in each instance.

Persuasion’s Sir Walter Elliot is obsessed with age and especially horrified at the signs of aging in those around him. He is troubled at “the wreck of the good looks of every body” but himself and his daughter Elizabeth, because “he could plainly see how old all the rest of his family and acquaintance were growing” (6). He is also disgusted at the premature aging of sailors and tells a story of one Admiral Baldwin, who was a “deplorable looking person” with a “face the colour of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree, all lines and wrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at top”; Sir Walter guessed the admiral’s age to be 62 and was astonished to learn that the man was only 40, “and no more” (19–20). Also a “distress” to Sir Walter is the “rapid increase of the crow’s foot about [his neighbor] Lady Russell’s temples” (20). Lady Russell, for her part, is described by the narrator as “of steady age and character” and is probably Sir Walter’s contemporary (5). When Sir Walter learns of the existence of Anne’s friend in Bath, the widow Mrs. Smith, he disparages the friend as not only low company for Anne but also as an “old lady” that Anne could put off until tomorrow. He remarks, “She is not so near her end, I presume, but that she may hope to see another day. What is her age? Forty?” Anne replies, “No, Sir, she is not one and thirty” (157). Sir Walter’s obsession with the signs of aging demonstrate his shallow character.

Persuasion has been said to use age and aging as its central theme, in no small part because of its older heroine, Anne Elliot. In chapter 1, we learn that “a few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early” (9). The narrator emphasizes this again three chapters later, when Anne is said to have suffered “the early loss of bloom and spirits” (27). Anne, at age 27, is shown to have grown old before her time. The events of the novel help her to recapture her bloom; it is envisioned as a “second spring of youth and beauty” (9) or as “every beauty excepting bloom” (77). Anne may have lost her bloom, but her older sister Elizabeth is “still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago” (10). When we are reintroduced to the novel’s hero, Captain Frederick Wentworth, it is with the revelation that he appears no older than he did seven years before. He reportedly believes that Anne is “altered beyond his knowledge!” (141). But she notes that “he was not altered, or not for the worse … the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth” (142). It may be inferred from the use of the word bloom throughout Persuasion that even among the more sympathetic characters and the narrator, youth and age are not measured by numbers alone.

Persuasion is sometimes called Austen’s autumnal novel, because written near the end of her life. It famously concentrates on issues of time, alongside those of aging. As Janice Sokoloff argues, Austen “creates … an atmosphere which continuously returns the reader to issues of time and its passage: the vivid depictions of autumn; the elegiac tone so many critics have commented upon; and the recurrent and varied articulation of the experience of time.”¹⁶ Sokoloff concludes that these “features combine to create a haunting aura of chronology and mutability in nearly every character in the novel” (17). Building on the work of Sokoloff, Lamont, and others, more ought to be said on the subject of age and aging in Persuasion, especially its depiction of the slippery category “middle age.” Though middle age is of great importance to the study of Austen and aging, it is to Emma instead that I turn in the remainder of this chapter, for its focus on the related category of old maid, whether in middle or old age.

Emma is an important text for studying the old in Austen, as it presents her most conspicuous old man in valetudinarian Mr. Woodhouse. We are never told his precise age, but the narrator remarks on the “disparity” of age between him and his 21-year-old daughter, Emma. The narrator explains that Mr. Woodhouse “had not married early” and that he “was a much older man in ways than in years.”¹⁷ On the female side, Emma features what is arguably Austen’s oldest character, the “harmless old lady” Mrs. Bates, who is an “excellent mother” to the garrulous Miss Bates (21). Mrs. Bates is called “a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille.” Her signal contributions to the action of the novel are that she breaks her spectacles and falls asleep at times convenient to young lovers (236, 240). If Mrs. Bates seems most important in the novel as an audience (receptive or not), her daughter, Miss Bates, serves as Emma’s direct foil in regard to her future imagined marital status. Indeed, the novel begins with a seeming endorsement of old maidism. Before turning to a reading of the novel, however, it is worthwhile to consider cultural constructions of the old maid in Austen’s era.

The Old Maid in the Long Eighteenth Century

The age at which one might be said to reach old maidenhood—whether in Austen’s fiction or in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries in Britain—is notoriously difficult to pin down. In Austen’s Lady Susan, the eponymous heroine is 35. She is described as “excessively pretty” for “a Lady no longer young” (Minor Works 251). Women and men of “five and twenty” are regularly called young, but at 29, Persuasion’s hateful Elizabeth Elliot is said to have “felt her approach to the years of danger” with “apprehensions” and “regrets,” though she “was fully satisfied of being still quite as handsome as ever” (7). The narrator tells us that 29 can be “a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost,” if there has been neither “ill health nor anxiety” (6). Still, the “years of danger” would seem to imply a chronological age, as well as a physical condition. Most sources point to the age of 30 or 40 as a numerical designation for old maidism in the period.

Some scholars suggest that social anxiety over old maids emerged in the Victorian era, from Charles Dickens’s vengeful Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1860–61), to George Gissing’s somewhat more sympathetic portraits in his novel The Odd Women (1893), to W. R. Greg’s astonishingly insulting essay, “Why Are Women Redundant?” (1862).¹⁸ In the latter work, Greg proposes sending so-called surplus old maids to the colonies to marry them off to men who cannot afford to be too choosy.¹⁹ It could be argued, however, that the figure of the old maid came to cultural fruition in the Restoration or the eighteenth century.²⁰ The Oxford English Dictionary locates the term “old maid” from the 1530s. It dates the first use of the word spinster, with the meaning old maid, to 1719. Prior to that, spinster was used to denote merely the common in-home activity of spinning or any woman who was not married.²¹ Curiously, though the eighteenth century produced a great deal of discourse about old maids, their proportion decreased across the period. Single women went from approximately 15 percent of the population in the late seventeenth century to half that number in the late eighteenth.²²

Old maids, declining as a portion of the population, were solidifying as a class in the cultural imagination, and stereotypes about them, too, were forming. The old maid was a stock figure who appeared in all genres of literature. Arthur Murphy’s play The Old Maid (1761) features the 43-year-old Miss Harlow, who believes that she, not her younger married sister-in-law, is the love object of an attractive young man. Miss Harlow’s brother, with whom she lives, ultimately concludes, “an old maid in the house is a devil.”²³ By the end, Miss Harlow realizes her undesirability, professes herself disgraced, and says she will “hide [herself] from the world forever” (255).

Other depictions were just as punishing but far more virulent. The 1713 Satyr upon Old Maids calls the group “Amazonian Cannibals” (qtd. in Lanser 302). Daniel Defoe’s follow up, “Satire on Censorious Old Maids” (1723), suggests that “if an Old-Maid should bite any body, it would certainly be as Mortal, as the Bite of a Mad-Dog.” A 1749 poem describes old maids in hell and dubs them “gloomy,” envious, and full of rage—a “lean, nauseaous, antiquated race.”²⁴ Oliver Goldsmith’s fictional dialogue in The Citizen of the World (1764) has two men disagreeing over whether old maids in London deserve to be treated with sympathy because they would be married if they could, or if they deserve no sympathy because they are full of “pride, avarice, coquetry, or affectation.”²⁵ Stories illustrating the latter position take up the greater portion of his Letter 28. The once-familiar saying that “old maids lead apes in hell” also gives a vivid sense of the contempt with which this group was viewed.²⁶ A dictionary from 1834 notes that the saying “is still in use in the jocular sense” (qtd. in Whiting 345). As a young American woman put it about old maidism in 1762, “the appellation of Old made [sic] has always appeard to me very Formidable, and I don’t believe one of our Sex wou’d Voluntarily Bare that Title if by a proper opportunity they could avoid it.”²⁷

Most descriptions demonstrated that old maids were held in very low esteem. In his Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1775), Dr. John Gregory encourages young women to marry, because old maids’ tempers are infected with “chagrin and peevishness.”²⁸ He believes such women cannot make a dignified transition from youth to “the calm, silent, unnoticed retreat of declining years” (106). Old maids, it seems, are destined to make dreadful old women and to take on many of the negative stereotypes of the female elderly (querulousness, garrulousness) in middle age. A Poetical Address to the Ladies of Suffolk (1785) also describes “antiquated virgins” as “peevish” but adds the further description that such women are changed to a “lump of malice” who rail alternately at both sexes, are deceitful, and enjoy cheating “simple fools.”²⁹ The British Apollo characterizes old maids as liars.³⁰ Later, it also offers some quasi-sympathetic reasons for the negative characteristics it sees in old maids. In responding to a fictional correspondent who complains that as an old maid she is “slighted and despised by all” and that people say her “looks and qualities differ from the rest of womankind,” the Apollo responds that it is “no wonder if crosses, vexations, teasings, and disappointments shou’d alter the looks and qualities of [such] a person” (3: 10).

Negative and farcical representations competed with more sympathetic ones. Frances Brooke’s periodical The Old Maid ran for thirty-seven issues in 1755–56, under the pseudonym Mary Singleton, Spinster, the magazine’s admirable 50-year-old persona.³¹ Those who study the eighteenth-century old maid have also pointed to the work of Mary Astell (1666–1731), Jane Barker (bap. 1652–1732), Sarah Fielding (1710–68), Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), and Sarah Scott (1720–95) as providing more positive models of eighteenth-century spinsters. Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) early in her life wrote a poem, published posthumously, titled “Bouts Rimés, in Praise of Old Maids.” In that short verse, Barbauld—though she belittles the life experiences of old maids by underestimating their emotional and practical hardships—also describes their personal strengths:

Hail, all ye ancient maidens fair or—brown,

Whose careless minutes dance away on—down,

No household cares your free enjoyments—saddle,

In life’s wide sea your lonely skiff you—paddle;

What though no lover seeks your heart to—steal,

Nor bells salute you with a noisy—peal,

Yet shall you never mourn your husband—fickle

Nor children cropt by death’s untimely—sickle,

No hoyden romps shall your prim head-dress—blouze,

No noisy sot your peaceful slumbers—rouse,

No nurse attend with caudle and with—cake

Too dearly bought when liberty’s at—stake;

Slander against your fame shall find no—handle,

While stead of squalling brats, dear pug you—dandle.

In pleasure’s free career you meet no—stop,

Greatly alone, you stand without a—prop.³²

Through most of the poem, Barbauld imagines the life of an old maid as an uncomplicated, comfortable one, in which dogs play a major role and pleasure is probable. The last line qualifies the previous ones, with its use of “greatly alone,” as the poem makes the old maid’s life course seem courageous, albeit lonely: she (unlike those who are wives or mothers) supports herself to stand.

During Austen’s era, full-length works of fiction appeared centering on old maids. Although purporting to be sympathetic, these novels may be viewed as overwhelmingly not so.³³ For instance, Ann Emelinda Skinn’s feisty epistolary novel, The Old Maid; or, History of Miss Ravensworth (1771), features 40-year-old Aunt Patty, an envious, spiteful woman who has been praying for a husband “these twenty years; and all to so little purpose” (1: 27). In the end, Aunt Patty turns out not to be a virgin, discovered naked in bed with the family butler (3: 102). The heroine of the novel is Aunt Patty’s spirited nemesis and niece, Emily Ravensworth, who, like Emma Woodhouse, initially determines not to marry. Emily finds the choice between matrimony and “antiquated virginity” to be a “hard” one but determines to become an old maid out of “pure spite,” if her alternative is to marry a wretch (64). By the end of the novel, Emily becomes Mrs. Blanche, and her hatred of old maids in general and Aunt Patty specifically seems to be one of the reasons she ultimately agrees to “dwindle into a wife” (16).

In a fascinating essay on Skinn’s notorious life and her remarkable novel, Susan Staves notes that the old maid of the title might refer either to Aunt Patty or to her niece Emily, as both are Miss Ravensworth through much of the action.³⁴ Staves concludes that Skinn has split “the figure of the woman alone in two, allowing Emily to fulfill her wishes and leaving the self-hatred to be projected out into Aunt Patty” (176). Skinn, Staves discovers, was herself involved in three highly publicized trials for divorce from her husband William Skinn, all of which she lost (180). The couple had separated after sixteen months of marriage in 1768. Skinn “went on to marry an army officer, who eventually abandoned her in poverty,” according to Cheryl Turner, and she combined teaching, writing, and sewing to support herself.³⁵ Though her novel’s narrator is skeptical of the goodness of actual men, Skinn is (as Staves argues) also seemingly skeptical of the degree to which one should sympathize with old maids. Skinn was in her early twenties when she wrote the book, apparently her only publication (177).

Though The Old Maid is in many ways sui generis, it was not the only work of fiction during the period to make an unmarried woman its titular center. Mrs. Ross’s The Balance of Comfort; or, The Old Maid and the Married Woman (1817) features a heroine who values the single life and socializes with spinsters, though she herself also marries at novel’s end.³⁶ A decade after Austen’s death, an anonymously published novel, The Confessions of an Old Maid (1828), claimed to offer the narrative from young adulthood to the present of the love life of 54-year-old single woman, Clorinda Mirabelle. As a first-person narrator, Clorinda laments that any romance described from the mouth of an old maid “is ever looked upon, by a most disrespectful world, as a burlesque!”³⁷ But her narrative is presented as a cautionary tale, encouraging women to understand marriage as a “calculation” (3: 279) and chastising “men (many at least of them) [who] are pleased to contemplate the title of ‘Old Maid’ with contempt and ridicule” (287). Clorinda even offers an alternative term to old maid—“Unwedded Independent,” mistress of herself (282–83). Despite all of its reassurance of good will toward the so-called sisterhood of old maids, Clorinda acknowledges that her story presents “some-what of a caricature” (268). She encourages pride and dignity in her class and says it is a happy one, but she also acknowledges that she has fallen into the stereotypical errors of old maidism, such as not perceiving that “her day is past” where romance is concerned. The novel is said to serve at once as consolation to old maids, as well as inspiration and instruction to maids young and old (290–91).

When Confessions of an Old Maid was reviewed by the periodical La Belle Assemblée, the reviewer did not doubt that the work was “the veritable production of one of the sisterhood.”³⁸ Others were more skeptical. The Literary Gazette’s brief notice calls the novel’s “sketch of old-maidism … a caricature of the common-place character—the ancient vestal of comedy, farce, and the novel, for the witlings of long years” and suspects (rightly) that the work was written by a male.³⁹ (The novel has been attributed to Edmund Frederick John Carrington.)⁴⁰ Few aging single women, it would seem, were willing to publish works of fiction or nonfiction about their own “kind.” Such topics were more likely to be tackled by married women or by men, whether married or not.⁴¹ (This, too, might serve as indirect evidence of the kind of reception that an unmarried woman writer over 30 might expect, if she wrote about and became closely identified with old maids.)

Although the theory of male authorship of the Confessions novel was then mere speculation, it was well known that the most influential late eighteenth-century work defending old maids had been written by a man. Once-renowned poet William Hayley (1745–1820) anonymously published A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old Maids (1785), signed “a Friend to the Sisterhood.” The work was almost immediately attributed to him in the periodical press, and his fascinating, troubling, and now rarely discussed three-volume defense enjoyed three editions, the latest of which incorporated significant additions and corrections (1793).⁴² The Essay was translated into French and German and excerpted widely in periodicals of the day. From the first, the book was roundly criticized, though both fictional and nonfiction works of the period recommended it or featured characters who were reading it, and it apparently sold well. The Dictionary of National Biography (1891) refers to it as “one of [Hayley’s] few still readable works”—a damning commentary on the poet about whom Robert Southey is alleged to have said, “Everything about that man was good, except his poetry.”⁴³

For contemporary readers of Hayley’s Essay, the most puzzling question seems to have been deciphering its intentions. Many found the book a humorous lark. Others took it at face value—as a serious, valuable defense of a downtrodden group. An obituary of Hayley in the London Magazine (1824) sums up his accomplishment in the Essay as “an agreeable combination of learning, sprightliness, and arch humour.”⁴⁴ Hayley, the reviewer notes, “now and then approaches to irreverence on sacred subjects, but, as I am persuaded, without any ill intention” (504). The poet Anna Seward (1742–1809), a friend and admirer of Hayley’s, writes in a private letter that she reported “with freedom” to him that she believed his “wicked wit seduced him into the ungenerous conduct of betraying the cause of which he stood forth as the champion; and of increasing, by his sarcasms, the unjust contempt in which the unprotected part of our oppressed sex are held in their declining days.”⁴⁵ These responses suggest readers found it to be a serious work, a satirical work, and occasionally both. Reading the Essay today remains a challenge.

Difficulties in construing the Essay’s tone arise from its first pages. Hayley dedicates his Essay on Old Maids to the learned Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), a well-known classical scholar. Hayley writes, “Permit me to pay my devotions to you, as the ancients did to their threefold Diana; and to reverence you in three distinct characters; as a Poet, as a Philosopher, and as an Old Maid. … Your virtues and your talents induce me to consider you as the President of the chaste Community, whose interest I have endeavoured to promote in the following performance.”⁴⁶ He continues by noting that the term “old maid,” although it may be held inferior in “vulgar estimation” to poet and philosopher, is the one that Carter holds with “dignity” (a word later echoed in the Confessions novel, as we saw). That quality has made Hayley wish Carter to appear as the “Protectress” of his little volumes (v–vi). Because the dedication uses a simultaneously weighty and cheeky tone, it is hard to know whether its author meant any of it to be taken seriously. Carter was well connected and well respected and was not a common or even a likely target for ridicule.

Carter was apparently not impressed with Hayley’s singling her out. In reporting her response to the dedication to her, Carter’s nephew, biographer, and editor Montagu Pennington notes that Hayley anonymously sent Carter a copy of the work in an elegant binding shortly after it had been published. (One wonders what light this ought to shed on what Hayley thought he was doing in the dedication?) Pennington writes that Carter “was neither pleased, however, nor flattered by the compliment. Had that Gentleman known her personally, he would have been assured that all the wit, learning, and genius, displayed so abundantly in that performance, could never compensate, in her opinion, for the improprieties contained in it; and that no compliment to herself could induce her to excuse the ridicule thrown upon others.”⁴⁷ Pennington suggests that Carter took seriously the work’s dedication to her but deplored its harmful effects, if not its “learned” message—whatever she may have construed that to be.

In the first chapter of the Essay, Hayley seems to defuse readers’ doubts that his writing this book was anything but a solemn endeavor. He urges his reader to take his project seriously and not to suspect him of questionable motives. After all, he argues, he could have written about disgraced commanders or discarded statesmen and profited from the work with a reward. He avers that “in the present case, I can have no such prospect to stimulate my pen; for, though the persons for whom I wrote cannot be said to possess the favour of the public, yet I solemnly protest, I have no expectation that any one of them will be admitted into the cabinet of any potentate or prime minister in all the kingdoms of Europe, or obtain any influence in the United States of America” (1: xviii). By the third volume of his Essay, Hayley reverses course on his proclamation that he will not profit from the work and concocts an ingenious way to do so. He suggests that old maids form local societies, “little convocations of their order,” appoint presidents and maiden secretaries, and collect dues—an “honourable tax” (3: 252). He says he will live off of the interest, “Expecting the sum to be very great” (253), and when he dies “which … can hardly be very distant,” he will give the sum to reduce the national debt. Sadly for Hayley’s pocketbook and for the national debt, such a scheme never took hold.⁴⁸ Though this section of the essay certainly sounds satirical, and perhaps even humorous, some readers took it quite seriously. As we will see, Hayley’s work had a profound impact on discussions of old maids and on how they were represented, if not on how they actually lived.

It is unclear if Jane Austen read Hayley’s Essay on Old Maids. She certainly knew his other writings, as she owned six volumes of his Poems and Plays, which she inscribed in 1791.⁴⁹ Deirdre Le Faye has also found a possible link between Austen and Hayley, suggesting that The Loiterer essay, which Austen may have authored, by “Sophia Sentiment,” took its pseudonym from one of Hayley’s productions.⁵⁰ Recent scholars have begun to link—however elliptically—Austen’s novels to Hayley’s Essay.⁵¹ His treatise was rightly dubbed by one reviewer “singular,” as the book’s first volume describes the supposed character flaws and positive traits of old maids, followed by a second volume that traces the history of old maids from the classical era.⁵² A third volume is filled with sermons, medical speculations, and a bizarre fantasy in which Hayley dreams he has arisen from the dead in a room filled with worshipful old maids. But the question that Hayley entertains first in his labyrinthine work is, What is an old maid? “I was on the point of defining an Old Maid to be, an unmarried woman, who has compleated her fortieth year,” but then he hit unexpected difficulties (2): “This perplexity arose from my desire to fix, in the most unexceptionable manner, the aera of Old-Maidism; a phrase which I use, indeed, without authority: but as I write on a new branch of philosophy, let me vindicate the philosophical privilege of coining such new words as my original work may require” (2–3).

He decides that, in order to define old maidism, he must consult women themselves. This does not clear up his dilemma, as he learns the following: “The misses of twenty considered all their unmarried friends, who had passed their thirtieth year, as absolute Old Maids; those of thirty supposed the aera to commence at about forty-five; and some ladies of fifty convinced me how differently they thought upon the subject, by calling others, about three or four years younger than themselves, by the infantine appellation of girls; from whence I presumed they would advance the aera I speak of to the age of sixty at least” (3). Hayley, unsatisfied, consults a man who had just married a woman of 43 and had a son with her. This man rejects the label “old maid” altogether, believing that all virgins are in a perpetual state of childhood and never deserve the label “old.” Hayley dismisses the position of the new father and concludes that “the world in general … never fail to give the unwelcome title of Old Maid to unmarried ladies of forty” (5), so he will follow suit. Hayley defines the onset of old maidism somewhat later than his culture (and than Austen) generally did, which may seem a kind of sympathetic response. But if Austen and Hayley differ over the numerical age at which old maids come into being, the two authors seem to agree almost to the letter on the personal qualities generally assigned to them.

Silly, Satisfied, Smiling, Prosing, Undistinguishing, and Unfastidious: Emma and Old Maidism

The Austen novel that most deserves investigation alongside Hayley’s treatise—and which has not received much attention from that angle—is Emma.⁵³ Hayley’s Essay has direct relevance to Emma from the first chapters of both. Austen’s novel begins with conversation about a just-married woman who may be considered a former old maid. In a situation similar to that of Hayley’s new father, described above, Austen’s couple is expecting a child by the story’s end. The woman is, of course, Mrs. Weston, heroine Emma Woodhouse’s former governess. We first learn about her through her long-time employer, Mr. Woodhouse. He insists on referring to Emma’s ex-governess as “poor Miss Taylor” (1: 8), rather than by her married name. Mr. Woodhouse thinks it “a pity … that Mr. Weston ever thought of her” and later laments that “young people would be in such a hurry to marry” (52). Mr. Woodhouse in effect takes Hayley’s essay, which offers advice for how old maids should and should not comport themselves, a step further, implying that the world would be a better place if there were more old maids. That he calls them “young” also shows his unusual relationship to this group.

Mr. Woodhouse is a ridiculous figure, fond of gruel and afraid of everyone catching cold—not a character in whom readers are to put much faith. His daughter Emma, however, offers extended commentary on old maids. Early in the novel, she lectures her young protégée Harriet Smith in ways that resonate with Hayley’s treatise. Harriet warns Emma that if she does not marry, she will become an old maid like their family friend Miss Bates. Emma scoffs at the comparison: “and if I thought I should ever be like Miss Bates! so silly—so satisfied—so smiling—so prosing—so undistinguishing and unfastidious—and so apt to tell every thing relative to every body about me, I would marry to-morrow. But between us, I am convinced there never can be any likeness, except in being unmarried” (1: 180). Emma’s description of Miss Bates catalogues the faults that Hayley describes old maids as possessing. He suggests that they suffer from four principal failings: curiosity, credulity, affectation, and envy, or ill nature. Emma’s characterization of Miss Bates falls neatly in line with this list, with the exception of “envy and ill nature.” Hayley links curiosity to garrulousness and nosiness, what Emma calls prosing, or telling everything relative to everybody, in Miss Bates. Hayley’s quality of credulity is linked to Emma’s “undistinguishing,” and his citing affectation may call up Miss Bates’s silly and smiling qualities. In Miss Bates, Austen has presented the stereotypical old maid, as Hayley defines her, almost to the letter.

There is more to the conversation between Harriet and Emma. Emma next refuses the category of old maid for herself, even when imagining herself aged and unmarried. She excludes herself from the category—and certainly from its reputed loathsome characteristics—on economic grounds, determining that she will not be “a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid!” (1: 179–80). Emma argues that a “very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross” (180).

Upon further reflection, Emma retracts some of her insults: “This does not apply, however, to Miss Bates; she is only too good natured and too silly to suit me; but, in general, she is very much to the taste of every body, though single and though poor. Poverty certainly has not contracted her mind: I really believe, if she had only a shilling in the world, she would be very likely to give away sixpence of it; and nobody is afraid of her: that is a great charm” (1: 180). Here, Hayley’s good qualities of old maids come into play. He determines these to be ingenuity, patience, and charity. Emma allows Miss Bates to have patience and charity in abundance, though she appears short on ingenuity, at least in its sense of genius, talent, cleverness, or quickness of wit. It is possible to see Miss Bates’s ingenuity as the talent that makes her appeal to the “taste of every body” but Emma, as a secondary eighteenth-century meaning of the word was honesty and straightforwardness. Miss Bates’s ingenuity in that second sense—what we would now call a kind of ingenuousness—is something Emma, with her quick-witted ingenuity, capitalizes on in the famous, painful scene at Box Hill. There Emma unthinkingly teases Miss Bates about her inability to say no more than three very dull things at once.

After she has delivered her joking insult to Miss Bates at that climactic picnic, Emma defends her remark to Mr. Knightley by arguing that “what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in” Miss Bates. Mr. Knightley counters with the very economic arguments about old maids that Emma herself had voiced earlier. He lectures Emma, saying, “Were [Miss Bates] a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed!” (3: 131). Emma had previously refused to imagine herself part of a figurative sisterhood with other unmarried women, even though she wished to remain one herself. At the end of the novel, we might say, the heroine matures at the expense of an old maid’s feelings.

The little existing scholarship on Austen, Emma, and old maids defends Austen’s characterizations as sympathetic. In her essay on eighteenth-century old maids in British women’s writings, Jean B. Kern argues that Austen was “understandably gentle toward her spinster characters” and that “Miss Bates is an excellently conceived character who illustrates the faults of a spinster too anxious to please her social superiors” (210). Kern believes that Austen, throughout her fiction, “treats old maids sensitively and delicately” and dubs Austen “the best of the spinster novelists,” who developed “the old maid beyond mere caricature” (212). I argue, on the contrary (through Hayley), that Austen’s Emma was very much in thrall to the caricatures of the old maid in her time. Kern concludes that Austen “uses Emma’s thoughtless discourtesy to the old maid to discipline the intelligent but self-centered heroine,” which “shows how sensitive Austen is to the plight of the unmarried woman [Miss Bates]” (210). Although I agree with Kern that Miss Bates illustrates the “faults” of a spinster, I argue that Austen’s treatment of this “excellently conceived character” is not particularly sensitive. The novel’s climactic scene at Box Hill shows Austen’s sensitivity to the plight of the intelligent but self-centered heroine, Emma, as well as how partial she is to her paternalistic hero, rather than to the spinster Miss Bates. For both Emma and Mr. Knightley—and for Emma in particular—Miss Bates functions throughout the novel as little more than an object—whether of pity, charity, or derision.

In her short essay on Austen, Emma, and Hayley, Katharine Kittredge concludes, “Austen’s depiction of Miss Bates defies the most brutal aspects of the stereotype” (“Bates” 27). Kittredge directly links Miss Bates and her unmarried female author, seeing in Emma a critique of the fictional depictions of unmarried women. Kittredge contrasts Austen’s old maid to the decidedly more acidic portraits of the type found in the novels of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Frances Burney (26). But Austen’s fiction did not delve into the kinds of broad humor found in these texts, whether dealing with old maids or any other socially marginalized group. Like Kittredge, Isobel Grundy briefly considers Austen’s Emma, Miss Bates, and Hayley’s treatise, concluding that “Miss Bates’s happiness is designed partly in support of the anti–William Hayley, pro–old maid side of the argument.”⁵⁴ I do not find such arguments wholly persuasive. Even if we accept that Austen did not repeat the most vituperative fictional characterizations of old maids—that they were “primping hags … unaware of their physical repellence”—it does not mean that she has either redeemed or implicitly criticized the dominant stereotype.⁵⁵

Many critics have discussed the ways in which Emma is brought to maturity in the novel by Mr. Knightley’s rebuke. What we have not remarked is that Emma comes to this point through the efforts of a male champion of old maids. Mr. Knightley and Hayley are similarly positioned in relation to their texts and their subjects. Both set themselves up—unasked—as defenders of old maids and purveyors of truth about them. They perceive that their contemporaries come up short in both areas, warranting a lecture on the subject.⁵⁶ Where Hayley advertises his desire to be a savior to old maids in his Essay, the fictional Mr. Knightley is more modestly messianic. He seeks no notoriety for his good deeds. Still, both Hayley and Austen’s hero purport to be friends to old maids, acting on the sisterhood’s behalf. Why would Austen re-enact Hayley’s characteristics of old maids in her novel and then take the further step of making their principal defender a male?

Because Mr. Knightley chastises Emma for her narrowness, it is tempting to read Miss Bates (and Emma on Miss Bates) as Austen’s response to her culture’s cruel depictions of old maids. It is further tempting to construe Emma’s actions as a warning to readers to treat old maids with greater kindness. The connections with Hayley’s treatise would then be said to show that Austen was willing to replicate her culture’s stereotyping of old maids in the name of overturning them. But are these stereotypes actually overturned in Austen’s novel? The last we hear of Miss Bates, she is spreading gossip across the neighborhood of another impending marriage, that of Frank Churchill to her niece Jane Fairfax (468). Miss Bates has by no means left aside her prime failing, curiosity. She does not experience the growth and development that Emma does. Furthermore, though Miss Bates is a good-natured fixture in the Highbury world, she entirely drops out of the final two chapters. She is in no way central to the portion of the narrative in which Emma and Mr. Knightley’s happy marriage is concluded. In short, even if we see Emma as redeemed insofar as her poor treatment of old maids is concerned, Austen leaves Miss Bates hanging out to dry at novel’s end.

From this evidence, I conclude that Austen’s Emma does not offer a challenge (subtle or otherwise) to prevailing attitudes on old maids. What Hayley’s treatise and Austen’s novel have in common is a desire to speak for a population that they tacitly accept as blending the ridiculous and the good. Neither author seeks to widen the scope of old maids’ characterization, instead repeating stereotypes with a vengeance, albeit from a liberal and seemingly well-meaning vantage point. Both, in other words, blend pity, contempt, and humor in their approach to old maids. Though many of us would like to get away from the pattern of defining Austen herself in the limiting framework of the morally upright spinster-author, we are still in thrall to it unless we acknowledge the possibility that, like Emma, Austen mildly disdains and even distances herself from spinsters, the group of women with whom she has been most often identified. In terms of the history of the novel, Austen’s repetition in Emma of the common cant about spinsters should not astonish us. After all, “the novels of the century provided virtually no models for happiness in the single state.”⁵⁷ Austen’s fiction was, in this manner at least, not in the vanguard for women. For most of her characters, “things that are old are boring, irrelevant, or restrictive,” as Claire Lamont writes (669). Though Lamont does not specifically discuss old maids, they, too, might be considered in these terms as “old things.”

Dear Aunt Jane; or, This Old Maid

The reading I am offering of old maidism in Emma may seem surprising in light of Austen’s life. We might expect a member of the supposed sisterhood to present in her fiction a more supportive picture of the class to which by the 1810s she would have been assigned. Austen “was an old maid herself,” as one source puts it, so she must have “thought about her situation with a keenly analytic mind.”⁵⁸ But does her identity necessarily translate into sympathetic fictional treatment? The question of whether or not Austen enjoyed being an old maid—whether it was an identity she felt comfortable in or embittered by—has been and continues to be debated by her biographers. In Jane Austen among Women, Deborah Kaplan finds Austen at home in the role. Kaplan theorizes that Austen deliberately assumed “the guise of spinsterhood” in order to spend more time with female friends.⁵⁹ Citing biographical anecdotes about Cassandra and Jane taking on the sartorial trappings of middle age earlier than was customary, Kaplan argues, “Austen was apparently exploiting contemporary stereotypes about spinsters to her advantage” (122). Through these means, Kaplan suggests, Austen was also able to recede from women’s domestic social duties in favor of writing. Arguing against biographers like John Halperin, who emphasize Austen’s not marrying as a source of bitter personal disappointment, Kaplan suggests that spinsterhood may have become Austen’s deliberate, positive choice.

Kaplan uses as evidence a letter that Austen wrote to Cassandra in December 1808, just shy of her 33rd birthday, describing a ball she had attended. “Our Ball was rather more amusing than I expected. … The room was tolerably full, & there were perhaps thirty couple of Dancers;—the melancholy part was, to see so many dozen young Women standing by without partners, & each of them with two ugly naked shoulders!—It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago!—I thought it all over—& inspite [sic] of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.”⁶⁰ Five years later, in 1813, she wrote again to Cassandra, “By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like” (251). In the same letter, she refers to a conversation with a Miss Lee whom Austen determines “is at an age of reason, ten years older than myself at least.” Austen may well have been growing into a happy, single middle age, rather than a stereotypically embittered, obnoxious, or self-negating spinsterhood.

It is an unfortunate fact of literary history that Austen’s critics have been limited in vision when it comes to making sense of her life and career, especially in regard to her remaining unmarried. Such caricatured versions circulated during her lifetime as well. Austen’s contemporary Mary Russell Mitford reported a friend saying that Austen had “stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that every existed.” As Kathleen Freeman notes, in a mid-twentieth-century biography of Austen, Mitford’s “portrait is a mere cliché of a spinster” (153).⁶¹ The “picture built up” in the nineteenth century of Austen as “a rather prim spinsterish figure who hardly knew the facts of life” (161).

The critical effects of this sense of her life are not difficult to trace. Most obvious are readings of Austen’s fiction such as E. Margaret Moore’s essay on Miss Bates, which purports to be sympathetic to the character and the author. Moore takes a biographical and psychoanalytic approach to explaining the greatness of Emma. She suggests that Miss Bates being mistreated moves us because “Emma perceives Miss Bates to some extent as a mother-figure” and because Emma’s “flirtation with Frank Churchill is a tacit reminder of Miss Bates’s sexual inadequacy.”⁶² These interpretations are then linked to Austen’s negative relationship with her mother and with Austen’s “envy of the maternal role,” which Moore says is “to be expected in a childless woman” (584). Out of a painful childhood (and adulthood), Moore implies, comes lonely old maidenhood and great art. This account and others like it present profoundly limiting versions of Austen’s novel and of her literary career.

It is quite possible that Austen judged her own life through one set of beliefs and expectations and created the characters in Emma through another. Even if she herself was a happy, unconventional, and against-type unmarried older woman, her representations of old maids need not be looked to for necessary sympathy. What my reading of old maids in Emma demonstrates is that even if we see Austen as a feminist (as I do), we need not understand her as presenting all of her female characters through a progressive lens. Austen’s heroines may range beyond dominant ideologies for women, but her old maids appear to have conformed to them.⁶³ Perhaps we would be asking too much of Austen in wanting her to create minor characters that break the gendered mold. But it seems that Austen did not seek to challenge representational trends where old maids were concerned. What my argument suggests is that even if she cannot be charged with cruelty and satire akin to Hayley’s, and even if she did not draw on the most damaging sexual stereotypes of old maids, like Skinn’s, Austen accepted limiting representations of old maids in her era. In her characterization of Miss Bates—her fiction’s most prominent old maid—Austen may even be called condescending, directly echoing the least offensive material found in Hayley’s Essay, while sidestepping the question of whether “any form of mature female sexuality that is not employed to placate a husband must be corrupt.”⁶⁴

Determining that Austen was no more a true friend to the sisterhood than was Hayley need not give any credence to the view that Austen herself was therefore a stereotypically censorious old maid. To return to that model of dismissing her and her writings—as practiced by Lawrence, Mudrick, Halperin, and others—gets us no further in understanding the nuances of her single life or her knotty portrayals of aging single women.⁶⁵ Her representations of old maids, like Hayley’s, are complicated enough to allow for multiple readings, and we ought to continue to credit Austen’s fiction with many innovations, formal and ideological. Though she may have seen beyond some of the restrictive patterns then dominant in fiction in her approaches to gendered norms, we must entertain the possibility that Austen was not so perspicacious—or perhaps simply not so motivated—when it came to fictional old maids.