"To be a renter, a chuser of books!": What Jane Austen's characters read (and why), part 3

The Reader by Marguerite Gérard and Jean Honoré Fragonard, c. 1786. Image source: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

In her book What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Persuasions editor Susan Allen Ford examines the reading preferences of Austen's characters as a key to understanding them more deeply. In this post series I am looking at each of Austen's canonical novels to see what this perspective can tell us in particular about her heroines.

Last time, in "I am not a great reader," it was the turn of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. This week: Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Ford covers both Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey in a single chapter, discussed in "So rapturous a delight"; it's an indication of Mansfield Park's complexity that she devotes two chapters to it (the only novel that receives more than one).

The Mansfield Park theatricals

Ford's first Mansfield Park chapter is devoted to the private theatricals involving the Bertram siblings, their cousins Henry and Mary Crawford, and their neighbors Mr. Yates and Mr. Rushworth. Much has been written about the significance of the choice of play, Elizabeth Inchbald's Lovers' Vows, a translation and adaptation of August Kotzebue's scandalous Das Kind der Liebe (The Love-Child).

Title page of Lovers' Vows, from the German of Kotzebue, by Mrs. Inchbald, London, 1798. Image source: Internet Archive

A brief synopsis of Inchbald's version:

A young soldier on his first leave in years, Frederick, goes back to his home village and discovers his mother Agatha begging by the side of the road. She has been ill, and is now homeless and starving. Frederick has returned for a copy of his birth certificate so that he can leave the army and apprentice himself to learn a trade, but his mother reveals to him that his birth was never registered. Twenty years earlier she was seduced and abandoned by a soldier, who went on to marry a rich woman and become Baron Wildenheim; Frederick is his illegitimate son.

Frederick finds Agatha nourishment and shelter, and, having spent his last pennies on her, goes out to beg on her behalf. A passing rich man gives him a pittance and refuses more; when in desperation Frederick tries to rob him, he is seized and imprisoned. The rich man is, of course, the Baron.

The Baron, now widowed, has been approached by the wealthy Count Cassel, who is seeking to marry his daughter Amelia. The Count describes himself as "a gay, lively, inconsiderate, flimsy, frivolous coxcomb," and the Baron calls him "an idiot." The Baron has tasked Amelia's tutor Anhalt, a clergyman, with sounding out his daughter about this socially advantageous marriage. Instead, Amelia reveals to Anhalt that she loves him, but he rebuffs her because he knows that the Baron will never agree to the match—the social distance between them is too great.

All ends happily for everyone except the Count. When the virtuous Anhalt discovers the identities of Frederick and his mother, he reunites them with the Baron. And at Anhalt's urging, the Baron agrees to marry Agatha and recognize his son. Anhalt himself is then rewarded by the reformed Baron with Amelia's hand, to their mutual delight.

The Baron, Agatha and Frederick are reconciled as Amelia and Anhalt look on. Image source: Project Gutenberg

Its themes of seduction, sex outside of marriage, and forbidden love across class barriers made Lovers' Vows notorious (and also very popular). When Fanny learns that it is to be the play performed at Mansfield Park, "the first use she made of her solitude was to take up the volume which had been left on the table, and begin to acquaint herself with the play of which she had heard so much." Finding it "totally improper," the modest Fanny reads the entire play straight through:

Her curiosity was all awake, and she ran through it with an eagerness which was suspended only by intervals of astonishment, that it could be chosen in the present instance, that it could be proposed and accepted in a private theatre! Agatha and Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other, so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what they were engaging in; and longed to have them roused as soon as possible by the remonstrance which Edmund would certainly make. (Ch. XIV)

Edmund does remonstrate with his brother Tom and his sisters for their choice of play, to no effect. And soon, to avoid even greater impropriety, the moralistic clergyman Edward agrees to play the moralistic clergyman Anhalt. The role of the spirited, flirtatious Amelia is taken by the spirited, flirtatious Mary Crawford.

Meanwhile, her youthful and impulsive brother Henry plays the youthful and impulsive Frederick, while the sisters Maria and Julia Bertram vie for the role of Frederick's mother Agatha just as they vie for Henry's attentions offstage. Maria wins the role, which has several tender scenes with Frederick. The man she will marry, Mr. Rushworth, takes the part of the Count, and is similarly fashion-conscious and empty-headed.

As these assignments suggest, the play is improper not only for its language and situations, but because (as I wrote in "Two recent books on Jane Austen," following Paula Byrne's The Genius of Jane Austen) "the roles that the family members and neighbors take on in Lovers' Vows parallel and comment on their romantic attractions outside the rehearsals."

And despite her disapproval of the play, by degrees Fanny becomes drawn into the theatricals. Her own quiet refuge, the East Room, is invaded by Mary and Edmund, who seek Fanny's help to run their key third-act scene together:

The whole subject of it was love—a marriage of love was to be described by the gentleman, and very little short of a declaration of love be made by the lady. . .Fanny was wanted only to prompt and observe them. . .To prompt them must be enough for her; and it was sometimes more than enough; for she could not always pay attention to the book. In watching them she forgot herself; and, agitated by the increasing spirit of Edmund’s manner, had once closed the page and turned away exactly as he wanted help. It was imputed to very reasonable weariness, and she was thanked and pitied; but she deserved their pity more than she hoped they would ever surmise. (Ch. XVII)

Meanwhile, Maria and Henry are taking every opportunity to rehearse the emotional scenes between Agatha and Frederick. The passions expressed through the characters will later erupt catastrophically into real life, and Maria will become the "fallen woman" she enacts onstage.

"Does it not make you think of Cowper?"

Fanny's small library of books, "of which she had been a collector from the first hour of her commanding a shilling," are kept in the East Room (Ch. XVI). We can identify at least some of the contents of her library from her references to the poets it must contain. Among them is William Cowper, whose book-length poem The Task (1785) is quoted by Fanny in a scene in which Mr. Rushworth describes the changes he is intending for the grounds at his estate, Sotherton. Those "improvements" involve cutting down trees planted at the time of Elizabeth I:

". . .There have been two or three fine old trees cut down, that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly, which makes me think that Repton, or anybody of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton down: the avenue that leads from the west front to the top of the hill, you know," turning to Miss Bertram particularly as he spoke. But Miss Bertram thought it most becoming to reply—

"The avenue! Oh! I do not recollect it. I really know very little of Sotherton."

Fanny, who was sitting on the other side of Edmund, exactly opposite Miss Crawford, and who had been attentively listening, now looked at him, and said in a low voice—

"Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? 'Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.'" (Ch. VI) [1]

Title page of The Task, A Poem In Six Books by William Cowper, 1787. Image source: Hathitrust.org

Cowper's poem describes his wanderings around the estate of "Benevolus," his patron, and the musings the landscape inspires:

Ye fallen avenues! once more I mourn
Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice
That yet a remnant of your race survives.
How airy and how light the graceful arch,
Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re-echoing pious anthems! (The Task, Book I)

Cowper compares the avenue's arched canopy of leaves to that of a church. When the Bertram household and the Crawfords form a party to visit Sotherton, they are shown its family chapel, and Fanny is unimpressed.

"I am disappointed," said she, in a low voice, to Edmund. "This is not my idea of a chapel. There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand. Here are no aisles, no arches, no inscriptions, no banners. No banners, cousin, to be 'blown by the night wind of heaven.' No signs that a 'Scottish monarch sleeps below.'"

Fanny references not only Cowper's poem, but also quotes Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), undoubtedly another book in her small collection. Her love of Scott hints at the romantic feelings she conceals behind her modesty and reserve.

Title page of The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Walter Scott, 1806. Image source: Hathitrust.org

Cowper's poem continues,

. . .while beneath,
The chequered earth seems restless as a flood
Brushed by the wind. So sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,
And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves
Play wanton, every moment, every spot. (The Task, Book I)

It's not only the shadows of the leaves that play wanton on the grounds of Sotherton. The visitors are being given a tour of Sotherton by Mr. Rushworth and his mother, "when the young people, meeting with an outward door, temptingly open on a flight of steps which led immediately to turf and shrubs, and all the sweets of pleasure-grounds, as by one impulse, one wish for air and liberty, all walked out" (Ch. IX).

After this escape into the garden Edmund jokes about "feminine lawlessness," but we and Fanny soon witness transgressions by both Maria Bertram and Mary Crawford. From the house the group had "looked across a lawn to the beginning of the avenue immediately beyond tall iron palisades and gates." After walking through Mr. Rushworth's planned "wilderness" they find the gates locked. While Fanny sits on a bench awaiting their host's arrival with a key, Maria determines, with Henry's help, to "get out":

". . .that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. 'I cannot get out,' as the starling said." As she spoke, and it was with expression, she walked to the gate: he followed her. "Mr. Rushworth is so long fetching this key!"

"And for the world you would not get out without the key and without Mr. Rushworth’s authority and protection, or I think you might with little difficulty pass round the edge of the gate, here, with my assistance; I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited."

"Prohibited! nonsense! I certainly can get out that way, and I will." (Ch. X) [2]

Maria's quote about the starling is from a scene in Laurence Sterne's popular A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), in which Sterne's narrator Mr. Yorick compares a starling in a cage to a prisoner in the Bastille; perhaps this is another book on Fanny's shelf (or at least on Sir Thomas's).

Title page of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, by Laurence Sterne, 1768. Image source: Internet Archive

Maria and Henry have soon squeezed past the gate, and as Fanny looks on aghast, "by taking a circuitous, and, as it appeared to her, very unreasonable direction to the knoll, they were soon beyond her eye" (Ch. X). Soon Maria will go even further, and pass beyond Mr. Rushworth's authority and protection for good.

Maria is not the first to seek a way out. When Mary and Edmund arrive with Fanny at the gate, Mary soon contrives a way to leave Fanny behind so she can have Edmund's company to herself: "a sidegate, not fastened, had tempted them very soon after their leaving her, and they had been across a portion of the park into the very avenue which Fanny had been hoping the whole morning to reach at last, and had been sitting down under one of the trees" (Ch. X). Another temptation yielded to, and more wanton flirtation among the shadows. As with the Mansfield Park theatricals, Fanny's unhappy experiences reflect and echo the books she has read.

"To be a renter, a chuser of books!"

When the morally unreliable but well-off Henry Crawford proposes to Fanny, she refuses him, "perfectly convinced," as she tells Sir Thomas, "that I could never make him happy, and that I should be miserable myself" (Ch. XXXII). This severely disappoints Sir Thomas, for whom the basis for a woman's choice of husband is primarily his income and social standing. He decides to send her back to her parents' cramped, unkempt, and ill-managed home in Portsmouth for an extended visit:

. . .his prime motive in sending her away had very little to do with the propriety of her seeing her parents again, and nothing at all with any idea of making her happy. He certainly wished her to go willingly, but he as certainly wished her to be heartily sick of home before her visit ended; and that a little abstinence from the elegancies and luxuries of Mansfield Park would bring her mind into a sober state, and incline her to a juster estimate of the value of that home of greater permanence, and equal comfort, of which she had the offer.

It was a medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased. A residence of eight or nine years in the abode of wealth and plenty had a little disordered her powers of comparing and judging. Her father’s house would, in all probability, teach her the value of a good income; and he trusted that she would be the wiser and happier woman, all her life, for the experiment he had devised. (Ch. XXXVII)

Fanny is indeed dismayed by what she finds in Portsmouth. But she finds a purpose and consolation in her visit by taking her 14-year-old sister Susan under her wing:

The intimacy thus begun between them was a material advantage to each. By sitting together upstairs, they avoided a great deal of the disturbance of the house; Fanny had peace, and Susan learned to think it no misfortune to be quietly employed. . .[Fanny] often heaved a sigh at the remembrance of all her books and boxes, and various comforts there [at Mansfield Park]. By degrees the girls came to spend the chief of the morning upstairs, at first only in working and talking, but after a few days, the remembrance of the said books grew so potent and stimulative that Fanny found it impossible not to try for books again. There were none in her father’s house; but wealth is luxurious and daring, and some of hers found its way to a circulating library. She became a subscriber; amazed at being anything in propria persona, amazed at her own doings in every way, to be a renter, a chuser of books! And to be having any one’s improvement in view in her choice! But so it was. Susan had read nothing, and Fanny longed to give her a share in her own first pleasures, and inspire a taste for the biography and poetry which she delighted in herself. (Ch. XL)

Messrs. Lackington Allen & Co., Temple of the Muses, Finsbury Square. Plate 17 from Rudolph Ackermann, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics, Vol. 1, London, 1809. Image source: Internet Archive

Fanny had been introduced to those first pleasures by Edmund, and she is now taking on the role of tutor and guide that he had assumed when she first came to Mansfield Park. As she tells Edmund, "You taught me to think and feel," and now she is filling that role in Susan's life. Susan is getting a later start, and has a different character from Fanny. But through Fanny's tutelage, Susan's life will be transformed, as Fanny's has been, by a love of reading, and the imaginative engagement with the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others that it brings.

But not every Austen character loves reading books.

Next time: "Meaning to read more": Emma

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1. "Repton" is the garden designer Humphry Repton, who in his designs emphasized vistas and showcased the situation of manor houses.
2. A "ha-ha" is a deep ditch, invisible from a short distance, that prevents wild deer or grazing livestock from wandering onto the grounds. Its advantage over a fence or wall is that it does not interrupt the prospect with a visual barrier.