What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved Read Online Free PDF Page A

realise that she cannot stay long ‘as Caroline and Mrs Hurst were going out’ (II. iii). The implication, unperceived by Jane, is that Caroline Bingley has pre-arranged with her sister to extract her from a tricky interview. Again, they have been talking together. When Elizabeth and her aunt, Mrs Gardiner, arrive at Pemberley to visit Georgiana Darcy, she is in the saloon, ‘sitting there with Mrs Hurst and Miss Bingley’ (III. iii). They have clearly arranged to try to fight Elizabeth off. Miss Bingley confesses the confederacy when she deplores to Mr Darcy the supposed alteration in Elizabeth’s appearance since their last meeting. ‘She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again’ (III. iii). The fact that this malign pair are always scheming together should allow us to correct what is surely a printer’s error in all the standard editions of Pride and Prejudice . In Volume III Chapter xiii, where Jane recognises how she and Bingley were kept from meeting each other while both were in London, she explains, ‘It must have been his sister’s doing’ (III. xiii). But she immediately adds, ‘They were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me.’ ‘They’ were up to something: she and Elizabeth are thinking of both sisters, who have always been scheming together, and Austen must surely have meant ‘sisters’’ (plural possessive) not ‘sister’s’ (singular possessive).
    Sisterly togetherness can be deceptive. Maria and Julia Bertram seem to come as a pair, until we see that they are really rivals. They have ‘their own apartments’ at Mansfield Park (I. xvi) – all the grandeur that space can provide – and true apartness becomes natural to them. They begin in concert, alternating in their reports of Fanny’s ignorance (I. ii). They go out together as ‘belles of the neighbourhood’ (I. iv). But then come the Crawfords, and the casting of that play. The intimacy between the sisters is what allows Julia to know that she is being fobbed off with an undesirable part. When Henry Crawford asks her to play Amelia, she looks at Maria. ‘Maria’s countenance was to decide it; if she were vexed and alarmed—but Maria looked all serenity and satisfaction’ (I. xiv). Theirs is an antagonistic union: they know each other, as we say, all too well.
     
    The sister with whom she was used to be on easy terms was now become her greatest enemy . . . With no material fault of temper, or difference of opinion, to prevent their being very good friends while their interests were the same, the sisters, under such a trial as this, had not affection or principle enough to make them merciful or just, to give them honour or compassion. (I. xvii)
     
    These are sisters reared together as a proud pair who have long since ceased to talk to each other.
    Persuasion offers us the one hint of sisterly talk that excludes the heroine but is neither conspiratorial nor rivalrous. Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove may be fairly empty-headed girls, but Anne envies them ‘that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters’ (I. v). Close in age (nineteen and twenty) and schooled together, they have an easy – we might imagine somewhat giggly – closeness. When Captain Wentworth becomes a regular visitor to the Musgrove home and the dancing begins, we glimpse the possibility of a Bertram scenario: ‘as for Henrietta and Louisa, they both seemed so entirely occupied by him, that nothing but the continued appearance of the most perfect good-will between themselves could have made it credible that they were not decided rivals’ (I. viii). But the potential rivalry evaporates exactly because of their habit of talking to each other. On the walk with Anne, Mary Musgrove, Charles Musgrove and Wentworth, they find themselves suddenly in sight of Winthrop, where