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

conversational kinship is established, we do hear Susan speak, complaining mostly about the running of the household. Once she and Fanny become companions, no word of dialogue between the sisters is given us. There is some sisterly talk similarly missing from Emma . When Emma’s sister Isabella visits Hartfield for Christmas, she speaks a good deal, but from Chapters xi to xvii she says no word of directly quoted dialogue to Emma herself. The sisters speak at opposite ends of a crowded room, or through intermediaries. Emma, we have been told, has had seven years without Isabella’s company since her sister got married. The sisters are not well matched, but the separation is also a narrative requirement: in this novel Austen needs to isolate her heroine from advice and confidences and private conversation.
    In the end, in Persuasion , Austen has abandoned the idea that sisterliness might permit the warmest kind of intimacy. Though its plot is as sister-influenced as that of Pride and Prejudice – it too turns on an estate that will go to a more distant relative because a father has produced only daughters – its heroine has just one reported conversation with her elder sister, Elizabeth. This is when Anne warns her that Mrs Clay might have designs upon their father. Sisterhood makes the conversation possible, but also difficult. Anne is coldly rebuffed, though she hopes that her sister might be ‘made observant’ by this private exchange (I. v). With her other sister, Mary, in contrast, there is no shortage of one-to-one conversation, though this usually casts Anne as a tactful therapist, listening to Mary’s complaints and talking her round into cheerfulness. It is Mary, naturally, who causes her sister peculiar pain when she happily reports Wentworth saying, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again’ (I. vii). No wonder that sisterly chat holds no allure for Anne. It is often remarked that Persuasion marks a new departure – taking its heroine off to sea and leaving the landed gentry to their houses and their fates. It is also the end of sisterhood. When Anne becomes engaged once more to Wentworth, she cares ‘nothing’ about the ‘disproportion in their fortune’, but a different imbalance does pain her:
     
    to have no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will to offer in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity. She had but two friends in the world to add to his list, Lady Russell and Mrs Smith. (II. xii)
     
    Anne has escaped her family and can feel a melancholy relief. There is no more need for talking to her sisters.

THREE
    What Do the Characters Call Each Other?
    . . . in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them.
    Sense and Sensibility , I. xii
    Only one married woman in all Jane Austen’s novels calls her husband by his Christian name. The wife in question is Mary Musgrove (née Elliot) in Persuasion . Not only does she refer to her husband as ‘Charles’ when talking to her sister Anne, she calls him ‘Charles’ when she speaks to him directly. 1 Are we to take this as a commendable modern intimacy? Or is it an unwonted breach of domestic decorum? It is likely that anything Mary says will be a little wrong, and we note that she first addresses him as ‘Charles’ to oppose his wish to leave her with her sick child in order to go to meet Captain Wentworth. ‘Oh! no, indeed, Charles, I cannot bear to have you go away’ (I. vii). Such informality seems to make dispute all the easier for Mary, as when her husband tells Anne that Captain Benwick is full of her virtues. ‘Mary