What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved by John Mullan

she described bumping into a vicar from Hampshire whom they knew: ‘at the bottom of Kingsdown Hill we met a Gentleman in a Buggy, who on a minute examination turned out to be Dr Hall—& Dr Hall in such very deep mourning that either his Mother, his Wife, or himself must be dead’ ( Letters , 19). Mourning, as Austen’s novels require us to realise, is not the same as grieving. Characters who know all about the conventions of mourning do not necessarily know anything about grief. In the bleakly brilliant opening of Persuasion , Sir Walter Elliot’s imperviousness to melancholy reflection is shown us. How could he so often view the page in his ‘favourite volume’, the Baronetage, which lists the deaths of both his wife and his son? Though there might be a good motive for adding the date of one’s wife’s death, Austen’s wording makes sure we know differently. She tells us how he has supplemented the bare year recorded by the book by ‘inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife’. The wording (‘most accurately’) lets us see his fussy respect for the facts of aristocratic family history. It is anything but sadness.
    In this, the most elegiac of Austen’s novels, some of the conventions for condolence are laid out in all their emptiness. The Elliots failed to send a letter of commiseration to their (literally) distant cousins the Dalrymples upon the Viscount’s death, and thereby committed a grave offence. This is despite the fact that the two families had never met. In return and revenge, the Dalrymples scorn to send condolences on the death of Lady Elliot. These minor aristocrats are caught up in a petty tit-for-tat. Meanwhile the expression of real grief is difficult to find. Anne Elliot’s sadness at the death of her mother, when she was fourteen, is left inexplicit, but it is intimated. When she is playing the piano for the unappreciative and philistine Musgroves, we hear that apart from her time with Captain Wentworth, she had not known real appreciation of her musicality ‘since the loss of her dear mother’ (I. vi). That ‘dear’ is like a flicker of her own feeling, hidden from others. The autumnal mournfulness of the book’s first part is always associated with Anne’s loss of love, but it also reaches back to this loss of her mother. The novel, following its heroine’s own habits of fortitude and avoidance, will not say much about this. Something explicit emerges belatedly, when we find that Anne’s friendship with Mrs Smith was formed many years earlier when she ‘had gone unhappy to school, grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved’ (II. v).
    The Musgroves are themselves grieving for their dead son Richard – or rather, they have just been reminded to do so again by the mention of Captain Wentworth (I. vi). Their son died two years earlier, and was ‘scarcely at all regretted’ when news of his death first arrived. This is an extraordinary sentence for a modern reader: if their son had been sent away to sea because he was ‘unmanageable’, should his parents not have felt some extra stab of guilt and regret? Returning to the only two proper letters that, under Captain Wentworth’s influence, he had bothered to write to them while at sea, Mrs Musgrove is thrown into ‘greater grief for him than she had known on first hearing of his death’. There is some sense that Austen is rigging our judgements here. When, some time later, Captain Wentworth responds to Mrs Musgrove’s expressions of grief by showing ‘the kindest consideration for all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings’, it seems that the author is also trying to show some consideration after her earlier asperity (I. viii). The consideration is passing, for soon we are hearing of ‘her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for’. The novel is satirising her for acting up to grief now, not for failing to grieve