Kathy Lette has written many books including Dead Sexy (2003), Nip 'n' Tuck (2002) Mad Cows (1997) and Girls' Night Out (1989).
Jane Austen. The words struck horror into my teenage heart. I was convinced she was going to be one of those snooty Pommy writers who had hooked herself up intravenously to a Thesaurus. I felt sure she could only be enjoyed by highbrows who¹d been at Oxford so long, they had Ivy growing up the backs of their legs.
And then I read Pride and Prejudice. That's when I realised I was the proud owner of the World Indoor Record for Self Delusion. Because Austen is a literary goddess. Her acerbic satirical style is more controlled than a pair of Liz Taylor¹s panty hose. On the surface , her prose is so beguiling; her sentences so beautifully crafted, that the reader is lulled into a false sense of literary security. But a couple of chapters in, you find yourself fastening your psychological seat belts because it's gonna be a bumpy ride. Pride and Prejudice's pitiless observations on the social mores of English society, makes Austen the Margaret Mead of her times. A barbed commentator on the battle between the sexes, Austen realised that, as a woman, poetic justice was the only justice in the world - and set about impaling misogynistic enemies on the end of her pen. While full of passion and compassion, the fiercely independent Lizzie Bennet does not require a Knight In Shining Armani to make her happy. How much more radical than her insipid Bridget Jones prototypes women who¹ve kept their wonderbras and burnt their brains.
Elizabeth Buchan is the author of Secrets of the Heart (2000), Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2002) and The Good Wife (2003).
In the end, Jane Austen’s novels elude the final analysis. Despite realms of paper being covered by critics - including this one - who labour to dissect this and that element in the texts, the mysterious, protean qualities of sensibility and feeling, and that inner life which makes her novels great and enduring, ultimately escape definition. They just are, and so it should be.
Yet, one thing can be said with a degree of assurance. Jane Austen wrote five novels in which romance, satire and social comedy are used to illustrate the tussle between reason, good manners and morality, and the baser aspects of human nature and ridiculousness. Furthermore, the novels are predicated on the belief that civilized happiness is achievable only if based on tolerance, good humour, order and a willingness to examine, and to understand, oneself.
High ideals indeed, and the struggle to achieve them is never so funny, so sad and so clever in its examination of behaviour as it is in Pride and Prejudice, which has a good case for claiming to be the best-loved of her novels. It is set in a prosaic, if gently attractive, English landscape and a small rural community. It does not touch on politics or war or real, biting want. Its plot, which centres on marriage, and the dialogue are both confected as with the lightest of theatrical comedies - and we know that the author was very fond of the theatre. There are balls, morning calls and country walks. Officers, clergymen and that loaded condition ‘the gentleman’ people its pages. It is not a lyrical novel, nor is it given to poetic descriptions; rather its detail tends to hang on the prosaic and the everyday - after walking to Netherfield to visit her sick sister, Jane, Elizabeth’s petticoat was ‘six inches deep in mud’.
Yet, an element of fantasy runs deep and poignant through the story of an intelligent, spirited girl with only a £1000 in the four percents, (as Mr Collins so charmingly reminds her when he proposes) and a man of considerable means who, as he confesses ‘was taught what was right’ but not taught ‘to correct my temper’ and their progress towards the altar. This from an author who grew to maturity in the intellectual climate of the Augustan Age which admired Reason and Rationality and functioned socially on strict class divisions, where money and position spoke.
No one could have been more aware of how unlikely the union of Darcy and Elizabeth would have been than Jane Austen herself, who had personal experience of rejection. In 1795 she met Tom Lefroy - whose only fault (she confided in a letter to her sister Cassandra) was that he wore too light a morning coat. They danced several times, sat out and discussed the shocking novel, Tom Jones. The following morning, Tom came visiting. Clearly, there was an instant and mutual attraction. However, a relation sniffed what was in the wind and stepped in smartly and dispatched Tom elsewhere. The implication was unmistakeable: Jane was not a good match, too badly connected and too poor to be considered for the wife of an up- and-coming lawyer who needed to make his way in the world. In such a manner, the harsh rules governing the alliances and marriages of a middle class were made clear. As far as we know from the limited evidence available, Jane did not make too much of it either in her letters or in her behaviour. But we do not know how she felt and, on examining Pride and Prejudice, it is impossible not to conclude that the pain and humiliation of that experience sowed a seed in her writer’s psyche.
Pride and Prejudice was first written in 1797, two years after the encounter with Tom Lefroy, and entitled 'First Impressions'. After many revisions (‘I have lop’t and clop’t’) it was published in 1813 with its final title. The intervening years, during which Jane suffered various setbacks and possibly a period of depression in Bath, had not darkened its wicked comedy nor dimmed its gleeful satire on the manners and snobberies of her world.
Yet there is more than a whiff of revenge about the novel. For in fabricating Elizabeth and Jane’s romances - and it is worth reflecting that the original idea of the Romance was considered to contain elements of fantasy and flights of imagination - she is cocking a snook at the interfering relations and gossips who stifled her infant love affair. No one knew better that she did that to survive in the economic realities of her world, and the Austen family were often hard pressed financially, required tough thinking, a cool head and ruthlessness. In bringing Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy together, she is determined to show that other things matter too, not least that feeling, self-knowledge and love are superior to circumstances. Yet, surely she is also permitting herself the delicious fictional release of hope triumphing over experience? And is there not a tiny suggestion of - what we would now term - 'feminism' in this union? For, in marrying Darcy, Elizabeth ensures that the power to control her own destiny, and to a degree her family’s, have been considerably augmented. One has only to consider Jane’s frustration when she laments having to remain as a guest of her brother’s at Godmersham when she longs to come home to receive visiting friends, but has no money to arrange her own travel and none of her brothers can, or will, escort her.
Pride and Prejudice is, above all, a novel which changes shape and colour on every reading. As a younger reader, the pulsing excitement of the love affairs which are, as with the traditional Romance very properly strewn about with obstacles, and given here an ironic counterpoint by Lydia and Wickham’s ill-fated alliance, are perhaps the main focus. To re-read it later is to be struck anew by the skill with which the author questions the assumption that, in possessing money and property, a person is superior in mind and morality. It is stuffed with needle-sharp portraits and pointers which may take a few readings to appreciate. Of course, we tut-tut over Mrs Bennet’s frantic manoeuvres to marry off her five daughters, but it is the feline analysis of Mr Bennet’s behaviour that is the more deadly. Here is a man who has given up: who is openly mocking and contemptuous of his wife and whose detachment serves his family badly. Charlotte Lucas brings a lump to the throat when, newly engaged to the dreadful and stupid Mr Collins, she declares that she is not a romantic. ‘I ask only a comfortable home’. To be a penniless spinster at thirty was, as Jane Austen well knew, a grim prospect and there is dignity and pathos in Charlotte’s resolution. Nevertheless, the author cannot help letting fly the small barb when, at a later date, the new Mrs Collins is reflecting on Elizabeth’s relationships with Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Darcy and which one she should choose - ‘Mr Darcy had considerable patronage in the church and Colonel Fitzwilliam could have none at all’. Even the beloved and beautiful Jane does not entirely escape censure. For, if Jane had allowed her feelings for Bingley to show (as the sensible Charlotte advised) Darcy might not have been so determined to stifle her love affair with Mr Bingley.
The tyrannies of class and money are there for all to see - the power of the entail which will drive Mrs Bennet out of her house if Mr Bennet dies first being but one - but so too, less obviously, is a comment on the exhaustion of living in families and the different but equally exhausting tyrannies exacted by various members and the subterfuges to which their victims resort. Mrs Bennet’s nerves have caused Mr Bennet to retreat to the study. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s terrible power has pulverised her weak and sickly daughter. Charlotte Collins makes quite sure that she does see her husband for most of the day. Peace and quiet are precious commodities. There is often no time or space to talk things over, there is the need for concealment, and in a tight, contained community a transgression, such as Lydia’s, has the power to disgrace the whole family.
Comic and truly funny, brilliantly clever and a touch savage, there is a suggestion of sadness among the rejoicing in the spectres of the emptying Bennet household and the long years ahead of Charlotte. To counteract this, there is the powerful sense of the author’s delight in her own creation. She may have resented and mourned her failed love affair and, paradoxically, she held no illusions about matrimony but that did not prevent her rapturous delight at her ‘darling child’. Perhaps it is that spirit that ensures Pride and Prejudice becomes a companion for life.
Further reading:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Penguin published Esther Freud's first novel Hideous Kinky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in addition to Peerless Flats, Gaglow, The Wild and her most recent novel, The Sea House.
Re-reading Pride and Prejudice as I have just done, I was struck by how effortless a read it is, how fresh and lively and beautifully structured. It draws you in with such confidence, introduces the characters with such elegant strokes and puts a smile on your face. It is a story full of humour, intrigue, quiet cynicism and genuine depth of feeling and deals at its heart with a great British injustice, the archaic inheritance law that can see five girls made homeless in favour of a male relative, a law that in some families still exists today.
Edwina Currie stood for parliament in 1983 and became one of the nation's best-known MPs. She has her own weekend radio programme, "Late Night Currie" and also does TV presenting. In all, she has published ten books.
The year 1848, as Peter Ackroyd has pointed out, was a remarkable one in the annals of literature, for it saw the publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair within a matter of months. Each was set in the past, with a nostalgia edged with bitterness and disapproval. It was as if, in a year of revolution on the Continent and Chartist agitation at home, the nation’s writers sought to remind their public how much they had to be grateful for in John Bull’s England. The generation liberated by the Great Reform Act of 1832 had come of age.
These days few general readers willingly read Thackeray’s novels other than Vanity Fair, or indeed know much about him. His previous works are lightweight, the later ones ponderous and - frankly - boring. By the time Vanity Fair had made him famous - 'up there with Dickens' as he boasted to his mother - he preferred to be accepted in the best society rather than earn his living satirising it. Yet he produced a masterpiece whose wit, irreverence, pathos and sweep of history makes it one of the greatest English novels ever written. It is as if War and Peace has been crossed with the best bits of The Pickwick Papers, without losing anything of either. It is, above all, a great read - and a marvellous surprise to everyone who comes to it for the first time.
The book is subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', but it does have a central female figure, Becky Sharp: the book from start to finish is Becky’s story. She is hardly a traditional heroine, since her behaviour throughout is selfish, reprehensible and often downright cruel. An anti-heroine, perhaps? Except Becky is equipped with beauty (it is likely that Thackeray made her resemble his own pretty wife Isabella Shawe) guile, and good luck. Her personality is established in the first few pages: graduating from Miss Pinkerton’s academy for girls with her friend Amelia Sedley, Becky heaves out of the carriage window the copy of Dr Johnson’s 'Dixionary' given her as a leaving present. Soon after, she is tipping the wink at Amelia’s fat brother Jos, for marriage to a wealthy man is her best hope of support. When that fails (Jos gets drunk in Vauxhall Gardens and simply can’t take the hint), Becky becomes a governess in the home of the appalling skinflint Sir Pitt Crawley, who is too ghastly a prospect even for her. His proposal, on his knees before her, 'leering like a satyr', is a gem of Monty-Pythonesque black comedy. His nephew, Rawdon, who has 'prospects', is Becky’s target and here the two of them, both adventurers on the make, are doomed to come unstuck, with mixed consequences for both.
There are men, of course: four young men in particular, adventurers in their own way, but still within the limited possibilities offered to a gentleman. Jos works for the East India Company (as did Thackeray’s father), while William Dobbin, George Osborne, and Rawdon Crawley are army officers. Osborne and Smedley pères are something vague in the City. Thackeray warns his readers that he is about to tell a tale of harrowing villainy and complicated vice, with 'no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you.' But in his letters he admitted that his heart was with 'the Bohemian' Becky above all.
Becky is a minx and a schemer in a long tradition of English female characters. Less of a victim than Moll Flanders, much naughtier than anyone in Jane Austen, far more rounded and believable than any of Dickens’ women, she has much in common (it seems to me) with the real-life Harriette Wilson, the courtesan who tried to blackmail the Duke of Wellington (though Thackeray’s model is unknown). We are firmly on Becky’s side. Since she had the misfortune to be born penniless, what choice has she but to make her way in the world with whatever ruthlessness and singularity of purpose she can command? Despite many vicissitudes she ends her days happily enough in genteel retirement in Bath - where else?
Becky was immediately popular with women readers of her time, and her appeal has proved enduring; 'Becky Sharp' has become synonymous with a pretty witch whose cool materialism both appals us and leaves us envious. We are glad we are not like Becky (or insist that we aren’t), but under similar pressures wouldn’t we do the same? In which case we would hope to be just as successful, and just as untouched by guilt. The combination of looks, style, inventiveness, verve and sheer determination is irresistible; her victims do not merit our sympathy. She challenges stuffy conventional morality, and (mostly) gets away with it. The closest modern equivalent might be singer/actress Madonna. These days we adore bad girls, but the pleasure Becky has given readers for over 150 years suggests we always did.
Thackeray gave the word 'snob' its contemporary meaning, of one who is falsely superior; he had written a brilliant series in Punch on the topic just before starting Vanity Fair. The crass snobbery and discrimination to which Becky is subject make the modern reader cringe. A wealth of humiliation is contained in a single sentence: 'The Lady Blanche avoided her as if she had been an infectious disease.' So we crow with joy whenever Becky comes out on top. Take for example the scenes in Brussels as the battle of Waterloo rages nearby, its outcome bloody and uncertain. Thackeray opens Chapter 29 with: 'We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants.' Chaos reigns: Jos’s manservant steals his clothes, the minor aristocrats who came to watch the spectacle are trying to flee the city, but Becky, brave, resourceful and level-headed as ever, makes a killing when she sells her husband’s horses, at a hugely inflated price, to the same Lady Bareacres who has previously cut her dead. Yes!
The multiple Sedleys, Osbornes and Crawleys provide many opportunities for Thackeray to guy the morals and mores of his time. It’s no wonder that female readers loved the book from the start, since not one of the men comes off well. In all probability, Thackeray has put himself, with his personal failings shrewdly observed, into several of the chaps. Fat Jos who wouldn’t miss a meal, for example: neither would Thackeray who died, overweight, of a stroke brought on by over-eating, at the early age of 52. Even the most tedious character, faithful William Dobbin who hopelessly loves Amelia and her child for years, reflects the author’s self-imposed celibacy, for tragically Isabella broke down and was confined to asylums, leaving him with two small children to bring up and few doors open to him.
The young Thackeray had talents as an illustrator, but turned to writing for magazines for his keep. He was an early star of the new publication Punch, and there learned to be both observant and wicked. When his proposal for Vanity Fair was accepted he started writing the monthly parts often with only the haziest notion of how each episode was to conclude. Something magic happened. 'Written more or less on the hoof' is how Thackeray’s most recent biographer, D. J. Taylor, describes it. The stories of the printer’s boy waiting in the hall to collect the last few pages of each episode turn out to be true; under pressure to find an extra thousand words, Thackeray let his imagination run riot. Without the slightest pause he conjured up sparkling prose, a vivid wit and energy flowing from his pen.
'Write what you know' is the old advice given to aspiring authors. Indeed Thackeray’s life story reads like a novel. Born a gentleman, with the family money made in India (the same as fat bachelor Jos Sedley’s) and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge from which he was sent down in disgrace, he had lost a fortune of £20,000 by the time he was in his early twenties, much of it by gambling. The scenes in Vanity Fair of Rawdon Crawley playing cards to clean out suckers such as gullible George, or Becky in reduced circumstances touring the grimmer casinos of Europe, come straight from his own knowledge, and are lively, rueful and self-critical. Some of the family money was lost as banks and businesses failed; as you read how poor old Mr Osborne failed to cope with sudden penury, or the Sedleys’ struggle as investments in India go under, every painful detail leaps from the page.
Thackeray had been there and done that. A single chapter, 'How to Live well on Nothing a Year', is the distillation, one feels instinctively, of a great many experiences (the trick, it turns out, is not to lower your standards and not to pay the tradesmen - I am reminded that Winston and Clemmie Churchill were known in Westerham village, near their Chartwell home, for not paying their bills). The joy for readers is that his pen superbly conveys, without cant or euphemism, the horrible emotions of bewilderment, misery and remorse in a world where property was all.
The Times of 10 July 1848 summed up the appeal of the novel, in a judgement that has not been challenged since: 'Never did a writer more completely steer clear of the fallacy so common to authors, that one isolated quality may, somehow or other, be made to look like a human being. The great truth, forgotten every day in the literary world, that man is a mixture of qualities, and it is that the problem of genius to represent that mixture without inconsistency, is never lost sight of by Mr Thackeray'.
Nobody in Vanity Fair is wholly good; nobody is wholly bad. The authorial ambiguity is at the heart of its charm. Unlike Dickens, for whom many characters are ciphers, there is little in Vanity Fair that is present simply for effect. Whereas Jane Austen’s creations often seem (like their author) to live totally insulated from the heat and smoke of the dark satanic mills that made them rich, in Vanity Fair our noses are rubbed in reality. Dickens’ many novels, with all their imperfections of hopeless plots, inconsistency and cardboard characters are far better known, perhaps because while we take materialism seriously, we feel we ought really be better behaved, and for that Dickens’ vulgar sentimentality is to hand. We are all snobs now. But in 1848 the young Thackeray had his finger on the pulse of a thriving, upwardly-mobile nation, which could still laugh at itself and its pretensions. We learn more about them, and about ourselves, as we turn each page. Do it with pure pleasure.
Further reading:
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
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