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So You Think You Know Jane Austen? (1)
I recently rediscovered my copy of So You Think You Know Jane Austen? and, just for kicks, went through the P&P section, as that’s the one I know the best. If I may offer a word of advice? If you own and/or are considering owning this book, take everything the authors assert with a grain of salt — with a mound of salt, as it were.
So, largely for the purpose of venting, here are my ‘Yes, I rather do think I know Jane Austen’ replies; by the way, this is supposedly arranged by level of difficulty, from easy to difficult.
(For convenience’s sake, I assume the events of the novel occur over 1799-1800; ‘A1′ is my original reply, A2 their answer, with some typically kind and sweet-natured comments on my part.)
A1: Candid Jane (22-23), witty Elizabeth (20-21), pedantic Mary (either 18-19 or 19-20), fretful Catherine/Kitty (17-18), wild Lydia (15-16).
A2: ‘Beautiful’ Jane;
— While true as far as it goes, I don’t think Jane’s beauty is treated as her most defining attribute.
‘quick’ Lizzy; ‘clever’ Mary (who nonetheless lacks ‘genius and taste’),
— Er . . . no. Does anyone with a drop of sense ever describe her as clever? Certainly not the omniscient narrator. (In fact, I’m pretty sure that Darcy is the only person the ON ever calls “clever”.)
Kitty (Catherine) is ‘slight and delicate’ and coughs (is she tubercular?);
— She is slight and delicate according to Jane, and coughs all of what — twice? Probably she is small and slender, like Elizabeth, but I doubt there is anything more than that and a good dose of laziness.
Lydia, the tallest, laughs and has dangerous high ‘animal spirits’.
— Lydia is hardly defined by being the tallest Bennet sister!—well, except insofar as we easily see that her physical maturity has outstripped any emotional/mental growth she may have been capable of. Nor is her high-spiritedness the real problem. Elizabeth is spirited too.
Their ages range from 22 (Jane), 20 (Elizabeth), down to the coltish Lydia (15).
— While this is accurate enough, I can’t help wondering if the authors realise that most people will have a birthday over the course of some thirteen months.
A1: A blue coat. Quite the man of fashion, Mr Bingley. (Notice that in most adaptions, it’s Darcy who gets the blue coat. Personally, I imagine Darcy in black-on-black relieved by more black. Well, maybe a white cravat.)
A2: A blue coat. The colour indicates a certain (charming) lightness of character.
— It does? I thought it simply indicated an interest in fashion — a bit flashy, perhaps.
A1: Two, Louisa (married to the indolent Mr Hurst but apparently interested in Darcy) and Caroline. (I’d just like to mention that one preference I have for the later novels is that The Rival isn’t always made utterly abhorrent.)
A2: Only the odious Caroline and the nonentity Louisa later appear.
— Indeed.
In the last sentences of the novel, Jane Austen makes one of her very few historical references, when she mentions that ‘the restoration of peace’ will upset the career of Wickham (now a regular) and the prospects of his wife, Lydia. This is, presumably, the Peace of Amiens, 1802.
— Actually, it probably isn’t, unless Wickham cashes out. The implication, in my opinion, is that their post-peace rootlessness and freeloading is more or less permanent; the Treaty of Amiens only lasted a year.
Wickham, we may surmise, may later atone for his sexual misdeeds by gallantry in the Peninsular War
— Um . . . why should we surmise that? The problem with Wickham isn’t so much that he’s a (wannabe?) rake as that he’s greedy, dishonest, manipulative, and entirely without decency. I could more easily see him as a deserter who escaped and passed himself off as Lord Wickham on the Continent.
He may even survive to fight and die at Waterloo
— Again, I think the implication is that Wickham and Lydia’s freeloading lifestyle lasted a lot longer than a year. If Wickham did sell his commission after the Treaty of Amiens, he certainly wouldn’t have been at Waterloo thirteen years later.
A1: “About twenty-seven” at the beginning of the novel; she would have likely turned twenty-eight by the end, making her the same age as Darcy. Interesting. Any other similarities?
A2: Twenty-seven, ominously.
— Not that ominously. It would be a very different story if she were a pretty twenty-seven.
Now, perhaps, Charlotte is too old for marriage.
— No, she’s not. The narrator describes her as a young woman, and we see in Persuasion that Elizabeth Elliot may be self-conscious about her age, but she is still considered a highly eligible beauty at twenty-nine (think of her reception in Bath). I suspect that thirty was the point of danger; generally well-born girls married at about twenty-four or twenty-five and middle-class ones later. All of Jane Austen’s heroines but Anne marry young.
A1: The beautiful expression which renders her face uncommonly intelligent, her playful, engaging manners, and her light and pleasing figure. All these discoveries are treated as roughly simultaneous, and only the third could occur without at least some exposure to her personality. In my opinion it’s clear that he’d been in company with her for some time before being attracted on any conscious level.
A2: Her fine dark eyes and her brilliant complexion (usually a primary attraction in Austen’s heroines).
— Doesn’t that come later? I’m pretty sure it does, and has much less to do with Elizabeth herself than with Darcy needling Caroline. (Am I the only one that gets Mr Bennet/Mrs Bennet vibes off of those two?)
A1: Colonel Forster is the commanding officer. We don’t know who his second-in-command is.
A2: Colonel Forster and Captain Carter.
— Are we ever told that Carter is the second-in-command?
A1: Eight hundred pounds. Lady Catherine is an expert at conspicuous consumption.
A2: Eight hundred pounds. This seems a vast cost, unless it were plundered from some castle in Italy. It might conceivably be a printer’s error for £300 (in figures in the manuscript). Or perhaps it is just another Mr Collins absurdity.
— Or perhaps it is a Lady Catherine absurdity. Of course it’s a vast sum. That’s the point. Ostentatious splendour and all of that. She’d like it better for being insanely expensive.
A1: He doesn’t really estimate. He knows what Pemberley was worth when his father was steward, some five years prior to the beginning of the novel, because . . . well . . . his father was steward. And that was ‘a clear’ £10,000 a-year; that would be £10,000 a-year after the usual encumbrances (taxes and grandmothers and such).
A2: A ‘clear’ £10,000 a year. Bingley, the other very rich person in the novel, has a lump sum of £100,000 which would yield, from conventional investment, some £4,000-5,000 a year. Bingley, however, has no property to keep up.
— They mention ‘clear’ while ignoring its meaning. Odd. Bingley has no property — yet. That’s the whole reason for his fortune in the first place; he’s supposed to be buying an estate with it. That’ll probably eat up just about everything that isn’t settled on Jane and their children. Incidentally, Bingley is not very rich. He’s borderline rich, squeaking past the boundaries of richness, so to speak.
A1: Er . . . I really have no idea.
A2: ‘Superior’. He feels, with some justice, a haunting sense of his own indelible inferiority, despite the presentation to his monarch at St James.
— *snicker* Does he, now? I don’t get much of an ‘inferior’ vibe from him; in fact, he strikes me as an extraordinarily content man who, in a rather innocent and good-humoured way, enjoys flaunting his newfound importance while venerating those who are even more important.
A1: Enemy. Brother-in-law. Some would say half-brother. Also Darcy’s father was Wickham’s godfather.
A2: None.
If they’re talking legal relationships at the beginning of the novel . . . okay.
George is old Mr Darcy’s godson (the gentleman’s name, quite likely, was George Darcy, we may deduce)
— Especially considering that his daughter is Georgiana (which, by the way, is not a contraction of George and Anne but a feminine form of George, and very fashionable — especially for powerful families living near Bakewell). However, it could just as easily be coincidence – Wickham named after a father or godfather, and Georgiana after a mother, aunt, grandmother, godmother, whatever.
A1: He’s only called a ‘young man’ throughout most of the novel, but near the end, he says that he was kind of an arrogant arse from eight until twenty-eight. Literally taken, that would mean either that he was twenty-eight before his epiphany (’some time’ after Hunsford), or that it coincided with his birthday. More likely, I think, he’s simply twenty-eight when he gives his post-engagement monologue and used eight/twenty-eight for symmetry. In either case he was likely twenty-seven at the beginning of the novel, and in common with the rest of mankind turned a year older in the next thirteen months.
A2: He is 28, which makes him thirteen years the senior of his 15-year-old sister
— No, it doesn’t. When we are given Georgiana’s age by Darcy, he’s recounting an event in the past (she was then but fifteen), and we are explicitly told, by the narrator, that she is ‘just sixteen’ in the summer of 1800. At that time, Darcy is twenty-eight. Therefore they are twelve years apart. (My mathematical genius astounds even me.)
(effectively, his ward)
— Not effectively. She is his ward.
and some seven years older than Elizabeth.
*snort* I’ll admit to being amused here. It’s evident that they’re going by the characters’ ages in 1799, not 1800, with the single exception of Darcy, hence the minor gaffe above. They’ve already given Elizabeth’s age as ‘20.’ Seven years older would make Darcy . . . wait for it . . . twenty-seven, and thus twelve years older than (then) fifteen-year-old Georgiana. *headdesk* A minor issue, perhaps, but this is trivia. You’re supposed to be right about nitpicky little details, that’s the whole point.
Thus endeth Level 1.